Williams led charmed life during Vietnam

CONDON – When Mike Williams was two years old, his family moved to Condon and his father went to work at the sawmill at Gordon Ranch. Mike attended grade school in Seeley Lake, high school in Missoula and two years of college at Bozeman. When he dropped out of Montana State University, things started moving fast.

Williams said, "We had an early Thanksgiving dinner and somebody went out to get the mail. While I was eating Thanksgiving dinner, I opened my draft notice!"

It was 1967, a time of major troop build-up in Vietnam. Williams preempted the draft by enlisting in the Army. It meant three years of service instead of two, but he hoped it would keep him out of the infantry.

"Within six months of enlistment I was in 'Nam," he said. "They were rushing us over there."

Given a choice of career paths, Williams had decided to train to become a helicopter mechanic. He said he thought that sounded kind of interesting. In Vietnam he found out helicopter mechanic was a euphemism for door gunner.

Williams said his first three months in Vietnam he flew every day. He considered himself lucky because his company's mission was to fly cover for helicopters dropping off ground troops. He was shooting multiple rounds from his helicopter door, but from high enough that he never saw any individual person he shot. He just laid down fire as directed. He credits that with saving him from the post-traumatic stress disorder that so many troops brought home with them from the war.

Yet the incongruity was never lost on him that his helicopter always turned around when fuel was getting low. He got to return to base and enjoy a nice meal and drink some beer. Meanwhile the ground troops were out there fighting for their lives.

Williams said, "We never knew anything about what was going on down there, but you knew it wasn't good."

Williams also never came in contact with Agent Orange, but he said, "I sure saw the results of it – dead trees and plants everywhere."

Fighting methods changed when the base got Cobra attack helicopters. The Cobra had no room for a gunner. It had a two-officer crew trained to fire its rockets, guns and grenade launcher. Williams became the crew chief of a Cobra he named the Montana Mercenary.

Williams may not have seen any enemy face-to-face, but he said, " What I did see was a lot of Vietnamese people with smiles of fear – trying to let you know, 'I'm a good guy.' You could just see it. It wasn't a true smile. And because of that, over the years I always had a desire to go back and see them living comfortably. And see true smiles."

Reflecting on the war, Williams commented, "Our sense of duty to fight in Vietnam was cloudy before getting there and it never really cleared up. So survival was the goal. In my view, none of us returned – usually unnoticed – to a more protected or enhanced country than when we left. And 50 million patriots never made it back."

In contrast to his own homecoming and that of his fellow Vietnam veterans, Williams said, "I often think about the deep and quiet satisfaction of [soldiers] returning from World War I and World War II."

When his tour of duty in Vietnam was over Williams was stationed at Fort Lewis, Washington. He spent over a year doing maintenance on jeeps and other vehicles. "Just basic stuff," he said. "Nothing of real importance."

He summed up the next chunk of his life just as succinctly. "Got married. Had a couple of kids. Got divorced. I raised the kids through high school."

Williams never pursued a career as a mechanic or anything related to helicopters. Instead he built rental log cabins for KOA. He also went to Japan 12 times to build the same type of cabin there.

Yet always in the back of his mind was that desire to go back to Vietnam and see the people happy. Through an Internet chat, Williams got to know Mai, a Vietnamese woman. She worked at the state insurance agency and became the first person to work with foreign insurance companies when that became possible.

Mai's father was General Phan, at one time personal physician to Ho Chi Minh. General Phan was a plastic surgeon. During the war he treated injured soldiers, which often entailed performing dangerous surgery in the tunnels of South Vietnam. He was also influential in setting up Operation Smile, a program to provide surgical operations for children with cleft palates.

For a couple of years Williams and Mai carried on an email conversation. Williams made two trips to Vietnam, where he saw happy smiles – and Mai. Subsequently Mai came back to Montana and they were married in 2008. Mai became a naturalized United States citizen in 2012.

Williams bought the sprawling building once known as the Wilderness Bar and Café and later as Montana Charlie's. The only furnishings in the building when he bought it were the bar and two mirrors. Williams added a living area onto the building and filled the place with his woodwork and unusual, historic and fun items like a working phone booth, a working jukebox, a pool table that used to belong to his dad, even a piece of barbed wire from a Siberian prison camp. (For pictures and an article on the refurbished building see the Sept. 6, 2016 issue of the Seeley Swan Pathfinder.)

Though Williams knows many soldiers came back from the war in Vietnam wounded physically as well as mentally, he said, "I just lived a charmed life over there, I did. I escaped [the health issues associated with Agent Orange]. I escaped the post-traumatic stress disorder. I don't blame anything in my life on Vietnam."