Chapter 4 Excerpt

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Thirteen miles south of LaMountain’s museum, within the city limits of Charlottesville, sits a grassy slope that overlooks a busy bypass road. Eight flagpoles tower over a tan paved platform fronted with a facade adorned with gray stones of varying sizes and hues. The black lettering on the facade spells out: Dogwood Vietnam Memorial.

It was at this spot in April 1995 that Bruce Eades first confronted the ghosts that the Vietnam War had spawned in his mind.  

“I had to face my demons,” said Eades, who saw combat in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968, but had never talked openly about it until that moment, 27 years later.

On that April day, in front of fellow veterans and their families, Eades walked to a podium and started his healing. 

“Because of the stigma associated with the Vietnam veteran,” he said, “I, like many others, rarely spoke of my experience in Vietnam and I kept those memories sealed inside me, not revealing them to anyone. I hid my tears when I remembered my fallen friends.”

Since that speech, Eades returns often to the Dogwood Memorial. He has mowed its grass. His wife Joan would embarrass him and snap photos as he tended it. He would pray at the memorial, too, sometimes in the rain.

“I’d cry a lot,” Eades said, remembering his early visits to the site. “I finally faced what I had done in my life.”

Every April, he takes part in a ceremony of remembrance at the memorial. Since 2016, he has been President of the Dogwood Vietnam Memorial Foundation. He calls the spot “The Hill that Heals.”

“Once I [spoke], I realized that I owed those guys a lot,” said Eades, referring to the 28 men from the Charlottesville area who were killed in Vietnam and whose lives are remembered with plaques at the memorial.

Eades’ realization reflects the humility that he often expresses. By mustering the courage to make his healing process so public, he has undoubtedly inspired others to confront their burdens. And that is the spirit of the Dogwood Memorial, as well as LaMountain’s museum, where Eades volunteered as a tour guide. He has used the memorial and the museum as a tool to tell his grandchildren his stories from Vietnam, stories he had been reluctant to share with his wife and daughters.

Walter Bruce Eades was born on July 16, 1947 at Martha Jefferson Hospital in Charlottesville, Virginia. He led the Eades’ pack, the oldest of four boys and two girls. Though none of his siblings joined the military, his father Walter served as a tail gunner in Europe for the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II. Walter later graduated from the University of Virginia’s commerce school and became a homebuilder. Bruce’s mother, Alice, was a teacher’s aide at Johnson Elementary School. They lived on Cherry Avenue, on the southern end of the city.

“We weren’t rich, but we didn’t know we were poor,” Eades said.

Throughout his youth, he stayed busy with the Boy Scouts and sports: gymnastics, track, and football.  

“I didn’t have time to get into a whole lot of trouble,” Eades said.

He attended Lane High School, class of 1965. While there, he played football for his uncle, Coach Tommy “The Golden Greek” Theodose, who led Lane on a 53-game winning streak from 1962 to 1967, the most successful streak of any team in the nation at the time.* More than five decades later, Eades downplayed the impressive feat, with his characteristic modesty.

“We never lost,” he said, “but that wasn’t a good thing, because you don’t learn a lot from winning all the time. You need to know how to lose.”

For Eades, the most valuable lesson imparted by Uncle Tommy was how to handle fear, he said, which would later prove useful on the battlefield of Vietnam.

“I wasn’t a big guy,” Eades said, “and he’d like to put me head-on with the biggest guy out there, just for the heck of it. To toughen me up.” 

After graduating from Lane, Eades studied at the University of Virginia’s engineering school. Though he was on scholarship, it didn’t cover room and board, and he couldn’t afford to stay in the dorms. Instead, Eades walked to class from his family home across the railroad tracks every day, clad in suit and tie.  

His time at UVa didn’t go well.

“I learned a lot about girls, a little bit about beer,” Eades said.  

He had planned to finish a five-year degree in four years by taking an ambitious 20 credit hours each semester. In Semester 2, he flunked out, overloaded and overwhelmed.

“I wasn’t mature enough to succeed,” Eades said.

Before he dropped out, he had already been talking with a local Marine recruiter. Then, on his birthday – July 16, 1966 – he received a draft notice in the mail. Hoping to have some choice in his fate, Eades returned to the Marine recruiter and was promptly given orders to prepare for basic training at Parris Island, S.C.

“I guess I was technically drafted, but I went and joined the Marines,” Eades said. “I knew where I was going: Vietnam. It was obvious. We watched the news. I felt like I would get the best training [with the Marines].”

Basic training in South Carolina was “8 weeks of hell,” Eades said. After the torment, he further prepared at Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, North Carolina, enduring advanced infantry training. For Christmas, he returned to Charlottesville for a brief family visit, and then, the Marines shipped Eades to Camp Pendleton in Oceanside, California for jungle warfare school. Most of the men then boarded planes for Vietnam, but the top brass asked Eades to stay behind and learn Vietnamese.

He enjoyed learning languages at Lane High – he took Latin and Spanish – and so when Eades took the language test as part of the Marine entrance exam, he scored well. Because of that, the Marines sent him to Vietnamese language school in Monterey, California. For 20 weeks, eight hours a day, Eades learned about the food, customs, and history of Vietnam’s people, and it branded within him empathy and appreciation for their plight.

“It’s an ancient culture, and they are a courageous people,” Eades said. “They’ve been at war for thousands of years, but they got up every morning and smiled. How they could be happy, I don’t know.”

The tarmac in Danang, Vietnam broiled at 130 degrees when Eades’ plane first touched it.  

“It felt like you went into an oven,” he said, explaining his first impression of the country that would be his home for the next 13 months.

His first assignment was a head-scratcher. It ignored his language expertise. The captain took one glance at Eades, handed him a rifle, and said, “You’ll be point rifleman.” The Marines, it turned out, needed infantrymen more than interpreters.

For Eades, war wasn’t all that bad. At least that’s what he thought after a week in Vietnam. During his first brush with combat, Eades and his companymates sat at their listening posts and heard over their radios the chattering of a Viet Cong group passing through the area. They called in the naval guns and “cleaned up,” he said.

A Stars and Stripes reporter visited after the skirmish and interviewed the soldiers, stitching together an epic story of Marine dominance.  

“We kicked butt,” Eades said, “We didn’t have any casualties, and I said to myself, ‘This ain’t so bad.’ I got a false impression.”

Eades’ honeymoon phase with war faded quickly. Snipers and booby traps became constant dangers. The casualty count of his company soon ticked upward.  

After four months with his platoon, Eades’ captain finally realized that he spoke Vietnamese, almost by accident. Eades would often practice his language skills at the Marine base with South Vietnamese who cleaned the vehicles and hauled away trash. One time, the captain overheard such a conversation and interjected.

“You know their language?,” he asked, surprised.

“Yessir,” Eades replied. “Remember, the first day here, I said I went to language school?”

He was soon embedded with a South Vietnamese army unit. For six weeks, he served as an interpreter for a South Vietnamese colonel and the Marine captain that worked alongside him. Both groups tracked nighttime ambushes and daytime combat patrols using the same battle maps. They would write notes on the maps with red grease pencils. Eades would mediate the strategy conversations to make sure the Vietnamese colonel and the American captain didn’t bump their troops into each other.

Eades was finally putting his language training to use, but he disliked the assignment. Later in his tour he gained respect for the South Vietnamese as a fighting force, but at this point, with this specific unit, he didn’t fully trust them. Eades felt they weren’t interested in the fight and weren’t taking their job as soldiers seriously. While walking patrol, they carried rifles with only one clip and opted not to bring along grenades. Eades sensed they were communicating with North Vietnamese troops to deliberately avoid confrontations. And they would pause their operation often and trek home for breaks, loaded up with weapons. They would then return from their rest empty-handed.

“I figured they must sell it on the black market,” Eades said.

Also, the South Vietnamese soldiers who Eades chatted with during downtime didn’t talk much about war, even though they were the main players in one. Instead, they would pen love poetry, sketch pictures of flowers, and write home to their sweethearts.

“It was something I didn’t fully understand,” he said.

Before he could request a transfer, the Marines sent Eades to a ship near the Philippines to train with a battalion landing team, for an operation named Badger Tooth. The training culminated on December 26, 1967, when he and all troops in Lima Company landed on a beach just north of the city of Hue, near the north-south border. Soon after, in the small coastal fishing village Thon Tham Khe, 48 Marines died in the span of 24 hours. They were ambushed. Eades called it “the worst day of my life.”

At 11 a.m. on December 26, Eades’ Lima Company came ashore, though it wasn’t until 5:35 p.m. that it made a quick one-hour sweep of the village. The unit met little resistance during its search. It killed three Viet Cong fighters and captured four, but the group found no evidence of an established stronghold. As night fell, the troops were ordered to dig in so that they could more thoroughly probe the village in the daylight.  

Before dawn, Lima Company left camp and made a crucial error. It marched into the wrong hamlet and quickly had to shift course. Because of this misstep, the unit didn’t reach Tham Khe until midday. As it neared the edge of the village, it was met with a ferocious barrage of machine gun bursts, rockets, grenades, and mortar fire. Later, it was discovered that an undetected North Vietnamese battalion laid there waiting. It had spent a year building a bunker and tunnel system at the village. A later investigation also found that the North Vietnamese troops withheld their fire until Lima Company was “drawn into the killing zones,” at its most vulnerable.

During the ambush, Lima Company fell back and re-grouped three times to charge up a hill leading to Tham Khe. Eades was a part of each assault. Each time, they retreated to a nearby creek. In its second rush forward, the company commander, Thomas S. Hubbell, was shot and killed, along with his radio operator. Eades was running right beside them.

During the third charge, a bullet grazed Eades’ helmet. Undeterred, he clutched two grenades. One, he tossed toward the village, and the other fell in front of him and rolled into the creek.

Amid the barrage, Eades also kept his eye on 13 Viet Cong soldiers embedded with the company who had defected and were carrying carbine rifles. They chose to stay at the creek and watch the fight.

“You couldn’t trust any one of them,” he said.

Ultimately, on December 28, the Marines secured the village. The North Vietnamese battalion had escaped through their tunnel network. One month later, Lima Company caught up with the same battalion and decimated them, a memory that unsettled Eades when deciding whether to describe the second encounter – in which more than 500 North Vietnamese were killed – as “payback.”

“Even a good day in Vietnam is pretty sickening,” he said. “War is ugly, and if I don’t get any other point across, I think that people in our country need to know that war is not a good solution. You think it’s going to be short, but it never turns out that way. People take war too lightly. The saving grace for this country right now is our veterans, because our veterans understand that. Nobody hates war more than a warrior.”

Some aspects of the soldier’s job are forgettable, and that was true with Eades. In fact, the second half of his time in Vietnam was a blur. He doesn’t remember the day to day.

“I think you become numb mentally,” Eades said. “I lost a lot of guys that I got close to. As you get further along, you start getting close to fewer people.”

During the second half of his tour, Eades continued his role of interpreter. He would interrogate captured soldiers or talk with the chieftains of the villages that the Marines passed through. The prisoners of war showed fear and also relief at not having to fight anymore, he said. Most refused to share much more than the name of their regiment, and Eades would say outlandish things to try to coax them to disclose more. One of his go-to crazy claims was that his uncle was Ho Chi Minh, the political leader of North Vietnam.

“I did whatever I could to get them to talk,” Eades said.

Because he was an interpreter, the North Vietnamese had a bounty on his head, according to South Vietnamese soldiers who worked with him. The reward wasn’t much, Eades said, “maybe a lot to a peasant.”

When asked how it felt to be a wanted man, he chuckled.

“I didn’t think much about it, really,” Eades said.

He was then only 19, after all, still carrying a youthful air of invincibility.

And that naive boldness led him down a North Vietnamese tunnel in search of a souvenir. Eades had left the field for four days to attend mine warfare school at the Marine air base in the port city of Da Nang. There, he learned how to disarm booby traps, a skill he was called on to use often.

One day, guys in his unit chatted about war souvenirs, and they centered their banter on the North Vietnamese flag as a desired prize. Talk led to action, and Eades – brimming with confidence in his ability to diffuse a booby trap – volunteered as tunnel rat to chase down a flag. After all, he had shed 50 pounds from his pre-Vietnam frame of 210, a result of his new diet of rice and the local spicy fish sauce nuoc mam. So he was well-suited for a trip down the narrow passage.  

The scheme was set. Eades’ fellow souvenir hounds tied a rope to his feet and lowered him down the spider hole. Clutching a flashlight and a hand grenade, Eades peered down into the darkened tunnel. He spotted the flicker of a soldier’s shoe, and then saw a man running. 

 “I’m going to toss a grenade,” he called back to his handlers. “You guys pull me out.”

However, the running North Vietnamese soldier had the same idea. He tossed a hand explosive first. Luckily, Eades scooped up the enemy soldier’s live grenade and quickly threw it back down the hole before it detonated.

“I gave up on the idea of a souvenir after that,” he said.

Except for a colorful story here or a noteworthy moment of combat there, Eades finds it difficult to recall the day-to-day details of his later months in Vietnam. Monotony set in. As did certain existential questions about war and morality.

“It’d take us five days to take a ville,” Eades said. “We’d hit it every day, and take it. Then we’d leave it, and [the North Vietnamese] would occupy it again.”

As he spoke, he glanced back to a book that was open to a photo of him in January 1968 in Quang Tri Province (in South Vietnam, near the North-South border) interrogating a prisoner. The boy looked no older than 16.

Eades’ eyes scanned the photo.

“We were constantly calling the engineers to bury [the North Vietnamese] with the bulldozers,” he said. “I was really sad about that. The more I’ve thought about it since, it makes me sad that they endured that. They didn’t have a choice, I don’t think, these young men. We didn’t have a choice either. It was just a bad situation that both of our governments put us in.”

“We were supposed to stop them from coming across the [north-south] border, and I guess we just did our job. But it doesn’t make it any easier even today just thinking about it. The possibilities. Especially in their culture, they feel very strongly about the way they’re buried, things like that. Those people didn’t have a proper burial, in my opinion. No way around it, I guess.”

On June 15, 1968, Eades’ time in Vietnam ended with a commercial flight back to California, with an eventual return to Charlottesville. He and the other troops returning home were advised to dress in civilian clothes to avoid strife. After all, those wearing the military uniform were sometimes cursed at or worse – spit on – by war protestors.

After 13 months on the battlefield of Vietnam, Eades was a changed man, and he felt it, in his relationships and in his own mind.

“You feel out of place,” he said, reflecting on his transition back to Charlottesville life. “You feel like you belong back over with your buddies and you feel guilty leaving them. And you can’t carry on a normal conversation with people. Your family treats you with some respect, though they’re pretty standoffish because they don’t understand you either.”

Eades also walked around highly alert. Everyday sounds often set him off, such as a car engine backfiring.

“The cliche is that you hear a backfire, and you hit the ground,” he said. “Well, that’s true, you do.”

For Eades, an act of helping others jostled him out of his malaise. Shortly after he returned from Vietnam, one of his aunts who lived in Newport News, Virginia died of cancer. His widowed uncle called Eades and asked if he wanted to come live with him and help raise his four young children. Eades held top-level security clearance status, so his uncle could get him a job at the local shipyard working on a nuclear submarine. Eades agreed to help parent and moved in for six months, a decision that he said “saved me.”

“Those kids were so much fun,” he said. “They took my mind off of [the war]. I learned how to love again.”

Six months into his time in Newport News, Eades developed a mysterious illness that weakened him to the point that he could no longer work. His temperature peaked at 105 degrees. His doctors were baffled. Was it malaria? Finally, after about six weeks, a large team of doctors that examined Eades at the McGuire Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Richmond solved the mystery. The ailment was hookworm, a parasite that embeds in the small intestine and can lead to blood loss, even anemia.* The organism thrives in tropical climates with poor sanitation. Eades almost certainly contracted it in Vietnam.

After healing from hookworm, Eades returned to his parents’ home in Charlottesville. His father made a deal with him: live in the basement and work for his construction company so that he could plot his next move. Eades agreed to the pact. His longer-term plan was to go back to the classroom and earn a college degree, and he did. But not before cupid’s arrow stung him.  

He re-met a young woman named Joanie who had grown up in his neighborhood, a block away. He would often see her playing at the park in his younger years. Now, they danced together at a club called the Sip and Sizzle.

“She sizzled a lot, so I married her,” Eades said. “She changed my life. She gave me a reason to want to be a better person and to start caring again. When I came back, I knew I needed a balanced life. I knew I needed a relationship.”

The courtship was a lengthy one, however. Joanie thought Bruce was crazy, as he recalls. Their conversation topics often drifted toward motorcycles. After all, he owned five before he ever owned a car. On their first date, Bruce drove Joanie in one of his bikes. As Bruce tells it, Joanie was scared to death and refused to go out with him for three months after that. When Bruce finally talked her into going out again, he borrowed his brother’s car.

Soon after the second date, Eades used the money he had saved from his military service – about $100 a month – to buy a new Volkswagen Beetle. After a year, he traded it in for a Volkswagen van with tye-dye curtains and moved to Miami, Florida. Eades made a conscious decision to distance himself from his experiences in Vietnam. He grew his hair out and became a “weekend hippie,” as he describes it.

“I played the part of the opposite of a Vietnam vet because I didn’t want to be associated with the stigma,” Bruce said.

He used the GI Bill to earn a college degree in Miami and urged Joanie to move down with him. On Valentine’s Day 1970, Bruce and Joanie married. He never talked Vietnam with her.  

“I had to work two jobs,” Eades said. “I didn’t have time to think about Vietnam. I moved on.”

After college, Bruce and Joanie moved to Freeport, Texas. Bruce worked in commercial diving within the oil industry for eight years, but he disliked the blazing heat, and they moved back to Charlottesville. Bruce then bought a crane and started a steel company, earning a degree in construction management from Piedmont Virginia Community College along the way. His career in welding spanned 25 years and two companies, building churches, firehouses, and shopping centers.

Since that Spring day in 1995 when he spoke at the Dogwood Memorial, Bruce has dedicated himself fully to the cause of the soldier, volunteering for many veterans support groups. He has also examined his mind and soul for what he and his country did in Vietnam, and he’s reached some conclusions, about the conflict in Southeast Asia, and about war in general.

“America prides itself on not leaving anyone behind,” Bruce said. “I wish that were true. I think we left the Vietnamese people behind when we left Vietnam. I’m very sad for that.”

Americans should not blame wars on the military, he said.

“The military is the spearhead of war. They don’t decide on these wars. They just fight them. I think we need to look inside of each other. We can become a bellicose nation and not talk to each other and not listen to each other. We need to look at our politicians and how they serve. Politics is a necessary evil. War is a necessary evil. I’m not sure which one is worse.”

Bruce also offered guidance for how to meaningfully support veterans, aside from the requisite “Thank you” at a barbeque or at the grocery store.

“We thank the veterans, but we don’t ask them questions about how it was being away from their families,” he said. “The conversation ends often with ‘Thank you.’ That should be where the conversation starts. You learn a lot more listening than you do talking.”

In April 1995 at the Dogwood Memorial, he decided it was his time to talk. One of the men who led the plan to build the memorial, Jim Shisler, saw Bruce mowing the grass around the memorial in Summer 1994 and invited him to share his story. After a period of soul searching, he agreed to speak. He later became president of the group that supports the memorial, the Dogwood Vietnam Memorial Foundation.   

Fast-forward twenty five years and many speeches later, in April 2019, Bruce once again took the mic at “The Hill that Heals.” He struck a more light-hearted tone; his delivery conveyed a man who had worked through his Vietnam memories and had gained more comfort speaking to them. He recalled that in his 1995 address, he had opened his remarks by speaking in Vietnamese, a way to remind those gathered why America was in Vietnam: to help the Vietnamese people. His brother-in-law Joe was managing the sound system at the time. He almost cut the mic, thinking Bruce had lost his mind.  

“I got back on track in a more familiar Hillbilly English,” Bruce recounted with humility. “Fortunately, Barry Shisler who is doing sound today rides [motorcycles] with us [American Legion] Riders and knows me to be as crazy as he is.”

The theme of education pervaded the speech: Bruce’s own education and the education of local students. He mentioned learning more about the Vietnam War from a recent conference at the Virginia Military Institute.  

And then he spoke of Craig’s museum.  

Bruce welded some of its exhibits but could not bring himself to enter the museum during its first two years because of the haunting memories that the artifacts evoked. After two years, he led tours inside.

“Volunteering with other veterans [at the museum] the past ten years,” he said, “I began to see the value in educating our youth about that dark period of our nation’s history. It was therapeutic for all of us to help Craig build the museum, where folks could learn that the Sixties were not so different from today. It too was a time of different points of view: from protestors, to draft dodgers and draftees to enlistees.”

Bruce then shared what he learned when students sat down at the museum to interview him.

“These very bright young people ask lots of great questions…It certainly gives us hope for these future leaders’ decisions, not making the same mistakes as our country’s leaders made with Vietnam.”