Ed Gouge carried Vietnam’s casualties, then found peace in Clinton

Last week the Buzz shared the story of Ed Gouge’s day in Washington, D.C., where the Clinton veteran was chosen to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and came home to a crowd of hundreds at Greenville-Spartanburg International Airport. This is the story of how he got there, and how a first-generation college student from a small town in the North Carolina mountains ended up spending 50 years in Laurens County.

Ed Gouge did not set out to be a soldier, a professor or a South Carolinian. He grew up in Marion, North Carolina, the McDowell County seat, the oldest of three sons, expecting to go to work in the furniture factory where his grandfather worked.

“I had it all figured out,” he said. “A little house, maybe a trailer. I had it all figured out.”

A chemistry teacher changed his plans

Then he landed in Dorothy Lonon’s chemistry class at Marion Senior High School.

“I don’t even know why I got into that class, but she turned my life around,” Gouge said. “When I finished chemistry one, I did two things. I signed up for chemistry two, and I told myself this is what I need to be doing. I need to be like her.”

He graduated high school in 1965 and enrolled at Western Carolina University, which began as a teachers college, becoming the first in his family to attend college. He finished in 1969 with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and, as he tells it, a second degree as well.

“A BS and an MRS,” he said.

The MRS was Diane, the only student employee in the chemistry department, a work-study administrative assistant who, by his account, did everything.

A letter from the draft board

Two weeks after graduation, a letter arrived from the draft board. Gouge enlisted instead, choosing the option that sent him to Officer Candidate School.

He is blunt about his reasoning. He knew he was not career military. He knew he was in love, and he knew he needed a job and a paycheck.

“I believed that as a citizen of the United States, I was bound to defend it,” he said. “So I went.”

Basic training and advanced individual training took him to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, where the Army trained its engineers. He does not remember being offered a choice about the specialty. From there he went to Fort Belvoir, Virginia, for six months of Officer Candidate School at the Army engineer school, the most physically punishing stretch of his service.

He and Diane had planned to marry immediately after he was commissioned as a second lieutenant. A week before the ceremony, her family called it off. Diane had become seriously ill, and doctors discovered a kidney that had likely never functioned since birth. It was removed. They married about a month later, and she was still bandaged from the surgery.

After a month of advanced officer training at Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indiana, the couple’s first duty assignment was Fort Jackson, where Gouge served as a personnel officer for incoming enlisted men. That is where his orders for Vietnam arrived.

He landed at Cam Ranh Bay in June 1971, at night, farther from home than he had ever been.

“I had a window seat, and I could look down and see tracers going back and forth,” he said. “That is when it stopped being something I had read about. There was a firefight going on underneath me and I was about to be on the ground in the middle of it. I was frightened.”

The casualty office

Gouge was assigned to the 101st Airborne Division at Phu Bai, and for nearly all of his eight months in country his job was to administer the division’s casualties. That meant forms, personal effects to gather and ship, and an enormous volume of correspondence with wives, parents and girlfriends. When families wrote back asking for more detail, sometimes the answers were already in the file. Sometimes they were not, and he flew out by helicopter to line units to interview officers and find those answers.

One night stands above the rest. Maj. Gartman, his supervisor and the best boss he says he ever had, woke him in his hooch to tell him there had been a crash. A Chinook carrying 29 men to relieve a guard unit at Da Nang had flown into a mountain in bad weather. No one survived.

The casualty office began pulling records and hit an immediate problem. No one knew for certain who had been aboard. The unit that supplied the men held a roll call, and the soldiers who did not answer were the soldiers on the aircraft.

“It was a process of elimination,” Gouge said. “That is the single most profound thing I witnessed, and I still think about it.”

He also sat on a board convened to determine the status of two officers whose aircraft was destroyed so completely that no remains were recovered. The question was whether to classify them as missing in action or killed in action. The board chose killed in action.

Gouge never carried a weapon in Vietnam, was never shot at and was never asked to shoot at anyone, a distinction he raises himself. His closest call came on a light observation helicopter he boarded late in the day to get back across a river to Phu Bai. He buckled in, reached over to close the door and found there were none.

“I told God on that trip I would never get on one of those things again,” he said.

His last job in country was not casualty work. With the 101st standing down, the officer responsible for classified documents rotated home early and Gouge was handed the assignment, top secret clearance or not. The documents were loaded onto a flatbed trailer to be convoyed over the mountains from Phu Bai to Da Nang for shipment home. Gouge stayed behind to close out the inventory and planned to join them.

Rockets hit the convoy. File cabinets came off the trailer and paperwork scattered across the road. No soldiers were killed. The men picked up every page they could find, stuffed it back in and kept moving.

Every document was accounted for. Gouge signed them off as fast as he could.

Coming home

He served three years total and left the Army as a first lieutenant in March 1972, choosing discharge over two more months at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, as the division came home. The Army flew him from Saigon to Fort Lewis, Washington, where out-processing took three days, then gave him a ticket to Charlotte by way of California.

He was still in uniform when he landed, and no one said an unkind word to him, then or later. He knew that made him the exception. The protests were in the news, and he knew other men were being met with insults and worse for wearing the same uniform.

“They were criticizing and disparaging the wrong people,” he said. “Those were soldiers who were ordered to go to Vietnam. If you’re going to criticize somebody, criticize the government.”

His cousin Ray, who served in artillery, was one of them. He came off the plane to hateful words and would not wear a veteran’s hat for years.

A sense of peace on campus

Gouge and Diane stayed in Charlotte until the summer of 1972, then moved to Clemson, where he spent four years earning a doctorate in chemistry. In 1976, his research director walked into the lab holding a letter. A small college in Clinton, South Carolina, was looking for a chemistry professor.

He had two other prospects, a one-year sabbatical replacement at UNC Asheville, 40 miles from where he was born, and a permanent job at a dye and finishing plant in Old Fort that later closed.

He drove to Clinton instead. Downtown was crowded that day for the funeral of Lynn Cooper’s father at First Baptist Church. Gouge stopped for gas, asked what was going on and got the story from the attendant. Then he found the Presbyterian College campus.

“When I walked on that campus, I felt a sense of peace,” Gouge said. “I knew right then that if they offered me the job, I was going to take it.”

Bob Hudson in the biology department pointed him upstairs to the chemistry department, where he interviewed with Nolan Carter and Randy Huff before being walked down to Dean Fred Chapman’s office and then to President Marc Weersing’s. At the end, Chapman looked at Carter, Carter nodded, and the job was his.

Gouge called his father, a Baptist minister, to tell him he would be teaching at a Presbyterian college and would only have to give up his Baptist background to do it. The silence on the line lasted long enough that he had to admit he was kidding.

He stayed until he retired, 50 years in one town and, for all practical purposes, one job.

“It was not a place where you could get rich, and the work was hard,” he said. “But it was fulfilling to see young people succeed.”

The Gouges’ daughter, Jennifer Ward, was born in 1974 and was 2 when the family arrived in Clinton. She lives in Laurens County with her two sons. McCauley is the older. Max, born in 2009, is a senior in high school and lives in Joanna. Both grandsons call him Graddy, a contraction of granddaddy.

Asked what he wants them to understand about his service, Gouge did not hesitate.

“That I did my best to preserve democracy and preserve this nation.”

He is careful about the word sacrifice, which he thinks belongs more to other men than to him.

“Sacrifice for me was being away from my family for 10 months,” he said. “But I never looked at it as a part of my life that was wasted. As scared as I was flying over, I was that proud coming back.”

Gouge has no regrets about any of it. Not the letter from the draft board, not the eight months in Phu Bai, not the three years that interrupted the life he had planned. He is proud of his service, and he is convinced that every step after it brought him closer to the town he and Diane have called home for half a century.

He does not regret saying yes to the honor flight either, even after nearly turning it down. The day stirred up memories he had not handled in a long time. It also renewed a patriotism and a pride in being an American that have been with him since he first raised his right hand.

Judging by the crowd that filled the concourse at GSP on Sept. 16, there are a great many people who are proud of these veterans, too.

Thank you for your service, Ed Gouge, we appreciate you.

If you missed the photo gallery in the first article check it out below.