Experiences and hardships of war remembered

As Remembrance Day and Veterans Day are once again observed on both sides of Maine/New Brunswick border on Monday, November 11, The Quoddy Tides will share some stories from men who served their countries in different ways during wartime.

Resisting Nazis in the Netherlands
Deer Island resident John Vink, 91, served in the Dutch Resistance during World War II. He was 17 years old and living with his nine siblings and parents in the city of Utrecht when the Germans shocked the small country by invading the Netherlands in May 1940.
"We'd been neutral," says Vink of the Dutch people. "But when the Nazis took over my country, they automatically became our enemy."
The Dutch Resistance groups that sprang up were primarily non-violent and were valuable in collecting intelligence that could be useful to the Allies and helping Dutch Jews escape.
"There were about a dozen of us in [my] resistance group, and it was evenly divided between boys and girls," he recalls. "Anything we could do to harm them, we did. It was as simple as putting a nail in a tire."
He points out that a simple conversation could be a form of resistance. "I could speak German, so if I was talking to one of the Nazis, that meant two people who weren't doing anything."
Everything remained so secretive that Vink didn't know, until the war ended, that his sister's fiancé was one of the resistance leaders.
"We tried to avoid being obvious and acted as normal as possible, so they wouldn't put a specific attachment to you," adds Vink. "The less you said, the less they could say about you. They couldn't torture you to death if you didn't say anything."
"It's very difficult for people on this side of the ocean to think about the position I was in while my country was occupied," he points out. "I told them in an elementary school [after the war] about my dressing up as a girl, and they thought that was funny. It saved my neck. The Nazis didn't pay much attention to girls, but if you were a boy, it was a different kettle of fish."
"Nonetheless, I wound up in Germany in 1945 because of my specific work," he points out. "I was sent to a labor camp in Lubeck as an electrician."
"The city had been severely bombed [by the Royal Air Force], and I felt sorry for them," says Vink. "The Americans call it carpet bombing, and Lubeck was totally destroyed. It was one big pile of rubble."
"Very few people had hatred for the Germans," he says of the Dutch. "They more likely felt sorry for them, because they were stuck with Hitler."
"Even in a war, I can't say, 'This one I hate' or 'This one I don't hate.'"
The Nazis officially surrendered on May 7, 1945, and the post-war years for Vink consisted, in part, of him helping the Dutch people rebuild their country "as much as I could" as an electrical engineer.
Vink was married and the father of three children when circumstances in 1958 led to his decision to move himself and his family to Canada. They landed with only $100 to their name and settled in Newfoundland, where Vink worked as an electrical engineer. He was a 75-year-old widower and attending the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton to get a degree in religious studies when he met his future wife Eileen, and they eventually moved to her family home on Deer Island.
"He's talked to hundreds of groups over the years," says Eileen of her husband's visits to schools and clubs. "I've watched him before in a school. He immediately got their attention, and he's a natural story-teller."

Fixing Hueys in Vietnam
William "Bill" Moffett of Robbinston is a U.S. Army veteran who spent three years in Vietnam servicing Huey helicopters in the central highlands.
"I went in a private first class and I left a staff sergeant E-6," says Moffett, whose actions earned him a Bronze Star medal for meritorious service before he came home.
Born in South Paris, Maine, Moffett had served in the Maine Army National Guard during high school and, at age 19, he decided to enlist in the regular army in November 1967.
"When I flew in to Saigon, a bullet went through the Pan Am jet I was on," he recalls of his arrival in Vietnam. "I can still see two lines of soldiers trying to safely make it to a building while under attack."
During orientation, the newly arrived troops were getting assignments, and when Moffett heard the question, "Who's going to Pleiku?," he volunteered. "You poor son of a bitch," added the officer.
Defenses were so primitive at that camp, "there was concertina wire around the perimeters" and "I spent the first month filling sand bags and digging foxholes."
"We were three clicks from the Ho Chi Minh Trail," he says of the 52nd Aviation Battalion, which was attached to the 119th. "It was quite the hot spot, but when I realized I was in a good outfit, I decided to stay."
His job was to make sure the army's workhorse helicopters, nicknamed Hueys, were well maintained, and much of that assignment was to patch up bullet holes. Supporting the South Vietnamese Army but flown by U.S. crews, the Hueys were introduced on medevac missions. Then they were armed with 2.75-inch rockets and .30-caliber machine guns. The Huey helicopter could insert infantry deep in enemy territory while Huey armed gunships escorted the Army and Marine transports.
During one battle, the Hueys sustained over 300 bullet holes in one night. "We had to work 36 hours straight to fix the shot up gunships."
Moffett recalls one particularly harrowing flight on a "bread plane" that was flying out of Saigon with the assignment of delivering bread to the troops. "The pilot says to me, as we get close to one camp, 'I'm not going to stop. I'm just slowing down enough so you can jump out, because they're under attack.'"
Near the end of his tour, his unit was involved in the siege of Plei Me, a Vietnam special forces camp that was attacked in November 1965. "During that attack 300 mortar rounds fell on us in one night," recalls Moffett. "Luckily, only one soldier got killed."
Although he didn't suffer any serious physical wounds in Vietnam, like many other veterans of that war, life wasn't easy for Moffett after his return to the U.S. "We were hated when we got home," recalls Moffett. "They told us when we got back to the States that that would happen, and they were right."
Back in Maine, he fell in love with his future wife and Washington County native Linda Kierstead while they were both working at Maine Medical Center in Portland, and they moved to Robbinston. Over the years, Moffett has been a truck driver, bus driver and school custodian, and both he and Linda were assistant scoutmasters.
He's never belonged to the American Legion or VFW but hasn't ruled that possibility out as the years pass and he feels more comfortable talking about his time in South Vietnam.

Career serviceman from Lubec
Marvin Sawtelle of Lubec, now 77, enlisted in the U.S. Army at age 18 and served his country for 20 years before leaving the service with a rank of sergeant first class. "I loved the infantry," says Sawtelle of his choice of military career. He received enough training in communications that he could have gone into any branch of the service.
Sawtelle was stationed for four years in an artillery unit within the newly divided Germany and is sure he practiced "almost on every piece of land in West Germany. Maneuvers. Maneuvers. Maneuvers. It was bad over there. The [East Germans] could have easily shot us, if they wanted."
When he had to serve another five years in West Germany, "the second time was a bit easier. The U.S. Army base in Augsburg, Bavaria, was better and conducted CPXs [Command Post Exercises]." A CPX was an exercise in which the forces are simulated, involving the commander, staff and communications within and between headquarters.
Sawtelle also served two years in South Vietnam on two separate tours. "In February 1969, I went there with a whole battalion, Cobras, Delta Company, Hueys and Charlie Company. I was stationed at Camp Evans. It was 15 miles south of the DMZ [Demilitarized Zone] and saw more combat with the artillery there."
Sawtelle spent six months stateside before returning to Vietnam in the fall of 1970. This time, "I was with the infantry at Firebase Dottie's as our base of operations." A fire support base was a temporary encampment widely used during the Vietnam war to provide artillery fire support to infantry operating beyond the normal range of support from their own base camps. FSBs followed a number of plans, their shape and construction varying based on the terrain they occupied. "We were in places that were so out in the woods, they didn't have names," recalls Sawtelle.
He didn't suffer any injuries in Vietnam and recalls, "One time shells were dropping all around us, and I lucked out." Not so fortunate were some officers who were up playing cards. "One captain and the three lieutenants got hit but lived."
Sawtelle's last overseas assignment took him to South Korea where he fell in love with Pok "Chung" Sun, and they married in 1974. She came home with him to Lubec when he retired from the military the next year. "I came home on September 1, 1975," recalls Sawtelle. "I attended carpenter school, then electrician school and became a master electrician, but now I've been officially retired.