On The 50th Anniversary Of U.S. Ground Troops Landing In Vietnam, A Philadelphia Veteran Remembers
By Pat Loeb
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) --- Today is the 50th anniversary of the arrival of the first U.S. ground troops in Vietnam. A Philadelphia man was among those who landed that day (May 5th, 1965), with the 173rd airborne division.
The Army seemed like a good place for Robert Toporek. In 1965, he was an 18-year-old high school drop-out who'd never even heard of Vietnam.
"When I got there I didn't even know where I was," Toporek says. "When I got off the plane... I was in awe and in shock and scared to death. I landed at Tan Son Nhut and there are all these tanks driving around and army guys with guns on and jets flying overhead and helicopters all over the place and I was like, oh my god, what have I got myself into."
Toporek and the 173rd were supposed to be there for 90 days. They ended up staying two years.
"We would land in a clearing and we'd get off the helicopters and we'd go into the jungle and we'd stay in the jungle for a week, sometimes two, sometimes three weeks and we just walked up to the jungle, day after day, looking for the enemy," Toporek says. "And then every once in a while we'd find them and we got engaged a number of times and a number of people got killed and wounded and you had to get those people out of the jungle and then we'd go back to base camp for a couple of days, sometimes a week or two and then back into the jungle."
Toporek ended up an anti-war activist when he got discharged. He didn't talk about his service for decades. Then he began to reach out to former comrades.
"They tell me the same story," he says. "They didn't talk about it."
Toporek thinks this anniversary is a good time to declare this the year of the Vietnam veteran. "It's time to honor them."
He plans a declaration at Philadelphia's Vietnam Memorial at 2 p.m.