Vietnam: "My Walk in the Sun"

Veteran tells stories of his Vietnam-era poetry
Kilgore News Herald
By CHELSEA KATZ
November 15, 2014

David Stroud walked up to the podium with his red Marine Corps League hat, but he has two hats he wears.

The other is a Vietnam Veteran, 3rd Marine Division baseball cap.

“Every now and then I’d wear that (baseball) hat because I’m a cripple,” he said, with his walker nearby.

“It’s my way of telling people one day I wasn’t. One day I was a Marine.”

But, says Stroud, it took him a few years to get the hat, because of the way Vietnam veterans were treated upon returning home from combat.

During the Vietnam-era, Sgt. David Applewhite said, anyone in uniform – no matter what branch or where they served – was treated poorly by the American public. Veterans were spit on, had things thrown at them and were constantly called names, he said. “In fact, a lot of us refused to wear our uniforms for when we’d come home on leave or anything because of that.”

Along with fellow veterans, Korean War veteran Sgt. David Applewhite stands and salutes during a moment of silence as part of Kilgore College’s Veterans Day program Tuesday afternoon. Although he served in Korea during the USS Pueblo crisis, Applewhite said, all Vietnam-era veterans vowed no future generations of veterans would ever be treated like they were when they finished their missions.

Twenty-five years after landing in Vietnam, Stroud met up with his fellow Marine veterans and only then did he feel he could get the hat.

Stroud’s experience with other veterans inspired him to write what he found to be poems that didn’t rhyme. The writing began when a WWII veteran loudly confronted Stroud in the Kilgore College teacher’s lounge, after learning of his service in Vietnam, and yelled at him, “We won our war!”

After compiling his poems, he titled one of his books “My Walk in the Sun” as a take on the “walk in the sun” phrase used during wartime to represent patrols when no one got injured or killed.
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