Loverink to speak on memorial day

In 1970, Gordy Loverink arrived home after serving 15 months with the U.S. military in Vietnam. First an infantryman and later a company clerk, the 21-year-old was grateful to be returning home to the Hollandale area unharmed.

 

He and others were met by protesters as they left their plane at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. Along with angry words, rotten tomatoes were thrown. Since he had missed his flight home to Minnesota, Loverink had no choice but to sleep in the airport that night, even though he had no change of clothing.

 

Once home, he eventually married, raised three sons, and proceeded with life–hardly ever sharing any of his experiences or bringing up the subject of his service.

 

“There was this code of silence that it seems we all felt, like it wasn’t something to be talked about,” Loverink recalls. “I wanted to put it behind me and forget it.”

 

Of course there were elements not to be forgotten. In Loverink’s case, he had experienced a hearing loss of about 80 percent. As time passed, his joints and back gave him increasing problems as a result of the many physical strains he had encountered.

 

Still, the causes of those strains were seldom discussed. Loverink recalls making friends with and spending many hours in the company of a fellow veteran. Yet it was only because of a chance remark that each of them learned the other had also served in Vietnam.

 

“I mentioned flying over an air base and being told we couldn’t land there as planned because it was under attack. We looked out our windows; the missiles were flying and there were fires burning all over.

 

“He told me he was among the soldiers defending the airbase. ‘I was down there,’ he said.”

Though he doesn’t fully understand the “code” which has kept him quiet for all this time, Loverink, 74, has decided it’s time to break it.

 

Invited to speak at the Memorial Day ceremony scheduled by the New Richland American Legion for 11 a.m. Monday, May 27 at the high school gym, Loverink has a goal for his speech. “I want people to understand what they’re saying when they say ‘Thank you for your service.’ I want them to think about what that service meant, what it cost us.”

 

He expects to speak between 10 and 15 minutes, but comments he has enough stories and observations to fill hours of time.

 

“The challenge will be deciding which ones to share,” he speculates.

 

In a lively conversation nearly two hours long, he shared examples capable of breaking a heart and then mending it again. A confrontation which only three of his fifteen squad members survived. A monsoon which delivered hurricane-force winds and 16 inches of rain.

 

“Picture six guys all huddled together under a rain cape, trying to hold the sides down,” he suggests. Another member of the group that night had dug a foxhole, covered the top with his rain cape, and settled down on an air mattress. There was so much rain it lifted the mattress out of the hole, sending it sliding downhill right through the security measures at the camp’s perimeter.

 

He remembers fellow infantryman Carlos Riviera. “He was quite the fellow,” recalls Loverink, telling of one night when his platoon was notified it was in danger and needed to move “immediately.” Awe still evident in his voice, Loverink describes how Riviera slipped down to where the trip wires, flares and land mines were arranged. “He didn’t even have a flashlight, but he got them all, somehow, without making a sound.”

 

He tells of three-week field deployments with no baths or showers and no safe drinking water. “They gave us iodine tablets and told us to treat the water from the rice paddies,” he says. “It was purple, and you had to pick the bugs out of it. But it was ‘safe’ to drink.”

 

Loverink’s twentieth and twenty-first birthdays came and went while he was in Vietnam. After serving his time as an infantryman, he also took on a second military occupational specialty (MOS) as a company clerk/typist.

 

The position entailed a wide range of duties. Among them were processing new soldiers as they joined the company, procuring equipment, and taking care of widely varied miscellaneous tasks. “Like Radar O’Reilly, on M*A*S*H,” suggests Loverink’s wife, Deb.

 

Having been in the field for nine months, Loverink said he knew what was needed and did everything he could to acquire equipment for his team. “From my perspective, everything the army owned belonged to me, and I just had to get it from those other people who were using it,” he jokes.

 

Loverink remembers that, as he was finishing his time in the clerk position, it fell to him to find a replacement. Considering his options, he thought of a soft-spoken soldier named Hal Schelling of whom he remembered thinking, “This guy’s not going to make it.”

 

He called Schelling in and asked whether he was willing to take the position on. After devoting a bit of time familiarizing him with the job, Loverink caught his “freedom bird” home.

 

Decades later, Loverink received a call from Schelling, along with a request to get together and talk. “We met right up here at the Red Leaf Cafe,” Loverink recalls. “He gave me a gift, and he said he had been thinking about me all his life since leaving Vietnam.

 

“‘You saved my life,’ he told me. ‘I wouldn’t have made it if you hadn’t gotten me that job as company clerk.’”

 

As his range of anecdotes makes clear, Loverink will be choosing among many experiences to share with the audience at the Memorial Day ceremony. He looks forward to speaking.

 

“I have three sons and 11 grandchildren,” he reveals. “Most of them plan to come, and they will be hearing about my time in Vietnam for the first time.”

 

Loverink grew up and raised his family in the Hollandale area, where some of his children still live. He and his wife Deb have been married since 2015, and have lived in New Richland since 2017. Gordy is a member of the New Richland American Legion.