"I carry their names right here in my wallet,” George Whitehouse says as he hands me a well-worn piece of paper.
There are seven of them, all casualties of the Vietnam War. Three were high school friends who died before Whitehouse graduated from American University in 1969 and was drafted into the Army. Four were members of his artillery unit, accidentally killed by an American shell just before U.S. involvement in the war ended in 1973.
Whitehouse had written down where to find the names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. “That wall is a big wall, so when I go down there I don’t have to look in the book,” he explains. “These guys died; I didn’t go to any of their funerals, I don’t know where they’re buried. The only real contact you have is to be able to go down and visit that wall.”
The veteran visits the wall regularly, always looking for the names in his wallet. But in January, Whitehouse made another journey that reconnected him with his lost buddies. He returned to Vietnam for 10 days as part of a delegation sponsored by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, which supports efforts to clean up unexploded ordnance that still kills and maims Vietnamese civilians almost 37 years after American troops left the country.
Now 62, Whitehouse helped launch thousands of rounds against the enemy—including the very last U.S. shell of the war—so the trip provided a whole new perspective on his experiences. “I view Vietnam not as a war anymore, but as a country and a people,” he says. “I really do.”
Whitehouse grew up in Bethlehem, Pa., where his father, a flight engineer during World War II, worked for the Internal Revenue Service. His uncle had been an intelligence officer who dropped behind German lines before D-Day. So the military was in his blood, and when he left for college in 1965, his father warned, “You probably won’t end up graduating when you think you are. There’s this thing called Vietnam…”
His friends from home started dying. Then his younger brother, Tom, “goofed off ” in college and was quickly drafted.
As we chat one snowy morning in his office near White Flint, this peppery, personable accountant no longer looks like the soldier he once was. But the past is not far from his thoughts: “That’s what I lived with, it was very personal to me. I lived through the anti-war movement, but I was not part of it. I took the other view.”
After graduation, he had few options. Finding a “friendly doctor” and wangling a medical deferment was out of the question for this son and nephew of proud WWII vets. Enlisting meant a higher rank but a longer commitment than waiting for the draft, and since Whitehouse was already working at an accounting firm in Bethesda, living on Battery Lane and “eating three meals a day at the Tastee Diner,” he wanted to finish quickly. So when the draft board back in Bethlehem called his number, he went willingly and was sent to artillery training at Fort Sill, Okla.
“All the guys I was with were just like me, college grads who were accountants or engineers,” Whitehouse recalls. “We all had high math scores, and artillery is all math.”
Whitehouse’s job was to analyze information from troops in the field and tell the gunners where to aim. It was a strange business, delivering death to an unseen target many miles away. “It’s a misnomer to say that people in combat see the enemy all the time,” he says. “You just don’t.”
What he did see were the four Americans cut down by an artillery barrage they mistakenly called in on their own position. Whitehouse knew the men, he helped fire the shot that killed them, and the tragedy scars him to this day. “I was part of that whole incident. I was there when it happened.”
The war was winding down, and a few weeks later camera crews crowded around as Whitehouse’s unit fired one last symbolic shell. “We had packed everything up to move out of there, but when we pulled the lanyard, it was a dud,” he recalls. “We had to unpack some ammo and get another round, so it was a fitting end.”
