News

Combat veteran looks forward to Honor Flight

By Bill Moss, Published: September 29, 2017

After he graduated from high school in Bronxville, N.Y., Frank Spehr tried a semester of college. He didn’t care for it. College was neither his lineage nor his destiny.

He joined the Marine Corps, the fourth generation of his family to do so.
“I was used to PTSD, you might say,” he says of his upbringing. “I was raised with a strict dad so the Marine Corps was nothing to me. It was just like home.”
His father had been an infantry Marine in World War II, fighting in the tough and deadly island-hopping campaigns of the Pacific. Post-traumatic stress was known as combat fatigue back then. Looking back, with the benefit of his own war experience, Spehr is sure his father suffered psychologically and emotionally from the scars of war.
At age 73, Spehr, who has lived in Mills River for 30 years, admits he is taking a risk by joining his first HonorAir flight this weekend.
“I saw the moving wall down in Florida in the early ‘80s and that was first time I cried,” he says. “Probably the only time I cried since I was a kid. I never cried in Vietnam. Both my parents are dead. I never shed a tear for them. The only thing that bothers me now is if a child or an animal is unnecessarily hurt. Everybody in here could drop dead and I’d just walk out.”
When Spehr says things like that it belies his own record during a year of tough duty in Vietnam. He cared, deeply, about the men who served under him.
The Vietnam wall brought tears because it “brought a lot of feelings back I didn’t know I had,” he says. But one thing the old platoon sergeant knew he would not find was the name of a soldier who served under him.
“Everybody I was responsible for — there’s not one of them that’s got a name on that wall. That’s a good feeling,” he says. “Not one of my men.”
He looks forward to the HonorAir flight, which will carry veterans from World War II, Korea and Vietnam to Washington on Saturday. Cofounded by Jeff Miller, the Hendersonville dry cleaning store owner and City Council member, HonorAir has expanded to add veterans of more recent wars.
“I’ve known Jeff Miller for years,” Spehr says. “I thank God that he didn’t get elected to Congress. He is serving the community in such a better capacity than Congress because it’s hands on.”

‘War and combat are two different things’

After boot camp at Parris Island, Spehr took 16 weeks of radio-telegraph training in California, then returned to the East Coast and deployed from Camp Lejeune with the 3rd Battalion 6th Marines to hot spots.
He evacuated Americans from the Dominican Republican when “there were some problems there,” went to Cuba as a communications chief on the fence line, deployed to Panama to put down the communist Sandinistas. “I didn’t fire at anybody,” he says. “I was just operating radios at that time.”
All the while, the young Marine wanted to go to Vietnam.
He got his chance in 1968 and would spend the next year in some of the deadliest combat of the war. The Marines shipped him to the DMZ, out of Dong Ha, with the 12th Marines. A sergeant by then, he was assigned to the 1st Searchlight Battery, a unit reactivated from World War II.
“We had 60-inch lights that could bounce off the ceiling and light up Khe Sanh 30 miles away,” he said.
Like many Vietnam veterans, he recalls with some bitterness the political constraints that handicapped the effort to liberate South Vietnam from the communist North Vietnam.
“War and combat are two different things,” he says. “War is what generals do. Combat is what we do.” The Marines fought alongside Army draftees. “These guys didn’t know what they were getting into or why they were there necessarily,” he says. “We had a lot of difficulty with the enemy. I’m going to be very vague with this because I have a problem reliving these things.”

‘Here to be a door gunner’

His job would change when he received orders to report to the 1st Marine Air Wing. He ran into a fresh-faced lieutenant colonel and pitched himself for a job.
“He had never seen combat before,” he says. “I just BS’d him. I said, ‘Look, I’m the only one on the orders here. I’m here at the wing because I’m such a good shot with the M60. I’m here to be a door gunner. Medevac.’”
Armed with the powerful machine gun, Spehr spent months aboard Huey helicopters into combat zones to rescue wounded soldiers and Marines. He flew 350 missions and came home with 18 air medals.
“In the spring and summer of 1968 was when more people got killed as far as my reckoning than any other period,” he says. “We were flying day and night.”
The blood and death and harrowing flights into enemy fire to save men took its toll.
“I had one Marine that got hit by a bouncing betty,” he says quietly. “He was a half a man. I was holding his intestines inside of him. He died in my arms. When I got to the hospital, the corpsman came out to pick him up and the damn corpsman dropped him.
“I pulled my .38 out and I was going to shoot the corpsman. I mean I was wound up. It was a bad night. We had received a lot of fire. We had holes in the helicopter. Fortunately, the crew chief grabbed my arm and said, ‘Settle down. The Marine’s dead. He’s not going to hurt him anymore.’ But that stays with me.”
When he left Vietman, he did not go home.
“I spent 9½ months in the hospital,” he says.
What for?
“Vietnam. That’s all I’m going to say.”
As has been documented in countless books, movies and documentaries, homecoming for Vietnam veterans was not the welcoming experience as it had been for WWII soldiers.
“We hated the hippies,” Spehr says. “Still do, to this day. If I see tie-dye shirt or somebody with a peace sign my stomach just knots up like this. When I came back to the States I never knew where I came back to. I thought I was on a different planet. It was not the United States I left four years before.”
If he left Vietnam, Vietnam never left him, not completely.
“I didn’t find out about that (PTSD) until 1998. I thought I was fine and everybody else was screwed up,” he says. During a visit to the V.A. Hospital in Asheville, a nurse recognized him. “He said, ‘You medevaced me out.’ Then we got talking, and he said you got a problem. I didn’t think I had it but it turned out I did.”
Counseling from doctors or psychologists who have never seen combat doesn’t help much, he says. He’s a member of the VFW and Disabled American Veterans, organizations of combat veterans who would rather not talk about combat.
Even today, “I’m hypervigilant,” Spehr says. “I don’t sleep much. I’m up every hour.”
He describes his wife, Susan, as his savior and his rock. She and Frank feed 25 deer. At first light, rabbits stand at his back door, peering hopefully into his face “like something out of a Disney movie.” This time of year Susan picks up bushels of culled apples from growers and she and Frank spend time every day cutting up the fruit for their deer friends.
It’s something safe he can do. Take care of innocent life. Gaze into the forest at dawn.
On Saturday he’ll be with veterans from wars spanning three decades. He says he looks forward to being among kindred spirits.