By: Robin Ford Wallace, Staff Reporter

Thinking about Vietnam still makes Marshall Tripp mad. 

From the way he got sucked into the U.S. Army to the way he was treated when it spat him out, there’s not much in the story that doesn’t make Tripp see red. “He’s angry at everybody,” says his wife, Sue.

Tripp, 63, originally of New Home, made headlines last month when the Army belatedly awarded him a Purple Heart. Wounded in the jungles of Vietnam in November 1967, Tripp received the medal in November 2009 when a colonel from Fort Gillem, arrived at his Pisgah home to pin it on his chest. 

In the intervening four decades, raising a family, working a job, fighting a battle with the bottle and finally winning it, Tripp kept his rage sealed up tight inside, but at night it would leak out and keep Sue awake as she watched her husband fight and mutter in his sleep. Once, still dreaming, he grabbed her by the throat.

So both of them believe it’s a good thing that Tripp is finally learning to let the rage out – even when it makes life awkward, as when, a few weeks ago, he stopped his car in the middle of the road to bawl out a driver who was tailgating him. “I had the anger all the time,” said Tripp. “Now I don’t try to keep it.  Somebody comes up and crosses me, I just uncross them right quick.”

But let’s back up a bit, and consider how he got so mad.

In 1966, Tripp, then 20, spent the work day in Chattanooga at Dixie Yarn and the rest of his time in Trenton raising hell. His father told him later – “when it was too late to wring one of their necks” – that his drinking and troublemaking had made him unpopular with certain Trenton officials who had “helped” his name onto the draft list. “They thought I needed to go somewhere and take time away from my whiskey bottle,” he said.

And if that made Tripp mad, military life did little to improve his mood. “I hated the Army,” he said. He couldn’t stand being told what to do every minute, from what to eat to when to go to bed. “They didn’t even talk to you like a human being,” he said. “They talked to you like you was a dog and you didn’t have no sense.”

Then, after a few months’ training, Tripp shipped out to Vietnam with the infantry, and that’s where the real trouble began.

Tripp has spent 40 years not talking about Vietnam. Asked to do so now, he recalls first the physical misery of it. Arriving at the Bear Cat camp in South Vietnam, he slept on an air mattress in a tent, but the big guns going off all night kept bouncing him off it. “So after three days I pulled the plug and just slept on the ground,” he said. 

He also recalls bedding down on a rice paddy dike and, another time, propped against a tree in the driving rain. “It just wasn’t the ideal place to be asleep in,” he said.

The guns went off all night, he said, to keep Vietcong guerillas out, not because there was ever a battle going on. “You didn’t have that many battles out of them,” said Tripp. “You couldn’t hardly pin them down to fight you. They’d stay on the run and snipe at you all the time.”

Indeed, it was the elusive but deadly nature of the enemy that defined the whole bitter, crazy-making Vietnam experience. The VC were seldom seen but the GIs were never safe from them. They made their presence felt through minefields and booby traps and ambushes that made every step an exercise in pinched nerves.

It wasn’t conventional warfare – “They didn’t call it a war,” noted Tripp – where bridges were built across rivers to facilitate invasions. Bridges tended to be blown up at night by unseen hands. Tripp spent some days securing roads the VC would again booby trap when darkness fell. On one such, the Americans lost three dozen men to mines. 

“Or sometimes they’d say ‘search and destroy’ – just most of the time trying to locate the enemy so you could destroy them,” said Tripp. 

As he describes it, this meant mostly walking around in the jungle, waiting to be jumped. “You were supposed to know what you were shooting at before you shot it,” he said. Most of the time, though, he didn’t see anything, and he came to rely on his sense of smell to know when the Vietcong were near. The spicy food they ate gave them a distinctive odor, he said.

It was spooky, too, how the dead ones disappeared. Tripp described the scene of a night ambush on Halloween of 1967, when casualties had been heavy on both sides: “All we found the next morning was a big puddle of blood, the bullets that they’d shot, and where they’d been laying out there waiting on us to get there,” he said. “They always got their bodies somehow.” 

It was the next month that Tripp was “walking point” on an operation through thick jungle. That meant first in line, a magnet for booby traps, but Tripp had volunteered: The guy who had been doing it before was a newbie jittering with nerves who kept the safety of his rifle off. “Every time he’d hear a little noise, well, he’d hit the ground and that thing would go off,” said Tripp. “We just got where we couldn’t stand it no longer.”

So Tripp took his place, got too close to a bush, and took a punji stake through the flesh of his calf. 

Punji stakes were typical VC perils, lengths of bamboo sharpened to a point and concealed at an angle to wound passing GIs.  Sometimes they were coated with poisons or human excrement to promote infection.

It was a serious enough wound to reap Tripp, albeit 42 years later, his Purple Heart; but for the present, he had no choice but to walk several more hours until the company reached a clearing wide enough for a helicopter to land.

And though it was a serious enough wound to keep Tripp in a field hospital for the next couple of weeks, it didn’t get him sent home. “Well, I tried,” he recalled. “I done a lot of limping but it didn’t do no good.”

Home he did finally go, though, shipping stateside in January to finish his compulsory two years at Fort Benning. And home made him mad, too. 

First, there was the Army, which in those days discharged its veterans without much ado. “When we came out of the service, that’s all it was, you’re just out,” said Tripp. “Nobody really give a durn.”

And then, that Flower Power year of 1968, there were the war protesters. “They called us baby-killers,” said Tripp. “They said we killed babies over there. Of course, that’s who was blowing us up half the time.”   In Vietnam, he explained, children would sometimes walk up to soldiers strapped with explosives, miniature suicide bombers.

The hippies made Tripp madder even than the Vietcong. He recalls a street corner in Fort Lewis, Wash., where he and a buddy, both still in uniform, were poised to whip 15 of them before MPs dragged them back to base.

So Tripp went home mad. He went to business college on the GI Bill, married Sue, had three children – and stayed mad for the next 40 years.

Then something happened. 

Two things, actually, that weren’t really connected. First, Tripp retired from his construction work at 62 and was thus in the market for new health insurance. He and Sue approached the Veterans Administration to see what he was eligible for.

What they found there was that the world has changed some. “It’s so much better now,” said Sue. “Now there’s counseling, there’s people to talk to.”

The VA now tests Vietnam vets for things like Agent Orange injury and posttraumatic stress disorder. In Tripp’s case, it fixed him up with a group of other Vietnam vets who meet periodically for talk therapy. He can be a little gruff about the touchy-feely stuff  – hello? This is Tripp? – but acknowledges it’s a relief to talk with others who were “there” and who “know.”

And then there was the Purple Heart.

That was the work of his son, Marcus, a career Army man. The younger Tripp went through the records and proved to the U.S. Army it owed his dad a medal. And the Army, on Nov. 23, delivered.  

Sue had just had surgery and the Tripps couldn’t go to Atlanta for the ceremony, so the ceremony came to the Tripps. There were roses, 60-odd attendees crowded into their small home, and not a dry eye in the house.

 “It brought water,” admitted Tripp.

Now, perhaps a little less bitter, Tripp knows that working through his anger will still take time. “I hope it gets better,” he said.

“It’s got to get better,” said Sue.