Barry McAlpine
Faces of Five Wars
Story by Karin Orr
Portrait by David J. DeJonge

Historical original interview; not a current biography.
Recovered original Word document: Barry McAlpine.doc

Barry McAlpine
Staff Sergeant
U.S. Army
Vietnam War
	
	“I’m an aggressive kind of guy by nature,” says Dr. Barry McAlpine with and easy grin.  “If you’ve got a football team, I’m the linebacker, and if you’ve got a baseball team, I’m the catcher.”  A chiropractor in Holland, McAlpine is also emotional about “simple things” like love and patriotism.  “If I hear taps, I’ll cry.  If I see… the older guys marching in a parade, I’ll get sentimental,” because “these guys paid the price.”
	With such feelings, it isn’t surprising that McAlpine chose not to take student or marriage deferments when he was drafted for Vietnam.  What is startling is his description of ten months intense combat as “a good experience”-especially since he was wounded three times and received three Purple Hearts.
	Instead, McAlpine refers to his service as a blessing.  “I was given gifts for that,” he says.  “It gave me a wonderful outlook on life.  It gave me freedom.  It gave me a family.  It gave me values.”  While in Vietnam, McAlpine gave readily of himself, too.  But he is not so forthcoming about that.  Twice he was wounded administering first aid to other casualties.  “You’ve got to or they’ll die,” he says matter-of-factly.  “Then I had to go back in and take care of some unfinished business.”
	“Unfinished business” is the kind of code those who have been in battle use.  It is a sample of the understated way warriors describe a situation the rest of us would find terrifying and intolerable.  In a letter of commendation, the Army says McAlpine left a position f safety, not only to aid and evacuate the wounded, but also to come forward a second time, “to close with and destroy the enemy.”   He also led his comrades when their squad leader was killed and, finally, stood alone and killed the remaining enemy soldiers with “courageous and aggressive action.”
	For taking care of business, McAlpine was awarded his first Silver Star.  The second came three months later, when his platoon was under attack, out of water, and low on ammunition.  After their re-supply aircraft was shot down, Sergeant McAlpine rushed to the crash site, carrying the wounded pilot to safety and preventing “more serious injury to four other soldiers.”  “Can you imagine?”  McAlpine laughs.  “I mean, here’s a twenty-year-old kid who must have been watching too many John Wayne movies.”
	McAlpine, however, does not slough off the awful consequences of his squad’s mission to “search and destroy.” “I questioned some of the things I did at first,” he reveals.  “Then I made it real simple… You get real goofy going picky on the things you’ve got to do… if you’re going to survive.  I was on a mission; I wasn’t a missionary.”  Yet every time he rode the helicopter skids into the jungle, he said the Lord’s Prayer, thinking “every word, all the way through, just like ol’ time catechism.”
	Now that his war and the wars previous are over, McAlpine has no ill will for the Vietnamese people, “or French people, or Germans, or Japanese.”  Life is hard enough, he believes, “without veterans putting on their own old stigmas they should have buried a long time ago.”  The veterans themselves, though, McAlpine would like remembered, but now with pity- “There’s not a veteran I know that wants sympathy,” he says, “whether he’s in a wheelchair or walking with crutches.”  Nor with mourning.  The friends he lost “aren’t interested in me crying on their graves… They’re interested in (me) saying, ‘Hey, thanks.  You did a good job.  Remember me, think of me, but carry on’.”