Like many retired military service members of his particular vintage, Jerry Herker served a tour in Vietnam during the war. But unlike many others, his experience didn’t result in so much emotional baggage as it did perspective.
“It changes your whole attitude toward life,” Herker said during an interview in his modest split-level Medical Lake home he and his wife, Patti, have lived in for some 40 years.
Herker spent most of his 27-year Air Force career working on aircraft as a maintenance technician, wrenching on everything from small, single engine Cessna O-1 forward observation planes to F-4 Phantom fighters and B-52s.
From his enlistment in 1963 to his retirement as a Chief Master Sgt., Herker served on bases from the now defunct Schilling Air Force Base in Amarillo, Tex. to the remote Shemya AFB, now Eareckson Air Station, in Alaska, near the tip of the Aleutian Island archipelago that separates the north Pacific and the Bearing Sea.
He met Patti while he was stationed at Minot AFB, N.D. They married in September 1969. A month later he received orders to Vietnam.
Herker’s assignment was to support air operations from a small airfield in Báo Lôc, just west of Cam Ranh Bay in the Lâm Dōng province in Central Highlands region of then South Vietnam, as a crew chief.
“It was kind of an isolated location,” he said.
The airstrip from which the unit’s three single-engine Cessna O-1 “Bird Dog” planes flew consisted of interlocking, perforated steel planking. There were no runway lights, he said. His unit consisted of just nine men — four pilots, another crew chief, two radio operators and a single intelligence officer.
Their mission: to serve as the air element of forward air controllers, or FACs, who performed reconnaissance and coordinated air-ground operations with ground combat units.
Part of Herker’s job as a “FAC-er” was to load white phosphorous rockets beneath the wings of the planes. White phosphorous is a self-igniting incendiary that burns with a white smoke. The rockets were not for direct offensive purposes, but to highlight targets for artillery and air-ground support aircraft. Pilots flew missions alone.
“These pilots would put these rockets in as close to the bad guy as they could as a marker,” Herker said.
He and his small crew were self-sustaining. The rockets were shipped to them in pieces, which they had to assemble before placing them on the aircraft’s wings. They pumped fuel into the aircraft with hand pumps.
Their living quarters were steel conex boxes surrounded by sandbags in what’s known as a MAC-V, or military assistance command, a joint-service facility Herker and his comrades shared with a U.S. Army unit. An Army artillery unit regularly fired over their heads.
But the airfield where they worked was a mile and a half from the main MAC-V compound. Herker and his eight fellow airmen also served as airfield security, with Army back up, if needed. There were, of course, always armed.
They occasionally had rockets fired in their direction. Unexploded ordinance had to sporadically be removed from the runway.
“We actually worked 24/7,” Herker said. “We flew airplanes every day unless the weather wouldn’t let us.”
He recalled the Báo Lôc area as being fairly benign in terms of conflict, possibly because of the presence of Montagnards, people indigenous to the Central Highlands who became important allies of the U.S. military there.
Still, they were occasionally attacked.
“We knew when the rockets were coming because the mamasans wouldn’t come to work that day,” Herker recalled.
Mamasan is a broadly used colloquial military term of endearment for local women, typically at Asian duty stations, who are often employed as domestic labor for U.S. servicemen.
“If the mamasans didn’t come to work we knew you better get your flak jacket and helmet on and take your gun and head for the bunker that night,” Herker said.
Herker said he didn’t see or experience any direct loss of life during his tour. Still, he was cautious.
“You had to be more aware of your surroundings because you were in a combat zone,” he said.
Herker’s own experience about his tour in Vietnam was that he didn’t see much difference between being stationed there during a war, or at any other stateside duty station.
His philosophy about Vietnam is different than most, saying that he didn’t think Vietnam vets had it any worse than combat veterans of other wars, at least in his experience.
“I don’t care which war you’re in, war is hell,” he said.
The difference with Vietnam vets wasn’t in their combat experiences, but in the attitudes of American’s when they arrived home.
“When we came back from Vietnam is where we had it so much different,” Herker explained. “We didn’t come back with any respect from the general public.”
Like most Vietnam veterans, he too experienced the direct, individual criticism and vitriol of protesters who lay in wait for returning servicemen when they landed back home.
He was in uniform when he arrived in San Francisco from Vietnam. Protesters confronted the returning GIs in the baggage claim area of the airport, spitting on them and calling them baby killers. They would approach servicemen individually or in small groups, step in front of the men and challenge them.
At least that was Herker’s experience. He did nothing when protesters confronted him, he said. He just turned and walked away.
“I had comments I’d have liked to make, but (the protesters) weren’t worth making any comments over,” Herker said, noting he had been counseled by superiors to not engage them. “I hated them and thought they were a bunch of jerks, but that was no place to be confronting them. Be better than they are.”
But Vietnam caused Herker to view life differently.
“I respect life more than I did before,” he said. “And lives of others more than I did before.”
Herker said he suffers no post traumatic stress issues, other than the occasional dream about coming under attack.
“I’m one of the lucky ones,” he said.
After his retirement in 1990, Herker landed a job with the General Services Administration in fleet management, retiring from there in 2006.
He now serves fellow veterans through the Veterans of Foreign Wars, as he has since he retired from the Air Force. He is a past VFW state commander, and is currently serving as chief of staff for the national VFW commander-in-chief, a job which has him traveling all over the U.S.
He is also active in the Spokane Area Veterans Honor Guard, a group who participates in funeral services for veterans in the greater Spokane region.
“Wherever they need us to go, we’ll go,” he said.
Asked why he serves in in those capacities, and Herker’s response was mission-driven.
“When I retired my purpose was serving veterans, and helping veterans, their families and service members,” he said. ”That’s what we do. That’s our mission in the VFW.”
Overall, Herker said he enjoyed his Air Force career and the people he served with, all without regret.
He estimated that 98 percent of the people attending Memorial Day services are veterans and their families — people who served or families of those who served.
He felt most people don’t understand what service members families endure while their husband, wife, father or mother are deployed.
“It’s a heavy load to put on families,” Herker said. “Kids back home — a lot of stress for them to go through.”
“They’re the ones that support all this stuff, the family members of veterans,” Herker said of celebrations like Memorial Day.
The mission of the VFW is, in part, “To serve our veterans, the military and our communities. To advocate on behalf of all veterans,” according to the VFW website.
Herker has done just that for 29 years — longer than he served in the Air Force. Which might explain his prevailing attitude toward society in general.
“I want people to know that if it wasn’t for veterans, you and I wouldn’t be here. There’s a reason we have the freedoms we’ve got,” he said
It’s something that shouldn’t be taken for granted.
“People think they are owed something and they’re not,” Herker said.
Lee Hughes can be reached at [email protected].
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