Vietnam Veteran shares thoughts on LZ Lambeau Event

Onalaska Vietnam Veteran shares thoughts on LZ Lambeau Event
Posted: May 20, 2010 12:21 AM EDT

35 years after the end of the Vietnam War, Wisconsin veterans are finally getting a formal welcome home.

A big event this weekend at Lambeau Field in Green Bay will honor the state's Vietnam vets for their service and sacrifice for our country.

The event is called LZ Lambeau, named for the landing zones the veterans were often deployed to. Of the more than 165,000 Wisconsin veterans who served in Vietnam, nearly 1300 never made it home and for those who did, it wasn't always the warmest of welcome backs. Now, all these years later, the public is getting a chance to recognize and thank a group of veterans that sacrificed so much and got so little in return.

Every day, 63 year old Tom Baertsch of Onalaska lives with the horrors of the past. "There isn't a day go by that I don't think about something that went on and there's still the nightmares and there still are the flashbacks and there's still all that kind of stuff," says Baertsch.

Although Tom's learned to live with the emotional scars from more than four decades ago, he considers himself lucky to even be here today. "There was many times when I made peace with the lord, like they say there's no atheists in a fox hole. That's probably one of the scariest things for a 21 year old to be able to do is to be at peace with himself that if he's going to die, he's going to die."
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