Photo Provided St. Clairsville American Legion Commander Larry Barnes, left, recognizes Vietnam veteran Floyd Jamison as the post’s Veteran of the Month. The sacrifices of those lost overseas and the nation’s duties to those who returned are issues of note for him.

ST. CLAIRSVILLE — St. Clairsville American Legion Veteran of the Month Floyd Jamison still ponders the Vietnam War, those who returned and those who did not.

Jamison served with the I.S. Navy from 1960-71, earning the rank of chief warrant officer. He served in the Vietnam theater in 1967-68.

Originally from a farm in Chillicothe, Ohio, Jamison graduated high school in 1960 and chose to follow his family’s military tradition.

“My family has a long history of service. My father, my uncle, my grandfather all served in the Navy, my maternal grandfather served in the Army. I had an uncle in the Marine Corps and two uncles in the Army,” he said. “I joined the Navy right out of high school. I wanted to get a good education. … I got a very good education from the service, in electronics primarily.”

Jamison is reticent about his role in combat, but he had some close scrapes.

“I got into aviation a bit, for a short period of time. I couldn’t stay in aviation because I was grounded with an injury. I wound up finishing my career in the surface Navy on board a guided missile destroyer as a division officer,” he said. “It was an ejection from an aircraft. We were hit by a missile and I had to eject. I spent some time in the hospital and I was medically grounded.”

He served aboard the U.S.S. Intrepid in 1967 as well as on the U.S.S. Coral Sea.

“I was on an aircraft carrier a lot of that time, so I didn’t see a lot of the ground war. A few times I’d have to go in-country to work with the Marine Corps a little bit on close air support and communications issues. I did fly around quite a bit in the theater doing support functions,” he said.

“I enlisted in communications,” he said, adding he worked with a new naval system that ensured secure voice communications between combat theater and Washington D.C.

“It was kind of a vital role, because that communication was used between unit commanders and communication and Washington. A lot of it was talk about target selection and mission profiles,” he said. “Most everything I was working on was top secret.”

He also served in Greece, instructing Greek Navy personnel about equipment and systems transferred from the U.S. to their navy.

In civilian life, he worked in computer systems and early development of automated teller systems software, and corporations such as Apple Computers. He is also a member of the VFW. He now resides in Glen Dale.

Jamison still reflects on the war and those who served.

“I came home from Vietnam. There are 58,000-plus … who never came home from there. Those are the real heroes. Those are the guys who didn’t come home. The ones who did come home were spit on and degraded by the people in this country, and even today we still have around 30,000 homeless veterans. … It’s a travesty.

“I think Vietnam was a very ill-conceived war that was run by politicians for political reasons only, to the detriment of the services. I don’t think the commanders in theater were allowed to make the right decisions or were allowed to make decisions, period.

“I personally witnessed communications between admirals and Washington, D.C., where the admiral was telling the White House staff that this was a prime target that we absolutely had to hit in order to make an impact on the war, and they were told ‘absolutely not,’ because a plane strays off that target and flies across the border into China it’ll create an international incident and we can’t have that,” he said. “The military commanders in Vietnam had their hands tied, and the result of that was a lot of men died for no real reason.

“Vietnam was an ill-conceived war that ended badly for us. It ended with no real accomplishment out of the war. It was a waste. It was a waste of lives and a waste of money and time,” he said. “I’m not ashamed of the fact that I served there and I’m proud that I did serve there, but there were over 1,700,000 men who did serve there, and out of those, 200,000-plus were wounded severely and 58,000-plus never came home. Those guys are the heroes. … Those men gave more than we could rightfully ask them to give, and that bothers me tremendously to this day.”

Jamison said people in service support organizations continue to try and assist veterans who return from service with physical or mental wounds.

“We don’t have the wherewithal and the money. I don’t think the nation has done a good job of supporting the homeless veterans in this country,” he said. “I think that we need as a nation to come up with a program to end this kind of thing.”