Vietnam War veteran informs today's generation of long ago war

Vietnam War veteran Monty R. Murty of Ligonier Township remembers how in late January 1968 he was assisting South Vietnamese soldiers in decorating a Vietnamese village to celebrate the Lunar New Year.

Plans for the revelry that were part of the ongoing U.S. efforts to win the “hearts and minds” of a war-weary populace were interrupted when radio transmissions detailed attacks across the country by the communist North Vietnamese and Viet Cong.

“They (attackers) were already past us. We were pretty well cut off. There was so much confusion. Nobody knew what was going on,” said Murty, 78.

The Laughlintown resident plans to discuss this and other experiences as an Army officer in Vietnam during a program at 6:30 p.m. March 13 at the Westmoreland Conservation District office, 218 Donohoe Road, Hempfield.

“I want to familiarize today’s generation of Americans with the reality that infantrymen were fewer than one-third of all the troops that served in Vietnam, but “grunts” suffered 87 percent of the casualties,” said Murty, who served in Vietnam as an infantry officer from the fall of 1967 until he came home shortly before Christmas 1968.

The presentation is sponsored by the Forbes Trail Chapter of Trout Unlimited, of which Murty was president from 2011 to 2016. It will not be an attempt to explain the Vietnam War, but rather one combat infantryman’s story, Murty said.

“I want to give them a sense of what it was like,” he said.

Murty said he wants to highlight the most important take-away from his presentation — that more than 47,000 service members were killed in action in the Vietnam War. Another 10,778 were non-combat deaths during the war, according to the National Archives.

Murty was among the more than 150,000 wounded military personnel who required hospitalization. He recalled being shot in the right leg while carrying a wounded South Vietnamese soldier to a helicopter for evacuation.

Vietnam War Veterans Day is March 29 — the day in 1973 when the U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam was deactivated after the January 1973 signing of the Paris Peace Accords that ended the U.S. fighting in the war.

The day honors all veterans on active duty from November 1955 until May 15, 1975. That date was chosen because it is when 41 U.S. military personnel were killed in an attempt to rescue the American crew of the merchant ship Mayaguez, which had been captured by Cambodian communists.

There were an estimated 5.5 million Vietnam War-era veterans still alive in 2022, according to estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau.

“The veterans in their 70s, they’re still active. They want to do something important … something that counts,” Murty said about veterans involved in the local Trout Unlimited’s fishing event for veterans and first responders each fall. It is part of the National Trout Unlimited’s Service Partnership program intended to teach fly fishing as a means of healing the body and soul.