Escaping Vietnam Former Green Beret Guerrilla Fighter Spends Decades Struggling To Put War Behind Him

FROM FOR THE RECORD (Wednesday, July 22, 1998): Correction Book Topic: Neil Sheehan’s book “A Bright Shining Lie” concerned John Paul Vann and not David Hackworth as reported in a story about Vietnam veteran Steve Yedinak that ran in Tuesday’s paper.

If you’ve never experienced Vietnam’s heat, you can only imagine what Steve Yedinak endured that January morning of 1967.

It was suffocating.

It was so hot that rivers of sweat ran down Yedinak’s face and into his mouth. The goggles he was wearing began to fog.

Yet he and the 15 Cambodian soldiers that he led remained silent and unmoving, their weapons trained on a nearby L-shaped confluence of two remote jungle trails.

As part of the ultra-secret Mobile Guerrilla Force, a joint group of Cambodian anti-communists and U.S. Special Forces troops, Yedinak’s group had a mission: to strike deep into Viet Cong-controlled territory.

To seek out the enemy and, Yedinak says, “to hurt them.”

That was what Yedinak waited to do that morning as he lay in ambush. And about 10:30 a.m., the opportunity came.

He furtively signaled to his fellow troops: Someone was coming.

He’d heard, he would write later in his memoir “Hard to Forget,” “the singsong noise of Vietnamese.” As the voices grew louder, he gripped the detonator for the explosive charge — the claymore mine — that covered the exposed pathway.

“Within seconds,” Yedinak wrote, “I saw two bright blue fatigue shirts exposed in the mid-morning sun.”

He quickly tripped the explosive.

And the world erupted.

In addition to the claymore that, in a blinding roar, propelled a mass of jagged metal pieces at and through the two Vietnamese, dozens of rounds from the Cambodian rifles cut through them, too.

The result was instant death.

“All that was left of the two VC trackers could be viewed high above in the translucent discoloration of the leaves on the trees,” Yedinak wrote. “Unfortunately for me, it was something I would not soon forget, if ever.”

Thirty-one years later, Yedinak is preparing to come home. Again.

He will read portions of his book, from which the above incident was drawn, at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at Auntie’s Bookstore.

Born in Colfax in 1940, Yedinak spent most of the first 24 years of his life living in Spokane — fishing Inland Northwest lakes, skiing the slopes of Mount Spokane, playing hockey on a frozen-over Mission Park and generally, he says, “raising hell” while graduating from both Gonzaga Prep and Gonzaga University.

He now lives in Newport News, Va. The money he makes as a self-employed contractor/builder/ handyman supplements the pay he receives as a retired Army lieutenant colonel with 26 years’ service.

But Spokane remains an important part of who he is.

As does Vietnam.

His book’s original subtitle, “How One Vietnam Vet Tries to Escape the Ominous Torments of War,” is evidence of that. It reflects the legacy of two tours of Vietnam, service both in Special Forces - better known as the legendary Green Berets - and the 101st Airborne. And it reflects a chest full of medals, including the coveted Combat Infantryman’s Badge and four Bronze Stars.

Overshadowing all that, though, is something unseen but certainly felt: the unresolved pain connected with Yedinak’s wartime experiences that the years have not been able to erase.

“I got to a point in my life in which I knew it wasn’t going to go away unless I put it out there in front of me and examined it,” he said during a recent phone interview.

The writing was therapeutic. But it wasn’t easy.

For four years, Yedinak labored at his writing desk, taking breaks for months at a time, “anesthetizing” himself regularly with “a cold beer” to weather the traumatic memories.

“And I began to realize …” (Yedinak paused to compose himself) “… and I’m realizing now …” (another pause) “… as I’m talking about it that if you’re ever really going to get over it, you have to endure the doubts and the heartaches that are associated with that kind of life.”

In both his book and over the phone, Yedinak comes across as a curious blend of temperaments.

On one hand, he is sensitive enough to still feel the deep sense of grief that typically afflicts those who travel war’s violent landscape.

On the other, he writes unabashedly, with a traditional kind of pride, about the sense of duty that took him to Vietnam in the first place.

“As a young lieutenant from Spokane, Wash., I was leaving my family and friends with mixed emotions,” he wrote. “I did not want to go but knew I must. Is that not what love and commitment are all about?”

As his career progressed, Yedinak demonstrated a similar blend of diverse emotional traits in the fulfillment of his various missions. He was both tenacious, disciplined and ambitious while being bullheaded, headstrong and, at times, seemingly self-destructive.

He might, for example, construct a plan of action if ordered to, then refuse to follow it. Often as not, he’d punctuate his displeasure with a well-oiled profanity.

He was a good soldier, and he was a maverick.

In other words, he was a perfect candidate to be a Green Beret.

“You had to harness them probably like a spirited racing horse,” Yedinak said of his Special Forces buddies. “(They were) definitely fragile in some respects but (filled with) unbridled fury and power and speed.

“These guys did great missions,” he said with a laugh, “but they also knew how to relax.”

The main portion of “Hard to Forget” (which Ivy Books, no doubt to attract fans of military memoir, gave the subtitle “An American with the Mobile Guerrilla Force in Vietnam”) concerns Yedinak’s tour with something called Task Force 957. Formed in October 1966, the group was the U.S. military’s first effort to use Special Forces troops in specific guerrilla operations.

Yedinak was one of Task Force 957’s organizers. His commanding officer was a man whose fame currently derives from his pro-constitutional, anti-government views: James G. “Bo” Gritz of Kamiah, Idaho, the man who helped negotiate the surrender of Randy Weaver during the Ruby Ridge standoff.

“Bo Gritz right now is kind of anathema to most of the country,” said Yedinak, laughing. “But I got along with him very well.”

Throughout his first Vietnam tour, Gritz, Yedinak and other Green Berets, along with their Cambodian allies, fought the same kind of guerrilla war against the VC that the VC had been waging with some success against regular U.S. and South Vietnamese troops.

“I really have a lot of respect for the kids who went over there and fought in conventional infantry forces,” Yedinak said. “They just did what they were told and had very little leeway.

“And many of them, unfortunately, got killed using tactics that, in my opinion, were asinine.”

Yedinak wasn’t the only one who felt this way. So did David Hackworth, the retired army colonel often described as “America’s most-decorated veteran,” whose story was detailed in Neil Sheehan’s book “A Bright Shining Lie” (it was Hackworth who first read and then recommended Yedinak’s book for publication).

But they, and others, were in the minority. The policies of large-scale, conventional military action prevailed. And so the travesty we call the Vietnam War played out its sad 15-year story.

Meanwhile, like many GIs, Yedinak returned home. But that was just the beginning.

He had trouble adapting to civilian life. He was assigned what seemed to be a choice stateside post, that of teaching ROTC at Loyola University of Chicago, but he quarrelled with his commanding officer. He returned to Vietnam for a tour with the 101st Airborne.

He returned home a second time. He suffered from nightmares. He endured.

Throughout all of this, Yedinak found strength and solace in his family - both his family of origin in Spokane and his family of choice, including wife Donna and their three children.

His book details some of this. It intimates the rest.

In the end, “Hard to Forget” is a study of psychological healing. It is Yedinak’s attempt to use his own experience as a guide for us all to understand just what Vietnam meant to those marked by it the most.

Many questions remain, but one stands out: What sets Vietnam apart from the rest of this nation’s armed conflicts?

It’s easy to speculate. Was it the lack of public support? Was it the arrogant and wrong-minded military policy? Was it the feeling of betrayal that many Vietnam vets still wear right next to their hearts?

Yedinak thinks the answer is more personal.

“Dave Hackworth said that the Vietnam War scarred him more emotionally than any other war, than all of the eight Purple Hearts that he got,” Yedinak said.

“I think this is a question that needs to be asked, and answered, by everybody - by those who went and those who didn’t.”

READING Steve Yedinak will read from his new book, “Hard to Forget” (Ive Books, 276 pages, $6.99) at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at Auntie’s Bookstore, Main and Washington, Spokane.