At 65, Chester Green still suffers from PTSD. Flashbacks and loud noises haunt him.

At 65, Chester Green still suffers from PTSD.  Flashbacks and loud noises haunt him.

“I’ve seen booby traps come off the ground and blow a man’s a head off,” he said.  “I was wounded, but I was one of the lucky ones.  I got to go home.”

Green served in Vietnam twice.  He joined the Marine Corps after graduating high school and traveled to Vietnam for the first time in 1964 as one of the first Marines on the ground in that war.

“It was tough the first time I saw somebody get killed,” Green said.  “Morale was pitiful because we knew we didn’t have the support of the people back home.  In Vietnam, a man had two things to keep him alive: a mother at home praying for him and God answering her prayers.  That was it.  I would be a millionaire if I had a dollar for every time my mother was on her knees.”

Engaged in guerilla warfare, Green trusted no one, not knowing whom the enemy was or when he might be attacked.  “The enemy could be standing right next to you and you’d never know it.  And when a bomb goes off, that’s a sound you never forget.  All you can do is take cover and hope for the best.”

Men were limited to C-rations that came out of a can, and baths were a thing of the past.  Water was scarce, and what little was available to the men had to be purified.  The Vietcong attacked at night, and men were constantly on patrol.  

“Things were never laid back,” Green said.

Men slept using the buddy system, one man sharing a foxhole with another.  Men suffered from malaria and jungle rot because their feet got so wet and they never had clean socks to change into.

“We also spent a lot of time trying to convince the Vietnamese people we were there to help them, but they were too scared to talk, afraid of the repercussions of what might happen if somebody found out.”

On one of his most frightening nights in Vietnam, Green and others suffered an attack that lasted into the daytime.  “We lost 67 men and we were very low on ammo.  I didn’t know if we were gonna make it,” Green said.

Green returned from Vietnam for the final time in 1968 on medical discharge and was released from Philadelphia Naval Hospital in 1970.  During his time in Vietnam, he suffered from wounds in the foot, the leg, the back, the stomach and the arms, earning six Purple Hearts.

“Being a Purple Heart recipient is an honor because you know you were giving your best serving your country, and you know there were others who gave more than you.  They gave their lives.”

After the war, Green went to vocational school to become a plumber like his father.  Now he spends his days speaking at schools and doing community work.

“This world’s been good to me. I owe this world.  I owe God because he answered my mother’s prayers.”