They remember: Five decades after America's withdrawal from Vietnam War

What happened during the Vietnam War charted life afterward for those involved, its influence inescapable and outsized.

The official withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam on Jan. 27, 1973, signaled the unofficial start of postwar life in the United States. How those who returned were received and treated would be a subject of controversy for decades and continues even today.

The steepest price was paid by the 58,000 troops who were killed and the families left behind. Another 150,000 vets were wounded, many returning with missing limbs or suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Fifty years later, another 1,600 service members remain missing.

But the conflict’s tentacles were infinite, and many more were affected in myriad ways. Everybody lost something — the only difference is the degree.

• A former prisoner of war walks the perimeter of his Illinois residence daily to check that it’s safe.
• A 20-year-old who served 13 months in the Army’s 101st Airborne remains disturbed about racial injustices he experienced.
• A boy born to a soldier in the war zone spends his adult life searching for his father and mother.
• An Army chaplain joins the antiwar movement after seeing firsthand the war's impact on South Vietnamese civilians.

This is what they said.

Army PFC James Pfister

Army Pfc. James Pfister sensed something was up when his Viet Cong captors led him and other prisoners on a 58-day trek from a POW camp in South Vietnam to a location near Hanoi in North Vietnam in 1971. He just wasn’t sure what it was.

It turned out to be his first steps to freedom.

It had been three years since Pfister, a helicopter gunner, and his crew were shot down on Jan. 5, 1968, in Quang Nam province. Pfister, 19 at the time, broke his back and was captured, along with pilot Gene “Bones” Anton.

They were moved around the jungle to different camps, assigned to hard labor, beaten, placed in isolation and forced to forage for their own food and firewood.

“I caught rats, gutted them and roasted them. Snakes, lizards, anything that crawled,” said Pfister, now 74, a native of Evansville, Indiana. “I had 10 cases of malaria, dysentery, parasites.”

During the first two years at the camp, eight POWS died, most from unattended injuries at capture or new wounds suffered in camp. Marine Sgt. Russ Grissett, who lost 75 pounds, died after he was beaten by Viet Cong guards for eating the camp kitchen’s cat.

A couple of the POWs, Pfister said, reached their human limits and “just gave up.”

Prisoners’ duties included burying their own dead. “I was there for all eight,” Pfister said.

When Pfister’s prisoner group arrived at the prison in Hanoi known as Plantation Gardens, they discovered why they were moved; the United States and North Vietnam were in peace negotiations — and a linchpin of the deal was the release of all POWs.

Pfizer and the others were transferred a year later to the prison complex known as the Hanoi Hilton. In January 1973, the same month the Paris Peace Accords were signed, they were told they’d be going home.

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Pfister recalled saying.

Two months later, on March 6, Pfister and a group of about 40 POWs were put on a bus and driven to the Saigon airport, among the first of 591 prisoners released in Operation Homecoming. Also in 1983: Anton was released.

Pfister spent 11 days in a military hospital and three months recovering back home.

Across America, the POWs were welcomed as heroes and greeted with parades, including in Evansville. Pfister went to the White House on May 24, 1973, and met President Richard Nixon, as well as entertainers Bob Hope, Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne.

“I shook the president’s hand and told him, ‘Thank you’,” Pfister remembered.

Pfister, now a staff sergeant, reenlisted, partly to qualify for a full pension. He held a variety of stateside jobs until he could retire from the military as Sergeant First Class, E-7.

“After all I’d been through, I wasn’t going to just quit,” he said.

But the physical, mental and psychic scars remain.

He never stops thinking about Vietnam. Not for one minute. He can watch a television show and start thinking about soldiers he buried.

Fifty-years later, living in Illinois, he still has nightmares. Two or three a week.

And since his wife of 29 years, Karen, died in October, Pfister said, blocking out the bad memories has been harder.

“I keep waiting for her to walk through that door,” he said. “Every day now is just survival.”

After the war: First-generation Vietnamese Americans thriving in New Orleans

Kirk Kellerhals

For five decades, Kirk Kellerhals assumed his parents were killed in the Vietnam War. He spent his life trying to figure out who they were and how they died. Then in 2017, he discovered they were alive and well in America.

“Now I was going to meet them,” Kellerhals remembered.

Kellerhals was one of thousands of children of U.S. service members placed in Vietnamese orphanages during the war.

In 1969, his mother, Thuy-Nga Thi Niblett, was forced by her father and brother to put him in Danang’s Sacred Heart orphanage because he was the son of an American. His father, Air Force veteran Sheldon Soule, returned to the states before he knew Niblett was pregnant.

Two years later, a U.S. Army major adopted Kellerhals and brought him to the United States, raising the boy at various military bases around the world. Niblett emigrated from Vietnam that same year and began a decades-long search for her son and his father.

There is no reliable estimate of how many Amerasians were put up for adoption, but about 23,000 people born in Vietnam now live in the United States. In 1975, a U.S. program called Operation Babylift brought 2,000 Amerasians to the states, but not before the first flight crashed, killing 144 children.

His new family told Kellerhals he was adopted. They assumed his natural parents were dead.

Over the years, he grew curious about his heritage, partly because of bullying from other children and, later, discrimination by adults.

“I looked different, dark-skinned, so I was picked on because I had a father who was of German descent and a mother who was part Irish,” Kellerhals said. “I was called Bruce Lee, Charlie Chan, you name it.”

Eventually, he learned how to neutralize the harassment. He lied about his heritage. Whatever was convenient or cool. He was Latino for a while. Italian. Hawaiian.

Though he knew he was part Vietnamese, he was reluctant to identify himself as such, even after becoming a police officer in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. He was ashamed of the way Vietnamese women were portrayed as prostitutes and U.S. soldiers as irresponsible.

His wife, whom he met in South Korea, convinced him six years ago to accept his ancestry and to learn more through DNA testing.

Thirty days later, he was at his son’s high school graduation in Henderson, Tennessee, when he received an email from someone named Nga.

She said she was his biological mother.

He was suspicious.

Two minutes later, the DNA search outfit also sent an email.

“Congratulations: You have a parent-child match.”

Kellerhals called his mother that day. The next month, she traveled from Texas to meet him in Virginia. Shortly afterward, they connected with Soule, who was of English and Scandinavian descent, in Syracuse, New York.

Suddenly, Kellerhals transformed from an adopted orphan with no living birth parents into a middle-aged man with two parents and several siblings on both sides.

“There was an immediate bond, like I’d known them my whole life,” said Kellerhals, who is now a photojournalist. “The odds of thinking both had died to finding both birth parents was a blessing.”

Soule died in March 2022 at the age of 69.

Kellerhals has since founded an organization, Sea2C, with two other adoptees from Sacred Heart to tell the stories of children from the war and help them prepare for what to expect if they attempt to reunite with lost family members.

Assistant Army Chaplain Jerry Lembcke

Assistant Army chaplain Jerry Lembcke’s job during the war was to reach the “hearts and minds” of the South Vietnamese villagers.

By the time he came home in 1971, it was his heart and mind that had changed.

“I had become convinced the war was not in our interest or the interest of the Vietnamese,” said Lembcke, a member of the 41st Artillery Group. He spent 13 months in Vietnam.

“They didn’t want us there.”

As part of the U.S. military’s pacification program, an effort to gain the trust of rural civilians, Lembcke talked to villagers in orphanages, churches and hospitals, trying to arrange resources for them and persuade them to resist joining with Viet Cong guerrillas. Meanwhile, U.S. and South Vietnamese troops chased the guerillas out of villages in violent clashes.

“There was an iron fist and velvet glove approach,” Lembcke said.

When Lembcke returned to the Denver area, he joined the local chapter of Vietnam Veterans Against the War at a time when many GIs joined domestic protests, their way of contesting the country’s mission.

“People who were being drafted into the war had already been exposed to the protests here,” he said.

Lembcke’s chapter of veterans arranged for speakers at college campuses, hosted protests and marched behind Veterans Day parades. The American Legion wouldn’t let them participate officially, so they trailed along.

They got lots of support, he said. “Nobody booed us.”

Lembcke remained involved in antiwar activities, protesting the U.S. involvement in Central American conflicts in the late 1970s and 1980s and the Gulf War in the 1990s. He enrolled in graduate school, taught sociology and has written eight books, several examining postwar attitudes toward Vietnam soldiers and protesters.

In 1998, through his book “The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam,” Lembcke sought to debunk oft-told anecdotes about returning veterans being spit on by war protesters at airports and parades.

Lembcke said the myth was perpetuated in movies such as “Rambo: First Blood” and seized on by hawkish politicians to portray dissenters as anti-troop. It was repeated — unsourced — in media accounts, said Lembcke, now a professor emeritus of sociology at the College of Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.

In fact, the protesters’ grievance was with the government, not troops, with popular chants to “bring the boys home,” he said.

The claim that Vietnam vets were called “baby killers” at airports and parades was also exaggerated, he said, most likely a distortion of the chant against President Lyndon B. Johnson: “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”

2nd Lt. Anthony Francis

Shortly after Anthony Francis entered Vietnam in 1969 as a second lieutenant in the 101st Airborne, he learned there was a double standard when a Black commander tried to exercise authority.

Francis was ordered to rescind the punishment of a white soldier, who had fallen asleep on guard duty, and to force a Black soldier who was scared of heights to rappel from a helicopter.

His combat engineering unit of mostly Black soldiers was passed over for awards handed out after helping to build a road near the Demilitarized Zone. And, he said, he was held back for promotions.

“It seemed like we were always coming up short,” said Francis, 74, of Springfield, Massachusetts. Black soldiers were punished more often and more severely than white counterparts, he said, often for minor infractions.

For Black veterans, the Vietnam War was no refuge from the discrimination that set off the civil rights movement; it was one more hurdle to clear to make enlistment tolerable. The same held true of adjusting to civilian life after their return; there was no exemption from racism because they’d served.

“It was the same as I’d seen before the war,” Francis said.

More than 300,000 Black Americans served in Vietnam, representing 16.3% of the U. S. armed forces when 12% of the U.S. population was Black, according to the African American Veterans Monument. They comprised 25% of enlisted troops, but just 2% of officers.

In Brooklyn, New York, Francis attended an all-Black grade school and never knew a white person until high school. He volunteered for the Army in 1967. Two years later, after officer training school, he asked to be deployed and served for 13 months.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968 while Francis was at Fort Gordon, Georgia. The soldiers were confined to base while riots broke out in cities across the nation.

King’s murder didn’t deter Francis from serving.

“I separated the two,” he said. “My young eyes were bright, the military meant everything to me. I planned to make a career out of it. I had family members who fought in both world wars and Korea and felt obligated to be there.”

By the time he left Vietnam, discrimination in the Army had nearly broken him. The combination of public hostility against soldiers and continued racism was relentless and debilitating.

He was fed up. Angry.

“Going in I felt I could get along with anyone, but when I got home, if you were white, I hated you,” he said.

“I served with some great white soldiers and would again. But as a group, whites were the enemy. It was a systematic problem.”

Landing at Travis Air Force Base in northern California, Francis and other soldiers were told not to wear their uniforms when they reached the city because they’d be harassed. When they wore their military clothing anyway, on a commercial flight home to New York, cabs they tried to hail at LaGuardia Airport passed them by.

While enrolled at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, a student in class asked Francis how many women and children he’d killed. Another told him, “You guys are suckers.”

His eyes narrowed.

In 1980, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, he visited a counselor. At his first session, he cried for an hour.

He experienced a feeling like he was out of step with the world. Couldn’t get back in sync. An outcast.

Looking back, he didn’t know he had changed.

Part of that feeling is the isolation, Francis said, and being unable to develop the same affinity for others that he had for fellow soldiers.

In the Army, soldiers lived for each other. If one guy had a can of beer, everybody got a sip. You all wanted to go home, but you wanted to see everyone ahead of you get out first.

Back in America, “it’s not the same,” Francis said. “I have safe zones.”

Francis served in the National Guard in New Jersey, Massachusetts and Connecticut from 1976 until 1993 and retired with 23 years of service. He also worked to help Black vets receive benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs that they did not know they were entitled to.

He said he would do it again — if only to make sure the war is fought the right way.

“I can’t explain it,” Francis said. “In the center of madness, you need some balance. There is no such thing as a nice war.”