Thank you for this touching story. Most of us may be unaware that Canadians fought and died there. I am glad that their bravery and sacrifice have been honored.

Thank you for posting that information.

Interesting. I was still a kid at end of that war so did not remember much about it. Other than a classmate who couldn't stop crying one day because her cousin was killed in a training accident. It's good to have public memorials for those who offered their lives for the rest of us.

Thanks for posting this. I learned something.

10000 likes! That is a wonderful story, and thank you for sharing it. I’ll be sharing this story with my DH also.

I know little about history in general, so that's an interesting story. I also, learned something.

I had no idea! Thank you for posting that, Amicus.

Rusty

Thanks, it's interesting to learn of Canadian volunteers into the US military. It's understandable that surviving compatriots would want to honor them.

The phenomenon of people joining another nation's military is not unique. Mercenaries and soldiers of fortune aside, I can think of many examples. There were a fair number of Americans who joined the British Army, also some with the French, during WW 1 before the US joined the war effort. Similarly, many Americans joined Canadian and British forces, especially the RAF, at the beginning of WW 2 before the US became active. A more recent example, one with I guess different motivations than the preceding, is the number of Americans I've read about over the years who have joined Israel's military. I don't believe in any of these instances there are any governmental acknowledgements or memorials to those who were killed but I think that's understandable. Privately financed sites to honor others, of any kind without a primarily religious content (that could offend those of other views) ,should be welcomed.

My husband's family is French Canadian. I never knew this history. His draft number in 1972 was 159. His father was a WWII vet, and would have supported his son going to relatives in Canada to avoid that war.

Because of DH's work for the US Department of Defense as a systems engineer, he worked on a NATO project for over 10 years that took us to Europe quite frequently and we lived in the Netherlands for several years. I learned so much about the Dutch/Canadian alliance while we lived there. During that war, the Royal Family was exiled to Canada and (from Wiki): "The maternity ward of the hospital was temporarily declared to be extraterritorial by the Canadian government.[3][4] This ensured that the newborn would not be born in Canada, and not be a Canadian citizen under the rule of jus soli. Instead the child would only inherit Dutch citizenship from her mother under the principle of jus sanguinis, which is followed in Dutch nationality law. Thus the child would be eligible to succeed to the throne of the Netherlands. This would have applied if the child had been male, and therefore heir apparent to Juliana, or if her two older sisters died without eligible children."

The Dutch send 10,000 tulip bulbs every year to Ottowa in tribute to the birth of Princess Margriet.

If you ever fly to the Carribean island St Maarten, the airport is named after Juliana.

Canadian forces helped liberate the Netherlands and many Dutch immigrated to Canada. I belong to several Dutch/Canadian FB pages and still hear amazing stories of survival. Also helps me to keep up my Dutch language "skills" ...

Bravos to the three Vietnam Vets for honoring the brothers in arms they lost on the battlefield. Thanks for sharing. Another lesser known ally is Hmong people, who also fought along the Americans and Vietnamese during the war. Their Memorial was dedicated in Arlington National Cemetery. The reunification of North and South Vietnam took tremendous casualties for all involved, even long after the war ended. And the outcome was a slap in the face with communist ruling, unlike that of East and West Germany. My two uncles, residing on opposite sides of the wall, were elated to see each other after the wall came down.

The 3 American Vietnam War Vets from the MACV (Michigan Association of Concerned Veterans) went to great lengths, to ensure that their Canadian Vietnam War comrades were honoured in our own country. It's touching what they inscribed on the memorial.

It says:

Donated

by

M.A.C.V.

Michigan Association of Concerned Veterans

from three Americans who cared.

Ed Johnson

Ric Gidner

Chris Reynolds

on this day

Sunday, July 2, 1995

followed by the epitaph:

AS LONG AS WE LIVE

YOU WILL LIVE

AS LONG AS WE LIVE

YOU WILL BE REMEMBERED

AS LONG AS WE LIVE

YOU WILL BE LOVED

M.A.C.V.

THEY ARE NOT FORGOTTEN

Sadly, in later years, a marker was placed beside the memorial, in honour of Ed Johnson, who passed away from cancer in 2010, at the age of 61. Ed made the trip across the border to Windsor every year for our Remembrance Day ceremonies (akin to your Memorial Day) to honour his fallen Canadian comrades. We wanted his marker to echo back some of the words inscribed on our memorial, 15 years earlier. His marker reads:

YOU HAD A VISION TO LET IT BE KNOWN

THAT CANADIANS SERVED IN VIETNAM

AND WOULD NOT BE FORGOTTEN

AS LONG AS WE LIVE

YOU WILL BE REMEMBERED

CV.V.M.A.

(Canadian Vietnam Veterans' Memorial Association)

https://www.citywindsor.ca/residents/culture/monuments/pages/canadian-vietnam-veterans-memorial.aspx

As Elmer mentioned, crossing the border to serve in the other's military isn't new. Many Canadians served in the U.S. military, for the Civil War and the Spanish American War. Many Americans served in the Canadian military for WWI and WWII, before the U.S. joined the war in Europe. So it seems that when the call of duty strikes, the border isn't a deterrent.

I hesitate to bring this up for fear of a bottle and rock attack, but I'll share that among people I know who were in combat, after the fact influences and feelings about it can vary substantially. For many, their lives were forever changed, their ability to deal with their lives and people in it, were forever changed and not for the better. Perhaps a manifestation or variant of PTSD, the realities of which I fully believe in. There were others at the side of these same people who, while equally scared, equally haunted, equally troubled at the time, did their thing, went back to being civilians and were able to compartmentalize and leave behind the terrible experiences and get on with their lives. Yes, I also knew a few who were killed there, they sadly didn't have a chance to come home to lead normal lives.

Of the people I know, it's those of the first group - often troubled, often with nightmares, those who've had difficulties in life or even at the extreme substance abuse problems and mental illness - who tend to show up for Veterans Day parades, wear "US Army" of "Vietnam Vet" hats, who tend to have an interest in monuments and memorials, and who tend to be rather fixated on people and things related to their service. The others, not so much in denial but perhaps having had a less lasting and profound experience, seem to not have as much interest in the same things. Put another way, for the first group, for whatever reasons, the awful experiences have defined their lives. For others, not so much if at all and they were able to move on from it long ago.

I'm the sister of a 20+ year Navy vet who died homeless from alchol/drug overdose in a San Diego hotel room. Memories and physical disabilities from war haunted him. He was a Chief Master-at-Arms.

For others, not so much if at all and they were able to move on from it long ago. -Elmer J Fudd

Are you sure? Silence is not always golden.

Yes, quite sure. Some a few guys I know well, whom I knew before, during, after and ever since. The one I know best is a good friend's brother who as a draftee spent a year in Vietnam as a door gunner on a Huey copter. The Hueys were the copters that operated the ferry service, carrying squads to and from combat landing zones and picking up wounded.

If you want to think about the humorous expression of jeopardy of "hanging one's butts out in the wind", door gunners literally did that. He's fine, laughed it all off at the time with a callous and irreverent attitude and has had a normal life in all respects. I see him about once a year. He even said at the time, when he came home, that he was happy to have been in Vietnam because the PXs there sold consumer electronic goods at such low prices that he was able to buy and send home far more goodies than he could have ever afforded to get, at other Army assignment areas. Apparently the prices there were quite cheap. Imagine that as a take-away attitude.

I'll add another, a guy who was a good friend in college, older than the rest of us because he'd enlisted in the Marines after graduating from high school. Said he hoped to never make another such stupid mistake. He was a forward artillery observer in I Corps, the part of South Vietnam just below the DMZ border. His job was to call in coordinates to aim artillery attacks, often to battleships offshore. When the shells started landing, the "targets" knew there was an observer nearby and they would scurry to try to find him. Hide and go seek with lethal consequences. He laughed it off too, said it was scary but he was lucky. I lost track of him after college because he moved back East but about him I would also say he seemed normal in every possible way. A good student, did not party or drink excessively. A pretty squared away guy happy to take advantage of the GI Bill to have a good future as a graduate of a good college.

I was born and raised in Queens, NY. Down near Kennedy Airport.

It was a typical NYC neighborhood, sort of Archie Bunker type houses close together. All the kids in my neighborhood were close friends, we all grew up playing together, becoming very close to both their families and their children.

We all went to the same schools. During Vietnam, the Army drafted all the boys right out of high school. Some got notices during graduation. The boys who were a bit older and in college, didn't get drafted.

All the girls would write letters, help their mothers keep faith that their boys would come home.

So many of my childhood friends died. It was shocking. Week after week, one of their families would receive the sad news. The girls would check the military cars when they came down the street to see who was next.

It was the most depressing time for me. I cried and attended too many funerals.

That was the worse war, however it is the only war I remember. Both my brothers, who were much older than me were drafted into WW2 and Korea.

War is horrible and takes the lives of so many young men and women.

Amicus, that was a beautiful story which I didn't know about. Thank you for posting this.

Jane

Thank you Amicus.

Jane, it sounds like you and your neighborhood were horrendously and directly affected by the Vietnam war years. It must have been terrible.

There were many problems with the administration of the draft and one of the biggest was that practices varied greatly from one Selective Service board to another (there were hundreds of them or more in the US). To resolve that problem, toward the latter years of the war, the law was changed and the birthday lottery system was put in place as a system directed nationally.

The lottery assigned randomly drawn numbers to calendar days of the year and draftees were called based upon the number assigned to their birthday in order. A loose explanation of how it worked - if a young man's birthday was June 5 and the number assigned in the lottery for his birth year was 120, people with birthdays numbered 1-119 would be called first and then it would be the turn of the fellow with a June 5th birthday. For the lottery years, I don't think they ever got past or much past 180 so that those whose birthdays had higher numbers were never called up.

In my area, it was rare for a young man to be drafted right at or soon after finishing at high school because of how the system worked overall. Registration into the Selective Service System was required by one's 18th birthday and it took awhile, often a year or more, for them to get to and digest new registrations to process for the draft call. Not everyone attained age 18 before graduating high school (I was 17 myself) and even if so, one could get a student deferment that could be extended for the next year (or initiated) by being enrolled in a college of any kind. Community colleges counted as well as 4 year ones, the only requirement was to be taking enough classes for the particular school to consider the young man as a full time student. I myself drew a very low number but I had a student deferment at that point.

Most of the guys I knew who were drafted were 20 or older, often from blue collar families (why, I don't know) and not pursuing college studies. When I was at Army boot camp, my basic training company was a mix of those who'd joined the National Guard, those who had enlisted, draftees and Army Reserve volunteers like me. The draftees were as I described just before. While there were wait lists, it wasn't that hard to join the National Guard or the (even safer) Reserves to be sure to avoid the personal jeopardy of combat. I joined just as an insurance policy in case the rules changed and or my student deferment was lost and or it ended at graduation. There were many other ways to avoid the draft without leaving the country and frankly my experience was that those who wound up getting drafted had been lazy or inattentive about taking available steps to protect themselves.

Because of deferments, the numbers needed, etc., I don't think the draft "take" was ever greater than 1/3 of the eligible individuals of any birth age group. I served my 6 years quietly as a reservist with monthly "meetings" and two weeks of annual "summer camp". I had the equivalent of a professional white collar Army job in my reserve unit - no going out on maneuvers, no combat boots, no out marching in the dirt, no overnights other than summer camp and monthly meetings were 8-5 down the road from where I lived. . By the time I was discharged, the draft and the war had both ended but my personal safety had been ensured. It served its purpose for me.

For your neighborhood to have seemingly born such a disproportionate share of the load was most unfortunate. War is horrible and unfortunately as a nation, all these years and military fiascos later, we still haven't learned that we are not the world's police force and that the money spent and lives wasted in distant lands does nothing for our own safety or freedom and can be argued to have the opposite effect.

When the U.S. gov't decided they should go to Vietnam, not everyone agreed that American. involvement would change things in the long run. Their doubts were eventually proven true. But for those who did serve in Vietnam, they went with the hope of preventing the spread of communism to South Vietnam and further throughout Asia.

But the dragged out war was costly in lives and money, and considered a horrible waste of both. So unlike our WWI and WWII Vets, who could declare a victory, there would be no adoring public, or Victory Parades or welcome home celebrations, for the returning Vietnam Vets. Instead, they came home to a public who often disparaged their service and criticized them for having gone. Most felt unappreciated at the least, and some were treated with downright hostility, and often turned down for employment.

Some returned with their mental health pretty much intact. Others came back completely changed, and with no P.T.S.D. treatment available back then, failed to sustain relationships, alienated their families, turned to alcohol or drugs to blur their memories, or worst, committed suicide.

I use to assume the Vets who adjusted easily into life upon returning, must have had better mental health before they left, and more supportive families. But my Uncle, a WWII Vet, told us that was likely a wrong assumption. He said that the Vietnam Vets he knew, seemed to equate their ability to rebound 'back to normal' as strongly linked to which incursions they were involved in and what occurred. Either way, I'm glad our military now has much more access to any needed physical and mental rehab, once they return.

My neighborhood was definitely blue collar. Primarily, Italian and Irish. Most of the italian parents did not speak English even after being in the Country for many years. Their children were all born here and could speak both.

It was a neighborhood of children with little means to attend college. Most followed their fathers into a trade. Some got jobs at Kennedy Airport (then called Idlewild Airport).

I'm not sure of their ages, I'm assuming 18-19. Elmer, I also graduated at age 17. But most of the neighborhood boys were drafted immediately after graduation.

My husband, who was older than me was from Boston. He graduated college during the Korean War. He was drafted after college. The strange part, and he loved to tell people, because he had a college degree he was sent to Puerto Rico and did moss code. He loved it, he was on the beaches, got fresh fish from the natives who cooked them on wood fires on the beach. He was there 2 years. He never was sent to Korea. However, he was given an aptitude test by the Army before discharge. The test said he should go into medicine which the test showed he scored the highest. He had a BA in English and American Literature.

He decided to go to Medical School after the Army and eventually became a M.D. He always thanked his time in the Army as turning the direction of his life. The VA even helped pay for Medical School.

My brother had a different experience. Same age as my husband, drafted out of high school and shipped over to Korea. Horrible non-declared war. But he survived.

Although my brothers, WW2, Korea, my father WW1, I wasn't alive during those years. But I was alive during Vietnam and remember the horrors of that war vividly.

Jane

"I'm not sure of their ages, I'm assuming 18-19."

I believe your description which suggests the local Selective Service Board covering your neighborhood could have been more aggressive than others. That's consistent with what was going on in scattered places here and there and as before, it was one of the reasons why the lottery system was put in place to try to achieve more consistency. But I'll tell you that I was at boot camp (on the West Coast) with plenty of draftees, perhaps 1/3 or a bit more of my basic training company, none were 18 and I think most were 20 and over. We did have a few 17 year old juvenile delinquents but not draftees. These were teens who'd been arrested for criminal conduct, who at trial were given the choice of going to jail or enlisting as volunteers in the Army. No kidding. A handful of these, they were not only of decidedly blue collar origins but at the far low end of the intelligence bell curve. They struggled to learn even the simplest of things. One was nearly shot on the rifle range for doing something very stupid.

Korea wasn't a "declared war" but it didn't need to be. "Truman acted after the U.N. Security Council unanimously called for member nations to offer military assistance to the government in Seoul", quoted from words in link below. An interesting fact behind this is that while the 5 permanent members of the Security Council, including at the time was the USSR, then and now hold a veto over SC decisions, the Soviets were boycotting SC participation at the time and so were not present at the meeting to exercise their veto right. So it passed.

Jane, we don't need to bicker. A few other of your recollections differ from my own too but that's fine. It's all bad news from any perspective.

Korean War