Pal’s name on wall
Vietnam veteran Bill Hurd of Westbrook plans to visit the memorial wall while it is in Maine. He plans to go while wearing his maroon paratrooper beret.
“I know what war is like,” Hurd said.
The wall will be inscribed with the name of a friend who was blown up in Vietnam nearly 40 years ago. But Hurd, who later became a paratrooper, can’t remember the man’s name.
Now retired from the Army, Hurd was shipped to Vietnam in 1967 for a yearlong tour and first served on river patrol boats. “We were classified as ‘river rats’,” Hurd said.
He was a radio operator on a boat that patrolled the Mekong Delta. His boat got hit twice.
Later, two friends were killed on a convoy and Hurd witnessed one’s death. “I saw the guy get blown out of the truck,” Hurd said. “He was in my platoon.”
Hurd, a sergeant, recalled that the victim was 19, but he didn’t remember the man’s name. Hurd remembered rushing over to the man, but he was already dead when Hurd got there. “He was blond. When we got to him his hair had turned pure white,” Hurd said.
He served on the riverboat for three months before being stationed in a French-built fort overlooking the South China Sea. Hurd, armed with an M-16 rifle, lived in a tent and was in charge of a communication crew of about 40 men. “I had to make sure they stayed alive,” Hurd said.
They came under attack. “Charlie mortared us,” Hurd said.
Of his crew, only one was killed. Hurd said that man was shot off the back of a truck. “You never got to know anybody. They could be gone tomorrow,” he said.
Hurd was stationed in Korea when the United States got into the war in Vietnam. He was in a “hooch” at the demilitarized zone in Korea, and was so close to the North Koreans that one North Korean soldier spat on him. “If the North Koreans decided to do anything, our life expectancy was one-and-a-half minutes,” Hurd said.
Wall helps relieve pain
Because of declining health, Joyce MacDowell of Gorham won’t be visiting the wall during its visit to South Portland. “I would like to, but I can’t make it,” she said.
MacDowell is a Gold Star mom. Her son, Bruce MacDowell, who had served a tour in Korea and Thailand, died at age 21 while en route to Vietnam.
Answering a knock on her door in November 1973, she saw two Air Force officers, who asked if she was his mother. “Oh no. Don’t tell me, I don’t want to hear it,” she remembered saying at the time.
Last week, MacDowell sat at her kitchen table with her face buried in her hands, struggling to recall details. “I have blocked all this away from me,” she said.
Her son enlisted in the Air Force after graduating from Gorham High School in 1971. He worked on jet fighters and received a citation for outstanding service in Korea.
Bruce MacDowell had been home on leave and had checked in at Loring Air Force Base. He lost his life in a car. He apparently ran the engine trying to stay warm after the car became stuck.
MacDowell was devastated over her son’s death and doctors gave her medicated. She blamed herself for his death, wondering what she had done so badly that her son would be taken away.
A couple years later after losing a 12-year-old daughter, who was hit by a car, she contemplated suicide by jumping from a bridge in Westbrook. “Oh God, help me,” she remembered calling out. “It’s faith that pulled me through.”
She doesn’t visualize her son as dead. “To me, he’s still 22. He’s just away,” she said. “The Lord loaned him to me. He wanted him back and took him back.”
She said the memorial wall would help show other mothers that their sons are remembered. “The recognition will help ease the pain,” she said.
Wall fosters memories
Charles “Chuck” Dix of Hollis, a veteran of two wars, lost a friend in Vietnam, who served with him on a patrol boat there. Dix has visited the Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C. but didn’t look for a name. “Seeing the wall brings back memories,” Dix said Tuesday at the Stevens Avenue Armory in Portland. “It never gets out of your mind,” Dix said.
Dix, 58, was with the Coast Guard in Vietnam from 1968 to 1969. He was assigned aboard a patrol boat in Danang and then the Mekong Delta. “We went looking for trouble,” he said. “That was our job.”
Dix has served his country in two wars. He also served in Iraq in 2004-2005 with the Headquarters Company for Maine’s 133rd Engineer battalion.
In Vietnam, he said his patrol boat crew boarded junks and supported troops with gunfire. He needed several ear operations after his eardrums were severely damaged when an artillery gun fired just inches away from his head.
Dix was hospitalized in Camron Bay but he saw others there who were in worse shape. In the hospital, he saw guys whose legs had been “blown off.”
Having served in both Vietnam and Iraq, Dix said he has seen both sides of the spectrum of public opinion.
The reception that troops received coming home from Iraq was markedly different than after Vietnam, when there weren’t big homecomings because of civic dissidence over the war on the home front. Dix said Vietnam veterans didn’t talk about being there.
In contrast, he recalled returning on leave from Iraq and getting a warm reception at the airport in Atlanta. “People there treated us great,” he said.
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Cutline (gold star mom 2) 
Cutline (Dix and LaBrie 1)
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