Roger Arndt is proud to have served in Vietnam yet it wasn't until recently that he decided to share his story. The reason he came into the Undercurrent office the week of this year's Remembrance Day has to do with a young man, Rich Ochoa, whom he calls Ricardo. It was Ricardo, a member of Arndt's Mariachi band, who has written a song about him: The Ballad of Don Rogelio. And Arndt has worked closely with the young man because he "wanted it to be real" and recently added a slide show to the song. The result is a very personal video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zNg99bWI0w). "I felt so humbled that Ricardo would write a song. When I watched the video for the first time, it was almost disconcerting," Arndt said. "It really shows how young everybody was," Arndt says. "I was 18 when I signed up with a pal."
Arndt became a combat medic and, later, after getting flight qualification, a gunner. He was in the 11th Combat Aviation Battalion where he worked in the dispensary. "You could either fly once a month to get your pay or fly with a fly gunship team if you got voted in." Arndt got voted in. "Who doesn't want a medic on their team," he says. He started flying on his days off, sometimes picking up wounded people under fire, sometimes manning the gun. "Half the time, I was a medic - fixing people up. The other time, I was doing sort of the opposite."
But he also did other things, like delivering supplies to orphanages or administering hearing tests. He still recalls one occasion when he came in from a day of flying. "One of the doctors grabbed me and said, 'Can you take bullets out?'" Arndt says he took his helmet off, scrubbed in and was directed to help two patients: one had fragments in his head and another a bullet in the torso. "It was one of the best nights," he recalls.
"In Vietnam, I had the reputation that I could go anywhere. And I was accepted as an equal," Arndt said. "There were times when you just go in and accomplish the mission." He recalls being on a flight and receiving a radio message that there were two men on the ground who were wounded. "One had a spewing chest wound and I realized that if they don't get picked up, they would be dead," he shrugs. "So we went in even though we weren't supposed to go in. And we thought we knew what we were doing."
Some of the memories are hard to talk about, including the story of Arndt's friend. "Kevin and I both went to Lord Byng [Secondary School]," Arndt said, adding that they signed up to go to Vietnam together. He knows of one more Lord Byng student who went to Vietnam and says with a sad smile, "Kevin was killed, the other one was wounded and I came back mildly messed up."
"It's not sure how many Canadians fought in Vietnam because some enlisted as American. But at the memorial in Washington, there are around 100 names on the wall of Canadians who were got killed there," Arndt said. One of them was his friend Kevin Low.
"That was hard," Arndt said. "I saw him the day before he died." Arndt explained that he got sick in basic training. Low moved ahead with helicopter maintenance training, while Arndt did medic training.
He came across his friend's name when he sorted through a batch of army glasses in Vietnam. "There was a pair of glasses with Kevin's name on them," Arndt said. "I phoned around and then I drove over. I took him to the dispensary that night and we chatted about Lord Byng, his family and about the girls we knew." That night, the two friends made plans to get together during the week before Low was going to go home - his week off.
"Just before that, we got hit and, all of a sudden, I realized that he hadn't called me." Arndt made inquiries and found out that Low had been hit by a rocket round and was wounded in Lai Kae. Arndt visited Low in the hospital. When he returned two days later, all he found was an empty bed and was told that his friend had succumbed to a pulmonary embolism. "I went crazy for a time," Arndt said. "The hardest thing was coming back to see his mom." What affected him most was the unspoken thought that if he hadn't enlisted, his friend might not have gone to Vietnam.
At the end of his one-year-stint in Vietnam, Arndt had lots of offers to stay longer including one from the the 159th Dust-0ff, a unit whose batch he wears on his jacket. But he left, with mixed feelings. "There is loyalty and camaraderie with your unit, and after a year, you can't wait to go home," he said. They were instructed not to run to the plane but couldn't help it. When the plane took off, everyone cheered but then "the plane went dead," Arndt says. "You waited to go home but you then felt like you were leaving home. And you know what your buddies are doing back in Vietnam."
One of the most difficult things about coming home was the fact that there was no warm welcome waiting for them. "The troopes that came back were shunned, no one welcomed them home," Arndt says. "It's a weird situation. We came home and we couldn't participate in Remembrance Day until 1994 and weren't allowed to join the Legion." It wasn't Canada's war, Arndt was told but that hasn't stopped him from saying, "It was this Canadian's war."
It hasn't stopped him from wearing his badges and participating in Bowen Island's Remembrance Day ceremony to remember those he fought with in Vietnam. It's been a while for Arndt to get any kind of recognition but when it comes, he accepts it with grace. "I was wearing my Vietnam vet hat in Lynden, Washington, when an old woman came up to me and said, 'Thank you for your service.' Then I went into a grocery store and the young girl at the cash register said the same," Arndt recalls, then he adds. "I told them, 'You are welcome.'"
Arndt says that Ricardo, the young man who set his story to music, had a cousin who was killed in the Vietnam war. The young man listened to Arndt's first-hand accounts and finally wrote a song about him. When Arndt asked him about the reason, he replied, "It's important, Don Rogelio." Just as he found a community in the comrades in Vietnam, Arndt has found another source of friendship in the Mariachi community and everyone calls him Don Rogelio. Arndt and Ricardo played music together and developed a closeness that Arndt treasures. "How often do you find someone who is over 60 hanging out with a young man who us genuinely interested in his experiences and asks the right questions?" Arndt said.
And the process of working on the song together has only brought them closer.
"Here is a Mexican singing about a Canadian who has a Mexican alter ego," Arndt laughs but quickly grows serious gain. "When you come back, you realize that you have given up your youth."
About the video, Arndt says, "It has become greater than its parts."
