TRAVERSE CITY — A copy of Phil Caputo's "Rumors of War" rests on the coffee table in Bob Hanley's house.
It's been only a couple of years since the Vietnam veteran has been able to read books about that war.
He read Caputo's 1977 memoir/autobiography twice.
"He comes the closest to describing what the Vietnam War was like for a soldier," Hanley, 68, said. "It helped a lot. That was a hell of a four years out of my life."
Hanley, a 1962 Traverse City Senior High graduate and a retired Consumers Power lineman, served 13 months in combat. He came back with some "nicks and scratches" and considers himself lucky for that. But his inner wounds continue to heal.
"You'd think you'd get over that stuff after 45 years, but you don't," he said.
His voice cracks sometimes when he talks about the war, especially when the conversation shifts to Tom Yagle, a boyhood buddy and neighbor kid who became the first Grand Traverse area soldier to be killed in Vietnam. Yagle died April 16, 1966, about two weeks before his year-long tour of duty in Vietnam was to end.
Hanley and Yagle grew up in Leelanau County about four miles west of Traverse City along M-72. They played cowboys together, liberated a few melons from neighbor gardens and attended Norris Elementary School. As teenagers, they worked on souped-up cars together, cruised up and down Front Street in downtown Traverse City and hung out at one of the four drive-in restaurants at that time.
"That Corvair Spider could really wax that Ford, in any race," Hanley said of their cars. It is a good memory. Vietnam is not.
In July 1963 "out of the clear blue sky," they decided to enlist for a three-year stint in the U.S. Marine Corps buddy program.
There were no good jobs in Traverse City and no promise of any, Hanley said.
Yagle quit high school after his sophomore year, got a job at a local mink ranch and earned enough money to buy a car — a white Corvair with red interior. Hanley, who worked at a local rendering plant after high school graduation, had a 1953 Ford.
"We were both fed up with slaving," he said.
Hanley told his dad about the plan that night. He can still hear his father's response.
"Do you know what the hell you are doing?" asked Roy Hanley, a World War II veteran.
Bob said yes. He believed in freedom, democracy, patriotism. He wanted to get out of town, see more of the world and better his chances of finding a good job.
"Traverse City was a little one-horse town then," he said. "You couldn't buy anything from Saturday night to Monday morning."
War's early stages
Neither he nor Tom Yagle knew what was brewing in Vietnam. In 1963 the United States had 16,000 servicemen in Vietnam, but the "first television war" was just beginning.
Newscasts that started with Vietnam War body counts wouldn't begin in American living rooms until 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson started dispatching large numbers of American troops to Southeast Asia.
By then, Yagle and Hanley were already in Southeast Asia.
Other Cold War news held sway in the early 1960s. In 1961, the communist German Democratic Republic, backed by the Soviet Union, started building the Berlin Wall. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 brought the world to the brink of nuclear war in a nerve-wracking showdown between President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev.
Television coverage wouldn't dramatically change until after the Tet Offensive on Jan. 30, 1968 — a major turning point in the war. By then, Hanley had been home a year.
Yagle and Hanley were both 18 when they walked into the Marine recruiting office at the east end of Front Street downtown in early July 1963. They enlisted in the Marines' buddy program.
The recruiter said they'd train and serve together and probably go to Okinawa. He never mentioned Vietnam, Hanley said.
The buddy program ended at the processing center at Fort Wayne in Detroit. Tom immediately was sent to boot camp in San Diego and then to Camp Pendleton in California.
Yagle stood about 6 feet tall and weighed 200 pounds. Hanley, at 5-foot-6 and 110 pounds, was detained for a couple of days while the Marines made sure he met enlistment qualifications.
"Tom was a big strapping guy," Hanley said. "I was a plain grunt."
Held daughter one time
They saw each other a couple of times on leave before shipping out to Vietnam, and then never again.
Tom Yagle arrived in Vietnam on May 6, 1965. By that time, he had married and his wife was pregnant with their daughter, Theresa.
Yagle saw and held her only once on leave when she was a month old.
Hanley originally was assigned in October 1965 to a helicopter assessment team aboard a 7th Fleet ship that cruised up and down the shore of Vietnam. Three months later he was re-assigned to a combat unit that made an amphibious landing in January 1966 on a beach between Chu-lai and Da Nang.
It reminded him of an old John Wayne movie. All he could see was 250-300 yards of beach and sand before there was any cover.
"I didn't think we would make it," he said. "It was a long way to run with 40 or 50 pounds of gear. Thankfully, there was no incoming fire."
Hanley knew Yagle probably was "in-country" but had no idea where. He learned about Yagle's death in a letter from his dad that arrived the same day the Stars & Stripes, a military newspaper, reported it.
Yagle died on April 16, 1966, in a blaze of mortar fire while defending the Da Nang air base from an attack.
"Despite being wounded and the intensity of fire directed at him, he fired six more rounds of mortar and helped the company repel the Viet Cong," said citations that came with the Bronze Star and Purple Heart and other posthumously awarded medals.
'Knew something was wrong'
Dan Yagle, Tom's younger brother, wasn't home that day in 1966 when the Marine chaplain came to tell his devastated parents, Earl and Delores Yagle, that their son had been killed.
"I knew something was wrong the minute I walked in the door," he said.
At the funeral, Tom and Dan's younger brother, Roger, announced that he planned to join the Marines. He enlisted in 1967 and was wounded three times, but survived Vietnam only to die stateside in what was called a hit-and-run accident. Family members said the report was inconclusive. They believe Roger may have been beaten to death in an unprovoked attack by four local men near Camp LeJeune, N.C., who did not care for the Marines.
Dan named his son Thomas Roger Yagle in memory of his brothers.
Their names live on through Yagle Brothers Detachment #165 of the Marine Corps League. Chartered in 1970, the area veterans group serves former Marines and veterans of other military branches with honorable service.
Hanley can't remember his reaction to Yagle's death, only that he was numb. His unit lost a lot of men about the same time. Death was everywhere.
"War is hell, like they say, and to keep you from going crazy, the mind tries to remind you of good things, to protect you," he said, choking up. "That op Tom got killed in blew the heck out of us, too. You get close to the guys in your unit. You knew their folks, their wives, everything about them. It hurt and hurt bad when they got killed and Tom got killed, but it didn't register."
Hanley was 22 years old when he came home in 1967. He married in November, bought a house, and worked for a car dealership and Cone Drive Gear before landing a job with Consumers Power, where he worked for 33 years, mostly as a lineman. He and his wife, now divorced, have two children, Kenneth and Lynette.
Hanley credits veterans at the local Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 6985 for helping him deal with what he knows now was post-traumatic stress disorder.
VFW posts in many places across the United States didn't allow Vietnam veterans to join because that war was officially considered a "conflict" then. That wasn't the case here, he said.
"The guys at the VFW welcomed us and they felt that we actually belonged in the VFW," he said.
He paged through a "Vietnam Experience" book on the coffee table, looking for a picture of the four-wheel-drive "mule" Yagle's howitzer sat on.
"The war was quite an ordeal to go through and we were really just kids," he said. "That's all we were, kids."
