Slipping on his dog tags last week for the first time in 45 years, longtime Jefferson resident Al Rowedder has admittedly been quiet about his service in Vietnam. A recipient of the Bronze Star, Rowedder is the first Vietnam veteran from Greene County picked to take an Honor Flight. ANDREW McGINN | JEFFERSON HERALD

Honor Flight opens a new front

Rowedder among first Vietnam veterans set to take Honor Flight

By ANDREW MCGINN
a.mcginn@beeherald.com

Al Rowedder was seemingly the last guy who would’ve been drafted in the spring of 1969.

“Most of them,” he said of local draft boards during the Vietnam War, “if you were in education, they didn’t draft you.”

“Most of them,” he continued, “if you were married, they didn’t draft you.”

“Most of them,” he added, “if you had a child, they didn’t draft you.

“I had all three.”

He was for sure an unlikely candidate to wind up hacking his way through a jungle with a machete and feet that were perpetually wet, but if Uncle Sam really wanted to take a married high school basketball coach with a month-old baby son and train him to fight communist guerillas on the other side of the planet, then Rowedder was at least willing to go.

At 71, the longtime Jefferson resident and real estate agent is now the first Vietnam veteran from Greene County to be selected for an Honor Flight — and that’s just as surprising.

On Veterans Day 2015, Fort Dodge-based Brushy Creek Area Honor Flight announced it would begin accepting applications from Vietnam veterans.

“I thought I’d just put in my application, assuming it’d be a couple of years,” Rowedder explained last week. “Rather than two or three years, it was two or three months.”

Rowedder will be one of three Greene County veterans aboard the May 7 Honor Flight, but the first and only Vietnam veteran.

Local Korean War veterans Donald Knight and Orvie Umbaugh will be making the trip as well.

The Fort Dodge Honor Flight hub — one of 130 regional hubs in the national Honor Flight Network — has taken a chronological approach to how it honors veterans from Webster and surrounding counties.

Beginning in 2010, the first five chartered flights out of the Fort Dodge Regional Airport bound for Washington, D.C. — where veterans are treated to a whirlwind, all-expenses-paid trip to see their memorials on the National Mall — contained only World War II veterans.

Then it was opened to veterans of the Korean War.

Now, Vietnam.

To date, Brushy Creek has flown more than 1,200 veterans to the nation’s capital solely using donations.

Remaining World War II veterans still get priority, but other applications are accepted on a first-come, first-served basis.

Since opening the process in November to Vietnam veterans, Brushy Creek Area Honor Flight already has received close to 330 applications, hub president Ron Newsum said.

“I wanted to do it while I could still get around and absorb stuff,” said Rowedder, who’s never before visited the famous black wall bearing the names of more than 58,000 Americans.

Eight other Vietnam veterans from Greene County — Richard Vogel, Larry Brus, Don Ihnken, Robert Sondgeroth, Thomas Hammel, Louis Swanson, Carter Fetters and Jerry Spaulding — are on the waiting list for future flights, according to Newsum.

For Rowedder, the experience could very well be sensory overload compared to the homecoming he received at the Omaha airport on Halloween night in 1970, when he stepped off the plane from Vietnam.

To be clear, there wasn’t one.

There was only the wife he hadn’t seen in a year he didn’t even recognize.

“He came off the plane and didn’t recognize me I had lost so much weight,” Gretchen Rowedder recalled.

It stands in wildly stark contrast to today’s amped-up, intensely patriotic homecomings, when you’re sometimes left to assume the National Guard transportation company fresh from Bahrain at some point stormed Utah Beach.

“You just slithered home and tried to pick up the pieces,” Al Rowedder said.

He brought with him a Bronze Star, earned for meritorious achievement, and a simple request.

“Please do not ask me any questions,” Gretchen Rowedder remembers him saying.

“We went home and tried to figure it out,” she said.

Their son, Tracy, had been just a month old when Al Rowedder entered the Army in June 1969.

A 1967 graduate of then-Northwest Missouri State College, Al Rowedder had been hired by the high school in Eagleville, Mo., to teach not only social studies, but physical science and physical education as well. And he not only coached the boys’ basketball team, he coached the girls’ team, too, plus track.

He and Gretchen had married in ’67 — she from Manning and he from arch-rival Manilla, which wasn’t completely unlike a boy and girl from North and South Vietnam falling for each other.

“When I left that area, they were still shooting at each other,” Al Rowedder joked.

But in Missouri they found their Thailand.

Gretchen Rowedder got hired as the school nurse.

“We were very comfortable,” Al Rowedder said of the life they were creating for themselves.

That first season, the boys basketball team was “above average.” The girls were “below average.”

It turned out to be his only season.

That spring, Mr. Rowedder was tapped by the draft board back in Denison for a slightly different kind of team — the Americal Division of the U.S. Army.

“It would’ve been easier to go in as a single person,” he reflected.

He soon found himself walking patrol in the jungles and rice paddies near Chu Lai alongside guys who conceivably could have been on his hoops squad the winter before.

“I wouldn’t call them kids, because they were in the Army, but they were 19- and 20-year-old young people,” Rowedder said.

Operating out of a firebase named Hawk Hill, Rowedder’s age, he believes, helped him make better decisions, but it didn’t make war any less frightening.

“All the time,” he answered matter-of-factly when asked if he was ever scared.

“You just go day to day and day to day,” he explained. “And you’ve got to have a little faith.

“I shouldn’t say a little faith. You’ve got to have a lot of faith.”

Gretchen and Tracy moved back home to Manning for support.

She wrote every day, sending cassette tapes of Tracy babbling.

Al Rowedder became singularly focused on survival.

The odds of him surviving improved when one day a chopper arrived with orders for him to return to Hawk Hill. The college-educated teacher soon learned he had just been promoted to assistant company clerk.

“You’re still in the middle of nowhere. It’s just that you have sandbags instead of foxholes,” he said.

He delivered mail (sometimes by helicopter) and wrote citations for combat decorations, including a Silver Star destined for a young grunt named Rex Allen. The name has stuck all these years thanks to the singing movie cowboy of the same name.

“It’s one of the full names I can remember,” Rowedder said.

Other guys are remembered only by nicknames like “Alabama” or “Mr. Peepers.”

This Rex Allen was probably only 19 or 20.

“If it wouldn’t have been for him, they would’ve been pinned down for a while,” Rowedder said. “For the Silver Star, I didn’t have to embellish any.

“He was like a John Wayne or an Audie Murphy.”

Rowedder is quick to note, “I’m not a Rex Allen.”

That Tracy (joined later by a sister, Heather) grew up and never asked questions “was fine,” he said.

“It’s in the past,” Rowedder said.

Like most combat veterans, he was simply an ordinary man thrust into an extraordinary situation.

Yes, there were moments of intense fighting.

But you don’t qualify for an Honor Flight by how loudly you talk when you get back home.

“It wouldn’t make a good movie,” Rowedder said, “but it was enough for me.”

How to help
On May 7, Fort Dodge-based Brushy Creek Area Honor Flight will embark on its 12th Honor Flight since 2010, this time taking about 145 area veterans to Washington, D.C.

Each flight costs about $100,000 to undertake.

The nonprofit organization exists solely on donations.

Donations received from Greene County residents will be put toward Honor Flights for Greene County veterans. No portion of the money goes to any state or national organization.

Send donations to: Brushy Creek Area Honor Flight, 320 S. 12th St., Fort Dodge, IA 50501-4816.

For more information, contact Ron Newsum at 515-571-4477.

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