“The feeling had
gone out of everything. It was like we were zombies. You didn't care anymore.
July was terrible. The [North Vietnamese] whacked Ripcord, that hill we were
on, with mortars and rocket fire. Day after day, night after night. I was
getting shell-shocked. I didn't care if I got out. At night you could hear the
[enemy] yelling from the jungles all around, "GI die tonight! GI die
tonight!" This was our deathbed. We thought we were going to be overrun.”
--SPC. 4TH CLASS DANIEL THOMPSON, wireman at Firebase Ripcord, Vietnam, July
1970
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| The Liefers |
When you get the rare chance, it is always good to spend time in the presence of a hero. Heroism, if you
break it down, is mostly an illusion. It is wired in our primal survival instincts
to run away from the danger. When in battle, Liefer tells me you rely on your training, defying instincts.
Liefer and his 91-year-old wife Neva's comfortable senior citizen assisted living apartment is decorated with pictures of family and mementos of their long marriage and the life they have built. They, my wife Shawna and I sit, and converse surrounded by the very vestiges of the heritage a man will fight and die to protect.
It is a beautiful afternoon for our visit, 2022 mid-term election day and three days before Veterans Day. A 24-hour news channel keeps an anxious nation current on the day’s critical election, filling our meeting space with noise. In a nation in desperate need of healing, partisanship abounds.
Fueled today by non-stop social media, we have come to blur bullying narcissism with toughness, mistake unabated cruelty for masculinity, mask authoritarianism as patriotism. So, as a nation in dire need of a moral compass, we must hold on to the illusion of heroes. Today more than ever we need the timeless concept of heroism, imaginary or not.
Fear is not
supposed to be the great motivator of heroes, but it was fear, as much as
anything, that was driving him. Liefer was a short timer, ready to
fly his last mission as a C-7 cargo pilot in Vietnam. He had flown an F-86
fighter jet in an earlier tour of Korea. The C-7 was less sexy than a jet-propelled fighter, but also more
dangerous. It was 1969 and all was winding down, both his deployment and this
unpopular war. Once should be enough if everyone does their share. But he was
now in a second hot spot and his replacement, the next generation of the
American Warrior had gone AWOL. So, Liefer was pulling his second share.
But this war was different than the wars fought by our ancestors. Liefer's father had fought in World War I and two of his older brothers had served in the South Pacific during World War II, heroic engagements to defeat the evil Nazis and the brutal Japanese war machine. Our dads never shared their horrors, men back then didn’t talk about emotions like fear. But war is hell, and the fear Liefer felt in combat was the same as of his older brothers, both who made it home from a simpler and nobler war.
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| Korea |
The politicians
had not even gotten around to declaring it a war, it was a police action. But
the death and the destruction all around Omer Liefer looked, felt, just like it
had throughout history for any soldier locked into the jaws of war.
There were talks
before Vietnam turned into a death zone. After a decade of killing there were
peace talks in Paris to end the war. So why the fighting in between? The nation
was beginning to ask was it worth the loss of those who made the ultimate
sacrifice?
But Liefer would
not let himself go there, the why of Vietnam. He couldn’t. He had to stay
focused on surviving this last sortie. He had a wife and three children and a
farm waiting for him back in his hometown of Red Bud, IL. On December 23, 1969,
he left Vietnam for good, home in time for Christmas.
Kim Liefer Cicero
was apprehensive for the return of a dad who for throughout the first 15 years
of her life been here today, gone tomorrow. “We knew he was away because he
flew jets, but I can’t really say we understood why,” she says today from her
home in Douglass, MA. “By the time he went to Vietnam I was old enough to know
he might not come back.”
“When he went, we
were worried because the war was constantly in the news, and I was at an age
when I was aware of the war. But he downplayed the danger- he was flying cargo
planes rather than fighters. But he had some close calls, which he didn’t share
with us until much later."
Many Vietnam Vets came home suffering from PTSD, a conditioned so misunderstood at the time it had not yet been given a name. Liefer today says he was fine, had gotten through the soul grinder that was Vietnam without losing his grizzle or
his grin. "I can’t say I have ever
noticed that the war had any negative effect on him," says Cicero. "But he hides things well. Dad was career military and
took every assignment in stride-orders are orders kind of thing. We didn’t hear
his stories of close calls until much later. I was an adult when I heard the
first ones.”
Cicero is still learning about her dad. She also has been blessed for the last 50 years to learn from him. Many young girls of the time buried fathers they never knew. "Back then, we didn’t appreciate what our soldiers in Vietnam had gone through. Dad had been living a life and death existence, every day. It is hard for civilians to understand.”
“I got to Vietnam at the very worst of times," Omer Liefer says. "I landed in the country on New Year’s Day 1968, right before the TET Offensive," an event that dramatically raised the level of conflict and American casualties. "I flew fighter jets in Korea but when I was sent to Vietnam, they switched me over to Cargo planes. I flew a C-7. My first flight was the day of the TET Offensive. We had no idea anything of this size was coming," a major counterattack by the enemy to try and knock American forces out of the war.
"My first flight load in Vietnam," he recalls, "was a USO troupe, can you believe that? I was taking (them) out to the jungle to entertain the troops. We get ready to land and all heck is breaking loose, incoming enemy machine gun fire on both ends of the runway. Headquarters radioed and said we don’t know what is going on but get the heck out of there. We aborted the landing and beat it back high speed to our main base.”
Welcome to the War.
Liefer spent a
year in the jungles of Vietnam. He kept meticulous records of his experience.
He landed on 105 different landing strips. His job was to deliver
reinforcements and cargo to the front-line troops. “Most of the time it would
be a small patrol that was sent out and had dug in on top of a hill somewhere.
They would clear by hand an area for us to land. It was very primitive,” And
very dangerous. “The enemy would wait until our wheels hit the ground and then
they would open fire on the plane because they knew we would have to go all the
way to the end of the runway again and turn around as we needed every inch of
the landing strip to take off and clear the trees. We were an easy target. And since the jungle was so thick, we couldn't see them, just the tracers from their guns. But then they figured that out and they went to launching mortars at us and our machine gunners from the helicopters couldn't find them.”
A cargo pilot's duty, according to Liefer, was more different than the
role of a fighter pilot. “The cargo planes were bigger, slower, and not near as
well armed as the fighters I flew in Korea.
Plus, we had to land in enemy territory, often in the middle of the
jungle where it was easy for them to hide. Still, my job was safer, had a lower
causality rate, than the troops on the ground, the ones in the field. They had
it rough.”
Too often his
return cargo were the bodies of dead American soldiers. His plane was never
downed, but he estimates 40% of his missions took incoming enemy fire. “We
tried not to fly at night, it was much more dangerous. Out in the bush, our side
would have to light up the camp for us to find it at night and the enemy in the
jungle always had the advantage at night. If a small platoon was pinned down
and running out of ammunition, and that happened a lot, we would fly in and
drop by parachute the supplies. We didn’t have room to land. We would drop down
to 100 feet and slow to 120 mph to make the drop and that made us a very
attractive target. That was always the most dangerous mission, the one we lost
the most C-7s to.”
Before his
Vietnam experience, Liefer served 13 months as the leader of a
missile crew in Korea. He hated the job, he wanted to fly jets, a job he had
trained stateside 13 months for. "At least I did get to fly a minimum of
four hours a month to keep my flight ready status." While in Korea, he would volunteer for
any mission that would get him back into the cockpit. That almost cost him his
life.
"We were on constant alert for any kind of potential problem along the Korean border. We were going to shoot a test missile over the sea and the day before they sent me out in a little unarmed T-33, the smallest plane we had. No on-board radar and no weapons. It was a training plane and worthless in combat. They wanted to use me as bait to see if our radar would pick up any enemy planes. About one hour into (the two-hour mission), base radioed me and says, 'you have a Chinese MIG coming up on you from China.' The radio man says, 'get home now.' My top speed is 350 mph. I knew the MIG could fly at 700 mph plus. I am 100 miles from base. The MIG is going to run me down. The radio keeps me informed of the MIG’s location. 50, miles, 40 miles, 30 miles. When they get within 10, I radioed back, fill me in every mile. When he gets within 4 miles, I am going to swap ends,” - terminology for a defensive evasive maneuver that would turn his plane suddenly 180 degrees and put Liefer on a direct line heading straight at the enemy plane.
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The Korean War
was never a war that raised the nation's passion level. Today it is called the
Forgotten War. Korea's history, indeed, has been one of hostility, double- cross
and poverty. For 5,000 years, the
countryside has been dominated by local warring tribes and entrenched feuding
lords. We already have North Dakota, what the hell are we doing here? The same
as with Vietnam, any soldier had to ponder, "what am I fighting for?"
When I visit with
the now 93-year-old retired warrior, I am greeted by a man with a sunny
disposition. But I also sense reserve. He does not smile much. “He is amazing, his outlook on life is so positive. You cannot
spend time with him without feeding off his love for life,” says his daughter.
Over the years Cicero has tried to emulate her father's upbeat and selflessness
drive. “I have always felt, if I could live like him, I would be both happy and
successful.”
Two years ago, the Liefers moved
into an assisted living apartment and off their farm, but they still own
the land, renting it out to a neighbor who tends the fields. They still visit
their homestead, checking lovingly, on a regular basis. "In 2020 I got very sick," Omer shares. "We didn't think he was going to make," says his wife. "It was his lungs." Her husband quirky interjects, "I was also 91 years old. That didn't help. But I bounced back pretty good, don't you think?" Still, the couple knew it was time to downsize.
He is 93, she is 91, yet they both graduated with the Red Bud Class of 1948. "I started school at five and he started at seven," says Neva. "He had to walk to school, and it was three miles. His mom didn't think he was old enough until he was seven."
"I farmed 300 acres," Liefer says of his post military life. "I grew corn, beans and wheat. I also would carry about 15 breeding cows and would sell the yearlings. With the cattle I also kept about ten acres of pasture and used part to put up hay. I enjoyed farming. I still have my tractor and my mowers."
Liefer found peace in farming. “I was fortunate that I had a good military pension, and I did not have to rely on the farm to feed my family. Farming can be so unpredictable. You need a lot of land today to make it go. It can be a very stressful life.”
The couple are
well liked and valued members of their senior citizen community. They both stay
engaged performing chores for their many neighbor/friends not still blessed
with like vitality. They have taken charge of the home’s landscaping, and both are currently proudly basking in the compliments they receive for their latest project, the ground's impressive colorful mums. “Normally the frost would
have gotten them by November,” he says. “But we have had such a mild fall. When
you farm, you learn to accept and live with the weather. God is in charge.
All we can do is watch the forecast and adjust.”
Barb Mertz is the Executive Director of the Garden Place, the Liefer's airy and bright Assisted Living home. She notes that most come to live in the Red Bud facility requiring more than they can any longer give back. The Liefer's are an exception. "They are just wonderful," she says, "Great people. They for sure give a lot more than they take." The couple do all of the home's plant watering, both in the lobby, dining room and outside courtyard. They also do the watering for their neighbors who are given by the area funeral homes the floral arrangements after the burial services of relatives. It is a big job, Liefer notes, dryly. "When you get to our age there is never a shortage of funeral flowers."
I ask his
thoughts, with 50 years of historical hindsight, on the unpopularity of the
decade long Vietnam conflict, a war history now marinates in negativity. “We
can look back now and say we should not have been there; it was an unwinnable
war. But I was a soldier, and a soldier follows orders. It is called duty and
it is what our military is built upon. I took an oath, and an oath defines you.
I never compromised my honor. I followed orders.”
I ask about
America’s recent pull out of a 20-year conflict in Afghanistan. Was it a repeat
of Vietnam, a waste of the ultimate patriotic sacrifice made by thousands of
young American men and women in a mission lacking a defined purpose? His answer
I found rather cryptic. “If we didn’t learn anything from Vietnam, then we
wasted the lives of a lot of fine young Americans, again.”
Liefer says what still to this day bothers him about Vietnam
was the lack of home front support for those, many of them draftees, putting
their life on the line for their nation. In particular, he still is bitter of
the behavior of Jane Fonda. She became for many the impresa of the privileged
elite who opposed a conflict they had no blood stake in.
A child of a
celebrity, later a well-known actress of her own right and finally a physical
fitness guru in the 1990’s, Fonda in July 1972 accepted an invitation to visit
North Vietnam, a nation America was still at war with. She made several public
service announcements over the Voice of Vietnam radio pleading with American
pilots to stop the bombings of the North. She
famously posed with an enemy anti-aircraft gun, a weapon whose sole mission was
to kill American pilots. Fonda is to this day, viewed by many US Military
veterans as a traitor who should have been, upon the return to her comfortable
and privileged life in the United States, criminally prosecuted.
“We are all
Americans," Lifer declared. "Period. You don’t disrespect your country like she did. She was
paying tribute to a weapon that was intended to kill me - had killed and maimed
many of my fellow pilots. I know of at least five transport pilots that were in our
training class that didn't come back. I will never forgive, and she should have
been made accountable.”
The Liefer’s were
both graduates of Red Bud High School, class of 1948, but they didn’t date
until almost six years later. “I started teaching in a Lutheran school the fall
of 1948, right out of high school,” she tells me. "Omer had a factory job here
in town.” In 1952, Omer Liefer knew, with the Korean War at its peak, he was going to
be drafted. “I wanted to learn a trade so I thought the Air Force and its
electronics program would be a good fit for me, so I enlisted."
He spent two
years as an enlisted man. He was, he says, a farm boy who had never been out of
Randolph County, but he was older than most of the recruits in Basic Training
and he figured quick how the military rolled; you need the stripes or be ready
to spend the next four years knocking out the push-ups some punk college boy,
younger—but with one more stripe—orders you to do. Without college, Officer
Training School was out of Omer's reach. Then the Air Force changed the rules.
“The number of
pilots had been drained by the heavy fighting in Korea," Liefer recalls,
"and the rules were changed that you didn’t have to be a college grad to
get into flight school. I signed up quick. Half of our class, including the
officers, washed out, but I made it, number one in my class.”
Proudly sporting his newly earned flight wings and Second Lieutenant stripes, Liefer came home on leave and on Main Street in Red Bud ran into Neva, his former classmate. Something just clicked, she says. “In six months, we were married, and within ten months of our marriage, our son Randall was born.”
The coupled raised three kids. Neva was a long-time teacher, retiring from the Red Bud public schools. She persevered in earning her bachelor's degree in education. "We moved around so much it was hard. I would get started, and then we would move, and I would have to start over in another college. I needed two years of Texas History there and I was on schedule to graduate. Then we moved before I could finish the second year."
“My two brothers and I were very close to my mom," says daughter Kim. "She held the family together." Her dad agrees. "My wife did a fantastic job raising our kids. I was often gone, and it all fell on her," the Lt. Colonel says. "I once figured that I was away on deployment from my family for a total of five years. I missed a lot. When I came home, I eased my way back into their lives. My wife had been the one carrying the load so for me to come back in and right away be the disciplinarian, would not have worked."
Neva says she knew that when her husband made the
decision to make the military a career, it would be an enlistment for the
entire family, a burden she stoically accepted. It was a nomadic existence. The family always, wherever
they moved, immediately found a church to attend. Neva says it gave her children
a faith in God, a strong influence in keeping them on a straight path to
adulthood.
“It was rough on
the kids,” she says. “We were always moving. Randall was born in Tennesse, Kim in
Alabama and David in Michigan, three within five years and all three in a
different state. I am happy for at least our two youngest, Kim and David, Red
Bud did give them some stability. Kim was able to do the last three years of
high school here in Red Bud.” Kim graduated in 1975 and was a mainstay on the
school’s state tournament volleyball team and then played volleyball in
college. “Our youngest, David, was able to go all four years of high school
here in Red Bud. It was late, but they did get to lay down some roots.”
Mrs. Liefer says her
three children respected their
parents, and they respected authority. They were raised on military bases where
rules were strict, but they didn't complain. When the family settled into Red
Bud in 1972, she worried that with their compliant attitude in a civilian world
dominated now by a sex, drugs and rock and roll mentality, that her kids with
their military culture of discipline might be viewed as a little too
goody-goody for some. “I was a schoolteacher,” she shares. “And I know how kids
can be, especially in a small town when new kids come in. But once their
(school mates) got to know them, they were well liked. Randall was the quiet
and serious one. David was the character and Kim was somewhat in between. But
they all found their place and we are very proud of all three."
Oldest son
Randall, a 1973 Red Bud High School High alum, is a graduate of the United
State Air Force Academy. Like his dad, he retired from the Air Force as a Lt.
Colonel. He then began a second career as a professor at his alma mater in
Colorado Springs, Co. Randall's son, Nathan, will soon also retire from the Air Force. He is an ROTC grad who became a Lieutenant Colonel and a fighter pilot, the third generation of the family to such serve his country. Liefer says his grandson has a high-level security clearance, in advising the
nation’s newest military branch, the Space Force. Daughter Kim is a retired
schoolteacher living in Massachusetts. Youngest of the couple’s three children,
David, lives an hour away, across the Mississippi River, in Missouri and is
employed in the computer industry.
Liefer left his family in the middle of the most unpopular war
in U.S. history. In May 1970, during a protest at Kent State University in
Ohio, National Guardsmen fired into a student protest, killing four. The United
States invaded Cambodia and the protests exploded. The war was tearing the
nation apart. The Viet Cong enemy knew they could not defeat this foreign enemy
with fire from within, but with political attrition from afar. By 1968 domestic
criticism of the war had become so strong that the U.S. command in Vietnam
decided not to meet force with more force, which would have sent even more body
bags to middle America, where once strong support for the war was wanning. The soldiers in the uniform of the nation were forgotten pawns in a widening cultural
war, with honorable men like Retired Air Force Lt. Colonel Omer Liefer left twisting
in the wind, both on the battlefield and upon their return to civilian soil.
Liefer lived the first half of life defined by honor and sacrifice. For the last half century, by contentment and grace. He says he is not a hero. The heroes did not
come home. The heroes, he says, had children who grew up fatherless, forced to
give comfort to lonely, grieving widowed mothers whose haunting pain would
never really cease. He says if not for God’s will, his family could have buried
a husband and a father lost to a conflict that many now label as unnecessary.
These are gut wrenching testaments to the horrors of war he knew all too well,
yet I sense no hint of emotion in his voice, still the stoic soldier, duty
bound.
He says he
mentally survived Vietnam by making his farm back in Red Bud his singular
obsession. When other pilots would share plans for post-military riches, car
dealerships and fancy downtown offices where they could become the movers and
shakers of the financial world, or perhaps commercial airline pilots, he said
he had no interest in cashing in. He wanted only to return to his hometown in
one piece and then every spring turn the sod, to make things grow. He thought
only of corn and family. The older he gets, the more Liefer tries to simplify,
the more he settles into his simple routines. His wife says he doesn't have any
hobbies, but he is always busy, always in demand. Seated next to his wife, I
notice for the first time a smile.
In a simpler time, our conquering war heroes were welcomed home with ticker tape parades. The men who survived the jungles of Vietnam came home to a at best indifference from a nation that wanted to forget. Retired Air Force Lt. Colonel Omer Liefer was told, it's hell over there. You had a wife and three kids, I remind him. You had already done a full tour in Korea, done way more than your share, I plod. You had the seniority to sit this one out, safe and out of the line of fire. Did you ever think about seeking a spot in the National Guard, staying stateside and out of the meat grinder Vietnam by 1969 had become? No way, he responds, “I took an oath. I had to go."
I know it is a half a century late, but welcome home Sir and thank you.
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