Veteran returns to Vietnam

By Sarah Szczepanski
Assistant Features Editor

July 4, 1969 — Lafayette resident Walter Griffin, 20 years old, experienced his first day in combat.

Arriving at a base in Vietnam, he was told to go wait at a helicopter-landing mat. That night, the base was hit with a mortar attack.

Griffin, all alone, scrambled into a nearby bunker. "I thought, 'I'm going to die my first night here,'" he said. "I didn't know where to go or what to do, so I just hid for the whole night. I didn’t have a weapon or anything. Like a good Marine, I was told to stay there and so I stayed there."

June 19, 2001 — Griffin's airplane arrives at Tan Son Nhat Airfield in Saigon, Vietnam. He anxiously waits in line to clear customs.

The surly Vietnamese passport checker shouts at someone to stay behind a yellow line and Griffin begins to have second thoughts about his trip.

He goes outside and finds himself in the middle of hundreds of Vietnamese voices, faces and signs. Griffin scans the crowd and his eyes rest on a sign with his name on it that is held up by a middle-aged Vietnamese man.

His revisitation to Vietnam had begun.

Griffin, a teacher at Attica Elementary School, got the idea to travel back to Vietnam four years ago when he saw a documentary on veterans bicycling across Vietnam. He had applied for one of 80 Eli Lilly Teacher Creativity Fellowship three years in a row, and finally he received one. He was supposed to come up with something creative that he, as a teacher, could share with Vietnamese students and the community.

This was something he wouldn’t have been able to do without the endowment, according to his wife, Mary Griffin. "It's fantastic for a teacher to be able to look at an experience (he or she) would like to do and bring it back to the students," she said.

Griffin got to learn about the culture and the native people of the country the second time he was there, which was under different, more fortunate circumstances.

As a soldier, children would scatter when he approached a village. Now, the people, curious about newcomers, would go out of their way to welcome him.

He talked with a woman who survived the massacre at My Lai, a village where at least 300 civilians, including women and children, were reportedly killed by American soldiers.

Although he was not yet in Vietnam at the time of the massacre, Griffin, who witnessed similar atrocities committed by the Viet Cong, said he cried with the woman. "We had a real good experience of healing in this place," said Griffin.

During his trip he said many people told him it was now a different time and the war was a long time ago.

Griffin said that once he got in combat, it was hard to have a lot of friends. People just didn’t know who would still be alive the next day, he said.

Thirty-one years later, he sits with two Vietnamese soldiers on liberty who are laughing and patting his stomach, not thinking of the time when enemy firing barely missed his head near the end of his 12-month military term.

"They called me the 'Happy Buddha,'" he said. "I had a lot of Vietnamese rubbing the belly of the hefty American. So they called me that a lot — at the beach especially."

Griffin saw a few of the old bases where he was stationed, but a lot of bases were still blocked off by the army, and could only be viewed from the road. Griffin didn’t know that photos were not allowed in some areas.

"We took a picture at a wrong place," he said. "Within 20 minutes, two plain-clothed policemen came and detained us for three hours."

But he said the people were still friendly. "When they took us down to the police station, they sat us down at a little table and gave us tea — hot tea," he said.

The policemen also released the men to go to lunch.

Griffin said besides the friendliness and the family unity of the people, it was all the ways that people were economical that stuck out to him. He saw a woman washing out plastic bags in a river and he saw a truckload of old American shell casing worth money that was gathered by the civilians even though it was a dangerous task.

One of his best experiences was visiting an orphanage. "I was really impressed with how happy the children were," said Griffin, who stayed an extra two hours playing games with the children.

These experiences are just some of the many situations that Griffin hopes to relay to the community through his grant. He is trying to obtain help for some of the schools in Vietnam by enlisting the help of schools, churches and other Vietnam veterans around the area.

"So I'm sharing my experiences with the children over there and my reconciliation with the former enemy. I'm sharing culture with students and I am available to talk about many subjects," he said. "All the ghosts are gone."

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