What the State May Have Looked Like for a Returning Vietnam Vet

As the end of preparations for my upcoming book Can-Do Californians is now in sight, I’m going through those final steps of reading through the draft, making minor adjustments, and finalizing the project.

It’s also a time of thinking back to a family member who spent a very brief period of time in California as a returning soldier from Vietnam.

That soldier was Army Specialist Four, William Newvine. Billy has been featured in a number of columns here on MercedCountyEvents.com and is the subject of a book I wrote several years ago.

He died six months upon returning home from Vietnam. My book Finding Bill, features interviews with soldiers who knew him.

One of those soldiers told me what it was like when Bill and some members of his unit returned stateside.

They returned to the Bay Area of California, where for two to three days, they were mustered out. Mustering out describes the process for a soldier to go through before he or she returned to civilian life.

The returning soldier is subject to medical tests, and counseling as to what to expect in civilian life.

They were being reminded that they had to drop some of their old military habits.

As Bill’s friend Paul Metzler told me about eight years ago, “A lot of us swore like bandits over there. We were in a strange world over there, so the military gave us suggestions on ways to adjust our behavior back home.”

Paul remembers the time at the Oakland Army Base almost like it happened much less than the actual time that has passed. The time was October 1967. Vietnam was now a topic dividing the nation. While the men were inside acclimating to the return to civilian life, outside there were demonstrations from anti-war protesters.

“Protesters were there, but there were not too many of them and it really didn’t bother us,” he said. “We were so happy to be back in the states.”

Not everyone who mustered out at the Oakland Army Base was confronted by protesters.

Bud Stevenson who lives in Solano County, wrote an opinion essay published in the Daily Republic newspaper in 2016.

In that essay, Bud tells of his experiences July 20, 1968:

After a trans-Pacific flight aboard a Braniff Airways flight, with one stop in Hawaii, we landed at Travis Air Force Base and were taken by bus to Oakland Army Base, where we received our honorable discharge papers. Next stop was SFO, and then a commercial flight to New York, where my family still lived.

After a day of doctors, counselors, and Army officials pitching for returning soldiers to “re-up” for another tour of duty, Bill Newvine, his friend Paul Metzler, and two others chipped in for a taxi ride from Oakland to the San Francisco Airport.

They likely took in the magnificent view from the Bay Bridge, where they could see the San Francisco waterfront, the Golden Gate Bridge, and Alcatraz off in the distance.

At the Airport, the men boarded a plane bound for Chicago. In Chicago, the four exchanged addresses, promised to reunite in the summer of 1968 in the Adirondack Mountains, and then changed planes to their respective hometowns.

My uncle died in a car accident just six months later. As near as anyone can tell, that planned upstate New York reunion in the Adirondacks never took place.

Bill Newvine was in California for just a couple of days. He took in what sites he could while in the San Francisco Bay Area. By all accounts, he liked what he saw but probably thought he would never return to visit California.

Once he got back to his hometown in upstate New York, he began to return his life to normalcy. He picked up his new automobile, got a job, and reconnected with friends and family. Indeed, he never did return to the Golden State.