By James Windell
After two tours in Vietnam and being shot more than seven times, Albert Anthony was not welcomed home when he returned more than 50 years ago.
Maybe that’s one reason Anthony, a South Haven resident, stayed in the Army for 30 years. Trained in Special Forces and the Rangers, he learned essential survival skills. Those skills got him through the years he fought in Vietnam. But they could not protect him from the attitudes of those who were opposed to the Vietnam War. Nor could those skills protect him from PTSD or cancer.
Although, PTSD doesn’t allow Anthony, now 80 years old, to get out much, he attended the Welcome Home Vietnam Veterans event on Saturday, March 29 at South Haven’s American Legion Post # 49.
“I didn’t know there were that many Vietnam Veterans in South Haven,” Anthony said in an interview after the event. “I have had so many ‘Welcome back homes’ and so many ‘Glad you’re backs,’ that it is a big change from when we came back to from the war.”
Anthony was born in Saginaw, Michigan, but grew up and attended high school in South Haven. At South Haven High School, he was both a track and basketball star and he has been told that his record for high hurdles still stands.
Following high school, he started college, but after a year he found himself blackballed at the college he was attending. “They wanted me to testify against my roommate, someone I grew up with, that he was selling marijuana,” Anthony says. “I refused and they wouldn’t let me come back the next year.”
That’s when he went to talk to an Army recruiter. “I was told by the recruiters that I could get a college degree and wouldn’t have to pay a nickel,” he recalls. “I signed up, but what they didn’t tell me was that I was going to Vietnam.”
Within six months, he was in Vietnam. As a somewhat naïve 19-year-old, he had no idea what he would experience.
“I had never seen a body that was mutilated or blown apart or that was covered in blood,” he says. “I went to Vietnam feeling good. I was young and I had a lot of training. But soon after I got there, we went out on patrol one night and you were not supposed to smoke at night. My partner was standing up, talking and smoking and a bullet hit him in the head and his brains splattered all over me. I had certainly never seen anything like that.”
Having trained in the U.S. Army Airborne School, which was known as Jump School, as well as with Special Forces and the Ranger School, Anthony had learned special skills. “I had skills and tools to compensate for my fear,” he says. “My skills worked, and I could get over what I was seeing. I had never seen anything like what I was seeing. Soon, though, I would have to go out and pick up bodies. Sometimes there would be half a body or a head without a body. But you had to bring the bodies back after a firefight.”
One such event earned him a medal for bravery. “I went out in the midst of a firefight and brought back my captain who was shot in the neck and bleeding out,” he remembers. “Nobody else would go out because they were too scared. I can’t blame them, but I got up my courage and I reached him and put pressure on his wounds.” A few months later he was awarded a medal for his actions.
Despite his good survival skills, he was shot seven times in another action one night. “I was messed up pretty bad,” he says, “and they flew me to an air force base and from there I was taken to Valley Forge General Hospital in Pennsylvania.”
In the hospital for six months, he asked to rejoin his unit in Vietnam. “I said I wanted to go back because they were doing their job, and I was just in a hospital. I was trained to do the job and so I went back.”
After a couple of more tours of duty in Vietnam, he was shot in the kneecap and returned to the U.S. to have his knee replaced. After that recovery period, he again asked to return “because I had gotten used to applying my survivor skills.”
He also did a tour in Afghanistan before he retired from the Army as a Sergeant Major. Since he got his promised college degree as well as a master’s degree as a social worker, he spent 10 years working with adolescents for an agency in Michigan. While he says he was shot several times in Vietnam, he survived, however, the throat cancer that was discovered in 2020 “Almost took me out.”
He underwent seven weeks of radiation treatment, and his cancer is now in remission. It was his next-door neighbor, Tom Renner, who drove him to his daily treatment appointments. “Tom took me every single day and brought me back,” he says. “That’s what I call a good friend. He’s the greatest guy I’ve ever known and the best friend I ever had.”
Since his PTSD doesn’t allow him to go out very often, it was his good friend Renner who took him to the Welcome Home event at the American Legion.
“It was good to be with so many other soldiers,” Anthony says.
