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An infantry company commander, his tour was spent in the jungle: 28 days in, three days out. “Then we slowed down, stopped, realized what had happened and just started laughing.”įranco saw and felt much in Vietnam. Ran as hard as I could with Franco following.

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“I began running at full speed to get out of there.

“There was this odor of festering water, a Vietnam odor,” Meshad says. Yet, after recent storms, he and another veteran, Newhall restaurant owner Bobby Franco, were out jogging. But no nightmares, no drugs, no psychoses. Also an inspiration for postwar writings and his counseling networks. Meshad, 50, brought many things back from the war: a fearless, more focused approach to life. He returned in 1970 to found the National Veterans Center counseling facility, and then the National Veterans Foundation. He served in Vietnam as a mental health officer working from rear-area hospitals to isolated firebases. Shad Meshad of Los Angeles is the nation’s most voluble Vietnam returnee. If things got bad, I could always look in a mirror and say I asked for it.”Īlthough Lauria and several million Vietnam veterans are far from dysfunctional and have never suffered flashbacks or alcoholic rages, all who served have inner echoes that are the legacy of any vivid experience. “I always knew what I wanted to do, to act, and the love of that, the drive to succeed kept me going,” he says. Yet it was having a career, believing he could succeed as an actor, that sustained him in Vietnam. Lauria says he and friend Franz carry mild double doses of survivor guilt because, Lauria explains, “We not only survived a war where so many were killed, we came home and became successes.” He survived intact, he says, but not unstained. Then a platoon commander at An Loc near the Cambodian border. Lauria was a Marine Corps lieutenant aboard a helicopter assault vessel in the South China Sea. Also Dan Lauria who played the father in those “Wonder Years.” If Oliver Stone hadn’t experienced Vietnam, he would never have directed a trilogy of watershed war movies, including his Oscar-rich “Platoon.” Nor would journalist Bill Broyles have developed “China Beach” for television.Īnd Peter Arnett, then with Associated Press, now with CNN, would never have earned the spurs-to say nothing of a Pulitzer Prize-that have made him America’s best-known war correspondent since Ernie Pyle.Įmmy winner Dennis Franz of “NYPD Blue” is a Vietnam veteran.