They were just boys

“They needed people, and we were just kind of a link in a food chain,” Westhope native and Vietnam War veteran Dennis “Denny” McKechnie says. “I didn’t have a choice. I got No. 19 in the lottery, and my buddy got 18. … We knew where we were going, right?”

They were just boys when their country called them.

“I didn’t want to be there, but yet, here I am with 30 guys. They don’t want to be there neither,” Denny recalls of the plane ride to Vietnam in May 1971.

He was only 20 years old.

Over the next nine months, Denny would rack up 494 combat hours, 21 medals and the kind of memories that never leave you, no matter how hard you try.

He was 21 years old when he boarded the plane to go home in February 1972.

“Hell, I was 21, but an old man already,” Denny says.
 

HUNTING FOX
Denny was working at an auto repair shop in Williston when he walked into the U.S. Army recruiting office with draft papers in hand. The recruiter sold him on aircraft maintenance after saying the bodywork specialties were full.

He completed basic training at Fort Ord, Calif., before advanced individual training at Fort Rucker, Ala., where he learned “aircraft maintenance” was actually door gunner training.

Denny refused at first.

“I said I didn’t sign up to be a door gunner. … Them suckers get killed all the time,” he says.

He was punished with kitchen and cleaning duties, which kept him up all hours of the day and night.

“I lasted 10 days before I broke,” he says.

Denny’s first test came in the air. From the helicopter, he had to hit a bedsheet-type target which counted the bullets that went through.

“Where the hell did you learn to shoot like that?” the pilot asked.

“In a Piper Cub (aircraft) shooting fox,” Denny replied.

Having hunted his entire childhood in North Dakota, Denny knew how to handle a gun. And he was a good shot, even being named the top shooter in his headquarters company.

“I was good enough. I ended up getting two grades rank out of that. So, I was a Spec 4 less than five months in the Army, which is basically unheard of,” Denny says. “Then we headed to Vietnam.”

HUNT AND KILL
Denny was a helicopter door gunner with the 9th Infantry, 3/5th Cavalry in Vietnam, where he became the crew chief for a UH-1H Huey in just three months. In Da Nang, Vietnam, he served with the 101st Cavalry Airborne and the 2/17th Cavalry near the Demilitarized Zone or DMZ.

“We were in the s**t all the time, so we were going to get all the medals,” Denny says. “Some of those guys might have wanted them, but I wanted to go home with every finger and toe.”

His unit was part of a “hunt and kill” team, tasked with rescuing downed soldiers and destroying shot-down aircraft to prevent the enemy from acquiring military assets.

“We were the rescue ’copter, so we picked up a lot of the dead, wounded people,” he says.

Denny recalls saving a fellow door gunner using a 100-foot nylon rope he got in a trade with Army Rangers.

“I did some horse trading. I was good for that, and anything that could help us, right, whether it be extra bullets or whatever,” he says.

Soldiers on the ground tethered the injured man with the rope, then Denny’s crew airlifted him to a nearby tank unit atop a hill for medical attention.

Denny’s unit was recognizable by the triangle and cross sabers painted across the nose of the helicopters, which he painted himself.

“We were worth a bounty in Hanoi. If they could get that triangle out of our ’copters, it was worth about $1,500 in American money,” he says.
 

FIGHTING FOR THEM
With every story he tells, Denny has something to show for it: a wartime map of Vietnam, a bracelet fashioned from a piece of tail rotor chain off his Huey helicopter, photos carefully preserved in albums and the four funeral programs of friends who died in Vietnam.

“Westphal, we put 61 pints of blood in him,” Denny recalls.

“We lost a lot of guys. I lost my best friend, Denmark,” he says. “I’ll show you a picture.”

Denny holds brief moments of joy in one hand and pain in the other.

He talks about his living quarters in Vietnam – the “fun hooch,” he says, with pictures of girls on the walls that Morris put up, where the officers would come to imbibe on occasion.

Joy left the hooch when Denmark died and Morris lost a leg, and Denny had to pack up their belongings.

“All of a sudden, there I am sitting in a hooch that held four people with two of us (left),” Denny says.

“Probably my biggest regret of the whole deal was we made a pact with a few guys that – we basically roomed together, Denmark was one, Morris was another – that if we ever got killed, we would sit down and write a letter to their family. And I don’t know how many times I took out that sheet of paper and couldn’t do it,” Denny says.

But he’s never forgotten them, or any of the others he served alongside, because he was fighting for them, he says.

“I never fought for no flag. I fought for the guys next to me, right there in the damn ’copter. I wanted nine guys beside me to go home, all in one piece,” Denny says.
 

HOMECOMING
History has shown the Vietnam War era veterans did not get the homecoming they deserved.

“You get off the plane. You got everybody calling them baby killers, just screaming at you, saying you got blood on your hands,” Denny says. “To this day, I don’t know if I killed anybody or not, but I shot them. … That’s what it was. You didn’t pick and choose your targets. They chose you. You shot back.”

When Denny returned to Minot, no one was waiting for him, because he never told his family he was coming home. Instead, he hitchhiked back to Westhope, surprising his parents just in time for dinner.
 

HUNTING ARROWHEADS 
Denny did the best he could with the hand he was dealt.

After the war, he got back into bodywork, owning his own body shop in Westhope until 1989, then working as a body technician at Minot Air Force Base until he retired in 2019.

Next year, he will celebrate 50 years of marriage to his wife, Diane, whom he met when he returned from Vietnam.

They raised a son, Aaron, who gave them a daughter-in-law, Janna, and two granddaughters.

“The way I coped with it is I worked. I was either out in the country hunting arrowheads or I was working. (Diane) will tell you, there was days I spent 21 hours at my shop,” Denny says.

“It kept me (from) thinking thoughts or going out and getting drunk,” he says.

In retirement, Denny spends a lot of time hunting for arrowheads, something he learned to do from his father and taught his own son to do. He is also a collector of coins, guns and ammo. His hobbies keep his hands busy – and his mind, too.

“Sometimes, I’ll close the door up (of my hobby room) and sit there for eight, 10 hours,” he says.
 

ALWAYS IN YOUR MIND
Denny didn’t talk about his military experiences with his family until recently, and never in great detail.

“He’s a pretty private person. I was surprised he would even talk to you (for this story),” Janna says.

A few years ago, the family vacationed to Hawaii and went on a helicopter tour.

“He walked up to the helicopter, grabbed my hand and said, ‘This is the first time I have been on a helicopter since Vietnam,’” Janna recalls. It was the first time in 25 years she heard Denny mention the war.

The family also took a trip to Washington, D.C., where they spent half a day at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

“It was the first time a weight had been lifted off,” Janna says of seeing her father-in-law at the memorial. “It was a somber, sweet moment for my girls to get to be there for Grandpa, though they didn’t understand the totality of the whole thing.”

Over the years, Denny only talked about his service with other veterans, one of whom was a cousin, Max Zurcher, who suffered a chest wound in Vietnam. Zurcher dedicated his life to helping veterans and eventually convinced Denny to go back to the Veterans Affairs hospital in Fargo.

“He was on his deathbed, and I made him a promise,” Denny says. “I was the first one to get 100% (disability) on the first shot.”

What is understood now as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) wasn’t recognized by the diagnostic health manuals until 1980, and Vietnam veterans were the first cohort to have the term PTSD applied to their trauma-related symptoms. PTSD awareness and access to care was gained largely due to the tireless advocacy of Vietnam veterans and veteran groups.

“You try to just let things go, but they're always there. They're always in the back of your mind,” Denny says. “Some things trigger it. Some don't. Sometimes you sit down and talk like this. It actually even might relieve a little tension compared to what it builds. It builds in you. Yeah, sometimes I uncork. I try not to be around people when that happens.”
 

SO WE COULD BE FREE
There will come a time when no Vietnam veterans are left to tell their stories. What should we remember?

“Just realize we were kids in a war that we didn't choose to go to, and yet, when we came home, we got treated like nobody wanted to know us. … We died for our friends, not the country. And I don't hate my country, believe me, I would have never went if I hated it,” Denny says. “We were just there doing (our) job. Wasn't a job we wanted, but it was a job that needed to be done.”

“And one thing that you should write and put down, Cally, is that at the time I was there, I hoped every bullet took a life. And now, in retrospect, I hope that I never killed anybody, because I would have been doing exactly what they are doing, defending their country.”

Others never got the chance to tell their story.

“Freedom’s never free, and it never will be. … Honor those that are dead. I mean, thank them. Those are the guys that went through this s**t so we could be free,” Denny says.

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Cally Peterson is editor of North Dakota Living. She can be reached at cpeterson@ndarec.com.