It took several refined Google searches but I finally ran down this detailed piece. Exerpt from a larger article detailing the families charitable work.
AT ONE POINT when I was driving with John down Highway 61, I tried to start up a conversation about his war experiences.
"So were you in combat?"
"Yes."
"Why did you go to Vietnam?"
"When I was at Wooster, there were a lot of people talking about the war in the dorm rooms, but I didn't think they under-stood it."
"So you volunteered and joined the Army?"
"Yeah."
"What unit? What part of the Army?"
"I was in Special Forces."
"Really? Why did you do that?"
"I figured if you're going to do something, you should do it the best you can."
The conversation continued, deposition-like, until I gave up. Like many Vietnam vets, John is reluctant to talk about the war. Later I dug around and discovered that John's experiences were a whole lot more than just your basic tour of duty.
John was a Green Beret, part of a unit code-named the Studies and Observations Group, or SOG (cover for "special operations group"), a secret, elite military unit whose operatives would be disavowed by the U.S. government if captured. SOG often conducted actions behind enemy lines and in Laos and Cambodia. John joined the unit in 1968, right after the Tet offensive. On almost every mission there was a firefight. A particularly horrifying battle occurred in the A Shau Valley in Laos while he was assigned to a unit named ST (strike team) Louisiana. John was the commando team's No. 2 as well as its medic. One morning ST Louisiana was dropped from helicopters onto a ridge near the DMZ and was attacked by North Vietnamese army soldiers. In a memoir titled Across the Fence: The Secret War in Vietnam, fellow Green Beret John Stryker Meyer gives an account of that day: "Four of the NVAs rounds struck the tail gunner, wounding him severely. As Walton swung his CAR-15 [a sub-machine gun version of the M-16] toward the enemy soldier ... [his] rounds hit the NVA soldier and drove him back in the jungle."
The account goes on to say that Walton's commanding officer, Wilbur "Pete" Boggs, called in a napalm strike that landed yards away from John. Soon the six-man team was surrounded. One was dead and three were wounded. John tended to casualties, including Boggs, who was knocked semiconscious by shrapnel, and Tom Cunningham, who was badly hurt. "The knee got blown out and started hemorrhaging very, very severely. John Walton applied a tourniquet to my leg to stop the severe hemorrhaging," recalls Cunningham today. John called in two choppers for extraction. As the first Kingbee dropped in and lifted off with some of the men, the NVA intensified its assault. A second chopper was needed to get all the men out, but the landing zone was too hot to make it in. Walton and his team thought they were doomed, but suddenly the first chopper came back down, even though their added weight might make it too heavy to take off again. With the enemy advancing into the clearing, firing at the helicopter, and Walton trying to keep Cunningham alive, the Kingbee took off and barely made it over the treetops.
Cunningham and Boggs survived, though Cunningham lost his leg. That night while John was playing poker, someone pointed out that he had a flesh wound across his right wrist. A round fired by the NVA soldier John had killed had creased his skin. Later John was awarded the Silver Star. "If I were on the committee I wouldn't have given it to me," says John. "There were people doing things like that all around."
How do you come back from that to a world of garden hoses and toothpaste and everyday low prices? Sam and the family wanted John to join Wal-Mart, but the only job John felt comfortable with was as company pilot. Even that proved too confining. John set out on his own and started a crop-dusting business in Texas and Arizona. Crop-dusting may sound like an innocent enough occupation, but it's actually sort of an excuse to fly dare-devil tricks in a single-engine aircraft all day. (It's also kind of like doing bombing runs over and over.) You swoop down way low over Farmer Brown's alfalfa field— nearly touching the leafy green for half a mile or so— and then pull up, up, up to clear the wires at the end of the field. And then repeat.
Crop-dusting was a fine way for John to reacclimate himself to civilian life, but there are only so many years a man can do that. Next, the sea called him. "I started a boat-building business in California, Corsair Marine. We built trimaran sailboats. The company is still going. An Australian bought it several years ago." Meanwhile, John married, divorced, remarried, and had a son.
Eventually, though, Wal-Mart pulled John back. "It was around 1990. Dad was still alive. I had been running the flying services and the boat-building operation for a while, and was starting to do some other investments, and had been making some trips with Dad, and he asked me whether I'd be interested in being on the board. I jumped at the chance."
Over the past decade John has become more and more of a businessman. He bought another boat company, called Pearson Yachts, which makes high-end motorboats— though what really attracted him to the company was a subsidiary that made turbine blades for wind farms. That division has been spun off; it's now making blades for Mitsubishi and, according to John, "doing some prototype work for the government in composites for military vehicles and that sort of thing." John also formed a holding company called True North, which is the umbrella entity for Pearson, the composites operation, and his other venture capital investments. (One of Pearson's newest models is named True North, by the way.)
No matter where his life leads, John won't forget Vietnam, even if he doesn't want to talk about it. Late last fall a private jet landed at a small airport in Fargo, N.D., to pick up retired South Vietnamese Colonel Thinh Dinh. The jet was John Walton's. He flew Thinh to a SOG reunion in Las Vegas. It was the least John could do— 36 years ago it was Thinh in his Kingbee who came back to pick up Walton and just barely made it over the trees on that bloody morning in the A Shau Valley. John is a guy who voluntarily traveled to hell, is lucky to be alive, and now is one of the richest people on the planet. Maybe that's where his commitment comes from. Maybe that's why he's driving down that Mississippi highway.
REPORTER ASSOCIATES Kate Bonamici, Doris Burke
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2004...est15nov04.htm
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