In New York, people often get lost in the anonymity of the city, despite the fact that they live stacked on top of one another in apartment buildings. Danny Yodice, a resident of Queens, is one of these people. You might see him walking his Yorkshire terrier along the cemetery gates on Metropolitan Avenue and dismiss it as an average occurrence. Beneath his somewhat non-descript exterior, Yodice has a story to tell. He is a combat veteran of the Vietnam War – an aspect of his life that, to this day, weighs heavily on his psyche. His time overseas has had an irreparable effect on his life, signs of which can still be seen today. His field hat – which he wore every day during his year in Vietnam – and his dog tags, though slightly dusty, still adorn the wall in his room. He is a big, good-hearted man, with a full head of dark hair and a beaded bracelet wrapped around his wrist. The beads are red, yellow and green, which make up the Vietnam campaign ribbon.
Yodice descends from a family of veterans; his grandfather served in World War I, his father in World War II and his uncle in the Korean War. “I joined, I wanted to give it a shot, all the men in the family were in the military,” Yodice said. In 1969, when he was only 18-years old, he pushed up his draft and enlisted. Pushing up the draft enabled an enlistee to choose where they wanted to be stationed and what function they wanted to serve. Although he chose to be stationed in either Hawaii or Germany, he wound up in Vietnam. He initially wanted to be a heavy equipment operator, driving large trucks and front-end loaders, which he never became. Yodice studied electronics at Thomas Edison High School and scored high on the electronics end of the military testing. Although he was trained to deal with bugging equipment and jamming devices, he spent most of his time as a radio operator.
Upon arrival to Vietnam, it was apparent that he was embarking on a journey that he could not possibly begin to fathom. “The most impressive thing, when you first get there, is the heat and the stench of death in the air,” he remembered solemnly. “Scary,” was the only way to describe his first experience in battle.
Yodice spent his first three months in Long Binh, near North Vietnam, as a radio operator for the 5th mechanized infantry. “We were pretty far up north and there was a lot of action, we used to get hit every day,” he remembered. According to Yodice, near the north, they were fighting the North Vietnamese Army, or “regulars” as they were commonly referred to, but in the south, they had to deal with the Vietcong as well. “Even though we took heavy fire in the north, there was a lot of action in the south too,” he said.
Yodice was eventually moved to the 69th engineers, stationed in the Mekong Delta, where he rode out the remainder of his tour. With this battalion, he served as a combat engineer, whose job it was to clear mines and destroy the N.V.A.’s intricate tunnels. “Before they would send in a tunnel rat, they would send an engineer to disable the booby traps, I never went in, though, because I never fit,” he said.
The U.S. government, especially toward the later years of the war, wanted body count figures and the job of finding them went to the soldiers. It was not uncommon, Yodice said, for soldiers to go out on a patrol specifically to dig up the dead bodies of the enemy. “Sometimes we would be out and see a stiff arm poking through the dirt, and then we would have to dig it up and throw it into the back of the truck,” Yodice said. Another gruesome reality of the Vietnam War was the use of napalm. Napalm is a thick, gasoline based, incendiary gel that burns at temperatures from about 1400-2200 degrees Fahrenheit. “The bodies that were hit with Napalm would be burned and completely white, sometimes still crouching with their rifles up. It’s the most horrible thing, you’ve never seen anything like it,” Yodice remembered.
In February of 1971, after serving his year, almost to the day, Yodice was given the news that all soldiers long to hear, he was going home. The 18-hour flight from Vietnam was split with stops in Japan and Alaska. “I always remember taking off from Japan, I could see the snow on top of Mt. Suribachi, it was beautiful,” he remembered.
Upon reentering the United States, it did not take him long to realize that he was about to commence another, possibly more arduous journey – the return home. Unlike the veterans of the wars before him, Yodice was not greeted with parades and revering throngs. Instead, when he landed at the Oakland Air Field, he and the other soldiers were met by outraged college students spewing all sorts of degrading epithets. “There were all of these imbeciles there, spitting at us and calling us ‘baby killers.’ It was a slap in the face,” Yodice recalled. After spending a year of his life in a war zone, the unprecedented reaction and disdain of the public was a rude awakening. On his way back to Queens, Yodice stood in LAX airport, dressed in full military garb and was forced to endure people’s dirty looks and scornful glares.
Returning to his family, he found life mostly the way he had left it, except he was a different person, completely changed by his experience. “You’re in a war zone for a year, people are dying all around you and you’re supposed to come home like everything is hunky dory. You’re supposed to become a civilian over night, it’s hard,” Yodice said.
The change that took place within him was apparent to his family. His sister, Maryann LaManna, one year his elder, remembers, “When he was a kid, he used to tie a cape around his neck and run around the house like Superman.” However, the boy who grew up idolizing George Reeves’ Superman, returned a jaded and somewhat embittered man. “When he came home, he wasn’t the same bright-eyed boy he was. He was very disillusioned,” LaManna said. Yodice never spoke much about his time overseas and his family did not ask too many questions. “I was only 14-years old when he came home, he didn’t seem to want to talk to me about it and I didn’t ask him many questions. I was just glad to have him home safe,” said Richard Yodice, Danny’s youngest brother.
The transition back to civilian life was anything but smooth for Danny Yodice. Due to his background in electronics, he could have had a lucrative job in the field, but he found it hard to be around people. Instead, he spent nineteen years working the third shift at night at Republic Steel. “I couldn’t work in an office, so I usually worked late shifts, because there was nobody there,” Yodice said.
Beyond his distaste for being around people, the toll the war took on Yodice mentally was far greater, and harder to deal with. He, like countless other Vietnam veterans, now suffers from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). More than thirty years later, Yodice still goes to therapy groups at the Brooklyn Veterans Association. After his return from Vietnam, he occasionally suffered from flashbacks. “Sometimes I would be walking in the park and all of a sudden, the trees turn into the jungle and you don’t see regular people, you see the enemy,” he said.
In 1983, congress mandated that there be an investigation into post-war psychological problems in veterans. The study was called the National Vietnam Veteran’s Readjustment Study (NVVRS); its findings have shown that the vast majority of Vietnam veterans suffer some level of PTSD. Fortunately for Yodice, his flashbacks were not as serious as those of some of the other veterans. Ruben Pratts, a Vietnam combat veteran, gunned down two men, killing one and wounding the other, during the course of flashback. At his court case, he testified that he thought he was shooting Vietcong guerillas. He was found not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect, due to his severe Post-Traumatic Stress.
As Yodice would eventually learn, re-acclimating himself to a normal life would be a trying experience. “I’m still adjusting, almost forty years later and I still have nightmares,” Yodice said. Much like countless other Vietnam veterans, not long after his return, Yodice turned to drugs and alcohol as a coping
mechanism. “It was an escape, I would get stoned and pass out, but at least I got a night’s sleep. It was a way to beat the nightmares,” he said. It was not until the early 1980’s that Yodice cleaned himself up for good. It was around the time he met his late wife, Debbie, who helped him get through some of his problems. “If I hadn’t started a new life with her, I probably wouldn’t be alive today,” he said solemnly.
While addiction and Post Traumatic Stress reared their heads early, not all of the side effects of Vietnam came out as quick. Only about four years ago Yodice was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma – a direct result of his exposure to Agent Orange. Countless soldiers and Vietnamese citizens were exposed to dioxin, the toxic ingredient in Agent Orange, a powerful herbicide and defoliant used by the U. S. Military. To this day, birth defects are still emerging in Vietnamese children whose parents were exposed. Since the chemo therapy made him very ill, he was often treated as an inpatient and had to endure blood transfusions. Though his cancer is in remission, Yodice still has the chemo port in his chest because his doctors think it may come back. After years of doctor visits for his lymphoma, he has shed the sickly skin of chemo therapy and regained his healthy looking self. Since his diagnosis, in 2002, the U.S. government has been paying him a monthly pension check. “They know it was their fault,” he said.
Nowadays, many people watch movies like We Were Soldiers, The Deer Hunter or Platoon and think they actually know what the Vietnam War was like. However, watching a two hour Hollywood movie is a far cry from spending a whole year in the jungle getting attacked and watching people around you die. Today’s best sound systems can not possibly come close to emulating the thunderous boom of a B-1 bomber dropping a few tons of explosives. “Even from a mile away, you could still feel the ground shake,” Yodice said. His cousin, Michael Yodice, said, “Danny told me some pretty horrible stories, the movies just don’t do it justice.”
The field hat that hangs in Yodice’s room, with a worn peace-sign patch on it, is a relic of a time that still haunts him today. It was a time of drastic social change in this country. In 1969, during the so-called “Summer of Love,” Danny Yodice was in a jungle war zone. Though he was not physically injured during the war, the mental scars it left behind have proved just as hard to deal with.