Randy Maggio. Mike Young. John Harden. Gary Price. If you lived in McHenry County during the Vietnam War, you probably knew at least one of these young men. They were among the county's 35 residents who died in the war and 7,048 who served.
"Although the county has grown a lot in the last few years, it was still rural then," says exhibits curator Grace Moline, who is assembling a Vietnam War exhibit, "Marching Off, Left Behind," due to open in May at the McHenry County Historical Museum in Union. "The population of the whole county was only 84,210 in 1960, so everyone knew everyone."
While hippies taunted police in well-publicized riots in Chicago, Moline says McHenry County had one protest involving seven people at the draft board. "The only person who even mentioned it (to me) was a woman who worked at the board," says Moline, who interviewed 30 veterans and family members for the project.
Quiet McHenry County was a community of farmers, most of them Republican, conservative, patriotic. "If you were called to serve, you went," Moline says. The draftees far outnumbered the conscientious objectors.
Through the exhibit, Moline hopes to give McHenry County's Vietnam War veterans the recognition they didn't get when they returned and to teach museum visitors about the war's role in the county's history.
"Not everyone considered Vietnam a war," Moline says. "It was called a conflict. But, when you consider the numbers of men and women who served in this `conflict' -- 2.6 million Americans -- it's a huge segment of our population. In McHenry County, it touched everyone's lives."
The exhibit will include six vignettes of life in the '60s, at home and in Vietnam, each with donated artifacts and auditory props:
- A mother reading a letter from her son in Vietnam while a television announces the evening news.
- To illustrate the rebelling counterculture, a teenager in her black-light room, complete with a beaded room divider, beanbag chair and Lava lamp.
- A collage showing young people's choices during the war -- going to Vietnam, fleeing the country, protesting. "Also, we'll show the shift in attitude that occurred toward the end of the war, when soldiers started questioning orders and, according to some I talked to, the drug problem escalated," Moline says.
- A basic-training barracks scene, showing a McHenry County boy adjusting to military life.
- An American soldier in the Vietnam jungle, helicopters roaring overhead.
- A veteran coming home and adjusting to civilian life.
The exhibit will also include a Wall of Honor, with pictures, names and occupations of McHenry County veterans who survived the war, and a memorial listing those who didn't. "A separate portion will be devoted specifically to the nurses who served in war because so many people said they deserve special recognition," Moline says.
In addition to names and hometowns, the lists will include the veterans' roles in Vietnam, which ranged from building roads to repairing helicopters to cooking. "I hope to show that not everyone there was in combat, and not everyone who was killed was in combat when they were killed. At the time, it seemed like everyone there was fighting," Moline says.
So strong are the emotions about this unwar, even decades later, that some of the county's veterans don't want their names on the wall, Moline says. "There are some well-respected people in our communities who don't want anyone to know they are Vietnam vets. Some refused to be interviewed or asked, `Who told you I was in Vietnam?' " she says.
One of the veterans who did share his memories and mementos with Moline, lending his uniform and letters home to the exhibit, is Rich Oleszczuk of Crystal Lake, 49. One of six children of a World War II veteran and his European-born wife, he lived in Wonder Lake, which he describes as "not that different than it is today -- laid-back, middle-class, blue-collar." He was 20 in 1970 when he received his draft number, No. 152. "That's a number I'll never forget," says the president of Regal Tool Co. in McHenry.
After training in Kentucky and Louisiana, Oleszczuk was shipped to Saigon as an infantry soldier. Of the 14 months he spent in Vietnam, eight were in the jungle as an Army rifleman on search-and-destroy missions. "Instead of advancing a front, we were inserted into an area, told to find the enemy and kill them," he recalls. "After we were dropped off, we'd walk in a loop, then get picked up. Three days later, we'd do another loop."
Compared to the war his father fought, Oleszczuk says Vietnam was a "chaotic war with a genius, crafty enemy. It was surreal -- intensely hot, millions of mosquitoes, lots of malaria. We were all wet for weeks on end. Water was rationed. We all got Dear John letters, even the married guys."