Ex-Marine sees Iraq, envisions Vietnam

[MORTARDUDE]

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/auto/ep...bd0210035.html Ex-Marine sees Iraq, envisions Vietnam


By Emily J. Minor, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 1, 2003



Rich Robinson watches the war in Iraq and sees things that we don't.

Mainly his past.

"It puts me right back," he says. "I start having flashbacks. Sometimes it's not so bad, and sometimes it is."

For 35 years, he's had nightmares.

Robinson is a Vietnam veteran, and 12 months ago we might have cared less about his story. In all the years since he returned from war, not one journalist has ever asked Robinson about his time in Vietnam. Until now.

Now we all want to know.

Just how bad is war? Really?

"You've got another Vietnam here, storming up," he says. "That's what I believe."


A boy, changed by war

Robinson, 56, sat with me for nearly three hours Monday. And, piece by piece, with great care, almost as if not to scare me, he gave a careful reconstruction of a man who went to a place years ago, when he was just a boy, and returned to live a life shaped entirely by those four years in combat.

He is crippled by the gunshots to his legs and back. He was hit in three separate ambushes, each about a year apart. He was exposed to Agent Orange. He was hit with napalm. He's got hepatitis. Fully disabled, he's not able to work. Yet, somehow, through the years, he's patched together a life that does not involve anger. Or regret. He's got a daughter. A lovely wife.

He's got his buddies at Chapter 42 of the Disabled American Veterans in West Palm Beach.

"After I got home, I found I related better to people who knew what I had been through," he says simply.

Robinson grew up in Boston and joined the Marines when he was 17 to escape an abusive stepfather. His mother signed the papers because he was underage.

A year later, he was in Vietnam. "I was scared to death," he said. "Because none of us were prepared for these kinds of fights." He was a a machine gunner, a teenager with a 30-pound machine gun that got so hot during rapid fire you had to wear special gloves just to take off the red-hot barrel and reload. His first bullet came that year.

They patched him and sent him back out, and that was fine with him. Already, he was a U.S. Marine.


His home was the jungle

For four years, from 1964 to 1968, Robinson's home was the jungle. Friends died in his arms. He killed countless men. He crawled on his belly through rice fields fertilized with human waste and slept on the ground or the shore or a stump. He buried comrades in the swampy fields, always careful to mark the grave with a stone or branch.

Once, when he and a platoon were captured (March 6, 1968) and held for 18 days, they killed seven of the guards with their bare hands and then walked barefoot through the jungle for four days until they found American troops.

"That one's really hard for me to talk about because I just had the anniversary of that," he says.

This, Rich Robinson promises me, is happening. Now. In Iraq. To our soldiers.

As the war moves toward Baghdad, Robinson braces. We watch and wonder. He watches and remembers. American troops are about to begin house-to-house-combat, when soldiers must go from building to building and pluck the enemies from the civilians.

"House-to-house combat is the toughest," he says. "Because in war, you never know who's good, and who isn't."

emily_minor@pbpost.com

[MORTARDUDE]

or this is a wannabe ???

Larry