The Press Democrat - Santa Rosa Vietnam veteran gets long-overdue medals presented by Rep. Mike Thompson

Vietnam War veteran John Allen of Santa Rosa picked up a fistful of ribbons and medals four decades after the fact on Monday, with an assist from fellow veteran Mike Thompson, who is now serving his ninth term in Congress.

"Thanks for your service," Thompson, 64, a Democrat from St. Helena, told Allen, 65, a retiree, in a brief meeting at the congressman's Santa Rosa office.

"This is just great," said Allen, wearing a long white beard, suspenders and blue jeans.

His son, Patrick Allen of Cotati, said the occasion was "fantastic." His father, he said, "never spoke much about" his role in the agonizing war that ended in 1973, with American losses of more than 58,000 service members and Vietnamese civilian and military casualties estimated at more than 3 million.

Only recently, the Navy veteran began seeking the awards he was due, including a combat action ribbon and veteran service medal, encountering a bureaucratic thicket.

"There was a lot of confusion about where to go and who to see," he said. "It's government."

Thompson, a former Army paratrooper who was seriously wounded in Vietnam, said he considers it important to get veterans the honors they earned. Last week, he presented Vietnam service awards to an Air Force veteran from Benicia.

The two men are among the 2.7 million Americans who served in a war that ended in a bitter loss that is part of history for their children, who are now watching the nation cope with grinding conflicts in the Middle East.

"I'm very proud that he served," Patrick Allen said, describing his father as "a very pacifist type of guy."

Allen and Thompson served back-to-back tours in Vietnam: the former aboard two Navy ships in the Mekong Delta in 1969, the latter as a staff sergeant with the Army's 173rd Airborne Brigade in 1970.

An Oregon native, Allen enlisted in the Navy right after graduating from Sir Francis Drake High School in San Anselmo in 1967, a move he said was intended to beat the draft and avoid going to Vietnam. "That worked out," he said wryly.

Dispatched after a safe year at a San Diego naval air station, Allen was assigned to the "brown water navy" in the vast river delta at the southern tip of Vietnam, serving aboard a barracks ship, the USS Colleton, then a tank landing ship, the USS Hunterdon County, which had been recommissioned at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard after fighting in the Pacific during World War II.

Aboard the ships, "you never knew what might happen," said Allen, recalling rocket fire from the shore and the threat of mines and Viet Cong swimmers in the water. As a defensive action against the latter, sailors would routinely toss hand grenades in the water, he said.

Much of Allen's duty was down in "a hole," the ship's engine room, a loud, dimly lit place with a temperature of 120 degrees.

The 328-foot Colleton provided floating quarters and medical facilities for the Army's 9th Infantry Division, with ammunition and warm beer stored on barges.

Soldiers would "come onto the boat covered in mud, take a hose and clean off and head for a bunk," Allen said.

The Hunterdon County, also 328 feet long, supported helicopters and river patrol boats like the craft commanded by Martin Sheen in the 1979 movie "Apocalypse Now." Allen's ship ventured next to the Vietnam-Cambodia border while he was aboard, and the following year, in May 1970, the Hunterdon County was the first U.S. ship to cross into Cambodia as part of an invasion that prompted a firestorm of protest in the U.S.

After separating from the Navy, Allen settled in Sonoma County and worked for several local firms that manufactured electronic scales. He remembers the war "as if it were a couple of days ago," he said.

"I don't think it's strange at all" that communist-governed Vietnam is now a U.S. ally, with one of the fastest economic growth rates in the world, he said. "It's a beautiful country."

Thompson, a St. Helena native who still lives in his family's home, dropped out of high school after his junior year to join the Army in 1968. "I was really stupid," he said, describing the decision that he realized — in boot camp — might have been unwise.

Sent to Vietnam in 1970, his tour was cut short while he was leading a combat patrol in a valley one morning and the platoon's point man triggered an explosive booby trap, killing the point man instantly and knocking down Thompson, who was standing several yards away.

One piece of shrapnel tore through his nose and the metal fragments broke bones in both of his feet and severed an Achilles tendon, while the blast caused some permanent hearing loss. He spent four months recuperating at hospitals in Vietnam and Japan and was awarded a Purple Heart.

Returning to Napa Valley, Thompson went to school on the GI Bill, earning a bachelor's degree, high school diploma and master's degree, in that order.

In 1990, he narrowly beat a Republican incumbent to become the first Vietnam veteran elected to the state Senate, stepped up to the House in 1998 and last month celebrated 25 years of public service, going undefeated in 12 straight elections.

Thompson wears on his jacket lapel every day a replica of a combat infantryman's badge given to him during his 1990 campaign by the late B.T. Collins, a former state assemblyman who served as a Green Beret captain during the Vietnam War and lost his right arm and right leg to a grenade attack in 1967.

Thompson's first postwar return to Vietnam was in 2000 as part of President Bill Clinton's trip to Hanoi in 2000, the first time a chief executive had set foot in the country since Richard Nixon visited U.S. troops outside Saigon in 1969.

Thompson's third trip was a month ago with a House delegation consulting with Vietnamese leaders on workers' rights, trade and climate change, with a visit to wartime leader Ho Chi Minh's house on the grounds of the presidential palace in Hanoi.

"I like Vietnam," Thompson said. "The people are wonderful."

John Allen said he's not sure what to do with the ribbons and medals he received Monday. "Find a good place to put them," he said, possibly framed and hung on a wall.

Thompson had some advice for Patrick Allen.

"Fathers' Day may be over but he's still a hero," the congressman said. "So go home and mow the lawn for him."