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Monday, March 22, 2010

Vietnam vet in Haiti eager to share war experiences

Vietnam vet in Haiti eager to share war experiences

By Seth Robson, Stars and Stripes
European edition, Sunday, March 21, 2010

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — When soldiers working in Haiti see Giles Pace coming, they often do a double take.

A typical outfit for the 66-year-old father of six, who’s in Haiti working as a contractor in support of the U.S. State Department, is an Army combat uniform top, worn unbuttoned with the sleeves rolled up, and a tattered green beret that marks him as a former member of the U.S. Army’s elite Special Forces.

Soldiers who get close enough might glimpse his tattoo, with the SF emblem and the numbers of the 1st, 5th and 7th SF Groups that Pace served with during the Vietnam War.

The Chicago native did two tours of duty in Vietnam after joining the Army straight out of high school in 1961 and being assigned to 1st Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division.


Some Vietnam War veterans are reluctant to talk about the war, but Pace isn’t one of them. He said he’s eager to share his experiences to inspire today’s soldiers and show them that Vietnam War veterans are still supporting them. He’s also eager to tell them how much easier they have it.

“These guys don’t know what war is,” Pace said of modern soldiers. “We didn’t look like robo-cops. All we had were soft caps and our weapons and we’d go chasing [the enemy] in the jungle.”

read more here

http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=68803

3 comments:

  1. Wasn't Giles Pace supposed to be an iron-worker and a Church of Christian Liberty spokesman who lead a mercenary bunch of European former Nazi-collaborators (ratline exfiltrees)in Rhodesia?

    What's all this talk about "special forces" now?

    Is there any proof whatsoever that this guy was in special forces as he alleges?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Maybe that's a different person? I have no idea. Contact the reporter and tell them what you think.

    ReplyDelete
  3. He absolutely was special forces. I worked under him when he was an ironworker in the early eighties.

    ReplyDelete

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