ASHLAND — Greg Gorrell just wants people to remember — to remember the price of freedom.
“The freedom of our country was bought and paid for by men and women who paid the ultimate price,” Gorrell said while sitting on his patio in Arrows Landing in Ashland.
A week or so before Memorial Day, Gorrell, 78, placed 50 flags in his front yard — individual symbols of freedom that he and others fought for in wars throughout the nation’s history.
Gorrell served in the U.S. Army’s 9th Infantry Division, first created in 1918 during World War I. It did not deploy overseas until 1942 during World War II.
The 1963 Ashland High School graduate served from January to December 1967, in southern Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, as a 21-year-old draftee. During his year of service, he lost comrades. He doesn’t like to talk specifics.
“Our whole infantry division was in the thick of it. I’ll just leave it at that,” he said, sifting through memorabilia he pulls out on occasion. To remember.
In the pile of things are a few newspaper articles. One headline, published April 17, 1967 in The Old Reliable, reads “207 enemy killed in Rach Kien.”
The Old Reliable was a newspaper published by 1st Lt. Michael Munzell during his 1967-69 tour in Vietnam. The paper chronicled the 9th Infantry Division’s missions and operations in South Vietnam.
Rach Kien, Gorell said, was the South Vietnam village where his unit was stationed — situated about 45 minutes south of Ho Chi Minh.
Its articles detailed battles fought in and around South Vietnam, like the one waged on May 31, 1967 by Gorrell’s battalion.
In this battle, according to the article that was printed in the Aug. 9 edition, a detained Viet Cong soldier admitted to U.S. forces that the battle resulted in the death of 44 of his comrades, not 10 as originally reported.
“The casualty figure was revealed by an elderly man detained by the (third) Battalion, 39th Infantry. The suspect admitted that the Viet Cong dug 11 graves in a concealed area one mile west of Rach Kien and placed four VC bodies in each grave.”
Gorrell, often taking pauses to collect his thoughts and emotions, recounted on his back porch a battle that did not end up in the paper.
It was dark — middle of the night. Two of Gorrell’s comrades had watch tower duty. He and another soldier, named Julio, sat on guard in the unit’s sand-bagged hut. Their job that night was to keep watch for enemy forces.
“We had night scopes, they would let you see out in the night,” he said. “They weren’t as sophisticated as they are today.”
Nonetheless, the night scopes would allow soldiers to detect movement from around 2,000 yards away.
He and Julio sat in the hut — Gorrell on Fire Direction Control duty, or FDC, and Julio operated the radio. All was quiet, until it wasn’t.
“Night scope picks up significant enemy movement. And it looks like they are headed this way,” one of Gorrell’s comrades in the watch tower announces over the radio.
Gorrell’s FDC duty meant he used a device to determine how far away a mortar shooter needed to shoot. Since it was dark, they didn’t know. Gorrell had to act fast. He ordered Julio to alert the unit’s gunners.
As Julio did that, Gorrell went to work to calculate the approximate distance of the enemy, based on his knowledge of the night scope’s visibility.
Once he had that figured, he’d know how much of a charge needed to launch mortars with illumination rounds into the sky, giving the gunners the needed visibility to “do their job.”
And that’s what happened, Gorrell said.
“Had we all fallen asleep that night, we would have been overwhelmed,” he said. “That was early on (in my tour). And it was a wake-up call to how serious this was.”
“I remember that more than just on Memorial Day,” he said of the countless skirmishes and battles fought in his year’s time there.
He also thinks of his fellow soldiers who died.
“For me, the flag is just one of many symbols for the freedom of our country,” he said.
After the war, Gorrell finished his schooling at what was known as Ashland College at the time. He graduated in 1973 and shortly thereafter landed a job working as a financial controller for BorgWarner Corporation, an automotive supplier with plants across the country.
During his tenure with the company, he and his family lived in Parkersburg, West Virginia and Ottawa, Illinois. In 1987, he moved back to his hometown, Ashland, to work for Spreng-Smith Insurance Agency.
Coming home was tough — for him and the other 2.7 million men and women who served in Vietnam. Gorrell said he witnessed someone burning a flag upon his arrival stateside in 1968.
“But I made a decision,” he said.
His decision was to “do whatever it takes to overcome both wars. The one in Vietnam and war of the mood of the country at home.”
He served on the Ashland City Council, the Ashland County Council on Aging, the Ashland City Schools Board of Education. He served as president of the Ashland County United Way Board of Trustees and in many other civically oriented positions.
He grew his family with his wife, Gayle, of 40 years. He has six children, 16 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
And so the 50 small, mass-market American flags waving in the wind in Gorrell’s front yard aren’t just symbols of patriotism for him. They’re not just flags to casually salute or to ignore. They are not just material colored in red, white and blue.
They are a reminder.
