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For more than 50 years, the jungles of Vietnam have disrupted Army veteran Howard Stillwagon's sleep.
"The slightest little noise will wake me up and I'm nervous," says the Glen Cove resident.

He was one of more than 2 million American men drafted to fight in the Vietnam War.
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"No one knew why we were in Vietnam or what the war was even for," recalls William Richardson, an Army veteran from Glen Cove.
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A half-century since the war ended, Long Island Vietnam veterans shared their stories — some for the first time .
Hear them describe the traumatic scenes they saw, the mixed experiences they had when they returned home and what lessons they want Americans to learn.
Vietnam veterans from Long Island recount their journeys from battlefield to life after war
Howard Stillwagon, a Vietnam veteran, at his Glen Cove home. Credit: Jeff Bachner
In 1965, a communist insurgency in South Vietnam escalated into war between that country’s government, backed by the United States, and North Vietnam, backed by the Soviet Union and China.
American involvement expanded from a nominally advisory role to the combat deployment of hundreds of thousands of troops, with 2.7 million American men and women serving over the course of the war. U.S. military involvement ended in 1973. In 1975, North Vietnam won control of South Vietnam. In 1976, North and South were unified as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
The most powerful nation in the history of the world had failed to achieve its aims, at a grievous cost. American political scientist R.J. Rummel estimated that 3.8 million Vietnamese were killed in political violence in the Vietnam War and related conflicts in years that preceded and followed it. The Pentagon counts 58,220 American service members dead during U.S. involvement. Newsday has reported that 560 Long Islanders were killed in action.
This spring, 50 years after the end of the Vietnam War, Newsday interviewed six Long Islanders who served and came home.
Howard Stillwagon

For more than 50 years, Howard Stillwagon has struggled to sleep, his mind shackled to the jungles of Vietnam.
"The slightest little noise will wake me up, and I’m nervous," the Army veteran said in his Glen Cove home. "I've got to check every window and every door to make sure everything’s locked."
After he was drafted and landed in Vietnam, Stillwagon said he "leaned on" experienced soldiers who believed America was not "really trying to win."
"We had the capability to blow Hanoi off the map," said Stillwagon, 76. "We were just playing war games."
For several months in 1968 and 1969, Stillwagon and the 1st Air Cavalry Division performed "search and destroy" missions, eliminating supplies stockpiled by the northern People's Army of Vietnam. Their enemies would retaliate. Battles ensued.
"Looking at the body bags, thinking about their families ... thinking about my family ... I was scared," Stillwagon recalled. "I wanted to be going to school. I was a very gentle, nervous kind of kid, and all of the sudden ... I was trained to shoot weapons and kill people."
The war also exacted a physical toll on Stillwagon in June 1969, when his division, low on food and water near the Cambodian border, blew up several large trees for a helicopter to land with supplies. North Vietnamese forces heard the commotion and surrounded them before "all hell broke loose," he said. A rocket struck the tree protecting him, knocking him unconscious.
When he awoke with a concussion and a broken left kneecap, among other injuries, he helped apply a compression bandage to a soldier who was shot in his chest.
"I’m lifting him up and he’s cursing at me, I’m hurting him," Stillwagon recalled. "We wrapped him up, and I passed out again. I guess from shock ... I knew he was dying."
After that battle, Stillwagon applied for a hardship discharge to return home to his terminally ill mother. He said he was "browbeaten" and "bullied" by his superiors for months until he was discharged on Thanksgiving Day 1969.
"My dad, as soon as he saw me, he said, ‘You're shell shocked,’ and I said, ‘Yeah I probably am because I saw a lot of combat,’ ” Stillwagon said.
When he visited the Veterans Affairs hospital soon after his service, Stillwagon said, he was deemed only 25% disabled due to post-traumatic stress disorder, which his father, a World War II veteran, unsuccessfully urged Stillwagon to fight. Around 15 years ago, Stillwagon felt there was a newfound push to help Vietnam veterans, resubmitted his disability claims with the VA and was deemed 75% disabled due to his PTSD.
Between the care finally afforded him — sleep medications and his service dog, Cruiser — his family and his hobbies, Stillwagon said he’s "happy." He commands the James Erwin Donahue Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 347 in Glen Cove and recently reconnected with men he served alongside through Facebook.
"I like talking to these guys," Stillwagon said, "because they all went through it with me in the jungles."
William Richardson

When William Richardson enlisted in the Army near the end of the Vietnam War in 1973, he sought an environment more ripe with opportunities for someone like him.
"During that time, there was still a lot of social unrest going on in the country," Richardson recalled of America after the Civil Rights Movement. "There weren’t a lot of opportunities for Black men."
While serving in an administrative unit in the South Vietnamese city of Da Nang, Richardson traded racial divisions for global confusion.
"No one knew why we were in Vietnam or what the war was even for," said Richardson, 73, of Glen Cove. "Ultimately, it was just such a shame that ... America lost so many young men over a war that we didn’t know why we were even there to begin with."
Although he never saw combat, Richardson witnessed casualties of war brought into hospitals.
"Every day, all day, they were constantly bringing bodies in," the veteran recalled. "I saw a lot of that, a lot of the guys I had come to know and made good friends with didn’t make it. That was really, really tough."
Richardson was relocated to Oklahoma in March 1975 and discussed his experiences with an Army therapist. At first, the casualties kept him awake at night, but he said he learned to "compartmentalize" and keep Vietnam in the past. He continued a career in the Army through 1983, when he returned home to care for his children.
For nearly 50 years, he did not tell anyone else what he saw in Vietnam.
"Initially it was just too tough to talk about," Richardson said. "Then as the years started to pass, it just wasn’t something that ever came up in conversations ... My wife and I were married for 25 years before she passed away. I had never discussed it with her, not once. She didn’t even know that I had been to Vietnam."
When his fellow Black veterans returned home from Vietnam, Richardson said, they were overlooked even more than their white counterparts, especially when it came to finding work and continuing their education.
"It’s a shame that we felt like we were treated better in Vietnam than we were when we came back to our own country," Richardson said.
After hanging up his uniform for good, Richardson said he dealt with racism when running for local school board and city council seats. While he didn't get elected, he pursued his lifelong passion for social work. During his tenure with the Economic Opportunity Commission of Glen Cove, he counseled local students and took many on tours of historically Black colleges.
Today, Richardson worries that America still does not sufficiently support veterans when they come home.
"I started to see guys, veterans who had just come home from Afghanistan and were living in cardboard boxes, out in the woods ... sleeping on the ground outside of Penn Station," Richardson said. "I said, ‘Oh my God, this is a repeat performance of Vietnam.’ ”
Frank D'Aversa

Any call to duty was one a young Frank D’Aversa wanted to answer.
He enlisted in the Naval Air Force from October 1961 through February 1966. For nearly a year, D’Aversa served as an aviation structural mechanic onboard the USS Ranger off the coast of Vietnam.
"I was good at fixing bullet holes in the aircraft, when they came back shot up, to get them ready to fly again on another mission," D’Aversa, 81, of Hauppauge, recalled last Monday.
While he never set foot in Vietnam, the war took its toll on him. His arms that once mended war machines — which often returned to his aircraft carrier covered in Agent Orange — now shake with tremors, a symptom the VA recognizes as exposure to the crop killer.
He remembers the names of two members of his squadron who were shot down over Vietnam and the three-week mission to recover their bodies. Every Dec. 9, the day their plane crashed, he lights a candle in their memory at his parish. Whenever he hears a truck backfire, he recalls the dangers of the flight deck, where one haphazard landing caused a plane to burst into flames and fall into the water.
"It was quite an experience, and that was only one of many," he said. "You had to have your head on a swivel at all times, day and night."
When he was shipped to Southeast Asia in the summer of 1964, he felt he was serving an important purpose.
"We thought it was to protect our country from communism spreading over to our country," D’Aversa said.
He believes he and the United States fulfilled that purpose. But that was far from popular sentiment throughout the 1960s. Whenever he returned to his College Point stomping grounds, he found himself the target of many anti-war protesters.
"We were stunned to see the way people were treating us personally, throwing eggs at us and calling us ‘baby killers’ and stuff like that," D’Aversa said. Even his childhood friends "shunned" him when he returned home.
Despite this treatment, D’Aversa, who retired from the Naval Air Force Reserve as a lieutenant in 2003, proudly sports the neon green jacket of the Vietnam Veterans of America, a congressionally chartered nonprofit founded after many World War II veterans dismissed Vietnam veterans looking to join American Legions and VFWs. They did not perceive the conflict as "a real war," D’Aversa said.
Besides serving as the membership chair for the Suffolk County chapter of the nonprofit, D’Aversa also volunteers as a counselor with the Suffolk County Veterans Court, which offers alternatives to incarceration for veterans struggling with substance abuse and mental health disorders.
Long Islanders might have noticed him and his fellow green-jacket veterans at MacArthur Airport welcoming younger veterans returning from the Middle East.
"There’s always a welcoming committee of veterans, Vietnam guys, meeting them and greeting them at the airport," D'Aversa said. "They’re not just left standing there like we were."
Luke Magliaro Jr.

In April 1975, in some of the most hectic hours of the last American operation in Vietnam, Luke Magliaro Jr. guided Saigon’s evacuees from a stream of helicopters to the relative safety of the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Hancock, steaming off the Vietnamese coast.
Somebody handed him a baby. Somebody handed him a stack of worthless South Vietnamese banknotes. Some of the helicopters ran out of fuel and ditched in the South China Sea. Sometimes landing space on the flight deck was so scarce the crew pushed empty helicopters overboard. This was Operation Frequent Wind, in which 71 military helicopters flew 662 sorties to evacuate 7,800 Americans and Vietnamese from locations including the U.S. Embassy complex and Tan Son Nhut Airport in Saigon.
"We had a commitment to getting those people who were still there," said Magliaro, 69, an Inwood native, now director of veterans services for Hempstead Town. At the time, he was about 20. "Our obligation was to do what we could to get them out. Had we not been able, it would not have been a good scene."
Front page of Newsday from April 30, 1975. Credit: Newsday
It was a horrific scene, earlier in the spring when Da Nang fell to the Communist forces and the last fixed-wing aircraft flew out with some people so desperate they hid in the wheel wells.
With the South Vietnamese troops making what American military historian Daniel Haulman called a "chaotic retreat," Americans and their Vietnamese allies who remained in Saigon were endangered.
Even from the Hancock, miles off land, it had been obvious for months that "the fall of Saigon was imminent," Magliaro said. It felt, he said, "like you played in a playoff game and you lost, and you’re walking off the field."
Magliaro’s father and uncles had served in World War II or Korea, and he had friends, men he’d looked up to, who’d served in Vietnam. He believed then, as he still does, that the Vietnam War was just.
"We went with the purpose of peace and freedom," he said. "I feel genuinely proud that I represent the great United States of America and the great nation that we are, and I’m proud to have been a part of that."
Magliaro returned to civilian life and took a job with the company that would become NYNEX, the telephone giant. There he helped form a veterans’ advisory board, a calling he continues in his work with Hempstead.
"People that walk through my door are coming here because ... they’re veterans in need, or family members, and we’re the first stop" to signing up for veterans benefits. Sometimes, he said, they don’t come for paperwork help. "They just need a voice to talk to.”
Theresa Vereline

Despite being paralyzed from the chest down and with the help of a mechanized exoskeleton, Theresa Vereline crossed the finish line of the 2019 New York City Marathon.
While she was attending an event as an ambassador for that mobility assistance technology in Israel a few years earlier, former President Barack Obama had personally handed Vereline a challenge coin with his insignia.
But of all her life’s experiences, Vereline is most proud of her time as an Army medic from 1972 through 1976. She would have stayed enlisted much longer, she said, had it not been for sarcoidosis, a disease that first appeared as a respiratory illness nearly 50 years ago.
"I never wanted to stop," Vereline, 71, told Newsday last Monday. "But when I was sick, they said ‘no.’ I had to come home ... No more active duty. I was upset."
For much of her first three years of service, Vereline was stationed in Okinawa during the Vietnam War. She traveled to Vietnam by UH-1 "Huey" helicopter, bandaged wounded soldiers and continued first aid as the injured men were flown to military hospitals.
But during much of her final year in the service, Vereline was in and out of military hospitals as a patient, according to Pat Seagren, her wife of 30 years. Since 2011, Vereline has been paralyzed from the chest down. She developed neurosarcoidosis, and nodules formed in both her brain and her spine. Her doctors have pointed to Agent Orange exposure during her service in Vietnam as a likely culprit for the autoimmune disease.
"The Army said, ‘That’s it, we take care of you now,’ ” Vereline said.
Although she could no longer serve in the armed forces, Vereline was healthy and well enough to serve her community. For many years after her Army days, she continued her career in medical service, including stints as an ultrasound technician at the Northport VA Medical Center and as an EMT in Central Islip and Patchogue.
Following a series of strokes in 2022, Vereline moved into the Long Island State Veterans Home at Stony Brook University, a nursing home for service members funded by both the federal and state departments of veterans affairs. Vereline said she is proud of not only her service, but that of her fellow female residents at the veterans home, some of whom served in World War II and the Korean War.
"I have a hard time remembering" because of the strokes, Vereline said. "But I know in my heart, oh I would love to be back ... I loved being in the military."
Frank Santora

They tossed the body of North Vietnamese soldier, maybe dead, maybe alive, from a medevac helicopter flying above the Tay Ninh jungle canopy, said Frank Santora.
That was when he checked out of the war. "Americans don’t do that," he said last week in the dining room of his Cedarhurst home, looking back to 1969. "John Wayne didn’t do that." He thought, besides the Duke, of members of his own family who’d fought in earlier wars. "All my uncles — they hit the beaches in the Pacific, across North Africa and up the Boot [of Italy] ... I can’t believe any one of them would have done this."
Santora was 19, a 1st Cavalry Division infantryman in Vietnam since late July. This was three months into his time in Vietnam. Santora said his unit was attacked and afterward he was sent on patrol to see what was left of the attackers. That was when he saw the North Vietnamese soldier. He looked badly hurt.
"I says, ‘Take it easy,’ I’m trying to calm him down and he’s looking at me, pleading. He couldn’t talk. The first sergeant comes over, I say, ‘He’s dying.’ ”
"What the hell do you expect him to do," said the first sergeant. After the medevac helicopter lifted and he saw the soldier drop, Santora said he spoke to the men around him. "The other guys just looked at me, the sergeant says, ‘Shut up.’ Not that it was a conspiracy. Nobody cared."
In February 1970, eight months in, the Chinook helicopters dropped the men in Loc Ninh, which was rubber plantation country and a relief from the jungle. The first three or four days were quiet. On patrol, Santora handed out candy to the village children. Santora was taking a break from digging a foxhole in a forward observation post when the mortar attack came.
"I sit down against this gigantic tree ... Boom! I couldn’t hear. I went flying. I’m now a few feet away, I get up, I’m scrambling. Something’s wrong. I can’t breathe."
Santora said men who were near him but not shielded by the tree were killed. The ones who lived returned fire. Later, when the wounded were being evacuated, Santora said a medic looked at him, said ‘Oh my God,’ and hit him with morphine.
Santora, 74, said he took shrapnel in his arms, the right side of his torso, his right leg and his right eye. There’s still shrapnel in him. He kept the eye, but it doesn’t see.
He was, he said, "very, very angry for many, many years." The people and institutions he resented included the U.S. Army and U.S. political leadership; the Catholic Church, which, in his view, did too little to stop the fighting; fellow veterans who, in his view, wallowed in their pain instead of getting on with their lives; and himself for going to fight.
"I had no fear of dying. Watching people dying around me bothered me, and nobody's going to believe this, but killing other human beings," he said. "This guy's in his own country — so what if he wants to be a Communist?"
Santora got angry when he saw air conditioners in Army offices in the rear echelons. He got angry when he thought about how America sent a man to the moon on July 20, 1969, and days later sent him to Vietnam. "I’m in an anachronistic war," he said. "I just felt stupid and used."
When Santora came home, he ran through two marriages and "one job and one business after another," a pattern he thinks now was connected to his anger, though he was successful enough as a route salesperson delivering baked goods in New York City that he was able to retire at 59.
He was uncomfortable when blue-collar acquaintances treated him like a hero. The white collars were worse, he said, adding, "Anybody who had any sort of education whatsoever, they pitied you." He remembered a party when he was in his 30s full of academic types his wife knew and one a decade later when the same thing happened: "Somebody would say, ‘Well, Frankie, weren’t you in Vietnam?’ And then everyone turned to look at me." They looked at him, Santora said, as if he were a fool.
Santora is now commanding officer of John J. Oliveri VFW Post 1582 in Inwood and a member of several other veterans organizations. His beliefs don’t always align with those of his fellow members, but he says they share a mission: to guide younger veterans "navigating this behemoth known as the Veterans Administration" and advocate for them with lawmakers. "We fight to make sure the opportunities are there for these young people," he said. "That is why I stay."
He considers himself, once again, a patriot. For him, that word means "love of your country. That’s what you have to do. That means you love everybody, no matter who that person is. He or she is your fellow American."
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