Two veterans share their experiences in Vietnam

Donn Nemchick and Jim Roberts had two different homecomings after their Vietnam War service ended.

When Nemchick returned to McKeesport after his Navy tour in 1974, it was just unceremonious, he said. Everywhere he wore his uniform guaranteed someone buying him beers for a week.

“Half of the boys in my neighborhood had already come back from Vietnam,” he said. “We were able to vent about it without being harassed in our part of the country.”

But Roberts, who flew 48 hours from Vietnam and then boarded a plane in San Francisco in 1971 wearing his khakis and a blue beret, had a different reception: protesters at the airport and disdain from his fellow passengers.

“I just sat down and tuned out. People in the row in front of me and behind me and others across the aisle from me moved away. I had my own center section by myself. That’s what I remember,” he said. [There were] protesters at the airport, but I didn’t pay attention to them. They knew who we were with our summer uniforms, tanned and [looking] very fit. They just backed off. I don’t remember chants. I was just glad to be home.”

Nemchick and Roberts will help the Veterans Breakfast Club ensure their fellow vets have a better reception and a recognition of the sacrifices they made this Wednesday at the Vietnam Veterans Day 50th anniversary event at the Heinz History Center. Both have different stories, too, like many of the vets who volunteer with and attend VBC events.

Nemchick was a Naval petty officer between 1970 and 1974 at three naval communication stations, including Subic Bay in the Philippines and Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam. He was on board the USS Constellation, an aircraft carrier, during the last combat sorties over Vietnam and Laos in July 1973. It had jets launching every four to five seconds by steam catapult, a dangerous situation.

His job included communicating with aviators and submarines on missions across the Pacific. He would coordinate messages as part of the operations of the ship. At night, aircraft were caught on a tail hook on a cable across the deck, according to a 2021 article in Stars and Stripes.

Nemchick recalled an all-boys assembly at McKeesport High School right before he graduated in 1968, the height of the Vietnam War. “They had the Navy and Marine Corps there,” he said. “They told us, ‘We need men.’ At that point, we had lost 15,000 men.”

He knew if he enlisted, rather than being drafted, he would have a better chance of returning. His family, typical of many in McKeesport, didn’t have the wherewithal to send him to college. He was 17½ and had a year until he would be drafted.

So he worked at the then McKeesport National Bank for a year before enlisting, and when his service ended, he returned there, rising up through the management ranks, including after the former Three Rivers Bank bought it. But in 1988 he was laid off.

A flyer on a bulletin board at the Downtown federal building led him to the U.S. Small Business Administration, and he became a veterans business development officer. “I worked with veterans interested in contracting with federal government or starting their own business. I was able to work with veterans, which is my passion,” Nemchick said.

Retired and living in Munhall now at 72, he contributes to VBC in many ways, including podcasts, and spends much of his time in advocacy for veterans, including the McKeesport 23. “We lost 23 men from McKeesport in Vietnam. We honor them every Memorial Day and Veterans Day,” he said.

A member of the White Oak American Legion post, Nemchick helped bring a replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall to McKeesport several years back. He assisted with a granite memorial to the McKeesport 23 at McKeesport High School, who are the subject of a book, “Do You Know That Boy? One Town’s Remembrance of the Vietnam War,” written by Dale Saller.

That memorial is personal to Nemchick. His cousin’s name is on it; he died at 18 in 1966.

Because of security restrictions, it’s not always possible to people to visit the memorial at the school. So plans have been made to relocate it near the McKeesport Heritage Center at Renzie Park, overlooking the band shell there. A rededication is set for May 13.

He’ll be watching this year’s VBC event with his wife online, and Nemchick wants his fellow vets to have an important takeaway from it. “I hope they know that they are thought of as veterans and serving their countries. They are respected as veterans,” he said. “They went to a place that no one wanted to go to. We didn’t know what our mission there was as a country.

“I also want them to have something to be proud of them in themselves. VBC is available to them at no cost. They can record their histories for themselves and their families. They can write it down. Suicide rate among veterans is so high. I want veterans to know there are resources out there for them.”

Tuesday he’ll be at the Heinz History Center stuffing the gift bags for the next day’s event. So will Roberts.

Roberts served with a five-man Mobile Advisory Team in the village of Dong Xoai, where they worked with local forces from April to December 1971. The Farmington, W. Va., high school science teacher had a deferment but chose to enlist in the Army. He started as a private in the infantry, then attended officer training school and rose to the rank of first lieutenant by the end of his service.

That commitment came naturally to him. His father served in the military, and Roberts attended nine schools until he graduated from Scott High School in West Virginia in 1964. He earned his teaching degree at West Virginia University.

His duty coincided with a time the U.S. military called Vietnamization. After the Tet offensive in 1968, it wanted to turn the war over to the Vietnamese, Roberts said, and it started pulling out U.S. units and sending them home. By 1967, the military installed 350 MAT teams to assist the South Vietnamese, which underwent intense training before heading to their locations.

Roberts’ MAT 111 team, consisting of two officers, two noncommissioned officers and a medic, had advisory roles to the South Vietnamese. “We would train them. When they went out on combat, just two of us would go with them,” Roberts said.

As a former special forces camp, they managed to acquire or borrow an incredible amount of equipment, he said, including a flush toilet in the camp. That included procuring two water buffaloes and a borrowed swimming pool chlorinator that pumped that water for showers. The team had a cook and maids to do their laundry, making it a good place to live, he said.

The downside is his MAT team didn’t have the support other units from the U.S. forces had, and they had to rely on helicopters and more from the South Vietnamese army.

“When I first got there, we had the support of U.S. artillery. At the end, we were out there by ourselves. We were basically on our own. Things got riskier as times went on …. In camp, it was a nice place to be; in the bush, not so good,” Roberts said.

Roberts, now 76, created a video, titled “A Very Lonely War,” about his time at the camp, located in what was then called the Siberia of Vietnam, nothing but jungle and rubber plantations. It explains in depth the military side — how his MAT 111 team trained security officers, advised aviators and helicopter pilots, and helped sweep roads with the local troops, looking for mines and booby traps — as well as the good the team accomplished for the villagers. That included draining stormwater for mosquito control and installing sewage systems, helping the locals qualify for grants to get money and equipment, including tractors and enabling small businesses to be established, and introducing a new variety of rice for farmers to grow.

He served as assistant leader of MAT 111 that dwindled in size during his time there, and when the team was reduced to two Americans, the Army sent them home. Roberts had served eight months. He learned 10 years later that his village was run over by Viet Cong forces in the spring after he left. In the video, he said he did hear that the forces they trained fought back with favorable response, “demonstrating that their training had not been lost.”

Returning to his wife, then studying medicine at Women’s Medical College in Philadelphia, he resumed teaching science. When they moved to Pittsburgh, Roberts taught at Fox Chapel for a semester, then Gateway for 13 years. Roberts moved on to Carnegie Mellon University for 30 years, teaching introductory computer science. He retired in 2014.

He and his wife, Linda, live in Forest Hills, his 37th address, he said. They traveled to Washington, D.C., for The Wall ceremony, but Roberts said he was not particularly active in veterans organizations or events until fairly recently.

“I shut down most conversations about my service,” he said. “Basically, no one talked about it.”

His wife connected him with the VBC. “I think what [Executive Director] Todd [DePastino] is doing is important. I contributed an article to his newsletters. When I was writing the article, all these memories came back to me,” he said.

The pandemic gave him more time to write, Roberts said, and the end result is a book about his service, “MAT 111 Dong Xoai, Vietnam 1971,” that he published in 2021 on Amazon.

He chose Amazon for a major reason: The co-author of textbooks, Roberts understands the royalty system. “Amazon gives me 40% royalties,” he said. “If you can sell a book, you can generate a good bit of cash. VBC receives all the money the book sales generate.

“[Todd’s] the reason I wrote the book. It was a good therapy. I didn’t come home with PTSD or injury. Linda said I came back different.”

Roberts had not been in contact with his fellow team members for decades but tracked down their whereabouts while working at CMU and having access to some sites others did not have. He’s found his intelligence officer and his team leader but can’t find some others. He knows that two have died.

His experience is not unlike other Vietnam vets. “I don’t know why we suddenly started talking,” he said. “There was no welcome home, nothing welcoming people home. We didn’t come back in units. I don’t know if it is people wanting to feel good about veterans.”

Thanking him for his service doesn’t mean anything to Roberts. “Most Vietnam vets don’t say that to each other,” he said. “We say welcome home.”

Roberts attended last year’s VBC Vietnam Veterans Day event, and he and his wife will be at this one, too.

“I am going and glad that we are having it,” he said. “For vets, it’s just being able to see other veterans and talk to them about their service. Chat briefly, and you find out there are lots of people just like you. You can get some support.“

Nemchick, who will be heading to Texas for a USS Constellation reunion next year, noted that Pittsburgh has one of the largest contingents of Vietnam veterans in the country.

“Many of them have not been recognized. Today, they are retired, thinking about their service. Recognizing those, particularly those who have not been recognized, is important. … We cannot forget that era, one of the most tumultuous times in this country, much like today,” he said.

Roberts believes the event is also important for vets’ family members and others to attend and watch.

“I hope people take away from this the sacrifice that people make when we are called to war,” he said. “Now we have an all-volunteer Army. When we drafted people, everyone knew someone in the military. Without it, few people know people in the military.”