Fifty years made a world of difference for the Vietnam War veterans who were center stage for Saturday’s Veterans Day ceremonies at the Mt. Soledad memorial.
“Vietnam is a war that many people don’t want to talk about,” said keynote speaker Robert S. Brewer Jr., who served in Vietnam as an airborne ranger and infantry officer. He went on to earn a law degree from the University of San Diego and was the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of California from 2019 to 2021.
“But for those who fought there, we can never forget it,” Brewer said during the 90-minute tribute at Mt. Soledad National Veterans Memorial in La Jolla.
Former US Attorney and keynote speaker Robert S. Brewer Jr. spoke about his time as an Army Ranger during the Vietnam War at the Veterans Day Ceremony.
(John Gastaldo / For The San Diego Union-Tribune)
More than 600 people attended, many wearing red, white and blue clothing, and caps with veterans’ insignia. Most sat in folding chairs on the green lawn around the memorial. Temperatures hovered in the low 70s, and the sky was clear enough to see the Coronado Islands off the coast of Mexico.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the end of the United States’ participation in the Vietnam conflict, and it was the focus of every speaker on Saturday. U.S. ground troops officially pulled out on March 29, 1973.
Returning home from firefights in the jungles of Southeast Asia, service members were told to take off their uniforms and wear civilian clothes when exiting the plane. At many U.S. airports, especially near the end of the war, they were greeted by protesters.
“You do not deserve what they will say to you,” a grizzled sergeant told them, Brewer recalled from his return. “The war took a terrible toll on this nation.”
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall in Washington D.C. helps to tell the story of the war, he said. Engraved on it are the names of 58,000 Americans who died there between 1957 and 1975. It includes three sets of fathers and sons, 31 sets of brothers, 54 people who all went to the same high school — Thomas Edison High School in Philadelphia, Pa. — and 1,400 people who died on the last day of the war.
“Our worst nightmare was to be killed on the day you were going home,” Brewer said.
The MCRD San Diego’s color guard retired the US flag after the National Anthem at the start of the Veterans Day Ceremony. This year’s ceremony commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War.
(John Gastaldo / For The San Diego Union-Tribune)
Guest speaker Henry James “Jim” Bedinger told the story of ejecting from his F-4 Phantom jet as it went down over Laos. As his parachute floated to the ground he recited the Lord’s Prayer in his head while streams of machine gun tracer bullets flew past him.
“It wasn’t my fate to be rescued,” he said. He was quickly captured, blindfolded and tied to a tree. Later he was held as a prisoner of war at the infamous “Hanoi Hilton” for 1,223 days until his release in March 1973.
Several veterans said the thing they remembered most about military service was the camaraderie.
“You only remember the good times,” said La Mesa resident Mike Marmolejo, who was drafted in 1968 thinking he would serve less than three years in the Navy. “There’s a lot of bad stuff, but you only remember the good.”
Trained to be an electronics technician in an amphibious assault unit, he went on to make the Navy a career and had four separate deployments to Vietnam. After the war he helped remove the mines from North Vietnam’s Haiphong Harbor as part of Operation End Sweep, a requirement of the international Paris Peace Accords.
Tom Isenburg of Livermore, Calif., nicknamed “Sgt. Ike” attended the ceremonies as part of a weekend reunion with the 2nd Battalion, 1st Marine Division in San Diego. They get together every two years.
Isenburg enlisted partly because the movie actor John Wayne was his hero. He served from 1964 to 1967.
He spent one hitch in the Marines that included 17 months in Vietnam. After that, on the advice of his girlfriend, who was literally the girl next door, he got out and married her. He went on to work at Hughes Aircraft and later Applied Technology, and they had two children and then four grandchildren.
He and his veteran friends still don’t talk about the worst of Vietnam, he said. They focus on their busy lives, their families and their jobs. And they know their warrior reputation lingers.
“Even today you get a bunch of Vietnam veterans together, and people want to move out of the way,” Isenburg said.
“We came back right in the middle of it,” he said. “It was so clear it was something we could not discuss … just get on with your life.”
Opposition to the war caused conflict across the United States and even within military ranks, said Neil O’Connell, executive director of the Mt. Soledad Memorial Association. Despite that, he said, men and women did their duty.
“People serving in the jungles of Vietnam and the skies of Southeast Asia endured hardships we can only imagine,” O’Connell said. “Whether they were drafted or volunteered, they answered the call.”
Master of ceremonies Marc Bailey assured the crowd, nearly half of whom stood to be recognized as Vietnam veterans, that their military service is appreciated.
“We haven’t forgotten,” Bailey said. “We haven’t always done the best job of honoring you, and it breaks our hearts.”
The event included a flyover by the San Diego Salute Formation Team and music by the Marine Band San Diego and the Helix Highlander Pipe & Drum Band.
Mt. Soledad, with an elevation of 822 feet is a San Diego landmark, with views up and down the coast. It’s topped by a 29-foot-tall white cross on a base bearing nearly 6,000 black granite plaques with the names of the area’s military veterans.
