Healing Wounds

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat A photograph from the 1969 UA Yearbook shows a cross with a poem of protest against the Vietnam War.

"It would be kind of hard for me to walk around the hills now," he said.

Mobley was on patrol in a village with South Vietnamese forces when his squad encountered a "fly trap." In a split second, an enemy soldier popped out of a small camouflaged hole in the ground and fired his pistol.

Mobley was about six feet away when he was shot through the right side of the forehead. The bullet traveled through the top of his skull and embedded itself in the back of his helmet.

"He pulled the trigger a fraction of a second before I did," he said, adding that the scene ended in a shower of gunfire, as he and his comrades immediately opened fire.

"Before I hit the ground, he was in pieces," he said.

The bullet damaged a portion of his brain, rendering his right leg immobile. Discharged from the Marines in 1975, Mobley said he spent a lot of time in a sling and leg brace trying to rehabilitate his wounds.

Editors Note The Century 1999, the turn of the century and the millennium will be a worldwide year of historical reflection and celebration. The Arizona Daily Wildcat today features the second in a weekly series of stories examining the events that shaped the University of Arizona community and the roles we have played in world events.

He went on to receive undergraduate degrees in U.S. history and political science at the University of Arizona in 1988 and was president of the university's veterans club.

He led a movement to get the names of students who died in Korea and Vietnam mounted on the bronze plaque in the Memorial Student Union.

He raised about $2,000 to help get the names of the 88 UA student soldiers who died in combat up on the wall as a bartender at the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 10,008, through the Miller Brewing Company.

After three weeks of volunteers comparing names of UA student rosters to a list of war dead from the U.S. Department of Defense, Mobley and his partners saw the names embossed in the summer of 1987.

Speaking about his experiences helps him deal with his Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, the clinical euphemism for shell shock that thousands of veterans brought back from the war.

There was a time for about five years where he'd go through weekly counseling for the stress disorder because he had no one else to talk to.

"I'm down to once a month now," he said.

During his one and one-half tours of duty, Mobley said he received three Purple Hearts, and was run over by an M-48 tank during training in the Philippines. He was "blown out" of a helicopter during an enemy rocket attack.

Scenes like the latter were a major source for combat stress he has suffered since the war because he felt he was powerless to help his comrades.

"When the crash came down two guys weren't killed, but they were burnt to death, and I heard them screaming," he said, adding that 17 Marines died in the blaze. "I just couldn't move and I felt very guilty about that because they were my troops."

Mobley said he joined the United States Marine Corps in 1968 simply because he saw it as the ultimate patriotic sacrifice for his country: "The grand and glorious thing to do."

"Why else would somebody join the Marines?" he asks. "When I joined the Marines I didn't plan to come back to the United States alive.

"I don't regret it," he said. "I'm sorry I'm handicapped but again I don't regret it. I can't tell you I'd do the same thing again not knowing what's going to happen but I don't have any regrets about it."

As opposition to the war spread across the United States, troops returning from Vietnam were often at the forefront of demonstrations.

When Dennis St. Germaine returned from Vietnam in 1967, not much was happening on the University of Arizona as far as opposition to the war, he said.

St. Germaine, now a UA news services editor, was in the U.S. Army 1st Infantry Division and one of the first combat troops sent to Vietnam after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution facilitated the American involvement.

But there was a growing opposition on both coasts long before 1967, and it wasn't long before things started to heat up at the University of Arizona, he said.

"Arizona is kind of an out of the way, laid-back place, and it especially was in the 60s," said St. Germaine, adding that by the 1969 - 1970 school year, students became active in protests like the National War Moratorium.

As a veteran, St. Germaine said he couldn't understand the dragging out of the war, with the death toll rising steadily with each year of U.S. involvement.

"My point of view was that I didn't - and I still don't -think the war was being waged properly," he said. "If it was going to be waged at all, it should have been with some attempt to win, and that wasn't happening."

St. Germaine added that he went through many of the stages of adult life after he returned from Vietnam without seeing an end to the conflict, or the opportunity for many other young men to do the same.

"I got out and I got through college, got married, became a father, and it was still going on," he said.

But St. Germaine said it was the prevailing attitude of protesters like himself that the implications of the Vietnam war ran deeper than just the conflict itself.

"It just seems to me that there were several things that were wrong in the United States, one of those being that all people weren't treated equally under the law or even by other people," he said.

"There was a big civil rights protest about the same time the Vietnam War came along and the two were naturally tied together because many people who had served in the war were from poorer backgrounds."

St. Germaine said he believes that in Vietnam, the United States "made a line in the sand with communism."

"We didn't win that war in the sense that we took the land, but we won it in a sense that there have been no major fights for communists to try to take over since then," he said. "It kind of stopped the dominoes from falling."

Along with the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War, St. Germaine said the 1960s was a decade in which the largest generation of people conceived in this country was coming of age in a future they perceived as bleak.

"All those things sort of converged in the 60s and 70s, I think the worst is over," he said. "We're heading into a new millennium. The world is much different."