A Crippled Home Front

The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive the veterans of earlier wars were treated and appreciated by their nation.

-- George Washington

War was his best moment and his worst. Visions of whistling bullets, airborne body parts, screams of the wounded -- and that was a good day for Joe Hooper. The Medal of Honor winner and most decorated soldier in Vietnam would bolt upward in his Seattle bed, sweating booze from the night before. Those earlier appearances on national TV, the possibility of a Hollywood biopic, hanging out with Bob Hope and several presidents -- that just churned him up more inside. The catlike, strawberry-haired 6-footer and former Washington state football scoring champ at Moses Lake High School had enlisted at age 19 because he admired the military.

Then came Vietnam. Staff Sgt. Joe Hooper, 29, of the 501st Airborne Infantry, killed at least 115 of the enemy -- 24 of them in a six-hour firefight, lobbing grenades into Viet Cong bunkers and wading through withering machine-gun fire to repeatedly rescue wounded American soldiers. Fourteen out of 189 survived. After treatment for his wounds, Hooper broke out of the hospital to return to his unit. Part American Indian, he said he could "smell out" the enemy, and thought he was born to go to Vietnam. His 37 medals were more than those earned by World War II's Audie Murphy and World War I's Alvin York -- names that, unlike Hooper's, still ring familiar today. Like others of his era, he arrived home to accusations of being a baby killer. But that's not what eventually soured him on Vietnam. "At high schools, when I speak, the question kids most often asked me was, 'Would you do it again?'" he told me once. "I would, the reason being I thought my abilities helped save lives. But I would tell my children, if [we] were to do this over, 'Go to Canada. Don't fight a war you can't win.'"

In the end, it was Joe Hooper who needed to be rescued. From the day he left the service in 1974 with a $12,000 retirement check carried around in his shoe, his war was with himself and the bottle. Not all soldiers, including the many who were transported from the killing fields to home just a few days out of combat, had his agonizing psychological problems. Overwhelmingly, the average war veteran makes it through decompression to live a normal life. But Hooper wasn't average, nor was his war. ("Vietnam," says vet and psychologist Jim Goodwin, was uniquely "a private war of survival" by individual soldiers.) Hooper, with two children and a caring wife, was painfully arthritic and 60 percent disabled from his wounds. He sometimes toted around a gun when he boozed. "He drank hard, there's no denying that," Hooper's friend Larry Frank recalled. "But the VA couldn't deal with him drinking and running around, and that's exactly what the VA is there for, people with problems like Joe's." His binges lasted days, and sometimes he was carried out of Seattle bars by military buddies the way he carried the wounded over his shoulders in Vietnam. "When he'd get on a tear," remembered Medal of Honor historian Don Ross of Kitsap County, "Bob Bush [another Medal of Honor winner from Olympia] and I would go after him. It was a constant battle." In between bouts, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) gave him a desk job counseling vets on benefits and then let him go due to "problems adapting to the bureaucratic environment." In 1979, five years out of his army boots, Joe Hooper was dead from a cerebral hemorrhage. He was 40. The VA eventually was reluctantly persuaded to name a wing of its medical center on Beacon Hill after him, and the Army's reserve center in Bothell now bears his name.