We are proud to announce an upcoming event in Medford, Massachusetts to honor Vincent Mottola, a Bravo Company Marine who was killed in action at Khe Sanh on February 23, 1968.
Vincent, or Vinnie as his family calls him, had an MOS # of 0351, Antitank Assault Man. We Khe Sanh Marines would have referred to Vinnie as being in Rockets.
Vinnie is being honored in Medford next Sunday, 9/28/2014, at 10:00 at Zero Medford Street. Please consider attending this memorial celebration if you can.
In separate news, BRAVO! COMMON MEN, UNCOMMON VALOR, will be screened tomorrow night in Nampa, Idaho, at Elks Lodge #1389, 1116 1st Street. Doors open at 6:00 PM with the screening beginning at 6:30 PM. There will be a $10.00 donation to benefit the Wyakin Warriors Foundation which assists wounded veterans with education and career training. You can find out more about the Wyakin Warrior Foundation at http://www.wyakin.org/. There will be refreshments and a no-host bar and a question and answer session following the film moderated by noted author Alan Heathcock. You will be able to ask questions of veterans of the Middle East conflicts and veterans of the Vietnam War including men you will meet in the film BRAVO!
Alan Heathcock Photo by Mathew Wordell
On November 11, 2014, the Liberty Lake, Washington Fallen Heroes Circuit Course will be screening BRAVO! in conjunction with the honoring of Bravo Company Marine Greg Vercruysse, a Navy Corpsman who was killed in action north of Hill 881 South on June 7, 1967. The screening will take place in Liberty Lake’ s Meadowwood Technology Center. See more about the Liberty Lake Fallen Heroes Circuit Course at http://www.llfhcc.org/. You can find out more about Greg Vercruysse at the Virtual Wall: http://www.virtualwall.org/dv/VercruysseGP01a.htm.
Image from the Traveling Wall
More details to follow on the event in Liberty Lake as well as upcoming screenings in Oceanside, California, on 11/1/2014 and Newport Beach, California, on 11/15/2014.
If you would like to host a screening of BRAVO! in your town this winter or spring, please contact us immediately. DVDs of BRAVO! are available. For more information, go to https://bravotheproject.com/buy-the-dvd/.
BRAVO! has a page on Facebook. Please “like” us and “share” the page at https://www.facebook.com/Bravotheproject/. It’s another way to stay up on our news and help us reach more people.
In anticipation of the September 25th screening of BRAVO! at the Elks Lodge in Nampa, Idaho, we repost a visceral essay by the screening’s Master of Ceremonies, Alan Heathcock. Al is an award winning short story writer and in this piece he muses on Bravo! Common Men, Uncommon Valor, his life, and the value of story.
The Valor of Story: Why the Silent Man Fights Alone, by Alan Heathcock
The day was sweltering, the sky a shimmering white. It was July in Hazel Crest, the town where I grew up, in the southland area of south Chicago. I was nineteen years old, working at a public swimming pool. After my shift, I was to walk to a friend’s house a couple miles away. Coming out of a neighborhood, approaching a highway overpass, I spotted a large man on the walkway ahead of me. This road was isolated, and there was no one else around. Growing up in Chicago, I knew not to look people in the eye, knew to change course if it seemed there was trouble ahead. But I knew this guy. I worked the front desk at the pool, knew everybody. This guy was not a regular, but he’d been there. He smiled at me, and I nodded to him. “Hey little man,” he said. “You got some money I could borrow. My car’s out of gas and I just need a few bucks to get to work.”
Alan Heathcock Photo by Mathew Wordell
I was no fool. I guessed the man probably didn’t have a car or a job, and for some reason that mattered. “No,” I said. “Sorry, man.”
“Just a couple of dollars,” he said. “I’ll pay you back.”
“I don’t have it. Wish I could help.”
And then, in a blink, he hit me, his huge fist striking the side of my head like a stone on a chain. I fell hard, wheeled in a panic to see him standing over me. I scrambled to get away, but he had my shirtfront and hit me again. His face had changed. His eyes were crazy. I reached into my pockets and thrust the few wadded dollars I had up at him. Then he let me loose. He didn’t run, didn’t look around to see if anyone had witnessed what’d happened. He just walked away.
I walked away, too, holding my busted lip, and just went on to my friend’s house.
I’ve never told this to anyone. Even at the time, I said nothing to my friends, not my parents, certainly not the police. At the time it didn’t seem like a big deal. Or I tried to make myself believe it wasn’t a big deal. These things happened. We all took our turn. In fact, I’d been hit before, hit harder. So I just got on with things, went about business as usual. The money was not missed. The bruise on the cheek faded. What remained was a feeling. It never went away. I feel it now, writing this essay. An anger pointed at the man who hit me, at the world that created him. Anger at myself for not spotting the potential danger. Shame in being beaten down, in not fighting back, in just giving up the money (though that was the right thing to do). Mainly, I feel a heavy sadness, a profound disappointment in the world of men.
All these years I’ve carried this stuff around inside me, its weight a part of how I slog myself around, wary always of who’s standing on the walkway.
When I was nine years old, my Grandpa Heathcock sat me up on his lap and told me a story about a time he was working as a foreman for Sinclair Oil. He said he was driving a one-lane road through the oil fields when his truck came nose to nose with another truck. The road was too narrow, the ditches too steep, for either truck to pass or turn around. One of them would have to back up the way they came. My grandpa said he got out of his truck and told the other driver he was trespassing on company land and had to put his truck in reverse. The man refused. I remember clearly my grandpa balled a big meaty fist and told me, “So I hit that man until he went back from where he came.”
For a long time I thought my grandpa was giving me instruction on the nature of man, on how a man has to stick up for himself, sometimes has to fight. But then an interesting thing happened. Several years after his death I was on a fishing trip with my father and brother. I told them the story of Grandpa’s fight on the dirt road. My brother had never heard the story. My father agreed that he vaguely remembered something like that happening, but never recalled Grandpa ever talking about it. After asking around, I came to realize my grandpa had told only me, and that fact changed my understanding of the telling.
I now see that the story wasn’t a lesson at all. It was a burden. I’m convinced that for the same reasons I’d never told anyone about being robbed by the highway, Grandpa had never told anyone about the incident in the oil field. I’m convinced the reason he told me about the incident was compelled by the likewise impulse I have now in writing this essay.
The other night I was granted the privilege of seeing the first cut of Ken Rodgers’ film, Bravo! Common Men, Uncommon Valor, a documentary about the seventy-seven day siege where 6,000 men faced relentless attacks in the Vietnamese valley of Khe Sanh. These were Marines, the toughest of our toughest, the born warriors. These were some of the best-trained, most tenacious soldiers the world has ever known. The film consisted of interviews, with fifteen survivors talking about their experiences during those seventy-seven days and beyond. What was striking to me, beyond their amazing and often terrifying stories of ambushes, of fox-holes filled with bodies, of soldiers lost and alone on a battlefield, of mortar fire that never ceased, was that for the most part the men had kept these stories to themselves. If you were to meet them on the street, or in the grocery store, or down the pew, you couldn’t glimpse the roil of combat still alive inside them.
One of the Marines, a sharply dressed gentleman in a coat and tie, one of the men I’d wrongly supposed—judging him strictly by appearance—had been able to find his equilibrium after the war, said that even forty years after the fact, each and every morning he pulled his legs out from the bed covers, put his feet on the floor, and heard mortar fire. Bombs. Every morning. Secret bombs. Bombs exploding inside him. Bombs silent to the rest of us.
The highest purpose of story is to give voice to silent bombs. I write so that my grandpa’s pain is not lost to the grave. I write about my own fights so that they don’t sit like stones in the depths of my private shame. Even more profound is the document Ken Rodgers has created with his film, not meant to politicize war, not meant as propaganda to bolster the military, to mythologize the soldier. Ken Rodgers simply allowed his fellow Marines to release the truth, muted for too long inside men whose stories are the foundation of the greater human drama that has always included warfare, from the first hurled stones to the H-Bomb. Silence breeds confusion. Silence enables Hollywood’s trite action-figure nonsense to be peddled to the masses. There’s nothing more noble than the voice that finally breaks the silence, even and especially if the message delivered is one that makes us confront the best and worst of who we are. Who we all are. The message Ken Rodgers’ film delivered was not that war was separate from us, made from some government machine, some blueprint drawn up in a windowless room in the basement of the Pentagon, but that warfare comes from us. We are war. It lives inside us. It is not the violence, but the men, in all their bravery and heroism, in all their shame and demons, in all their pride and tears. And in their silence that is silent no more.
Not long ago my mother sent me pages from the diary of a man named Floyd Barker, a great uncle of mine five generations back. Floyd’s writings covered a lot of subjects, family life, marriages and travel and farming, but there was a passage that shook me awake. It reads: “After passing the present site of Brandenburg, Ky., the party was attacked by Indians and those not killed were made prisoners. It is said that one of the Barker boys tried to escape by swimming the river but was killed in the water and his body caught and the heart taken out and broiled and an effort made to compel his mother to eat it. However, this she refused to do.”
Upon first reading this, after the momentary shock of it, the brutality of the images making me recoil, I felt a deep connection with Floyd, a comfort. For isn’t this the truth of stories—the one Floyd told, the one my grandpa told me, the stories spoken by those brave Marines in Ken’s film, and my own stories, too—that we find, as almost a surprise though it should be obvious, that we are made of the same stuff, are plagued by the same feelings, are bolstered in that we are as much the same as different and by letting our stories be known, by breaking the silence of shame and anger and sadness, we are connecting with the greater fabric of humanity and from that point forward we are unburdened, made lighter, in simply understanding that we are not alone.
Alan Heathcock lives, teaches and writes in Boise, Idaho. He is the award winning author of VOLT. For more information, visit www.alanheathcock.com.
If you would like to host a screening of BRAVO! in your town this fall or winter, please contact us immediately.
BRAVO! has a page on Facebook. Please “like” us and “share” the page at https://www.facebook.com/Bravotheproject/. It’s another way to stay up on our news and help us reach more people.
On September 25, 2014, BRAVO!, COMMON MEN, UNCOMMON VALOR will be screened at the Elks Lodge in Nampa, Idaho. Doors will open at 6:00 PM with the screening of the film at 6:30, followed by a Q & A session. Suggested donation, $10.00 to benefit the Wyakin Warrior Foundation.
We are delighted to announce two very special guests for the event: BRAVO! Marine Ron Rees, and noted Boise author Alan Heathcock who will be the Master of Ceremonies.
Alan Heathcock Photo by Mathew Wordell
The Wyakin Warriors Foundation is a local nonprofit that provides a comprehensive education, mentoring, professional development, networking and job placement program for severely wounded and injured veterans. Wyakin Warrior Foundation’s motto is “Battle Tested, Business Ready.”
Wyakin’s goal is to prepare its clients for success. Since September 11, 2001, there have been in excess of fifty-one-thousand seriously injured service members who, when they finally get home, face unemployment rates of up to thirty percent for veterans in the eighteen to twenty-four year age range.
These veterans have been trained to fight and serve our country, but they haven’t been trained to function well in the civilian world. That’s where Wyakin comes in with six major tenets: Financial support, mentoring, professional development seminars, service projects completed by the veterans while they are still in school, networking, and active annual follow-up to monitor the veterans’ emotional, physical and professional status.
Ron Rees Photo by Betty Rodgers
Wyakin Warriors Foundation is a veteran-led organization that relies on a wide variety of volunteers to run its operations.
Please take a moment to learn more about the Wyakin Warrior Foundation at their website: http://www.wyakin.org.
And come on out to the Napa Elks Lodge at 1116 E First Street, Nampa, Idaho, on September 25th and support this event. The Wyakin Warriors need your help.
If you would like to host a screening of BRAVO! in your town this fall or winter, please contact us immediately.
BRAVO! has a page on Facebook. Please “like” us and “share” the page at https://www.facebook.com/Bravotheproject/. It’s another way to stay up on our news and help us reach more people.
This week the blog revisits a poignant encounter we had at The Wall in Washington DC while photographing the names of deceased Marines of Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Marine Regiment.
Bamboo flooring echoes like an old-time wood-floored hallway. The crack of sound rebounds into the corners of rooms and rackets irritatingly when you are trying to film an interview. When the old Marine you are interviewing is nervous and keeps tapping his feet it’s mindful of M-16 fire off in the distance, down in a canyon or a draw denuded of elephant grass and triple-canopy jungle, just raw, red ground pocked by the plague of bomb craters, trenches, and dead snags.
Betty and I found this out the way you usually find things out…the hard way. Right in the middle of an interview, you emerge from the monsoon mist into an ambush of recognition that you didn’t even think about: the need to muffle the sounds the floor makes, or that you need gloves to handle the lights, to keep them from sizzling the fat on your hands. Or from pinching the webbing between the thumb and forefinger, or that you better chat with your subject for a while about the rudiments of interviews so they aren’t in a state of sheer fright when the beams snarl at them and the red light on the camera blinks its message that the interviewee is suddenly naked to the world.
The Wall at night
And there are other things necessary when you make movies: research—patience, patience, patience—and more research and checking the validity of info, of sources.
This week in Washington, DC, we are doing research at Quantico and the National Archives. We’ve located films and photos and command chronologies and after-action reports and oral interviews conducted during 1968.
And things are moving forward. We will have a final trailer in the coming weeks, and we will then begin the editing process to finish the film.
As my old Marine Corps mate, Michael E. O’Hara, says, Betty and I are pilgrims, pilgrims of the body and the mind, in the realm of movies and film and memories. Across the big flat green eastern United States, roaming around looking for the threads that help it all make sense. The threads of story.
We’ve been to The Wall twice this trip to take photos and film the names. Last Sunday we went down early while the Park Service was tidying up after the twin revivals conducted by Glen Beck and Al Sharpton. The sun glared and dew coated the grass. A few people moved among the endless plastic bags of trash that lined the paths and walkways.
The wall was damp and looked like it had been hosed off and there was little hope we could immediately take any pictures because each name was coated with tiny bullets of water. I dug out my trusty big blue kerchief and began to wipe the water off the names. I started at panel 35 E with Steven Hellwig and was interrupted from my chore by an earnest young man and woman who asked me how to find names, understand the logic on the wall. Inside, I said to myself , what logic, logic to all this? But I didn’t because there isn’t a logic. I said, “Where you from?”
He smiled and so did she. “We’re from Alabama and we’ve been here for the Beck revival and we thought we’d come pay our respects to some men from our town who served and died.” I expected wild-eyed Beck followers but these people were polite and earnest. I explained how The Wall works and then went back to drying names and worked through the subsequent panels until I was at 46 E on my knees wiping off Gregory Kent and Jimmie Lafon McRae when a short man about my age holding a digital camera knelt next to me and asked if he could borrow my kerchief to dry a name when I was done.
He was tanned and had a hard New England accent. For some reason, I blurted, “Who you looking for?”
“Gregory Kent. He and I ran track together in high school and . . .”
I blurted, “I know him.”
He stared at me. “You know him?”
I hesitated. “I knew him. We served together.” The stare on his face made me think he wasn’t sure he believed me.
I pointed my finger at him like a pistol and went on, “You’re from Boston, right?”
“I live in Florida, but yes, I’m from Boston.”
I looked down and wiped the name again. “I served with him until he was killed on March 28, 1968, with this fellow.” I pointed two rows down to Jimmie Lafon McRae.
He sat back on his heels and looked at me like someone contemplating stabbing a snake.
Panel at The Wall with the names of Greg Kent and Jimmie L McRae
I hesitated again and then nodded. “They stepped out of a hooch and were talking along with Ron Exum from Philadelphia. A mortar landed between them and Kent and McRae were killed.” I could have told him that there were shrapnel holes in Kent’s chest that spewed like oil gushers, but I didn’t.
The man said, “My name’s Sully Grasso and, and . . .”
I looked at the names and brushed at them though they were already dry. I thought about Greg Kent, and how he liked to talk about dancing. He said he loved to dance, dance, dance.
Sully Grasso said, “Greg Kent won the state championship and could have gone to the Olympic trials but he joined the Marines instead. I’m here for Glen Beck’s memorial and I want to take a picture and a tracing and I want to write an article . . . this is a miracle.”
I don’t think I believe in miracles but I didn’t tell him that. I just cleared my throat as I looked away. He took my photograph, twice, as I knelt there. He asked my name and the pertinent details of Kent’s death.
I wrote on a piece of yellow-lined paper from my yellow pad the barest of details as I remember them. He went to get something to trace names. Betty and I tried to take photos. Sully came back and took some more pictures and traced the names, Gregory Kent and Jimmie L McRae. Then he walked up to me. Tears swelled in his eyes. I couldn’t look at him. He leaned towards me and I stuck out my hand to shake in order to avoid more intimate shows of emotion, but he pulled me close and hugged me. He said, “God knows my heart and he sent you here to meet me. He knows my heart. I didn’t have any idea about how Greg died and now I know.”
I’m not sure I even believe in God, but I didn’t tell him that. The steps of people walking by echoed off the smooth surface of the wall. A multi-colored wreath stood at the junction of the monument’s east and west wings and an old, scuffed jungle boot stood there by itself, in front of panel 22 W. A red rosebud stuck up from inside the boot. I nodded at Sully and thought about how Kent liked to prance around and dance, his energy exploding out of him, and then he was dead.
On the screening front, BRAVO! will be shown in Nampa, Idaho, on September 25, 2014 at the Elks Lodge. Doors will open at 6:00 PM with the screening of the film at 6:30, followed by a Q & A session. Suggested donation, $10.00 to benefit the Wyakin Warrior Foundation. http://www.wyakin.org Joining us for the screening will be BRAVO! Marine Ron Rees. Noted Boise author Alan Heathcock has agreed to be the Master of Ceremonies for this event.
If you would like to host a screening of BRAVO! in your town this fall or winter, please contact us immediately.
BRAVO! has a page on Facebook. Please “like” us and “share” the page at https://www.facebook.com/Bravotheproject/. It’s another way you can help us reach more people.
