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Kent Houp served as a radioman and gunner during the Vietnam War. Pictured large are Chief Clarence Lamb, boat captain, of Orange; PO2 Dixie Peterman, engine man, of Arlington; Rex McKenzie, gunners mate 20mm gunner, from Lampasses; PO3 Kent Houp, radioman and 50 cal machine gunner; PO2 John Brown, Coxswain from Austin. -
Vietnam veteran Dennis Blessing speaks at the Ben J. Rogers Regional Visitors Center -
Local Vietnam veterans -
A medical evacuation helicopter, landing on Houp’s small flattop to take the wounded to medical care.’ The majority of the time, we could wait until we reached a somewhat larger stream as depicted here,’ he said. ‘There were, however, times these brave helicopter crews came in during action to get our wounded to the care they needed to survive.’ -
One of the regular canals in which Hour and his squad conducted combat operations
Various Vietnam veterans told The Examiner appreciation for their military service has evolved dramatically since they first came home to, at worst, violent protestors, and small welcomings of family members at best.
More than four decades after 58,000 U.S. men and women were killed serving their country in the Vietnam War, government officials dubbed March 29 as Vietnam Veterans Day, making it a national holiday in 2017.
“I think most Vietnam vets would agree, if we had to put up with what we did coming home so the young people today can be appreciated for their service, then I’m OK with it,” said Kent Houp, a Vietnam veteran who served two tours as a radioman and gunner on search-and-destroy missions up the Mekong River.
Now a retired former marketing director with decades of experience in Southeast Texas, Houp was preparing to graduate from radio school at what is now the University of Texas, Dallas, when his class was visited by Navy officers seeking voluntary recruits for a new, mobile river unit.
“They needed some radiomen who could go help operate the radios on the boats and in conjunction with the Army,” Houp told The Examiner. “This was in the early or mid part of 1967. They showed some footage of boats going up these little canals and asked if there were any volunteers.
“I think I was one of two.”
From classrooms to carnage-filled canals
Like many soldiers who voluntarily risked their lives for their country, Houp left the relative comforts and safety of his Dallas classrooms to join other teens and 20-somethings on the front lines of a vicious war in 1968.
“I’ve been asked that a lot,” Houp said when pondering why he would leave the safety of his scholarly habitat and risk his young life fighting for his country in foreign jungles. Telling The Examiner he didn’t know how to answer questions like that for years, Houp continued, “We were raised as kids going to Saturday matinees, and you saw news clips of what was going on in Korea, and it was a different time.
“I figured somebody had to do it, so why not me? I knew a bunch of the guys in my high school had already joined the military. The only way I can explain it that kinda makes sense to people is recalling 9/11. There were thousands and thousands of people running from those buildings. There were a couple of hundred running into the building, why? Well, somebody had to do it.”
Houp said the war didn’t get cranked up until he graduated high school, saying, “It didn’t really ramp up until ’65, ’66, ’67, ’68, it kept ramping up until the decision was made that we were going to pull out.”
Any time his river squadron would go into combat, Houp would operate the 50-caliber machine gun and the Honeywell rocket launcher that rested above it. Houp’s boat would take Army soldiers up the canal for search-and-destroy missions.
“They’d load up in those just like you see in World War II,” he recalled. “We’d drop the battle ramp and they’d go charging off. Then, we’d sit there in the canals and fight it out.
“I set the radios up and made sure they were functioning for the Army guys. Once we started up on operations, unless something happened to a radio, my job was to be in the 50-caliber machine gun. We came under fire numerous times.”
Houp said the worst span his 220-man river squadron faced was between April and May of 1968, when 97 were wounded in action and four were killed.
“We had 97 get Purple Hearts in two months,” he said. “That’s taking bullets and/or shrapnel.”
Adding insult to injury, literally in some cases, some portions of the U.S. populace loudly expressed their disapproval of the war via heckling and haranguing.
A ‘well-earned welcome home’
In an effort to give Vietnam Veterans the thanks and warm reception they went without upon returning home from a brutal battlefront, the Southeast Texas chapter of Vietnam Veterans of America Inc. held a ceremony March 29 at the Ben J. Rogers Regional Visitors Center.
“I think when we came home, we all recognized, the political situation was not good for returning service people,” said guest speaker Dennis Blessing, a Beaumont native, 1965 graduate of Forest Park High School and Army veteran who served in Vietnam from 1967 to 1969.
Despite much of the nation’s less-than-stellar opinion of Vietnam veterans, Blessing said those who served came home with a profound sense of commitment to their communities.
“It was a commitment I didn’t understand completely,” Blessing said of the virtue he gained in his military service. “It was a commitment to something greater than myself. Certainly after training and arriving in Vietnam, that commitment continued.
“We continued that commitment throughout our lives to our career, to our communities, ultimately to our family, but that commitment to our fellow service people never went away. And now that most of us are a little bit older, I think that there’s now a commitment that we not forget the lessons to be learned. But, more importantly, that we not forget what people did and what they were willing to sacrifice in this greater good and this greater commitment.”
Like Houp, Blessing found himself in Vietnam shortly after being a student in college, saying, “I took the easiest courses I could find and the easiest professors I could find, and unfortunately still managed to flunk out of college. I worried about being drafted, and this good friend of mine said, ‘If you volunteer, you’ll never go to Vietnam.’
“Less than a year later, I’m in Vietnam looking for this guy. I’m not sure if I want to throttle him or thank him,” quipped Blessing.