My hat’s off to the staff of The VVA Veteran. The May/June cover has my vote for the best cover ever. Just something about the old soldier looking at the names of soldiers forever young.

R. J. Lowder
via email

As an NCOC Shake ‘n Bake graduate, I want to say how overwhelming it was to see the NCOC article in the May/June issue. Please let everyone know that a monument and bronze plaque are at the Infantry Museum for NCOC graduates.

Gary Higgins
via email

I was surprised to see the article on Army Shake ‘n Bakes in your recent issue. I graduated as an E-5 sergeant after a mere eight months of service in April 1971. Since leaving the service in 1972, I have never run into anyone who ever heard the term or understood how the program worked. While I was trained in artillery, I hadn’t realized that the Army also had similar programs in Infantry, Armor, Combat Engineering, and the Signal Corps.

Although I was drafted, I was given the opportunity to go to OCS, but it required me to extend my enlistment two years. The alternate offer of becoming an Artillery Crew Chief with an E-5 rank after sixteen weeks of intense training on all field artillery pieces and leadership skills was attractive to me.

Rather than just shooting howitzers as part of an artillery crew, the Artillery Combat Leadership school at Ft. Sill allowed me to earn my sergeant’s stripes before the age of 20. I returned home from my Vietnam War tour of duty with B Battery of the 3/82 Artillery and was discharged three days before my 21st birthday.

James A. Stettler
via email

Reading Richard Currey’s article on Shake ‘n Bake NCOs brought back some memories. I finished Basic Training at Fort Jackson in August 1969. I was selected to go to something they called Leaders School. It was a two- or three-week course that covered drill, field exercises, and leadership. I graduated as the top candidate in my group of about 40.

Moving to Infantry AIT, the company I was assigned to had four platoons but only three newly graduated Shake ‘n Bake NCOs. Our company commander’s solution was to give me a three-stripe armband and have me take charge of the fourth platoon during training.

Initially, the three other NCOs tried to push all of the bad details onto my platoon. After a week or two, I called them together and told them that we were all in the same situation, training to go to Vietnam, and that, while we were not equals in actual rank, we were equal in the responsibilities we had to ensure our men were trained and ready. It seemed to work and for the rest of AIT detail assignments were mutually negotiated.

I went to Vietnam in December 1969 and returned home in January 1971. I hope my three shake and bake brothers also returned.

Tom Carroll
Stony Point, New York

I enjoyed the well-written article about the Shake ’n Bake NCOs produced during the Vietnam War. Most of my squad leaders and platoon sergeants were Shake ’n Bakes. They were thoroughly trained and very effective in the field.

I remember some of them in my Ranger School class. If they got the tab, they were promoted to staff sergeant. Those who earned their stripes by longevity in the field were street smart as far as movement in the jungle, night ambushes, etc., but that is something the Shake ’n Bakes picked up quickly, along with the knowledge to call in artillery if needed, reading maps, etc.

I salute them.

Dave Taylor
via email

When I went to Vietnam in January 1967, I met two other soldiers at the Oakland Army Terminal, and we quickly became friends. I remember taking a picture of both of them the night before we left for Vietnam.

I only remember the name of one of them, Miller, and I remember calling the other guy Zac. I had the photo blown up to see if I could read Zac’s name, but it was blurry. We left Travis AFB and got to Vietnam a day later. When we got to Tan Son Nhut, it was about 2:00 a.m., and we were put in buses and transported to the 90th Replacement Depot at Long Binh.

At 6:00 a.m. we formed up and the OIC started calling off names for transfer to units. My name got called, and I said goodbye to my buddies and left. Because of a mistake in the paperwork, I spent the night in Saigon and went back to the 90th the next morning.

When I got there, I went to look up my buddies and was told that they were on a work detail at the Bien Hoa ammo dump the day before. While they were working, a sapper blew up the bunker and they both were killed. I didn’t believe it, so I started asking others who were on the same flight as we were, and they all said the same thing.

Fast forward to 2023. I was fortunate enough to be picked to go on an Honor Flight from Reno to The Wall in D.C. I looked for their names—and nothing. I talked to the guys who help at The Wall and they had no answers.

I’ve researched everything I could to find out why a Miller isn’t listed and have hit a brick wall. I can’t think of any reason why everyone would cook up a story to prank me and I don’t think they would have. No one knew I was coming back.

I just wish I had an answer to all this, but I guess there isn’t any. I go on remembering them both every day.

Scott Will
via email

I have to take issue with the glowing review by the VVA of the fiction book, The Women. Initially, upon hearing of the book, I was glad to see an author step up and introduce the courage and trials of the over 10,000 women who served in Vietnam, primarily the nurses.

Upon reading the book, I was absolutely disgusted. Admittedly, the author does a workmanlike job of writing, bringing settings and subjects to life, and she has had great success in fiction writing. The issue is simply that she has taken a sampling of a good number of the biographies of nurses and then proceeded to weave them all, with many duplicate occurrences, in a good number of very doubtful settings, into nothing more than a fantasy soap opera of the worst sort.

Serving in Vietnam was a gritty, hard experience for all of us, and this soap opera is an insult to those who served. I spent various times as a patient in several Army hospitals, the 12th Evac in Cu Chi, the 36th Evac in Vung Tau, the 3rd Field Hospital in Saigon, and finally Camp Zama in Japan. In all of these I found the medical staff to be superb.

The book, The Women, doesn’t tell their stories. Rather, it preys on them and mixes the many tragic and powerful stories into what is nothing more than a soap opera stew. The reality of the experiences of the nurses can be found in their writing, and I recommend the book Home Before Morning by Lynda Van Devanter. She served heroically in Vietnam, worked heroically back in the U.S. to overcome her PTSD, and eventually came to VVA to play a strong role in getting the women who served in the Vietnam War a place at the table.

Tom Crowley
via email

In Marc Leepson’s review of Kristin Hannah’s book The Women, he says the author got the details 99 percent right. Although it is a very good narrative about an overlooked aspect of that war—the nurses, doctors, and medics—I would not score any account of that terrible, complex war as having the details 99 percent correct, especially a fictional account written fifty years after the fact.

I spent nearly a full tour in the Central Highlands in 1967 as an infantry squad leader with the 4th Division. On my last day in the field, I was flown by helicopter to the 71st Evacuation Hospital in Pleiku after receiving an abdominal gunshot wound, and they saved my life.

The 71st Evac, coincidentally, served as the MASH backdrop in Hannah’s book. Her main character, Frankie, whose life mirrored the intense horror and lingering grief nurses endured both in-country and throughout their lives after the war, resonates with anyone who had even a taste of that experience.

While I agree that the author had a feel for the time and place based on her excellent research, for the sake of brevity, I will point out that if anyone, after reading this very good book on the subject, would like to read the narrative of an actual hero who, coincidentally, spent a year in that literal bloodbath known as the 71st Evacuation Hospital, please read Home Before Morning by Lynda Van Devanter, a nurse who served there—the real Frankie.

Dale Anderson
via email

Per VVA’s Founding Principle of, “Never again will one generation of veterans abandon another,” we should extend that credo to include our own generation’s allied veterans and not abandon them. I am referring to the Hmong-Laotian Special Guerrilla Unit veterans who fought loyally on our side in Southeast Asia and lost their country after having faithfully served with us.

Some escaped the re-education camps after the war and found their way to this country and have become citizens. As most of us are, they are in their seventies and eighties and suffering from the same ailments as we are, war-related or not. They receive no VA health benefits, which is something some VVA members are trying to remedy.

The feedback we have received from members of Congress who are sympathetic to helping is that direct U.S. troop involvement on the ground in Laos with the SGU needs to be documented. This would help distinguish the SGU from other groups that were CIA-run operations. Official documentation exists, of course, but these records are still mostly sealed and therefore shielded from open access.

I am asking for sworn statements from any VVA members who can attest to having directly served on the ground or in the air in Laos during the Vietnam War with the SGU. Please contact me at chopsticks7475@gmail.com if you feel you can help.

Brian Carn
via email

I am not much given to exaggeration or excess. With that in mind, the Honor Flight, from the Quad Cities of Illinois and Iowa to Washington, D.C., was in its own unique way the most remarkable and moving experience I can recall, and very much unexpected – in fact, the unexpected was the essence of the experience, and it kept coming: just when you thought they couldn’t top this, they did.

I suppose we could have expected some well-wishing from a few people who were there as we departed, and I suppose we could have expected some warm greetings from family members and perhaps a few others on our return. What we could not have expected was an airport concourse packed solid with hundreds of strangers, cheering, shaking hands, smiling broad and genuine smiles, thanking us for our service, in warm choruses of “Welcome home!”

I was speechless, overwhelmed, literally unable to utter more than a weak “Thank you” at the sea of faces, all strangers, hundreds of them, old and young. It was not like it was in 1969.

Most of us were veterans of the Vietnam War. A few were there from the Korean War. Two were from World War II. We should have guessed, but we could not have guessed the size of that reception, nor its warmth.

The experience was too profound to be contained in words, so I will quit trying to do that. Suffice it to say that those who organized the Honor Flight of the Quad Cities and brought it off so perfectly deserve blessings beyond measure.

Brian Alm
Rock Island, Illinois

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