Hundreds of Vietnam vets honored at Mall of America

This year marks 50 years since the end of the Vietnam War.

Hundreds of Vietnam War veterans from across the state made their way to the Mall of America for an event to honor their service hosted by the Minnesota Department of Veterans Affairs.

John Engebretson enlisted in the Marines in 1966 and served 13 months in Vietnam. He was happy to be able to connect with this community of veterans.

“It’s an emotional day,” he said. “I didn’t think it would be this way and it’s good to be with some people from my hometown, New Ulm. We all came up on a bus together and so that part shows cohesiveness.”

Due to the controversial nature of the war, he says there was little support for returning veterans.

"When I got back from Vietnam, I didn't let anybody know I even served,” he said. “And so I became a teacher in New Ulm — where I spent my career. We’ve come a long way. And I hope our country realizes that war is serious. And don’t enter it without having a very, very good reason.”

Gov. Tim Walz said it would have been easy for Vietnam veterans to be bitter when they returned from their deployments and did not get the kind of welcome the generation before them had gotten.

“The difference was the nation had not yet learned how to separate the war from the warrior,” Walz said. “And when each of you came back, it felt as if a nation had turned their back rather than welcoming.”

Walz said Vietnam veterans instead went to work making sure returning soldiers and sailors had access to resources.

“You set about transforming how this nation views our veterans,” he said. “You transformed the VA health care system into the world’s premier medical system, saying that we must care for our veterans. You transformed the way we saw the wounds of war, both physical and mental.”

“Now there were great heroes in Vietnam. The young men and women who went to Vietnam put their lives on the line every day. And you can see 50,000 of those names on a wall in Washington, D.C.,” said Vietnam Veteran Lawrence Mahoney. “There was also horror in Vietnam.” 

Mahoney said the war was morally difficult and enlisted men and women were negatively affected by poor decision making from military and political leaders.

“I don’t care what your position was, what your duty was. If you served in Vietnam, you were affected,” he said. “Veterans, take care of yourselves.”

James Mason of Mankato served with the Marines, on three tours in Vietnam. He was a scout dog handler, meaning he trained a German Shepherd/Husky mix to help keep U.S. soldiers safe.

“A scout dog handler is somebody who’s out in front,” he said. “What he’d do is search for booby traps, mines, snipers that might be dug into spider trap holes … I think without the dogs over there, a lot of people might not have made it because I know that he saved me probably 12, 13 times from trip wires and things like that.”

The dog was named Lad. Mason pulls out a weathered old photo of him from his wallet. Lad is wearing a hat, seeming to smile as he pants in the photo. 

Mason had trained Lad on a U.S. base and the pair traveled to Vietnam together on C-130s. Mason says they were inseparable, with the dog sleeping next to him during deployment and working with him all day.

“When it was time to come back home I wanted my dog, just like so many other dog handlers,” he said. “I offered them $5,000 — that’s what I had in my savings account to bring him home but you couldn’t bring him home because of the domestic dogs here in the United States. They figured he might have brought some kind of disease here. So a lot of them were buried in Da Nang Vietnam, at a military base there.”

Mason and other dog handlers get together every few years.

“Every dog handler in that room was crying,” he said. “Because they know they couldn’t bring the dog back. So it was pretty emotional… they’re not just a dog. I call him a Marine. He was just a Marine like me.”