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Rocky Bleier Honors Vietnam Veterans During Wheeling Visit

U.S. service members in the Vietnam War endured severe conditions and a determined enemy, only to return to a country whose residents often didn’t appreciate the work they did for their country. Among those veterans was former Pittsburgh Steeler Rocky Bleier, who gave an encouraging speech to other veterans gathered at The Highlands to honor military veterans on the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the war.

The event, sponsored by the Wheeling Vet Center and the Ohio County Commission, was held at the new Marriott Fairfield Inn Conference Center.

“There are times in our lives where people that you meet make a difference,” Bleier said, recalling when he was newly injured in the war, and in a hospital in Da Nang.

It was there that another severely injured soldier would stop by to encourage him and others each day. “‘You look better than you did yesterday,'” Bleier recalled him saying. “‘I’ll see you back in the real world one of these days.'”

Bleier said that soldier helped him see a powerful lesson — that he could actually “choose to make a difference,” he said.

Wheeling Vet Center team leader John Looney described what caused some Vietnam veterans’ trauma. Service members endured “enemy fire from hundreds of yards away … heat, humidity, poisonous snakes, malaria and a determined enemy — an enemy using ambush, booby traps, suicidal charges, spider holes, tunnels … and children,” Looney said. “Unlike other veterans, you came home to a country of discontent. They blamed and cursed you for the war that your government asked you to fight in. That’s a real sense of betrayal and anger.”

Many were discharged out of service in only eight hours, with only a brief medical check, leaving their sense of purpose in Vietnam.

Among those honored were Army veteran Terry Edwards of Cadiz, who served two tours in Vietnam from 1967-69; Loyal Springer of Bridgeport, also in the Army, who served in 1968-69; Gene Miller, a Marine veteran who served in Vietnam from 1966-68; Army veteran Floyd “Bubbles” Yost of Wheeling Island, who was drafted in 1969 at age 19 and spent 1970 fighting in Vietnam; and Joe Hoskins, who served an extended tour of 15 months, from 1970-71.

While they didn’t want to detail their own experience, some expressed dismay at being drafted, and described challenging, stressful conditions in which they were in combat for months before returning to home base, only to go out and fight again.

They left everyone behind, and it was difficult to communicate with loved ones.

“I was very young, and they threw me into a hostile force of people who were getting killed and injured,” Yost said. “But it was my job to go, because I was drafted. And that’s what we did in 1969. We went. There was no question.”

Springer was married only two days before he left for Vietnam, and said Thursday marked the 50-year anniversary of the date he left for Vietnam.

“I didn’t know why I was there,” he said.

Before the ceremony, Bleier visited with nearly 100 veterans and their family members, signing for them copies of President Barack Obama’s commemoration, and posing for photos with them.

He displayed, and at one point wore, all four of his Super Bowl rings.

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