VietnamVeteran Deserves Standing Ovation

McCrabb: Vietnam veteran deserves standing ovation
Journal News
By Rick McCrabb Staff Writer
July 26, 2015

“I’m proud of my service, like the other vets,” he said. “We were all anti-war like the rest of the country. I just wish people weren’t anti-solider. I never was comfortable talking about the war.”

MIDDLETOWN — There was a time — the day before Army Lt. Dan Sack was scheduled to arrive home in Cincinnati after serving during the Vietnam War — when he was spit on while walking through Haight-Ashbury, a neighborhood district near San Francisco and fertile ground for the hippie generation.

Sack and an Army buddy took a taxi from the Oakland Army base and toured the neighborhood on a Sunday afternoon. As they walked down the street, proudly wearing their uniforms, hundreds of hippies exited the neighborhood stores, and started chanting, “Ticket To Kill. Ticket To Kill. Ticket to Kill.”

He still doesn’t understand the meaning behind the words.

Patriotism, he said, hit “rock bottom” in the late 1960s.

Thankfully, before a riot ensued, Sack and his friend were picked up by a military police unit, put in the back seat of a government vehicle and driven to safety.

“I could have died the day before I got home,” he said.

Now, 47 years later, Sack will receive a much different reception that will include a standing ovation, not spitting. Sack, 70, of Middletown, will be one of the five veterans honored on Aug. 2 during a Dayton Dragons baseball game at Fifth/Third Field. He will appear on the field between innings and a 60-second video highlighting his military career and community service will be shown on the scoreboard.

Sack’s life, and for that matter, some of Middletown’s history, could have been rewritten on a February 1968 morning.

Sack and Jan Doxey, 22, of Florida, were sleeping in a hooch when a 122mm rocket exploded in the early dawn, sending Sack under Doxey’s bunk. Sack’s legs were filled with shrapnel, and he was temporarily deaf.

But Doxey was killed.
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