OHIO STATE WOMEN'S BASKETBALL Foster keeps military past secret

He spent two tours of duty in Vietnam.
COLUMBUS (AP) -- Sometimes it happens when he finds an item about Iraq in the three or four newspapers he reads daily.
Usually it occurs in an airport.
Jim Foster will be sitting there, on yet another basketball trip, and he'll see a stranger in a military uniform.
"It'll be a young recruit, coming home or going to fly somewhere," Foster said. "It's a very poignant moment."
He'll think back to years ago, when a flight landed him in Vietnam as a raw teenager with an uncertain future.
"It gives you empathy for what these kids are doing today, and their situation," Foster said.
Not a nice place
The Ohio State women's basketball coach paused, then added, "It's very difficult for people today to really put into perspective what in fact war is. It's not a video game. It's not all about smart bombs. It's a scary place to be. It's not a nice place to be."
Not many people know that Foster is a Vietnam veteran. He doesn't talk about it much. His military service isn't mentioned in his OSU media guide biography.
"I wouldn't say I think about Vietnam any more or less than the other experiences I've had in my life," Foster said.
Still, the war helped shape his character. It was there, in the mountains of Vietnam, where he began to look around and think about the world, and his place in it.
He was different when he got home: wiser, more curious about life, and how one can maximize blessings and opportunities.
"My mind churned a lot in those days, and it hasn't stopped," Foster said.
Perfect graduation record
Few people coach women's basketball as well as Jim Foster. He has won 529 games at OSU, Vanderbilt and St. Joseph's, dating to 1978.
He also has had every one of his players graduate, with the OSU seniors from last season on track to keep that record perfect.
"I'm not overly sympathetic to people not reaching their potential or not working to reach their potential," Foster said.
That attitude was formed in part because his sister, Judy, never had many opportunities. She suffered brain damage as an infant because of oxygen deficiency, and still lives in nursing care. Foster's coaching style also was affected by seeing the dreams of others ended by war.
"A number of kids I went to high school with, who I sat next to in class, died in Vietnam. They died," he said. "I had friends die, and brothers of friends. As I get older, I think more about how some people didn't get to live their lives. It stopped for them at 18."
Foster, 55, grew up the oldest of six in Abington, Pa., a blue-collar neighborhood near Philadelphia. His father served in World War II and Korea, didn't graduate from high school, and worked as a liquor salesman. Mom stayed home.
The family didn't have much money. Foster saw some friends heading to college, knew he wanted to do so, but also knew he couldn't afford it. After graduating from high school, he worked a summer on the New Jersey shore.
Enlisted
One day at the end of that summer of 1966, he left his job on the beach, took the subway to a military recruiting office and enlisted into the Army.
"It was either sit around and wait to be drafted, with no plan, or formulate a plan of action," Foster said.
The GI Bill was his incentive. He figured three years in the Army would help him pay for college when he got out.
"That was my scholarship," he said.
Then Foster blinked, got off a bus at boot camp in California, and had a drill sergeant screaming in his face.
"You realized then that your world had just changed, and Toto wasn't with you," he said.
The Army sent Foster to Vietnam in June 1967. He was assigned to Camp Holloway, outside Pleiku in the Central Highlands, northeast of the Ia Drang Valley.
"Where I was and what I was doing was significantly different than being in the infantry," he said.
Relatively safe
Foster worked as a specialist for the 604 Transportation Unit, which supplied the helicopters of the 4th Infantry. Occasionally, he traveled to Saigon or Nhatrang. Most of the time he was at his base camp.
"You had a job to do, and you did it," Foster said. "And you always knew how long you have left on tour. That's a big deal in the military."
Foster didn't go on search-and-destroy missions or encounter firefights. Still, death always lurked. Three people in his company were killed on base.
"Young people have a sense that everything is going to be all right," Foster said. "You figure it's going to happen to someone else. Ignorance is bliss. There's a lot of truth in the statement that youth is wasted on the young."
Attacks on Camp Holloway intensified after Jan. 30, 1968, when North Vietnam launched the Tet Offensive.
"After Tet, your awareness of the danger was greater," Foster said. "You went from being in a barracks to sleeping in a bunker. You went from practicing alerts to being in a state of alert because you were subject to mortar attacks and rockets."
Tet changed Foster, too. He began to read the military newspaper Stars and Stripes and line up its reports with what he was experiencing. Not everything matched.
"You start seeing that things were a little bit different than you thought they would be, or thought they were," he said. "You start to evolve. Your thinking starts to take different shapes and forms. It's the same as thinking during a college experience, only this was a little more reality and maybe not as much theory."
Changed his outlook
Foster went from being "not the worldliest guy" when he enlisted to being someone who "questioned the nature of the human condition."
Back home, his younger brother John had been drafted into the infantry. Foster knew his sibling would be sent into jungle patrols and subjected to much riskier conditions than his own. He also knew law prohibited two members of an immediate family serving in a war zone at the same time.
So instead of returning to the States in June 1968, Foster extended his tour for another six months. His brother did not go to Vietnam.
"It wasn't a big deal," Foster said. "I had a better situation. It's not something we talked about. It wasn't like a hard thing to do, nor do I think it was necessarily a special thing to do. It was just something you did."
Foster returned home in January 1969 and served his final six months at Fort Lee in Virginia. He was neither bitter nor haunted, but he was searching for a way to influence others, to make them reach their potential.
His search took him to Washington. He worked construction. He tended bar. He delivered flowers. He then ran a group home for dependent and neglected boys.
Hooked up with Auriemma
The man who hired Foster at the boys home, where he worked 4 1/2 years, persuaded him to go to school at Montgomery County Community College. There, Foster met Geno Auriemma, now the Connecticut women's coach.
Foster transferred to Temple University. He also accepted his first coaching job, as a boys assistant and girls head coach at Bishop McDevitt High School in Philadelphia, where he hired Auriemma as his assistant.
In 1978, two years before he graduated from Temple, Foster became the St. Joseph's women's coach.
The link from Vietnam to Ohio State isn't direct, but the war did help mold Foster into someone with a more grounded grasping of the world than many college athletes possess. It shows in his coaching style.
"Kids today, it's very difficult for them to understand that they have privileges and not rights," Foster said.
In April, he will return to Vietnam for the first time. He plans to go there with friend Jack Demos, a surgeon from Pittsburgh who travels the world offering procedural aid to the needy.
Sometimes, Foster is already back in Vietnam, at least in his mind. News about Iraq and fresh-faced military kids in airports make the past meet the present.