BILL STILWAGEN, 12TH MARINES

“I was a teenager, and in my mind I was fighting America’s war,” says Bill Stilwagen, USMC. “Mom and apple pie.  I think that changed when we were packing up to move from our base near Danang. We had employed a local woman to help with the housekeeping, and one day I came back to the tent to find her sitting on the bed, sobbing.  I asked, ‘What’s wrong, mamasan,” and she answered, ‘Marines go?  Vietcong come.

“From then on,” he nods, “I was fighting the war for mamasan.”

That was 1970; Stilwagen’s original taste of Vietnam—first as a field radio operator with the 12th Marines and later as door gunner with the Purple Fox Squadron out of Marble Mountain.

He’s been back thirty-two times since then, albeit on more peaceable missions.  As Logistics Officer and Vice-President of Vietnam Battlefield Tours, an organization founded by a group of Vietnam Veterans dedicated to provide professionally staffed tours to the battlefields of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, Stilwagen was engaged by Visionalist as bush guide to the Return to Vietnam segment of Our Vietnam Generation.

Today, March 4, 2010, Bill Stilwagen is sitting on the prow of a colorful dragon boat, floating easily down the Perfume River in Hue—the former imperial capital that was nearly destroyed during the infamous Tet Offensive.  Like Bill, Hue still carries deep scars from the war; like Bill’s scars, they are less evident on the city’s placid surface. In Hue, you need to look toward the Citadel and the Thien Mu Pagoda to see remnants of the artillery shelling; everything else has been repairs.  With Bill, you need to listen carefully to his story—his repairs have been do-it-yourself.

He’s not a big fellow today, and his physique is such that you might assume that he came into the Marines sort of scrawny.  Photos of him standing by the big tandem-rotor CH-46 don’t suggest any different—though with a thick shock of dark hair, he had the look of a leading man. 

“Had?” is the sort of from-the-hip comment you expect from him.  But also, deep and profound comments from years of post-war introspection.  He evidences a deep love for the people of Vietnam as well as the people of the United States—despite the fact that one side shot at him while the other side spat on him when he returned home after the war.  “I sensed so much misdirected anger in the protest movement,” he says.  “That anger should have been directed at the fools in Washington, the fools in Hanoi.”

He even finds a comparative level of compassion for the draft dodgers, who refused to even attempt the sacrifice he engaged willingly: “Would it have made any difference if their names were on The Wall?” he says, referring, of course, to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. which contains the names of 58,195 soldiers killed in Vietnam.  “It wouldn’t.”

Oddly, ironically, yet fully in character, he shows a similar sadness, if not admiration, as he leads us through the Gio Linh cemetery; a military graveyard holding the remains of Vietnamese killed in four wars—one of which, Bill fought in, and not on the side of these fallen men and women (on the inscriptions, the middle name ‘Thi’ indicates that the deceased is female.  He spreads his hands out to the thousands of tombstones and says, “This is an entire generation lost.  Any one of these people could have found a cure for cancer…”

This comment becomes far more telling the following morning.

Bill Stilwagen is verbose when you want him to be.  He describes the Vietnamese countryside with a cartographer’s eye and the people of Vietnam with the compassion of Margaret Meade.  He points to an old woman bearing her daily load on one of the ubiquitous carrying sticks, indicating her permanent clavicle damage from the pole; he shows us the satellite dishes on hootches as a dubious sign of progress. He describes the exotic fishing weirs by the riverside and the life cycles of rice.

What he fails to mention is that, for his efforts in the Vietnam war, he was recognized with, among other awards, the Air Medal for heroic action, the Bronze Star, the Purple Heart, the Combat Action Ribbon, the Republic of Vietnam's Cross of Gallantry, and New York State's Conspicuous Service Cross.

What he shares instead is that he has been diagnosed with cancer, the probable result of his contact with Agent Orange forty years ago—the same chemical which left a three-generations-removed Vietnamese girl in Hanoi’s Friendship Village mentally disabled.  Long before we learned of Bill’s illness, we watched him lovingly show the girl how his camera worked. 

Bill’s on his perch on the dragon boat when he tells us the news.  “I allowed myself a five minute pity party, then I said, ‘I’m a Marine, maybe I can beat this.  Marines are the shock troops; we’re about doing things that seem humanly impossible.”