John asked if I would put together an article for this publication that would do some good in our world, and I hope this subject fits that bill. I am Dick Nash and for most of the last twenty years I have been the president of an outfit called Vietnam Triple Deuce (vietnamtripledeuce.org). It is an organization made up of veterans of the four years (1966-1970) that 2/22nd Infantry battalion spent in Vietnam as part of the 25th Infantry division. We hold reunions every 18 months with what we call the “Mother Ship” of the 22nd Infantry Regiment. That organization is the 22nd Infantry Regiment Society, (22ndinfantry.org). Any vet who served in any of the four 22nd battalions in any theatre at any time is eligible to join the 22nd IRS. Associate memberships are available for both of these groups also for those who may have been attached or supported any of our 22nd Brothers and Sisters. These reunions are the subject matter of this article.
In 1998 I got my first computer and email access to the world wide web. I immediately started getting email invitations from total strangers who claimed to have served with me in Vietnam and wanted me to join them at a Dallas reunion. After a few phone calls I decided that it might help with the PTSD I had been dealing with for nearly thirty years, and bought tickets for my wife and I for the reunion. We made the trip, and got into the hotel elevator with two other couples who were also first timers. One was another Nam vet who turned out to have been in my platoon literally the week before I was assigned to it, and a wonderful WWII vet who had survived Europe with the 2/22nd all the way from D Day to Germany. We were greeted at the door of a large hospitality room by Bob Babcock and Awb Norris and welcomed to the experience of a military reunion for the first time. Most of the attendees were Nam vets, but the WWII vets numbered close to two dozen at that time, and those wonderful guys made sure that every single Nam vet was personally welcomed and shown the ropes of what the next three days would bring. That impression stuck hard in my criteria for conducting a good reunion…treat the first timers special.
Long story as short as possible, I have only missed one reunion since (for health reasons) and have come to call every vet of any 22nd infantry outfit my “Other Family.” If you think about it we are family in the strictest definition of the word. Whatever our time, whatever our conflict we spent a special time with others who formed a team, a family that worked towards a given goal while we looked out for each other successfully most times, sometimes not. It’s what every infantryman or woman has done since America’s beginning.
Our reunions are another special time where the first timers are given a lot different treatment than the time they were the FNG in the outfit. They are welcomed and introduced into the family by the seasoned members in ways that I won’t go into for sake of brevity, but suffice it to say they all come out of the reunion with full exposure to feelings of patriotism, closure, healing, and satisfaction in knowing that they soldiered as well as any army ever did. Do the bad memories come up? You bet they do, but they are dwarfed by the positives you are exposed to, and most have talked later about being able to deal with them a lot easier since their reunion experience. When you get to meet, greet and share time with the people you walked the walk with in combat whatever long time ago it was you are impressed by the experience. Check these outfits out at the web sites listed above, and please go to a reunion as soon as you can. Your “other” family is anxious to see you again…
- Dick Nash, Vietnamtipledeuce.org
