By RAY WYCHE

Two Chadbourn area military veterans of Vietnam, both disabled from battlefield actions, have found comfort in each other as they bear the scars they suffered in their long ago battles in the faraway south Asian country.

Mike Grout and Jimmy Martin met at the Whiteville Veterans of Foreign Wars post where both are members and became friends based on their similarities. Neither was drafted; each enlisted, Grout in the Navy and Martin in the Army, and both volunteered for what were probably the two most demanding and dangerous duties available.

Both came home classed as physically unfit for military service, with shrapnel in their bodies and thoroughly doused with Agent Orange, the defoliant U. S. forces sprayed from the air to uncover the hiding places of the Viet Cong and which is blamed for long-lasting ill effects on those it touched, and with personality changes resulting from the horrors they had survived.

Both managed to find work after their releases from the service, but both were forced to quit because their battered bodies could no longer tolerate even moderate physical demands. Now, both get about slowly and must depend on their walking canes.

These days, they spend a lot of time together; they know what’s going on in each other’s mind when television or a movie depicts war actions similar to what they experienced. Such scenes revive bad memories and they turn away from them and to each other for support.

Mike Grout was, as he puts it, “just an old farm boy” from Nebraska when he joined the Navy at age 19. Soon he was in Vietnam as a crewman on a Swift Boat, the Navy’s speedy river craft that sped along inland waters with machine guns blazing away at suspected Viet Cong positions on the banks.

It was hot action and dangerous duty but Grout wanted more. He applied for and was accepted into SEALS (SEa, Air, Land), the Navy’s ultra-dangerous, ultra stealthy special operations unit that worked mostly behind enemy lines. Also called the Silent Service for the secrecy surrounding their activities, SEALS are famous for their death-defying underwater missions; they used false names and worked alone or in small groups. Only the psychologically and physically strongest were accepted for training, and only the best graduated. Grout survived the training that was designed to weed out the less-than–perfect and was assigned to a SEAL unit in southeast Asia.

“I was doing silent service,” he says. “I can’t tell you where I’ve been.” The oath of secrecy is still in effect, he says.

He can say that on a mission in enemy-held territory he was captured, despite his efforts to remain undetected.

“I was in a rice paddy and I dug a hole in the paddy wall just big enough for my body. I can say I was underwater and breathing through a reed. I learned their (Vietcong) tricks. I was a loner.”

His captors locked him in a bamboo cage and interrogated him for lengthy periods. Grout won’t talk about what happened in captivity except to say, “I didn’t tell them anything. They even tried drugs (truth serum) but it didn’t work on me.”

The food his captors offered him “was not fit for human consumption,” he says, “but the rats and mice tasted wonderful.”

About 10 days after his capture, Grout saw some fellow SEALS who were also prisoners. He had a special gun, broken down into components, hidden in his bloused pants leg, the one place on his body that the Viet Cong failed to search.

He has little to say about his life as a prisoner of war.

“I have bad memories when that comes up,” he says.

He will say that he and four other prisoners managed to escape but reveals nothing about the details.

“All I can tell you is that it was a bloody mess when we left. And somebody is in heaven.”

Grout won’t say how or where he was wounded during the escape but 20 days later he had recovered enough to go on another secret mission. He was wounded for the second time.

“That one sent me home—unfit for duty.”

His wounds still bother him but it was exposure to Agent Orange that continues to cause more serious problems.

“I got sprayed four times and it’s still there. I can tell you that. The doctor says my heart is like a sponge.” He is on the list for a heart transplant.

The effect of Agent Orange is no stranger to Grout’s close friend and fellow Vietnam veteran, Jimmy Martin of Peacock Road near Chadbourn. Like Grout, Martin was not satisfied with merely being in the military; he wanted to go all the way so he volunteered for paratrooper training when he enlisted at age 17.

“I volunteered. I wanted to be on the front line. I went in because I had an obligation to do something that was done for me in World War II,” he says.

Martin was assigned to the 173rd Airborne Brigade, the only paratroop outfit to make a combat jump in Vietnam.

The entire brigade jumped late one afternoon, landing in the jungle.

“We were right on the landing zone and they were shooting at us but we didn’t take too many losses,” he says, although some troopers broke bones when they landed in treetops.

It was on the ground that the 173rd found the going rough.

“We played war like they (the Viet Cong) played war.” Like the enemy, Martin’s unit fought a hit-and-run type of war: strike the enemy hard and get out. Whenever his unit captured a village or strongpoint, he says, “We always left a regular deck of cards—with our unit insignia on it. We were proud of who we were.”

He recalls one particularly bloody battle in which, he says, his unit “spent five days and five nights just to get to the top of a hill, only to give it back to them” when his outfit was ordered to be withdrawn.

Martin says the 173rd was a young man’s outfit.

“Our oldest man might have been 24, 25 years old. But we grew up fast.”

The 173rd suffered 93 percent (counting replacement troops) casualties during the war, one of whom was Martin who was hit by shrapnel in both knees and who took two bullets in his left leg.

“I lay around until the legs healed up and then caught more fragments” in a later action that ended his combat career.

Martin spent a total of 15 years in the Army, getting out only when officials finally ruled him unfit for combat duty. “I was obsolete,” he says.

Like Grout, Martin was exposed to Agent Orange and its effects are still with him.

“You get pneumonia quicker and you get infections quicker,” he says.

Grout agrees that Agent Orange has caused long-lasting problems.

“I’ve got a heart with four holes in it, the doctors say. I’m on oxygen at night. There’s nothing we can do but suffer.”

Despite the suffering he went through in Vietnam, Martin says he would do it again.

“If it were not for my family and if I were able, I’d go to Iraq.”

Once they got out of the military, both men became truck drivers.

“I drove a truck for 27 years,” Grout says. “I had to get away from people. But in 1994, I had to give up everything,” he says, because of his failing health.

Martin also worked in construction as long as he was able.

“It got to where I was not able to climb ladders,” he says.

Martin says while he was in Vietnam, he never thought about what he would do after the Army.

“I never considered having a future. I expected to die over there.”

Despite the enemy’s efforts and the ravages of Agent Orange, both men made it back home—shot up, hurting and sick—in sharp contrast to what they were when they marched off to war as young men.

And now they have each other to lean upon, and they are thankful.