“I had an out and I didn’t take it” says Athlone Vietnam veteran

An Athlone veteran of the Vietnam war has admitted that he couldn't have lived with himself if he had opted out of enlisting into the US Armed Forces when he had friends who were being drafted.

As a dual citizen of Ireland and the US, Michael Dalton could have chosen to return to the land of his birth to avoid having to go to war in Vietnam. “I had an out and I didn't take it,” he says. “I had friends who were being drafted and I couldn't live with myself if I'd skipped out.”

Dalton was born in The Derries, Bonavalley, and is the son of the late John Dalton, Glynwood and Rita Smullen, The Derries, and nephew of Bobby Dalton.

53 years later, the Athlone native – who is the only person from this area known to have served in the Vietnam war - has spoken for the first time about his experiences and, rather than dwelling on the politics that led America into the doomed war in the first place, he prefers to focus on his call to duty.

“I chose to believe what I was doing was the right thing,” he says. “There's a statue in D.C. (Washington) and when I look at it I see boys helping each other, and that was it, taking care of your brother.”

However, in the space of less than two years, while Michael Dalton was at the battlefront in Vietnam, public opinion in the US turned very firmly against the Vietnam War and when he arrived back on American soil he recalls how the soldiers were instructed “not to wear our uniforms” and added that “no one bothered me, but nobody talked to me either.”

Such was the public outcry at the war that, when the young soldier stepped off the plane at Bradley Airport to be met by his family and friends he was “just another guy getting off the plane – there were no drums or bagpipes.”

Michael had left his native Athlone with his mother, Rita Smullen, as a five year old child to join his father, John, who had emigrated to Waterbury in Connecticut a year earlier “in search of the American Dream” according to his only child.

The Dalton family were no strangers to military service. Michael's father had served in the Irish Army, while his uncle (also called Michael) had served in Korea so the family had a long and distinguished connection to the armed forces.

After graduating from Wilby High School in 1966, a young Michael Dalton found himself emerging into a world where the Vietnam was the the hot topic of conversation. "They were grabbing everybody in the draft,” he says, and three months after registering his interest in enlisting, he got a letter. Pleas from his parents to their only child to return to Ireland in order to avoid the war fell on deaf ears.

Looking back on it now, Michael feels he was always “destined to go to Vietnam” as 220 men from his unit at Fort Knox in Kentucky were sent to Germany and his was just the third name on the list of those being sent to 'Nam. “They were shipping 50,000 soldiers every week to Nam....they were shipping us out like cattle.”

After saying goodbye to their son at JFK in New York, John and Rita Dalton returned to their home in Connecticut while he was transported onboard a Pan-Am flight to Cameron Bay in Vietnam alongside a cargo of anxious young soldiers.

“We were told to go into a building and line up,” recalls Michael, “when it was my turn the guy handing out assignments looked up my name, laughed, and told me I was being assigned to the 1st Cavalry in the Central Highlands. Apparently no one wanted to go there.”

Not only that, but the plane which was to transport him and the other young rookies was grounded for two days due to monsoons, so the soldiers were instructed to “sleep on the tarmac at Cameron Bay” while huge F-4 Phantom jets continually roared in and out of the airport. “Needless to say, we didn't sleep much,” he adds.

It was to be the start of a perilous journey for young Michael Dalton, which was compounded by the attitude of his superiors to the 'new meat' as the rookies were referred to. After landing at Camp Radcliff in the Central Highlands, the Athlone man asked a member of his Division why the patch on their uniforms was so big only to be curtly informed that the patch was the largest divisional patch approved in the United States Army and was made extra large because it was “worn by big men who do big things.”

The 18-year old recruit was assigned to guard duty on his first night which entailed standing out in the open, in total darkness for the next five hours. Already exhausted and disorientated from two nights sleeping on the tarmac back in Cameron Bay, he didn't realise at the time that he was standing close to a barbed wire perimeter fence which was within 100 yards of the enemy Viet Cong (VC) forces.

“I had survived a mortar attack earlier that day when our convoy came under attack on the way from the airport to our base, so I was not going to sleep out there while on guard duty as I had 360 days left in Vietnam and I was determined to come home alive,” he says.

He describes that first night of guard duty as “the loneliest place I've ever been in my life” and says it is “hard to believe a place like that existed.”

The next assignment for the young G.I. was to lead a convoy of trucks to a remote outpost 15 miles away from their base along the hostile Ho Chi Minh Trail to deliver weapons, ammunition and water, which he ended up doing several days a week over a period of months. Along the route they regularly passed by the scorched bodies of people who had been killed by American pilots, but he says they sped past at 40mph because they were “under orders to stop for nothing.”

Michael Dalton admits that before he went on patrol he used to seek absolution. “I was blessed,” he says, “and then I had to go out and do what I had to do....to stay alive.”

The tide of public opinion in the United States turned very firmly against the Vietnam War after the Tet Offensive in January 1968, and one of the longest and bloodiest battles that the Americans would fight against the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong guerillas living in South Vitetnam, which took place in the royal city of Hue.

Michael Dalton spent 12 days fighting in Hue as part of the Tet Offensive and said he was “lucky to get out alive....I had the luck of the Irish.” The Battle of Hue saw soldiers engage in urban warfare which literally saw them going from house to house. “The VC and the North Vietnamese soldiers were very brave, they could fight and I respected the way they protected their homeland,” he says.

After the Battle of Hue, the young Athlone-born soldier had just 28 days left to serve in Vietnam and he says he was “nervous the whole time” as he was aware that the tide of public opinion in the United States had turned against the war, and he was unsure of what he was facing into on his return from the battlefield.

“No one ever asked about my mental health,” he says, even though he admits that he could have done with some help. His experience in Vietnam triggered what has been a lifelong sleep disorder which results in the tiniest noise waking him up and bringing him to a state of alert. “Sleeping five hours in row is a miracle,” he says.

These days, Michael Dalton works as the City Clerk in Waterbury in Connecticut, a post he had held for the past 16 years. One day he came across a neglected headstone of a World War 1 veteran, so he set about raising funds for the restoration of all the headstones of the veterans and is hoping to be able to fund the cost of restoring 50-60 headstones per year in the area.

“These men were forgotten,” he says “and that is not acceptable. It's not about politics or ideology, when their country called, these men answered” - just as Michael himself had done back in 1967.

A version of this article was first published in the Waterbury Observer in Spring 2021 and this article is published here with their kind permission.