I interviewed Bill Furan in January 2006 and mourned his passing in 2017. We’ve been learning about Bill’s Vietnam service to help us better understand the Vietnam War’s impact on our region.

Bill enlisted in the Army in 1967 after receiving his draft notice. After completing Basic Training and Advanced Infantry Training the Army sent him to Airborne School and the Non-Commissioned Officer (NCO) Course at Fort Benning, Georgia. He added the chevrons of a Sergeant E-5 to his uniform.

Bill arrived in Vietnam May 21, 1968. Four days later he began serving as an infantry squad leader in Alpha Company, 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Infantry Regiment, 173rd Airborne Brigade.

Bill’s company was in the field constantly, patrolling in the lowlands or the jungle-covered peaks of Vietnam’s Central Highlands (GI’s called this patrolling “humping the boonies”) or doing combat assaults from helicopters.

Leading his squad during patrols and combat assaults was Bill’s near-daily responsibility. Days blended into endless, heavily-laden, heat-burdened, hiking through the countryside or jungle-covered hills or helicopter flights into landing zones (LZs) for more heavily-laden, heat-burdened, hiking. But one company patrol stood out in particular.

“We went out in the lowlands around Bong Son — we were kind of where the foothills of the mountains hit the rice paddies. Somebody must have told them where we were going because in three days we ran into twenty-seven booby traps. [We] had 119 men when we started out. At the end of the 3rd day we were going to set up in a laager site. We had about forty men of the original 119. The mortar squad wanted to set up. They moved a rock and got all blown to hell. After three days there were thirty-four of us walking. They took us out of the field, finally. It was a real hard time for those soldiers in my company.”

Bill’s charmed record of injury-free combat ended on Jan. 5, 1969.

“We’d go out in the boonies and, especially the Central Highlands where it’s triple canopy forest and the grass grows real high, there aren’t any paths anywhere, so you’ve got to have a machete to chop the elephant grass. We started going up this ridge and I found a bunker. We kept going and it wasn’t another 25 meters — it felt like a snake bit me in the leg. I looked down and it was a piece of bamboo — about a foot and ½ long and a quarter inch on the base and it went to a pin-point. They were buried at a slant in the grass. You couldn’t see them.

Before I could reach down and pull mine out and tell my men to stop, three more guys in my squad walked into them. They came in with a medivac in about 15 minutes and took us off to field hospitals.”

The punji stake that impaled Bill’s leg was contaminated, so his surgeon had to clean the wound.

“They cut you — debride all this muscle because the punji stick had feces on it. They did it with Novocain in a tent, but the Novocain didn’t work. I was the first one and the other three watching me almost passed out. It took about three big boys to hold me down while that guy was operating on me.”

Bill spent two months at the hospital in Qui Nhon before returning to his company. He spent the remaining weeks of his Vietnam tour on limited duty because his injured leg swelled up any time he put on his combat boots.

Bill reflected on what was satisfying about his Vietnam service.

“I never got anybody under my command killed. That’s what I’m most proud of — for being a damn good infantry squad leader. I know that the guys with me felt more secure than those in different squads.”

But other aspects of his service troubled him.

“The hardest things to take were right after someone we knew got killed or wounded. Sure, you tried to blow it off like, ‘Oh, he got wasted. It doesn’t mean nothing.’ But, really, it meant something to us. We just didn’t have time to sit down and do what humans do under those situations; grieve and have some sort of release from the kind of pressure that combat puts on you.”

Bill returned in May 1969 to a nation unsure what to do with him and other Vietnam veterans.

“Sometimes there is a little bit of resentment that I feel because I and the soldiers that served with me in Vietnam weren’t treated right — weren’t treated right at all. I came back here and was going to school. It was a pretty bad time in 1970 to tell somebody you were a Vietnam vet. The only recourse I had was there were a lot of Vietnam vets out at the college in Marshall — a lot of them in wheelchairs.”

Bill “teetered” for a long time between feeling pride in his Vietnam service and just keeping quiet. He met his future wife, Susan Riecke, and they married in 1974. He did not share much about his Vietnam service with Susan, though, concerned that she would not understand. She shared that he later suffered from the consequences of Agent Orange exposure.

Bill entrusted his Vietnam service story to me in January 2006 and I have been proud to share it. Welcome home, Sergeant William Furan. I hope you have found peace.

The Lyon County Museum is organizing an exhibit about the impact of the Vietnam War on Lyon County. If you would like to help share Vietnam experiences or help with the exhibit, please contact me at prairieviewpressllc@gmail.com or call Jennifer Andries at the museum at 537-6580.