Barges unload equipment and supplies on the Quang Tri River at Dong Ha, South Vietnam, where Everett Roberts was stationed.

ENTERPRISE — As Veterans Day approaches and the U.S. Marine Corps’ 246th birthday arrives today, Wednesday, Nov. 10, there’s one Wallowa County family that has reason to remember both.

The Roberts family — Errol, John, Susan and Everett — all served in the Marine Corps during the Vietnam War, following in the footsteps of their father, Ivan, who served in World War II.

Ivan was one of about 28,000 Marines and Army infantry troops to invade Peleliu, according to history.com. While he escaped that landing relatively unscathed, he was wounded in the legs by Japanese mortar fire during the invasion of Okinawa, Errol said during an interview with all four Thursday, Nov. 4.

“He had shrapnel in his legs all his life,” Susan said.

“They couldn’t take it all out,” Errol added.

But Ivan, who died in 2001, recovered from his wounds satisfactorily enough to return to log, work at a sawmill and farm near Wallowa and raise his four children with wife, Agnes.

“Otherwise, these three wouldn’t be here,” Errol said of his siblings. “I was already on the way.”

Family tradition

But Ivan was just the second generation of Marines in the family — and far from the last.

“One of Dad’s older sisters was married to an Irishman, Marquis ‘Mick’ O’Malley,” Susan said. “Uncle Mick had been in the horse Marines in China (during the Boxer Rebellion) and Dad admired him.”

When World War II broke out, Ivan was eager to serve his country.

“The story we got from Dad was that he and some other guys from here went down and were going to join the Navy,” Susan said. “But Dad didn’t like the look of the bell-bottomed pants so he joined the Marine Corps — that’s the family story.”

Ivan raised his kids on stories of how tough Marine drill instructors could be.

“He had stories about boot camp, so we were pretty well prepared when we went,” Susan said. “We were just like a bunch of country kids coming out.”

When Vietnam came along, O’Malley’s son, Mick, joined the Marine Corps and was in on some of the earliest action.

“He was a point man for a squad when they were out in the deep elephant grass,” Errol said. “A guy jumped up from about 5 feet away and shot him right through the neck — and he lived. He’s still got the indentations” from the wound. “He was a good example to me, him and my dad.”

So Errol joined in 1966 after a couple of years in college.

“That wasn’t going anywhere, so I joined up,” he said.

John, who’d been a track star at Wallowa High School in the early 1960s, also joined in 1966.

Not particularly inclined toward academics, John said joining seemed like the thing to do.

“I wasn’t going to college,” he said. “That was my job.”

In 1967, both Susan and Everett joined.

Everett just wanted to be a Marine.

“I was just afraid I wasn’t going to get in,” he said.

All three trained at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot — San Diego. Susan, however, went to the MCRD — Parris Island, South Carolina, where all women Marines did boot camp.

“I went because Everett was going and everybody else went, so I went,” she said.

Since their service, Errol’s three sons-in-law, Susan’s granddaughter and Everett’s son and grandson all have served, most during the more recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Their jobs

The Roberts who served in Vietnam had a variety of military occupation specialties.

Errol was trained in meteorology.

“When I went over, I was a sergeant and I was a forecaster,” he said. “I briefed all the pilots before their strikes in the north.”

He said his bases at Marble Mountain and Da Nang were not involved in any firefights, but took plenty of artillery strikes.

John was supposed to be a truck driver.

“I never drove truck but once,” he said. “I went into the MPs for a week then into interrogation at POW camps. We went on patrols to get prisoners.”

Capturing and interrogating prisoners was possibly the toughest part of John’s service.

“That depends,” said the least-talkative Roberts. “It depends on what day it was.”

With only a few women Marines actually in-country, Susan spent most of her service working supply and logistics in Hawaii.

“Everything that went out, men or materiel, went through our office,” she said. “I knew when they went, and I knew when they came out.”

That knowledge came in handy after younger brother Everett was injured.

Working as a diesel mechanic at Dong Ha in the Quang Tri Province near the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) close to Laos, Everett wasn’t in frontline combat. As a mechanic, he rode trucks so he would be available to fix them if they broke down.

“That was kind of a joke,” he said.

But every Marine is a rifleman first, as the saying goes.

“We also served as a guard on the truck,” he said.

In-country reunions

But it was during off-duty time that Everett blew out his knee — the only injury sustained by any member of the family in-country.

“I fell. It was a long way to the ground. There might have been some ‘liquid involvement,’ and it wasn’t (all) water,” he admitted. “After I got hurt, I was in Guam for quite a while and they decided I couldn’t go back so they sent me back to the States and the plane landed in Hawaii.”

That’s when he and Susan met up.

“I got a call that said there’s a medivac plane … on the ground, so the colonel called, gets me a driver, puts me in a jeep … went down to Hickam Field and that plane was taxiing down the runway for takeoff when we got there,” Susan said. “About that time, the jeep comes screaming around the corner of a building with officers in it. The officers asked if I’m Lance Cpl. Roberts and I said, ‘Yes sirs,’ and they told the driver of my jeep to follow us and they went screaming down the runway and we went screaming down the runway behind them.”

“By that time, the plane had already started its takeoff,” Everett said.

“All of a sudden, that plane sits back down and comes to a dead stop. … The most humorous part of this story is the pilot leaps out and he’s running around under his aircraft looking up because, we found out later, all they said to him was, ‘Abort takeoff, abort takeoff.’ So he thought something was wrong with his aircraft,” Susan said. “We pull up and these officers said ‘Lance corporal, come with us,’ so we go up the stairs of the medivac plane … and a guy yells ‘Is there a Cpl. Roberts aboard this aircraft?’ They all turned around to look, and he goes, ‘Uhh, yes sir. That’d be me.’ One of the officers said, ‘Get off of this thing.’ So we got off … and Everett and I are saying, ‘Hi, how are ya?’ and these guys are going, ‘Visit, we’re in no rush.’ So we visited for a while and he got back on the plane and they took off.”

Later, her driver asked, “Your dad a general or something?”

There were other reunions, too.

“John and I spent Christmas of 1968 together there,” Everett recalled.

Errol, John and Everett almost served in-country simultaneously. But it was the WWII tragedy of the five Sullivan brothers serving together aboard the USS Juneau who all died Nov. 13, 1942, when their ship was sunk, that led to a servicewide policy preventing multiple siblings from serving in harm’s way together.

“I had orders to go and I packed up my family because I was stationed in South Carolina and I actually started to pull out and this car pulled up and I had to unpack everything and put it back because (he was told) they just found out I had two brothers in Vietnam and I couldn’t go until one comes home,” Errol said.

Soon thereafter, John returned stateside.

“Actually, I drove you to the airport,” Everett recalled.

Possibly the best reunion was stateside when all four were stationed at various places around the country.

“The Marine Corps fixed it so we all had leave at the same time so we could be home for Mom and Dad’s 25th wedding anniversary in 1969,” Susan said.

Memories

Going to war leaves indelible memories on a young person that lasts a lifetime. The Robertses are no exception. But all the memories aren’t bad.

Everett recalls the smells of the diesel fuel and oil from his duty station.

“There’s a song that was called, ‘Those Were the Days,’ (from 1970) that was popular at that time. If I hear that today, I can almost smell it again,” he said. “When I hear that song, I can still smell that smell. That’s the one thing that stuck with me the most. … Fuel, oil, diesel — all of that stuff.”

For John, it was simply going home.

Errol recalls the large troughs outside the mess halls where Marines scraped garbage from their trays.

“The Vietnamese women would be standing out there at these 5-gallon drums filling up with our garbage,” he said. “That’s what they’d take home to eat.”

Everett recalled at least one humorous episode.

“There was the guy from the bakery they told to go burn out the crappers and they told him to put a little kerosene and a little diesel in there and light it on fire and he did,” he said. “Except they missed the part about lifting the flap of the outhouse and pulling the pot out … so a new four-hole outhouse went up in smoke.”

But some memories are less than pleasant.

John recalled some buddies he lost there.

Errol recalled coming face-to-face with the massive losses U.S. troops experienced.

“I remember one morning there were four C5As (transport planes) with their backs down and the body bags were 6 feet high and a football field long,” he said. “But I never talk about that one.”

Even in faraway Hawaii, death was evident.

“There was burial detail you could do if you wanted to,” Susan said. “You could greet the families who were burying their loved ones up there in the Punchbowl (volcano — the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific). … There were a lot of those.”

And some remember the greeting they faced upon their return.

“I remember getting spat on,” Errol said.

Susan, too, recalled the hostility at airports.

“There was a pile of screaming idiots at the gate,” she said.

But that wasn’t the case in Wallowa County.

“What John said earlier, when we came back, this was the kind of place that … they welcomed you home,” Susan said. “It was like with the guys in the Second World War.”

Legacy?

Errol recalled one time he was able to help heal the racial strife that plagued the country.

“At Marble Mountain (south of Da Nang on the coast) one night, there were about three black guys and four of us white guys in this one hooch (hut),” he said. “Of course, back in the 1970s, there was lot of this ruckus going on between whites and blacks … we didn’t get into a fight, but had a dispute. I took out my pocket knife and they jumped back. One of them was my bunkmate. … I said to him, ‘What’s the difference between you and me? You’re black and I’m white.’ So I took my knife and I stabbed my finger — not hard — and the blood popped up. I said, ‘Do that to yours.’ He said, ‘What do you want me to do that for?’ (I said) ‘Just do it.’ He finally did it. (I said,) ‘You see any difference? (He said,) ‘No.’ ‘Right, my blood will save you and your blood will save me.’ We had a great hooch from then on.”

In addition to inspiring younger family members to serve in the Corps, the Roberts veterans have served their communities.

Errol went on to Officer Candidate School and left the Marine Corps in 1988 as a captain. He spent 12 years as a precinct committeeman in La Grande, where he now lives. John has served as a track coach in Joseph. Everett and Susan both served on the Enterprise City Council simultaneously, after which Susan became mayor before her current stint as a county commissioner.

But their service in the Corps — and community — leaves them with some mixed feelings.

“I just believe in America,” Errol said. “My biggest problem is not liberal or Democrat or Republican or anything. We’re just not standing up for America like I think we should. That’s what we all served for and all those who fought in the big world wars did, for the freedom we have.”

Everett agreed, but added, “I’m a little ashamed right now of where we’re at.”