'We're not heroes. We just did our job.'

Don Turner was a go-to administrator during his 30-year Marine Corps career, and everything a Marine is reputed to be — dedicated, firm but fair, and proven in combat in the jungles of Vietnam.

But you won’t see Turner at The Traveling Wall, a mobile half-scale replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C., that will arrive in Medical Lake on June 13.

He’s been to enough memorials.

Enlistment

Turner enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1959. After boot camp and advanced infantry training, he served stints at what is now Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, Twentynine Palms, Calif., and San Francisco, where he picked up his third stripe — the rank of sergeant. In 1961 he ended up in Spokane, where he met Denise Michaelyn.

The couple eventually married in 1963 and enjoyed a long, two-year Spokane honeymoon before he received orders to his next duty station: Vietnam.

Combat

The Marine Corps has a long, proud history of getting the toughest of combat assignments and succeeding at them.

“One nice thing about Marines, one thing I respect about them after Vietnam, is that we run to gunfire,” Turner said. “And that wins us battles, because all of a sudden the enemy has something coming back at them as fast as they are putting it out. But you’re going to take casualties doing it every time.”

This was especially true in Vietnam. Roughly 8.4 million U.S. servicemen and women deployed to Vietnam during the war. Over 58,000 never made it home, enough people to populate the city of Great Falls, Mont.

The Marines suffered the most per capita causalities — 5 percent of Marines were killed in action in Vietnam, nearly twice as many as the U.S. Army who lost 2.7 percent of its servicemembers, according to The American War Library.

Between March 1966 and May 1967, the 1st Marine Division, where Turner was attached, was headquartered in the coastal city of Chu Lai and conducted 44 military operations near the demilitarized zone between North and South Vietnam against elements of the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong guerrilla forces.

According to a portion of his personnel file he shared, Turner participated directly in six of those military operations, plus countless patrols.

But he flat refused to discuss any details.

“I don’t know what I would describe,” he said.

Instead, he spoke in generalities.

“When that first bullet goes off, everything you’ve learned goes to hell,” he said. “You’re doing things instinctively — on the move, making decisions at a pace that people could never understand. It’s chaotic.”

Both sides know where the other is at, and try to outmaneuver one another, Turner said.

“It’s a noisy chaotic thing,” he said, with the overwhelming smell of carbonite, or gunpowder, filling the air. “It’s noise you can never comprehend that turns into individuals trying to survive.”

And as more Marines fall, the thinner the unit’s defenses become.

“There’s no way to describe it,” he said, noting that what’s seen in movies and on television doesn’t come close. “It’s not even realistic to what actually happens once that first round goes off.”

A sergeant and squad leader when he arrived in Vietnam, he was soon promoted to staff sergeant and placed in charge of one of the most lethal of military forces: A Marine Corps combat infantry platoon.

“As a platoon sergeant, your job’s to control fire and movement, so you don’t have time to think,” he said.

Thinking happens after the fact, when the platoon is back in the rear.

“It takes half a day or more just to get your adrenaline back down where it belongs,” Turner said, noting that’s why many came back “screwed up a little bit.”

He said that killing an enemy soldier was never an issue for him, but watching his Marines fall definitely was.

“You’re a band of brothers; you’re shoulder to shoulder,” he said. “And when he goes down that means you’ve got a weak spot there somewhere that’s not being covered anymore, in addition to losing a good Marine.”

At this point he stopped.

“See, that right there is making me a hero, and I don’t want that,” he said. “I’m not.”

Asked what he meant, Turner said that focusing on him as an individual in the overall operation was wrong. It was glamorizing war.

Stateside

By 1967 the Vietnam War and social unrest were reaching an apex when Turner returned to the U.S. and his first post-combat duty station in Kokomo, Ind. — as a recruiter.

It was “the worst duty,” he said. While recruiters are responsible for filling the ranks with fresh recruits, they also have an ancillary duty: casualty calls.

“It was worse than being in combat,” Turner recalled.

He served in Kokomo for 3 1/2 years, during the height of the war, when the casualties arriving from Vietnam peaked at 16,899 in 1968.

“We were busy,” Turner said.

Even as he delivered bad news, Turner was himself dealing with the aftermath of his own war experience.

“I was still in a shell, more or less,” he said. “Trying to climb out of it and figure out where my life was at.”

He credited his recovery to his wife, although they were nearly divorced at one point.

Like nearly every other Vietnam veteran, Turner also experienced the social vitriol of the times.

“They were throwing things at us, spitting at us, calling us names,” he recalled when his planeload of servicemembers arrived home. “It was just a nasty situation. All of us had a pretty rough time with that.”

It left an indelible mark on Turner’s psyche. Even today, 52 years later, the experience of being demonized still hasn’t gone away.

“Most of the time we’re still an afterthought,” Turner said, noting his appreciation for the effort civilians are making toward younger veterans. “The older ones are still out there hanging out in the dirt.”

He pointed specifically to Vietnam vets he knows who are still fighting to get disability benefits and medical care.

“That’s sad,” he said.

Administrator in Chief

From Alaska to Marine Corps Base Quantico, Va., Turner would go on to establish a reputation as a solid administrator the Marine Corps could rely upon to reestablish discipline in organizations that had failed readiness inspections.

One of his final duties was to square away the administrative department of a division-sized unit at Camp Lejeune, N.C. He was given free reign and reported only to a general.

And Turner continued to receive promotions. He picked up master sergeant — known colloquially as “Top” — while working as an Operations Chief with three other enlisted personnel in a department of 26 officers who handled classified material.

“I kept them out of jail,” Turner said with a laugh.

At his promotional party a major stood up and said, “If you’ve ever had your (expletive) chewed, you haven’t had it done properly until Top’s done it.”

“I got some really heavy assignments,” Turner said of his later Marine Corps career. “But they’re not really glorious type things.”

In October 1983 he was forced to dust off his casualty call experience after a suicide truck bomb killed 220 Marines, 18 sailors and three soldiers in Beirut, Lebanon. After 24 years of service, Turner had gotten to know plenty of fellow career Marines. Because he’d served in Vietnam with some of those killed in Beirut, and he knew their wives, he was asked to help break the news.

He eventually retired on Aug. 1, 1989, and settled on the West Plains with Denise.

The couple were married 50 years until Denise’s death in 2011 after a six-year illness during which Turner served as her full-time caregiver. Denise’s goal was to live to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary, he said. She made it, passing away one month later.

“That woman stuck with me all the way through it, God bless her soul,” he said. “When I came back from Vietnam, she didn’t even know who I was. She got me back right again.”

Turner doesn’t dwell on Vietnam today, noting it only brings up feelings he’d rather not deal with. He still wakes up from nightmares and cold sweats.

“Why aggravate that?” he said.

He expressed respect for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and what it stands for; just don’t ask him to visit it.

“I don’t want to fight with the emotions,” Turner, who was wispy-eyed during the entire interview, said.

What is most important to Turner is instead humility, a common theme among veterans.

“I really don’t care what you say so long as you don’t try to make me out to be a hero,” he said of his story. “We’re not heroes. We just did our job.”

The Traveling Wall

A traveling half-scale replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C., called The Traveling Wall, will arrive in Medical Lake on June 12 and will be available for viewing at 250 S. Prentis St., Medical Lake, on the Medical Lake Middle School playfield. Each day will include an opening and closing ceremony. 

The Traveling Wall will be available for viewing for four days until June 16.

For more information about The Traveling Wall’s visit to Medical Lake go to http://medicallake.org/vmwall/. 

Lee Hughes can be reached at [email protected].