New film captures Iowans' Vietnam service
June/July showing dates set for Riverside, Osage, Waterloo, Altoona and Emmetsburg
CEDAR RAPIDS — When American men and women came home from Vietnam, a lot of America turned its back.
There were no parades. No mass homecoming celebrations at stadiums or ballparks. No streets and highways lined with American flags, signs and waves from well wishers.
Not like today.
There was, at best, indifference. At worst there were the epithets. Warmonger. Baby killer. Loser. Dopehead. The questions like, what were you thinking? How could you take an oath to kill for your country? Or just “suck it up, crybaby, and get back to work.” They packed their uniforms away, kept their mouths shut and bottled up memories of lost comrades, carnage and death.
To those who loved them, though, they were heroes. Jeremy Glazier is one of them. He’s embarked on a project to help rectify that dishonor of a half century ago.
His project began as a tribute to his dad who served during Vietnam. He hopes it can be a healing agent for his dad’s brothers and sisters in arms.
Under the auspices of the artisan studio of the Brucemore mansion and historic site in Cedar Rapids, Glazier has produced a documentary, “From Iowa and Back: The Vietnam Era.”
It consists of oral history interviews with his father and other veterans from across the state, in all branches of service.
He’s beginning a series of screenings of the work. He wants to show it to veterans groups and record the stories of additional veterans for a companion book to the documentary.
“Basically, I kind of came at the project as a (still) photographer,” he said. “I wanted to photograph vets, to begin with. But my dad, it must have been around 2000, he’d been struggling with Alzheimer’s” and a host of other health issues, from which he began a slow recovery. He talked about his service.
“I’d always wanted to do something with it,” Jeremy Glazier said. “I thought once he got a little bit better, I’d get him on film. And so then I put out feelers, and I said, well I’ll see if I can get some of Dad’s friends to participate.
“I’m 50 this year. I think a lot of us our age grew up around a lot of Vietnam veterans. Those guys were our dads, our uncles,” Jeremy said. “And oddly enough, during that time growning up, there was just a ton of shows on TV and in movies about Vietnam, right about 10 or 15 years after the war. My dad took me to see ‘Platoon.’ I was just kind of constantly surrounded by it.”
But there were few accounts directly the veterans themselves, especially in comparison to veterans from other earlier wars in advanced age. Given his father’s own health issues, “I started thinking — World War II, obviously any time anything happens with those guys, they’re on the news. But the Vietnam guys, even now, it’s very hard to find news stories about anything with Vietnam vets. I thought, ‘If I can get enough of these guys talking, I can turn it into something.’”
Glazier does some photography work for Riverside Casino & Golf Resort at Riverside south of Iowa City. Through connections there, he made contacts with the Give Golf Foundation, a golf program for injured veterans. Through that group, he found additional contacts for his documentary. It was in the process of gathering those additional interviews that he made connections with the Brucemore artisan studio, which is helping him see the project through to completion.
“Now we have the film done; there’s been some showings. We’re working through finalizing some of our edits from the first showings,” he said. It was selected for showing earlier this month at the Snake Alley Film Festival in Burlington. Eventually he’d like to get the film circulated through a distribution network or shown on public television. But right now, he’s been able to schedule a series of showings around the state.
Sixteen veterans in all are featured in the full film. It includes some veterans who were not in Vietnam but supported the troops there in many ways.
The documentary includes original music by Iowa City singer-songwriter Brian Johannesen and local musicians Marc Janssen and Gerard Estella.
“As a way to keep it going and keep vets involved, I’m also working on a photo book,” he said, taking additional stories and still photos at locations where he shows the film.
“I’m still going to offer (to take) the photos because they’re very striking to see,” he said. “It’s nothing special about the way I take the photos; it’s the guys themselves. Their personalities and their stories come through in the photos. I’ll still take a photo and have them tell me a little bit about their story.”
To that end, he’d like to encourage family members and loved ones of Vietnam veterans to come to the screenings, encourage the vets to come forward and tell their stories.
A Facebook page for news about the documentary and screening events can be accessed here.
The documentary premiered at Brucemore and will be shown free of charge at the following locations:
— 6 p.m. Tuesday June 17 at Riverside Casino & Golf Resort as part of a Give Golf Foundation fundraiser.
—6 p.m. Thursday June 26 at the Watts Theatre in Osage,
— 7 p.m. Monday June 30 at the Grout Museum District in Waterloo, which operates the Sullivan Brothers Iowa Veterans Museum.
—6 p.m. Tuesday July 8 at Prairie Meadows in Altoona/Des Moines
—12:30 p.m. Saturday, July 26, Riviera Theatre, Emmetsburg, sponsored by Emmet County Veterans Affais.
Plans also are in the works to show the film during one of the free veterans coffees held 10 a.m. to noon every Wednesday at the Grout Museum District
A preview of the documentary can be seen here.
At one point in the documentary, an Air Force veteran who was a mechanic talks about crawling up inside a transport plane to work on it. He looks around and sees stored inside a row of dead soldiers, all in white.
”And I thought, ‘Their parents or family members are waiting for them to come home,’ “ the mechanic says. Those who didn’t serve, or didn’t lose or have a family member serving, he says, “have no such cognizance of what that was about.”
The mechanic was John R. Glazier, Jeremy’s father. He served in the Air Force from 1971 to 1979.
He died March 19, 2024.
“I don’t think people really understand how short time is for people in the Vietnam era,” Glazier said. “Those guys are up in their 70s now.” And in many cases, “their health isn’t the best.”
It underscores the importance of getting those veterans to tell their stories and have them recorded for posterity — not only for later generations to learn from, but for the vets themselves to receive some appreciation while they are still around to receive it.
The film represents Jeremy Glazier’s effort to give the veterans of his father’s generation some acknowledgement and appreciation.
It is dedicated to his father.
Pat Kinney is a freelance writer and former longtime news staffer with the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier and, prior to that, several years at the Ames Tribune. He is currently an oral historian with the Grout Museum District in Waterloo. His “View from the Cedar Valley” column is part of “Iowa Writers Collaborative,” a collection of news and opinion writers from around the state who previously and currently work with a host of Iowa newspapers, news organizations and other publications. They are listed here. Clink on their individual links to check them out, subscribe for free - and, if you believe in the value of quality journalism, please support this column and/or any of theirs with a paid subscription. Thank you.
I did two years in Vietnam so I could get the hell out of the Army as quickly as I could! The Army spent a good amount of time lying to me, and working very hard to get me into Vietnam and the war. Arriving at Basic Training 23 October 1968 and arrived in Vietnam 19 April 1969 on my 19th birthday. After initial arrival in the Americal Division I arrived as a "trained" Turbine Engine Mechanic, a critical specialty . Getting to my company the First Sgt.asked my MOS (Military Operational Specialty) he responded, Engine man, well we got enough of those, you are now a Hydraulic Specialist. So much for the training, which was worse than poor and obviously way to short. I never had so much as touched a working engine and hadn't even seen a helicopter during training. With that said, flight controls were none of my training which was largely my job for a year, When I discovered I could not get promoted working outside my specialty and legally they couldn't leave me in that position. I eventually made my promotion board and was awarded E-5 in my specialty. I went home after 13 months for my first extention leave, and while at home I bought up all the 12 point qurter inch box end wrenches I could find at Sears with my own money. I took them back to Vietnam with me and passed them out, Our tool boxes were not equipted with these wrenches and the hot end section of a turbine engine is held on with 72, 1/4 inch, 12 point nuts. Tool boxes that held tools that were chromium plated, were cheap, and the plating that could peel off these wrenches, would destroy and engine if the plating would get sucked into the compressor section of the engine. Effectively cheap tools that didn't work for what we needed and often didn't even fit the bolts we had to remove! A great example of providing us with what we didn't need! As my example shows, we covered our own needs the same way I bought wrenches for the crew., and we made things happen inspite of the Army. We supported the helicopter companies we worked for including the medivacs, aircraft that were grounded for repairs were not available to supply the infantry, give air cover for operations, insert people, and get the wounded the hell out of harms way, sowe worked especially hard to move aircraft out of our hangar and back into service. We did things we weren't supposed to do, we ordered parts we weren't allowed to order untilthey sent the parts and we did things we weren't allowed to repair, then callDepot for an inspection on what we did! Once inspected and it passed, we were authorized to do the work and order the parts! Otherwise, we maintained an ilegal numberof parts to turn out ships faster and replaced our inventory with the parts we turned in. Our original parts came out of crashed ships that we destroyed in place as they were not salvagable as a ship. I ran the parts for the Engine Shop and my inventory included close to $300,000 in parts that normally would take three weeks to send back to the States and have them send us one in exchange. We speeded up the process and turned out aircraft in days rather than weeks, again, to protect our own when the Army would sooner play games over money, we were saving lives. Our lives! During my last 6 month extension our company moved up to Quang Tri from Chu Lai. We brought eight companies of helicopters with us. The invasion of Laos was about to begin and we were assigned to a tiny hangar that had room for two ships. We had no barracks and no tents. Light plants were ordered so crews could work outside when the rain finally stopped. We were expectedto do the impossible with not much! Working 12 hours on and 12 hours off, changing shifts from day to night every other week. Over 300 aircraft were turned out a month as I recall, the NVA were very good at defending their location in Laos, they were ready with tanks and SAM missles, 37 MM ack-ack guns and 51 Caliber machine guns with radar assist. Slow moving aluminum flying "beer cans" simply would go poof when hit by a SAM missle.