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Whittier, CA
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Article Last Updated: Saturday, January 25, 2003 - 10:38:06 PM MST
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Seeking belated welcome Local man campaigns for a day to honor Vietnam veterans
WHITTIER -- The
young 20-year-old from Whittier
followed his brother soldiers
across the Ca Ty River in Vietnam. Downstream, they could
see huts in the village of Phan
Thiet perched on the riverbank.
It was early afternoon on Feb.
19, 1968 a day that Jose Ramos will never forget.
"My platoon walked into an
ambush, a very well-organized
ambush,' Ramos, now 54, recalled. "We were wiped out in a
matter of two, three minutes. I
had 10 dead, and all of us were
wounded.'
The young medic quickly hunkered down and got to work.
"It's tough ... If you start feeling for every guy who loses a
hand or gets his eyes blown
out, then you're not going to
last,' he said. "I had to shut
down. I learned how to isolate
myself.'
Such experiences followed him
home. They changed the young
man.
"It was an incredible, stupid
job for a 19-year-old kid,' he
said. "My job was to save lives,
but at times I was forced to
take lives. At times, I was
forced to give up lives because
I had to make choices. I had to
pick who was going to survive
and who was not. That's just
the way it was.'
When he returned home after
his tour, those choices began to
haunt Ramos.
"I came back thinking that I
could have saved them all I
should have saved them all
but I couldn't,' he said. "I was
just a kid.'
Thirty years later, he is still
trying to save Vietnam veterans.
Ramos has launched a one-man
campaign to get the federal government to declare a "Welcome
Home Vietnam Veterans Day.'
It would not be a holiday. No
one would have the day off.
He chose Jan. 27, the anniversary of the signing of the peace
agreement that led to the end
of the war, as the day to honor
Vietnam veterans.
"I need to share with other veterans that they don't need to
turn to drugs or alcohol,' he
said. "They don't need to kill
themselves. They need to know
they are welcomed home.
There's a certain amount of
gratitude and appreciation out
there, except nobody knows
how to open the door. How do
you tell these guys we made a
mistake 30 years ago?
"We should have given them
praise. We should have welcomed them home.'
But will anyone listen to him
Ramos knows he is waging an
uphill fight.
"I know people have bigger and
better problems to deal with,'
he said, "but the more I dreamt
about it, the more I prayed
about it, the more I realized it
is workable. It's not an impossible task.'
Ramos started by appealing to
local cities, and he succeeded.
City councils in Whittier, Santa
Fe Springs, Pico Rivera, Montebello, La Habra and La Mirada
all have declared Monday, Jan.
27, "Welcome Home Vietnam
Veterans Day.'
Having such a day recognized
nationally would go a long way
in helping other, less fortunate
Vietnam vets, he said.
"The guys who are under the
bridges, the guys that still belly-up to the bar ... I'm hoping
that some awareness will come
to them. If one guy reads or
hears about it and says, 'Hey, I
got a welcome home today,'
maybe he can stop drinking.'
Delayed reaction
Ramos returned from Vietnam
in 1971.
"I had no idea that, getting off
that plane, I was going to be
different,' he said. "It was the
strangest feeling. I looked down
the ramp. A guy from the Air
Force was handing out certificates for a free steak dinner. I
was a kid. Very naive. I was
pissed off and it hit me in the
gut, like, this is it? This is
what I get?'
Even so, he became the quintessential American citizen. He
worked. He paid taxes.
"I did everything I was supposed to do, I thought.'
Although he had never graduated from high school, Ramos put
his war training to good use,
becoming a physician's assistant at Martin Luther King Jr.-
Drew Medical Center in Los
Angeles.
But in 1984, the war came
flooding back to his memory.
He began having nightmares -
nightly repetitions of combat.
He started drinking heavily. He
couldn't sleep.
"I wanted to sleep desperately,
but the minute I'd go to sleep it
was like turning on the VCR
and picking up right where you
left off. It was terrifying.'
He attempted suicide, lost his
job, drifted into depression and
stopped paying his mortgage.
He lost his home.
Ramos credits his family and
the VA hospital program for
saving his life. Then one day,
he received a fax about a group
of Vietnam veterans who
planned to make a bike ride
through Vietnam.
"That was what changed me.'
On Jan. 1 1998, Jose Ramos returned to Vietnam with other
American veterans. They bicycled the length of Vietnam
meeting people, visiting sites
and experiencing the country in
peacetime for the first time.
Schoolchildren followed the veterans' progress via the Internet.
When Ramos returned, he visited schools to speak about Vietnam. He was dismayed at how
little the students knew.
"I think it's real important that
they see how it changed my life
and that I'll never be the
same,' he said. "By doing that,
I hope when they get older and
run a corporation or the country, they'll never allow another
Vietnam to happen. See, that's
really the goal.'
February 19
Feb. 19 is a difficult day for Jose Ramos. He remembers the 10
buddies who died in the ambush that day. Last year, he
made up his mind to go back to
the place where it happened.
"This incredible sadness came
over me,' he said. "I had never
thought about the Vietnamese
who had died that day. After
they ambushed us, we called in
the world on them and they
paid the ultimate price. Nobody
walked away from that fight.
Every man on their side of the
river lost his life and I had
never felt compassion for these
men. I felt sad for me, that I
had never been human enough
to feel something.'
Tonight, Ramos will board a
plane and head back to Vietnam. He plans to stay in Phan
Thiet. On Feb. 19, shortly after
2 p.m., he'll stand in the same
spot where he stood 35 years
ago.
"I'm not going to go mourn and
I'm not going to feel sorry,' he
said. "I'm going to pray and
I'm going to thank God for putting that day in my life, for
putting the warriors on that
side of the river and the warriors on this side of the river.
I'll get on with my life. It's going to be my final closure.'
Mixed reactions
Other combat veterans, however, have mixed reactions to Ramos' "Welcome Home, Vietnam
Veterans Day.'
Pete Corodimas, 57, of Whittier,
who fought with the First Cavalry and as a door-gunner for
the 227th Assault Helicopter
Battalion, is skeptical.
"It would definitely make a difference to me, but unless it was
done in a genuine atmosphere,
I don't think a lot of the vets
would believe it,' Corodimas
said. "They have too much contempt over the years about the
denying and lying. It would
have to be genuine.
"There's so much been taken
away from the vets, and they're
not doing much for the guys in
the streets. It's because they're
defeated. They're defeated by
the government. They're defeated by society and most of all,
they're defeated by themselves.
They've lost hope.'
Corodimas has internal injuries
from the war and a bitterness
born of the rejection suffered
by many vets when they returned.
"There were a lot of smart remarks, a lot of armchair philosophers,' he said. "They said, 'I
wouldn't have done this. I
wouldn't have done that.' That's
why it's hard to talk to somebody about this who hasn't
been there.'
He agrees that schools should
teach more about the Vietnam
War.
"Children should always know
why they live in a free country.
They ought to understand that
sometimes war cannot be prevented. I think children and the
rest of the nation should be
told the truth about why we're
going to war.'
When Ramos heads off on his
bicycle trip to Washington,
D.C., in April, he will be carrying letters and postcards of support for "Welcome Home Vietnam Veterans Day.'
Cards should be addressed to
President Bush and mailed to
P.O. Box 556, Whittier, CA
90608.
-- Susan
McRoberts can be reached at
(562) 698-0955, Ext. 3029, or by e-
mail at sue.mcroberts@sgvn.com .
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