Return to Vietnam lifts veteran's spirits

Return to Vietnam lifts veteran's spirits
The Tennessean
By Bonnie Burch
August 5, 2013

BRENTWOOD, TENN. — The Vietnam that Kurt Seraphine remembered was filled with drab colors: grays, browns and blacks.

As a soldier, he’d never eaten in a restaurant or stayed in a hotel there or gotten to know any Vietnamese people personally.

From 1965 to 1966, when he served as a rifleman in the First Infantry Division in combat operations in the jungle north of Saigon, Seraphine said he “was always hot, thirsty, slept on the ground. And it was very dangerous.”

After being honorably discharged, his transition back into civilian life wasn’t easy, especially after many of his own college peers shunned him, calling him a “baby killer” and worse.

Since then he’s built a comfortable life with Vicki, his bride of the past 37 years and “the light of my life,” their three children and five grandchildren. At 68, he’s lived in Brentwood for 22 years and is a business broker for Crye-Leike.

Seraphine has visited all the major Civil War battle sites. But even as a military historian, he never could imagine returning to the battlefields of his youth. He thought he wanted to leave behind, as best he could, those harsh memories from his tour of duty.

But then he and his wife saw a television program where Gunny R. Lee Ermey, an actor best known for his role as Sgt. Hartman in the Vietnam War movie “Full Metal Jacket” and the television show “Mail Call,” encouraged veterans to revisit these sites as tourists through Military Historical Tours Inc., a travel group serving American veterans from World War II, the Korean conflict and Vietnam War since 1987.

Now his images of Vietnam have been replaced by brighter colors: all shades of greens and blues. He slept at five-star hotels and dined in excellent restaurants. And the Vietnamese people were happy — smiling even — and greeted the American visitors with warmness.
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