Unforgotten

George Whitehouse never really left the buddies who died so needlessly in Vietnam.

May 2, 2010 4:26 p.m.

Tom Whitehouse, Gen. Tranh Hanh, George W. Whitehouse and George A. Whitehouse in Hanoi, Vietnam, at the headquarters of the Veterans Association of Vietnam. Gen. Hanh was a fighter pilot during the Vietnam conflict and later commander of the Vietnamese Air Force. Photo courtesy: Whitehouse familySoon, Whitehouse was back home, where he married his girlfriend, Kathy Stangert, settled in Silver Spring and rejoined the accounting firm. He’s still here, a senior vice president at Payroll Network, a company that handles bookkeeping for many local businesses. For years, he seldom talked about his service.

“I think we all went kind of underground,” he says. “You didn’t know what the reaction was going to be. People didn’t put it on their résumé.” And the vets who were visible repelled him. “I didn’t want anything to do with these guys running around in fatigues and long hair. That wasn’t me.”

His view started to change when the Vietnam memorial opened in 1982. “So many people came out of the closet or woodwork,” Whitehouse says. “A lot of people went down there and saw the names and saw other vets and said, ‘He’s just like me, he was a vet.’ It really did help a lot.”

- Advertisement -

As the door to his past opened, Whitehouse gradually became more involved in veterans organizations (in 1997, he organized a reunion of the math whizzes who trained together at Fort Sill), and when the chance came to return to Vietnam, he was ready. He invited his brother, Tom, and together they convinced their 89-year-old father—who had served in Vietnam in the mid-’70s as a civilian employee of the State Department—to join the delegation.

Still, it was a shock at the Hong Kong airport to see the sign for their flight to Hanoi. “Am I really doing this?” he thought to himself. When the plane landed, the red and yellow flag of the Communist regime sent “a little chill” right through him. “The one thing in your mind is: How are we going to be treated?” Whitehouse says. “We were bombing the crap out of these people, and then in the South we left them. I was really queasy about that.”

His fears were unfounded. “Everyone was incredibly friendly. They seem to have put the war behind them, not just with us, but with each other.”

For one thing, a majority of Vietnamese are under 35 and don’t remember the war. For another, few signs remain of the American presence. Many U.S. bases have been reclaimed by jungle. One where Whitehouse served has been turned into a driving school. Wide boulevards and luxury hotels line the beach near Da Nang, where American troops once landed.

The most tangible reminders of the war are the abandoned bombs and shells that have claimed 100,000 lives. The delegation brought $1 million appropriated by Congress to help remove the weapons and rebuild wounded lives. In one village, they met a legless farmer who was set up in the mushroom-growing business by a grant from the Veterans Fund.

Sponsored
Face of the Week

The emotional high point came during a meeting with senior military officials, when George’s brother, Tom, returned some medals he had stripped from the corpse of a North Vietnamese soldier. “I thought of them as trophies,” Tom said. “As an older man, I know they are not. They represent a soldier and a person who served with valor. As such, they should be returned.”

After the official tour ended, Whitehouse found the spot where his four buddies had been killed. “I just had to revisit it, I guess,” he says. “I don’t know, pay tribute. I thought: What could I do to commemorate this? And there was nothing I could do.”

There is no marker in the jungle where the Americans died from friendly fire. But their names are inscribed on that small piece of paper in George Whitehouse’s wallet.

Steve Roberts’ latest book, From Every End of This Earth, was published last fall. Send him ideas for future columns at svroberts@aol.com.

Digital Partners

Enter our essay contest