T-L Photo/ROBERT A. DEFRANK Rick Johnson, left, adjutant with the St. Clairsville American Legion, congratulates Bob Hathaway, veteran of the month.

ST. CLAIRSVILLE — Bob Hathaway got more closely acquaintanted with the people of Vietnam than many U.S. soldiers during his service. He is the St. Clairsville American Legion Veteran of the Month for February.

He served in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam era, 1968-71. He was a 1st lieutenant in the infantry. Hathaway recalled the war.

“I didn’t take ROTC training because I thought the Vietnamese War would probably be over by the time I graduated, and unfortunately it was not,” he said. He enlisted and went to Officer Candidate School to get his choice of service branches. “Which turned out to be not true. Not even close.”

“When I got to Vietnam I was in Military Assistance Command, MACV, the advisory capacity to the Vietnamese, the regular Vietnamese Army and their regional forces,” he said. “I was assigned to a mobile advisory team.”

He was stationed in a province north of Saigon and worked with five other U.S. team members.

“Our job was to teach and train the Vietnamese on how to conduct warfare,” he said, adding he and the others were required to make do in the foreign land.

“We lived with them,” he said. “We had to build our own bunkers, and we would scrounge for artillery shell cases and fill them with sand and build a wall and roof, so if you took incoming mortar you wouldn’t get blown to bits.”

He added they even bought food locally or at U.S. bases.

“In MACV you’re pretty free to roam the country,” he said.

“We lived with the Vietnamese and went out on missions with them every day and taught them how to use weapons, but my main job I found out was calling in medivacs when they got shot or somebody was wounded, tripped a booby trap, and I did that for my first eight months over there,” he said.

The tragedies of war took on some personal aspects.

“My counterpart was a young Vietnamese lieutenant and we would go out on ambush together. Sometimes at night we’d be laying there on the ground, waiting for something to happen,” he said. “We’d talk. The guy was absolutely brilliant, spoke three languages. … He said, ‘I really appreciate you coming to help us, but you need to understand, you’re going to be here a year. You get to go home. This is the best I can look forward to as far as I can see ahead for my life.’

“And I felt so sorry for the man, because he’s right. Certainly after we left it probably got worse for him, and to this day I wonder what happened to him.”

Hathaway also remembered many difficult moments.

“One time we were to sweep a certain area, and we stumbled across some Viet Cong and they were dug in holes way down, in tunnels and bunkers. I called it in right away, and they sent me two jets, napalm, and I had never been in control of those before,” he said. “I’m talking to the pilots and I’m giving the enemy’s position, our position. … He said ‘Sorry Lieutenant, you’re out of luck. We can’t drop. You’re too close to a village.”

Another memory was the interrogation of Viet Cong prisoners by the Vietnamese allies.

“The Vietnamese were brutal,” he said.

“There’s some disgusting things that I did see there that bothered me,” he said. “That kind of thing bothered me, but I was not in a position to get in the middle of it. The Vietnamese were very tough on these people. Very tough.”

After eight months in the field, he served as a supply officer at a base camp for his last four months.

“The life expectancy of a second lieutenant when you first got in-country was not good if you were in one of the major divisions. Mine was relatively benign compared to some of the situations people were in, although I did see some action. I got a combat infantry badge and a Bronze Star, but I was relatively fortunate through my tour.”

In civilian life, Hathaway worked as an equipment salesman, selling heavy construction equipment to the coal fields. Later he started RICO Equipment Inc. in Morristown in 1983.

“I built the company up and I eventually had 10 stores from Pittsburgh to Indianapolis, sold the company at the end of 2010 and retired.”

He values his service.

“I was sort of a happy-go-lucky person so to speak when I was in college and really hadn’t grown up. The service made me grow up,” he said. “It taught me to pay attention to detail like you wouldn’t believe.”

Originally from Upper St. Clair, Pennsylvania, he now lives in St. Clairsville and Florida.