A total 58,200 servicemen died ….

A total 58,200 servicemen died during the war.

Norlander and his squad members discussed their fate with all the fatalism of youth: “If there’s a bullet with my name on it, it’s going to find me.”

In the dense jungles, Norlander picked up new skills. For example, the art of removing leaches without leaving the teeth embedded in the skin—the promise of an infection. The military-issue solution was Liquid DEET, a mosquito repellent that soldiers called “bug juice.” Contact with a lit cigarette also did the trick.

The jungle was inhospitable in other ways. In 1970, temperatures in Vietnam fluctuated between 80-86 degrees, day and night, according to historical data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It rained 170 days that year.

Besides bugs, snakes and unfavorable weather conditions, the squad had another rival to contend with: the Viet Cong, a communist force operating as the military arm of the National Liberation Front. Their tactics included ambushes, traps, tunnels and hiding among the civilian population.

Unlike earlier wars, soldiers rarely remained on one front. Helicopters dropped infantrymen like Norlander directly into conflict zones. Soldiers in Vietnam averaged 240 days of combat per year, a substantial increase from World War II’s 40 days of combat over four years, according to some estimates.

Within Norlander’s first week in-country, his camp came under mortar fire.

When his squad spotted a puff of smoke, they radioed for air support. Moments later, a AH-1 Cobra gunship unleashed a barrage of grenades on the area.

“We didn’t find any bodies or blood trails,” Norlander recalled, “but we didn’t have any more trouble that day.”

Norlander would go on to serve in 10 search-and-destroy missions over his seven months in Vietnam.

Each began with the roar of a Bell UH-1 Iroquois—the iconic Huey helicopter. With its two pilots, four infantrymen, and twin door gunners, the Huey was the soldier’s lifeline. The sound of a belt-fed M16 machine gun—a constant loud whir like a lawn mower—was a good sign.

“Once they were seen, they didn’t stand a chance,” he said. “Surprise was the only element they had.”

TheHueyswereoftenaccompanied by gunships armed with miniguns capable of firing 6,000 rounds per minute—enough to cover an entire football field in bullets within seconds.

Once dropped into the jungle, Norlander’s squad would spend weeks at a time in the field, often exceeding their planned 21-day missions. He remembered his first mission vividly— relentless rains, flooded rivers and the grueling march through soaked terrain. Standing 5 feet 7 inches tall, Norlander waded in rivers up to his chin with his rifle hoisted above his head.

He recalls watching snakes slither from the ground and up into trees: “It was too wet for them too.

By November, he hadn’t changed his clothes, socks or underwear since arriving. “After about 10 days,” he joked, “you don’t get any smellier.” Norlander’s final mission came in early 1971, a major offensive to reopen Khe Sanh Marine Air Base, overrun and abandoned since the Tet Offensive of 1968. The battalion’s objective: clear the surrounding area to the Laotian border so the Army of the Republic of Vietnam could disrupt the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a vital supply route for North Vietnamese forces.

The fighting was fierce. During a firefight, Norlander was struck by shrapnel in three places. With a shattered elbow, a shrapnel-torn leg and a bloodied face, his crewmates cut a hole in the triple-canopy jungle, exposing the dark, shaded battlefield to the sky, where a helicopter would airlift him to safety.

He couldn’t grab hold of the rope to be medevaced out due to his badly injured arm. Fortunately another wounded soldier had two uninjured arms.

“He could hold me and himself, and the two of us went up,” Norlander said. In the helicopter, a third soldier, hit in the stomach, went into shock as medics worked to keep him alive.

At the end of the four-week mission, over half of Norlander’s 120-member company had been killed or wounded in action. Two were killed on the field just feet away from him. He felt lucky to be alive.

At a field hospital, he informed doctors that his vision was “dark about halfway down.” The doctor informed him that his eye was halfway filled with blood, and he could see something protruding near Norlander’s eye.

The doctor used a pair of metal forceps to remove a chunk of shrapnel that had wedged itself between his tear duct and the bridge of his nose—which he dropped into a metal bowl with a memorable “plunk.”

The doctors’ main concern was keeping Norlander’s optic nerve intact. He spent the next two weeks with his eyes wrapped shut. A nurse opened his dressings once a day to apply eyedrops.

There, in the darkness, Norlander listened to Janis Joplin’s “Me and Bobby McGee” on the Armed Forces Radio “about a thousand times.”

He took his first steps at Camp Zama Army Base in Japan.

“I can remember the first day that I got out of the bed in about three weeks,” Norlander said. “Man, you talk about that leg hurting.”

The doctor there was so unimpressed with his walk—more like a shuffle—that he ordered him to attend physical therapy. And he’d need to walk there, up and down a flight of stairs, for good measure.

“He was showing no mercy,” Norlander said.

Norlander’s perspective changed when he arrived at his first session, where he was joined by a crew of post-operation amputees. In the medical ward, his neighbor was a career

With a shattered elbow, a shrapnel-torn leg and a bloodied face, his crewmates cut a hole in the triple-canopy jungle, exposing the dark, shaded battlefield to the sky, where a helicopter would airlift him to safety.

helicopter pilot whose foot was obliterated by a bullet that penetrated his aircraft. Some had lost vital organs, suffered permanent nerve damage or were scarred.

“I’d better quit feeling sorry for myself,” Norlander told himself. “Maybe it takes me a bit longer, but I’ve got two legs.” After treatment at Camp Zama, he was strapped to a stretcher and carried onto a fixed-wing aircraft, where he rode over 10 hours to Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, California. From there he was loaded into an ambulance, on his way to Letterman Army Hospital in San Francisco, where he remained for several months.

After recovering, Norlander questioned the war that had defined his early adulthood—a conflict between communist powers and the anti-communist West. Despite America’s overwhelming firepower, he came to see the Viet Cong as “a worthy adversary.”

He recalled offering a Vietnamese translator a carton of cigarettes, only to have the man ask for soap instead. A small cut, once marinated in the heat and grime of the jungle, could become a festering wound. As a U.S. soldier, Norlander could have these wounds doused in hydrogen peroxide and pumped with penicillin—but health services in rural areas of Vietnam were largely underdeveloped.

“In the U.S., freedom of the press, freedom to vote for the candidate of your choice, freedom to criticize the government, that’s ingrained in us,” he said. “Once we pulled out, once Saigon fell, once there was no more bombing, what those people were really interested in was food and medical supplies.”

Back home, America’s attitude toward the war had soured. Protests peaked in 1969 and became confrontational in 1971, when a large May Day protest led to 12,000 arrests, according to a book by Lawrence Roberts that cataloged the event. Reasons for opposition were multifold—civilian casualties, government misinformation about the war, and atrocities like the My Lai Massacre, among others.

The veterans of the Vietnam War received no revelry from the public. Many carried survivor’s guilt, others the weight of moral ambiguity, including orders to distinguish enemies from civilians in a war where such lines were often invisible. Norlander would grapple with these ambiguities for decades.

When he left the hospital, he was relieved to learn of his next assignment: the First Infantry Division at Fort Riley, Kansas.

“Nobody’s going to be shooting at me? That sounded great,” he said. As a tank driver, he found the work “easier than driving a stick-shift Volkswagen.”

Eventually, Norlander was honorably discharged from the U.S. Army. His daughter, Lori, was three months old when he returned from Vietnam, and he’d had his fair share of artillery and explosives.

He and his wife, Judy, had a son, Jared, in 1977. They moved around, eventually returning to California, where Norlander worked at a uniform rental company for two decades.

In 2010, after “retiring,” he took one more post—as a parttime GRF Security officer at the Main Gate in Leisure World, working the night shift and directing traffic. By 2019, he’d moved his way up to secondin- command: GRF Security Department manager, a position in which he still serves today.

A lifetime removed from the jungles of Vietnam, Norlander still carries the quiet strength of a soldier who fought his way home.

Today, he dedicates his days to serving the people of Leisure World. The official motto of the U.S. Army still applies: “This We’ll Defend.”

A small cut, once marinated in the heat and grime of the jungle, could become a festering wound.

Larry Norlander and Sgt. Cliff Smentek pose with M16 rifles in Vietnam.

Image Courtesy Larry Norlander