Local Vietnam veteran returns to Vietnam and Cambodia to put closure on the wounds of war after many years.
Suncrest residents Len Koolstra and his sons Dan and Jay recently returned from a trip to Vietnam and Cambodia. In every way, it was an eye-popping, life-altering adventure for the trio in the Far East, a place the younger Koolstras had never been before. But for the father, it was a full circle, the end of a long emotional journey, a closure for a 40-year battle. In Oct 1968, Len Koolstra, then a 20-year old young sunny Californian, found himself landing in the high land of central Vietnam, 40 km from Cambodian border.
Koolstra served as an Army combat engineer during the 14 month he was stationed in Vietnam. “Mainly sweeping mines as a demolition specialist and building bridges,” he says of his duties in the war zone. We have all seen enough movies to understand what war means, but nothing adequately compares to the trauma when one is under direct enemy fire. The base that Koolstra was stationed, curiously called Fire Base Oasis, came under fierce Vietcong attack on Mother’s Day, 1969.
“600 Vietcong, with 400 GIs,” the elder Koolstra recalled. By night’s end, 102 Vietcong were dead. Koolstra’s company lost 14 men. The North Vietnamese attacked the base for a week straight afterwards, with more US casualties. With a leg injury, Koolstra was hospitalized. It was there that the calamity of war, the combat trauma, the price the living and the dead paid, left its everlasting marks on the young man’s psyche. Surrounded by the brutal reminders of suffering all around him, in flesh and in spirit, young Koolstra turned introspective. He was particularly shaken after witnessing the suicide of a comrade. The soldier had shot himself after reading letters from his wife announcing her leaving the marriage.
14 months after the deployment, young Koolstra returned to a country embroiled in anti-war protests. “I was spat on, cursed upon, called all kinds of names.” The young man clammed up, bottled all his emotions inside him, and braved the long road ahead of him. “I just wanted to blend in. I wanted to disappear so I wouldn’t be singled out, reviled, spat on.” He put the war behind him and carried on his duties as husband, father and business owner for the next 40 years.
But how does one bottle memories like that? “There is not a single day that went by that I didn’t think of Vietnam,” Len Koolstra confesses today. “It is so painful to think of your brothers, that is basically who they are, who died there. And worse yet, I couldn’t talk about it.” Not one day went by in the last 40 years that Len Koolstra did not wrestle with the demon that tormented him. He moaned for the loss of the war, loss of life, loss of innocence, loss of faith, losses of what a young life could have produced, losses sustained by both sides. “Some of the dead are just kids!” Len says. At some point, Len came to realize that war is not between people, but governments.
Despite this internal rationalization, Koolstra could not shake his anger, resentment and distrust of all Vietnamese. Living in California, where there are a lot of Vietnamese immigrants, Len really did not enjoy the nagging apprehension that every Vietnamese he encountered on the street was likely to slit his throat. He did not like this irrational fear; nor his feeling toward what seemed like innocent and harmless people he encountered on American soil. In an effort to overcome the trauma and “reprogram myself” as Len calls it, he forced himself to befriend some Vietnamese, even going as far as allowing his hair be cut by a Vietnamese barber.
Growing up, Dan and Jay Koolstra had never heard their father talk about Vietnam. In fact it was in 2002, on a father and son fishing trip, that Jay, then 21, first heard his father, 54, mentioned Vietnam. The boys grew up into men and they both settled in Suncrest. 5 years ago, they started to hear their father talking about Vietnam, and how he would like to go back to see it again. But talk was all he did and the sons knew their father well enough to know he would never do it.
So on Father’s Day 2009, the brothers got together and bought a ticket to Vietnam for their father. If the old man wasn’t going to do it, the young men were taking him, before it was too late. So on Dec 02, 2009 the trio landed in Saigon Airport, with cash, passports and nothing else. “It was 90 degrees and 100% humidity.” Dan, the older son, says. “And we don’t even know where we were going or staying!” At the currency exchange window they picked out a hotel from the advertising board and the 2-week adventure began for the three musketeers.
To Be Continued Next Week.