Vietnam War veteran Larry Stoffel of Fond du Lac tears up when he talks about the love he has for God and Country.

The Reporter photo by Justin Connaher

A young and healthy Larry Stoffel was ready to take on the world in 1969 when he was part of the 1st Air Cavalry Division serving in Vietnam. Submitted photo

In the Eye of the Storm

By Sharon Roznik
The Fond du Lac Reporter

May 29, 2006

Vietnam War wounds disabled Fond du Lac's Larry Stoffel, but they didn't crush his spirit

In Vietnam Larry Stoffel was known as the jokester and the foxhole digger.

So says his buddy Alan VanDan, who served with Stoffel in 1969 in the First Calvary Division, back when the two young men were young and buff and fresh off the farm.

Stoffel never knew the full story of what happened to him in March 1969 until three years ago during a reunion between the two Vietnam vets and some other army buddies from Charlie Company, 3rd Platoon.

"I knew I was hit in the head with a bullet that left a hole the size of a softball. I recall losing five guys that day. But I don't remember what happened after that," said Stoffel, 59, of Fond du Lac.

He tells his story sitting at his kitchen table in his home on Kayser Street, surrounded by memorabilia of a war that took away his ability to work or drive or live like the rest of his friends. He points to faded photos of Vietnamese water buffalo the guys took turns riding in a pseudo-rodeo. Just to pass some time, he said.

His discharge papers and the certificate for his Purple Heart lie scattered among more Kodak instamatic shots — this time of butt-naked GI's jumping into a nameless river just north of Saigon, wild abandon on their young faces.

Partially blind, with a shrapnel-injured foot that doesn't work from the ankle down, Stoffel moves easily between telling slapstick jokes and choking up with tears. Anyone at the American Legion Post No. 75 in Fond du Lac can tell you he is the heart and soul of their military firing squad. Since 1975, he says, he's only missed three funerals.

"They got me as squad leader only they won't let me lead," he says. "They tell me to go right face and I go left."

Last Tuesday he helped place 60 dozen flags on the graves of veterans buried at Rienzi Cemetery out on County Trunk K in time for the Memorial Day weekend.

"I'm a die-hard. When there's hard work to do, I am there," he maintains.

When Stoffel was gunned down during an air assault gone bad it was somewhere along the Ho Ch Mien Trail, he recalls. As the attack by the Vietcong continued, the then 21-year-old laid in the open for hours before he and other wounded soldiers could be med-evaced out.

"Our platoon fought valiantly to stave off that attack while the rest of Charlie Company hovered in the air waiting to land. No one, seeing Larry's wounds, thought he would live," wrote VanDan of Indiana in a story that appeared in the April 2006 edition of the First Calvary's Saber newsletter.

A chopper pilot from the nearby 227th Aviation Brigade heard Charlie Company was in trouble and made several valiant attempts to get to the third platoon. As many times as he was shot down or his "bird was disabled" he would return to his base and jump in another helicopter to try again.

Surrounded by enemy, dead and wounded soldiers lay all over a hastily drawn perimeter, VanDan wrote. Two medics attended to Stoffel, one literally holding his head together, while they waited for help. The hours ticked by.

Disobeying orders to "get the hell out of there" that same relentless chopper pilot, Paul Keil, landed long enough to bring Stoffel and others out of the field.

The Fond du Lac vet recalls being on edge after spending nine months recovering in hospitals. He contracted spinal meningitis and at times his fever spiked to 106 degrees. Stoffel wanted to go back to Vietnam. He was discharged and sent home to Wisconsin.

Before he was wounded, the military told him he made sergeant but his papers somehow never made it through to make it official.

"Before I was drafted, I worked on my grandpa's farm. He told me that some day I would take it over. The day I was wounded, he put the farm up for sale," Stoffel said.

At the 2003 reunion, the men of Charlie Company said they had looked for Stoffel's name on the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial Wall in Washington D.C., scratching their heads that he wasn't there. No one could believe Stoffel was sitting in front them, alive, 34 years later.

John Couper, the medic that held Stoffel's head together, now lives in New Berlin. He recalls seeing Larry briefly at a Colorado hospital when he returned to the states. "They hadn't put the plate in his head yet. I was shocked," he said. Confused, surrounded by an American climate that was anti-Vietnam vet, Couper said he couldn't get over memories of that March 1969 assault for many, many years. He, too, assumed Larry had died. "I was so shook up by the whole incident. It took me 30 years to deal with issues and reconnect," he said.

These days he and Larry talk weekly. "It's meant a lot to me. Larry is always smiling and that's how I remember him in Vietnam. I don't think I could ever be as strong a person as he's become," Couper said.

In love with "God and his country," according to buttons fixed to his Vietnam vet baseball cap, Stoffel said he bicycles 1,000 miles a year, loves canoeing around Lake Winnebago, and horses, which he can't own but admires from a distance. He served as bartender at the Legion Hall for 30 years. "A lot of guys came home from Vietnam and became alcoholics and dope addicts. Me, I put my heart into the Legion. I survived because I love hard work," he said.

On June 3, he is heading to Louisville, Ky., for his third reunion with the First Calvary where he will meet up with VanDan, Couper, maybe even Keil.

"I loved everything about serving my country, and I'd do it all over again in a minute. I never gave it a second thought," Stoffel said, fighting tears that come too easy.

"It doesn't matter what you can't do. I learned to do what I could do and make the best of it."

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