During the Vietnam War, Gene Kelly didn’t sleep in a bed for 11 months.
That was among the least viperous of challenges he faced during a war that split the nation.
Kelly, who with fellow VFW member Jim Simons for several years have organized ceremonies for Memorial and Veterans days, on Monday will have the spotlight turned on him. He reluctantly has agreed to be the keynote speaker for the Leelanau County Veteran’s Day ceremony, which will begin promptly on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month — a reference to the exact time World War I ended in 1918.
VFW Little Finger Post 7731, located just east of Lake Leelanau on M-204, will again host the event.
Kelly, who with his wife, Pam, resides in Suttons Bay Township where they raised their two children, does not relish the thought of resurrecting — for the firsttime publicly —war-time memories of his service in Vietnam. But he sees the same divisions that tore at the country during the 1960s emerging today, and plans to offer words of unity in the face of election politics.
The America he and millions of other armed services members fought to defend remains just as worthy today of preserving for the next generation, he observes.
“We need to stop all the bickering,” Kelly said. “We need to focus on being American, and not focus on all this petty, political stuff. Nothing good comes from gossip. There is no upside to name calling. We’re just part of the tapestry of America.”
Reflecting back, he hopes and believes that war will never be fought by Americans in the same form that dominated the mountains and jungles of Vietnam. He shares some of his experiences in hopes of explaining the terrible waste on both sides of the battle lines.
It’s still unfathomable to him that hundreds and hundreds of drugged Viet Cong would charge heavily armed American troops in a single line formation armed only with sharpened bamboo sticks. The hope of their commandeers was that U.S. machine guns would jam or fail due to over heating. They usually didn’t.
“The result was sickening,” Kelly said.
“We would come under a human wave attack, also called a bamboo attack. There would be 700 to 800 people dead by the next day. And that’s not all of them because they believed in reincarnation and would gather up their dead at night. We would have a front end loader burying 200 to 400 people. And we would have maybe two (Americans) die. We never lost a battle. Never,” Kelly said.
A promising athlete, Kelly was recruited to play basketball at Monmouth University in New Jersey but was injured his freshman year. The Hawks swim coach saw potential during rehab and found a slot on the university swim team.
But Kelly envisioned a different life path. His great-grandfather and grandfather served in the British Royal Navy before his father immigrated to America. His parents served during World War II in the U.S. Navy, where they met.
Kelly’s father wanted his son to graduate from college.
“I asked (the Newark, N.J., draft board) to draft me. I was 18 and a sophomore in college. I said, ‘My dad is paying for me to go to college, which is a waste, and I hate it.’ But they couldn’t draft me until I was 19, so they drafted me on my 19th birthday,” Kelly recalled.
He served a year-long tour in Vietnam that started on June 25, 1967. He was in the field for the worst of the Tet Offensive, which started on Jan. 30, 1968, Kelly, the first member of his military family to serve in the Army, rose from a private to a sergeant while serving in the Iron Triangle area of Vietnam and in Cambodia. He became a platoon leader.
Kelly received the Army Commendation Medal for “heroism in the republic of Vietnam on 10 January 1968” — a description written on his award certificate — and a bronze star for “meritous service in the Republic of Vietnam” on June 20, 1968.
His time in the war seems a blur. When asked about his actions recognized on those days, he looks down. When pressed, he said, “This is a medal I got for doing something stupid.”
Like many war vets, Kelly struggles with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The affliction was strongest directly after returning stateside. One the wall in his office are the scratched-on names of three of his high school friends who died in Vietnam: Jimmy Nash, Carl Lambertson and Bob Grandy.
Kelly went on to lead a full and productive life. While visiting his uncle, a Coast Guardsman stationed in Traverse City, he met his wife and they set their eyes on raising a family here starting in 1975. He received certification as a national hardware lumber inspector from Michigan State and a builder’s license in 1984. His job was to provide an official quality rating for harvested lumber that was sold to a number outlets including Lazy Boy in Monroe and the Brunswick Corporation in Muskegon. Eventually he founded PDF Lumber in Bingham Township — named after his wife and their two children, Dana and Mathew — which was eventually sold to the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians.
Kelly won’t be attending a war movie being shown Monday at the Bay Theatre in recognition of Veterans Day, although he appreciates the effort to honor veterans.
“But I can’t go. I would never make it through. The older you are, the easier it is to cry,” he said.
