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Vietnam veterans, families of fallen, still hurt by way they were treated
YOUNGSTOWN
2
A Navy corpsman, Eisenbraun, who grew up on Hitchcock Road in Boardman, was killed by shrapnel from a mortar round Sept. 17, 1968, in Quang Tri Province as he lay across the body of a wounded Marine, sacrificing himself to protect his patient.
Had he lived, he would have been 67.
He was one of seven brothers and sisters.
Army Private 1st Class Amalio Gonzalez, a Youngstown East High School graduate, was in Vietnam just 22 days when he was killed April 25, 1966. An infantryman with the “Big Red One” 1st Infantry Division, he was killed by shrapnel, possibly from a land mine, said his younger brother, Enrique “Chico” Gonzalez of Campbell.
Amalio, who was drafted into the Army, arrived in Vietnam on March 29, 1966. He was a member of the 1st Infantry Division’s 2nd Battalion, 16th Regiment. Had he lived, he would have been 69. He was one of eight brothers and sisters.
Carol Bonte, Eisenbraun’s older sister, said her brother enlisted in the Navy in 1966 and volunteered to be a Marine corpsman.
“Larry became a corpsman because he was interested in the medical field and wanted to help people. He was just a good person,” said Bonte, 68, who is the principal’s secretary at Robinwood Lane Elementary School in Boardman where she had also been school nurse.
“I have a stack of letters he wrote, and he sent miniature cassette tapes home to his brothers,” said Bonte, of Boardman.
“Larry talked about being lonely and wanting to be at home. He talked about his friends there, and the heat and the long time between showers, but he didn’t give a lot of details about the war,” she said.
Two uniformed Navy men came to the door of Maureen and Jack Eisenbraun’s home.
“I was living in Cleveland; dad was at work; all the other brothers and sisters were home. My husband picked me up at work; an uncle and a neighbor went to get dad,” she said.
“It took two weeks to get him home. My poor mom was tortured. We were afraid we wouldn’t be able to see him. But he was buried in a glass-enclosed casket,” she said. He is buried at Calvary Cemetery.
“To this day, if mom hadn’t been able to see him in that casket, she would still be waiting,” Bonte said.
“Larry is still a part of everything we do as a family. We all have a space in our homes where we keep his pictures and medals,” she said.
“It was a very sad time. But he died doing what he wanted to do. In his letters, he said he loved what he was doing and felt he was making a difference,” Bonte said.
A uniformed Army soldier came to the Youngstown home of Manuel and Maria Gonzalez.
“My mother was in the house; dad was outside in the yard,” said Chico, 67, who was a senior at East High School at the time.
“I remember it like it was yesterday,” said Chico, who was outside during lunch period when he was called to the office and told there was an emergency at home.
“They didn’t tell me what the emergency was, but I expected something was wrong with mom or dad. ... I never expected that,” said Chico, who retired in 2007 after 40 years at Lordstown General Motors.
Two weeks after Amalio died, his last letter home arrived.
“When she got the letter, mom was convinced the Army had made a mistake,” Chico said.
He was buried with full military honors in Calvary Cemetery.
At the time, an uncle in the Air Force who worked in the Pentagon displayed Amalio’s decorations in the Pentagon “to honor him.”
Before he left, Amalio gave Chico the keys to his car, a 1959 blue and white Ford.
“‘I’m not coming back,’ he told me. So he knew,” Chico said.
Adding to their personal losses, the families of both men still feel hurt and anger that their loved ones, and other men coming back from service in the Vietnam War, alive or in a casket, did not get the respect they deserved.
But, the families say, the Mahoning County Vietnam War Memorial on the Square in downtown Youngstown provides some measure of the recognition, credit and respect they deserved.
“I thank whoever came up with the idea for the memorial. It takes some of the bad feeling away. It’s good to know that people can read the names and pay some kind of respect,” Gonzalez said.
It was former Youngstown Law Director Ed Romero, 66, assigned to the Army’s 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam, who, along with Gary Kubic, then city finance director, and William Dundee, then road department superintendent, also a Vietnam War veteran, started talking in the late 1980s about the need for a Vietnam memorial here.
At the time, Romero said, people were trying to forget the Vietnam War and “our thought was that maybe a monument to the men who fought the war would not be welcomed, as they had not been welcomed home at the end of the war.”
But, they pushed forward.
“We collected names from every source we could think of, and when we realized it was going to cost $11,000, we began raising money,” said Romero of Boardman, a 1966 South High School graduate.
The trio decided the memorial should be made of black granite from the same quarry as the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. – but broken off.
The Mahoning County Vietnam War Memorial, located on the square in downtown Youngstown, lists the names of 99 Mahoning County residents killed in action in Vietnam, in the order in which they died, and those missing in action and prisoners of war.
It was dedicated in July 1989.
Annually, at noon on the first Sunday in November, a Laying of the Roses ceremony is conducted at the memorial at which every name inscribed on it is read and a family member or friend or representative places a rose in their fallen one’s memory.
“I believe everyone on The Wall would have been embarrassed by the way those who came back alive were treated. We came home one at a time, not in large groups welcomed by parades. We were advised to not wear our uniforms,” Romero said.
For probably 15 years after coming home, Romero said he wouldn’t let people know he had been in Vietnam, and left that information off resumes and job applications.
“We were not well regarded, even by veterans of the Korean War and World War II,” he said.
“The memorial is an acknowledgement that, contrary to popular opinion at the time, we actually did something worthwhile,” Romero said.