a friendship forged under fire

The last time Larry Edwards had been on an airplane before Oct. 3 was when he was returning home from Vietnam in 1969 with his best buddy, Bob Loos. This trip, this flight, was for healing from what the two friends saw in the jungles near Saigon.

Edward s, of Colfax, and Loos, of Loyal, took their Honor Flight to Washingt on, D.C., earlier this month. Side by side they were again, as they were on a flight in 1969 that landed in San Fransisco and catapulted them back into civilian life after 14 months of war. More than 50 years have passed since they slept in bunkers with rats and chucked mortar rounds into the night sky against an unseen enemy, and the smiles they share now belie the flashbacks they still endure.

Loos, known by “Rupe” to Loyal family and friends, met Edwards in advanced infantry training in Fort Jackson, S.C. in 1968. Fresh off the Wisconsin farm they were, and they became fast friends as they were shipped together to Vietnam and stationed at the same base camp. So close are they yet, all these years later, that they’ve made plans to be buried at the same military cemetery near Spooner. In fact, as they applied for their spots on the Honor Flight that sends veterans to the nation’s Capitol for a long overdue welcome home, they would not have done it any way but together.

Loyal is in one Honor Flight territory, which flies out of Mosinee, but Edwards lives in the La Crosse region. When they applied for their spot some four years ago, they said there was no way they would get on that plane without their comrade.

“We told ‘em,” Loos said, “one wasn’t going without the other.”

Loos had been working at Midland Co-op in Greenwood when he was sent to the Army in 1968. So many Loyal boys were headed for service, he said, it was just a matter of time before he was drafted, too. Edwards tells the same story about leaving his job at Presto, where he was making 105-mm artillery shells that would one day become all too familiar to him.

Loos was first sent to Georgia for basic training while Edwards headed to Kentucky. Their paths took them both to the South Carolina base, where they finished their 10 weeks of infantry training and shared a plane ride back to Minneapolis for a 1-week leave. A few days later, they were on a plane again, bound for San Fransisco, and then overseas.

After arriving at Tan Son Nhut air base in Vietnam, the pair was shipped to the Ku Chi base camp, about 50 miles north of Saigon. Edwards had drawn the short straw of assignments, an infantryman, a “total grunt,” he says. “The guy jumping out of the helicopter, that was me.”

Loos was on a mortar team, stationed at a base camp but on call all hours of the day and night to rush out to support units in the bush with fire. His team would get a call for help, with coordinates, and would adjust their mortar tubes to send rounds out over the countryside. His mortars could travel seven miles, Loos said, and he never saw who was on the receiving end. It may well have been Edwards’ unit out there that needed the fire.

“Things weren’t good if you were calling in artillery or whatever,” Edwards said.

Edwards slogged through a year of hard infantry duty, going out on missions into the jungle almost every day. “Search and destroy” was the name of his game.

“That was your goal every day,” he said. Constant rain was an issue. On night raids, Edwards would sleep on the ground with little more than a pancho for cover. When he did get the “luxury” of a bunker, he wasn’t alone.

“Every bunker you were in was full of rats,” he said. “I’d say on average, you’d have 20 rats running over you every night. You never get used to rats running over you.”

Loos and Edwards were in ‘Nam during the Tet Offensive, when the North Vietnamese took advantage of an expected lull for the Vietnamese New Year to launch a massive surprise attack. Loos recalls being in base camp, with attacks exp ected at any time. Edwards said the concertina wirelaid out around the camps for protection was so sharp, “If you would look at the wire, you were bleeding.”

Through Tet and afterward, Loos was “on call all the time” to respond to units in need. He recalls throwing illumination rounds into the sky so men could see what they were dealing with.

“We had to keep those guys lit up so they could see if the enemy was coming,” Loos said.

Come they did, Edwards said. “They had a monsoon once and they left us alone for like two days,” he said, otherwise fighting was relentless. Years after they were in Vietnam, Edwards and Loos learned how close the North Vietnamese really were.

“That’s where all the tunnels were in that area,” Edwards said. “They had tunnels underneath our company.”

Edwards said the day-to-day grind was not something soldiers thought much about.

“You don’t know any better. You don’t have any choice,” he said.

Loos said he took the advice of the men who had been there before him, and didn’t take his malaria pills for the first six months. Getting sick, he said, could’ve been his ticket home. After getting closer to his release date, he said his outlook started to improve.

“After six months, it was like, ‘Well, maybe I am gonna’live,” he said.

Loos and Edwards did have a choice after their year in Vietnam was up, but both men decided to sign on for an extra 58 days. That way, they said, they would be sent straight home instead of having to spend time at a base back in the States.

“Everybody said,’You crazy?’” Edwards recalls. “Well, yeah, I guess so.”

Both men had earned Bronze Stars for their actions, and Edwards was wounded once. It came when a fellow soldier set off a booby trap on patrol.

“I was far enough away so all I got was a piece of shrapnel in my chin,” he said.

While Edwards said there was no luck on his side when he was drawn for infantry duty, some fortune followed him through the many missions.

“I was shot at with a rifle, machine guns, RPGs, rockets,” he said. Once, a squad of South Vietnamese soldiers -- who were on America’s side -- mistakenly opened up on Edwards’ unit with 105-mm shells, the same ones he had helped build before being drafted.

It wasn’t any physical wounds that Loos and Edwards found followed them after their tours, and still do now. Loos said he noticed it right away, the mental anguish, when he came home and went back to hauling feed.

“It was kind of hard there for a while,” Loos said, “from shooting people to visiting with people ...right off the battlefield and back to work.”

“I’d done my best to stay drunk for a year,” Edwards said. “Or was it two?”

Edwards went back to his old job, too, for a time, then went on to work at Uniroyal in Eau Claire and later as a manure hauler. He and his wife, Wanda, had two kids and five grandkids.

Loos met and married his wife, Jackie, and they had two girls and seven grandkids. He worked at Grassland for a time and retired from Land O’Lakes.

Through all those life experiences, the friends said they have never been able to leave their years in ‘Nam behind.

“You always get flashbacks, I do anyway,” Loos said. Edwards nods. The Honor Flight did help, though, they agree. At the airport in Mosinee, after they boarded the flight early on the morning of Oct. 3, water canons sent a cascade over the plane, as a symbolic cleansing. In Washington, they saw all the landmarks, the Pentagon, the Lincoln Memorial, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

The Vietnam Wall. Edwards knew some of the men whose names are etched there. He found as many as he could.

“That one guy that was killed, we just called him Frenchie, and I didn’t know what his name was,” Edwards said.

Another name he found, but it was high on the monument wall. He got down on his hands and knees and his guardian for the day climbed on his back so he could reach the name to get a copy of the etching.

Loos and Edwards were among 104 veterans on their Honor Flight -- all but one of them from Vietnam. Many of the guys, they said, still carry severe physical wounds with them, a reminder that some sacrificed more than others.

“We ain’t half as bad as those guys,” Loos said. Edwards said the day was so busy, he didn’t have time to process what it meant to him. Afterwards, in his hotel room, he read letters written by little kids to thank the veterans for their service.

One letter read, in part, “Dear Veteran: We might not have been here right now if it wasn’t for you guys. Please rest now.”

“I had no idea I had that many tears,” Edwards said.