Word: viet
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Even before he went to Viet Nam, Robert Muller, 35, knew he stood a good chance of becoming a casualty. At the Marine platoon leaders' class in Quantico, Va., he learned that during World War II, 85% of all company-grade officers in the Corps were killed or wounded. Crippling injury, not death, was what most worried Bobby and his buddies. "I remember saying that if I lost a leg, I would rather be killed. As to the possibility of being paralyzed, well, that was not even open for discussion." Confined to a wheelchair for the rest...
Muller saw combat the day he arrived in Viet Nam. "I got off the chopper, walked down the trail, and immediately saw bodies," he recalls. "Suddenly, the reality of war was driven home." Less than a year later, while trying to lead a company of reluctant Vietnamese soldiers up a hill near Con Thien, he was struck in the chest by a Viet Cong bullet that severed his spine...
Muller became active in the 25,000-member Viet Nam Veterans Against the War. He eventually became disillusioned about the movement, fell into depression, and turned to drugs. But on a visit to the family of a Viet Nam veteran who had killed himself, he met his future wife, Virginia. "She turned my life around, and gave it meaning and purpose," he says. Muller graduated from Hofstra Law School in 1974, and three years later founded what became the Viet Nam Veterans of America (current membership: 8,000), to lobby for the rights of all those who had served...
...spit-and-polish image of a career military officer: stocky and silver-haired, he stands straight as a bayonet and has a level gaze. But when former Marine Lieut. Colonel William Corson talks about the injustices done to veterans of the Viet Nam War, there is anger in his voice. Says Corson: "They deserved a hell of a lot more than we gave them. What did we do to facilitate the re-entry of these guys who sacrificed so much? The answer is, damn little...
Corson, 55, knows his subject well: for the past seven years, he has written a Viet Nam Veteran Adviser column for Penthouse, one of the few publications that has aggressively pursued the question of America's treatment of its Viet Nam vets. Son of an accountant, Corson quit the University of Chicago in 1942, at age 17, to join the Marines and served in the South Pacific during World War II. He left in 1946 to earn a master's degree in finance and economics at Chicago, but rejoined three years later to fight in Korea. Corson...