Mike Howard, seen at his home parish of Precious Blood in Owensboro, served in Vietnam from July 1967 to July 1968. ANDY TELLI | WKC
‘Faith helped me to stay grounded’
Recalling Vietnam 50 years after war’s end
BY ANDY TELLI, THE WESTERN KENTUCKY CATHOLIC
Fifty years ago, on April 30, 1975, the last Americans in Saigon scrambled onto a helicopter atop the U.S. embassy to escape the advancing North Vietnamese army. The chaotic exit ended the United States’ involvement in one of the longest wars in our nation’s history.
By the time the last American left Vietnam, the war was only a memory for Mike Howard, a member of Precious Blood Parish in Owensboro who served in Vietnam with the U.S. Army from July 1967 to July 1968.
“I put it all behind me” after returning home, Howard said.
He grew up in the Whitesville community of Daviess County, was a parishioner at St. Mary of the Woods Parish there, and graduated from St. Mary High School in 1963.
In 1965, a local Army recruiter let Howard’s mother know that his draft number was coming up. Instead of waiting to be drafted, Howard enlisted and left for boot camp in September of that year. Not quite two years later, Howard shipped out for Vietnam.
“I was a little concerned. I didn’t know what to think,” Howard said. “But there was no way of getting out of it, so I went.”
Mike Howard, a Precious Blood parishioner, strikes a pose while on guard duty in Vietnam. Howard served from 1967-1968. COURTESY OF MIKE HOWARD
Howard was stationed at a communications facility on Monkey Mountain near Da Nang operating the large generators that provided electricity for the communications equipment.
He still remembers the poverty of the local Vietnamese people. He and the other American soldiers would take their trash, including cardboard boxes that supplies had been shipped in, to the nearby dump. “As soon as we hit that dump all the kids 7, 8, 9, 10, would fight each other to get the best piece of cardboard because that was shingles for their hut,” Howard said.
Howard was fortunate that he avoided any combat while in Vietnam. But not everyone was so lucky. Howard remembers people he knew from Whitesville who were wounded or killed in Vietnam.
Frank Mason was serving in the Army in Germany at the time, but the war in Vietnam was a constant presence. “I worried about it all the time I was there,” said Mason, a parishioner at Sts. Joseph and Paul Parish in Owensboro. “I didn’t want to go kill nobody, and I didn’t want nobody to kill me. It was constantly on your mind whether you were there or not.”
Mason grew up in Hawesville and was drafted in 1968. He ended up as a tank commander in Germany, part of NATO’s line of defense in the case of an invasion of Europe by the Soviet Union.
“There were young guys that were in my unit who would volunteer to transfer to Vietnam,” Mason recalled. “We got the ‘Army Times’ newspaper that listed all of the soldiers that had died that week, and usually within two weeks these young men were dead.”
Faith helped Mason through those times. “Faith helped me to stay grounded because I knew God was on my side, and I knew He was going to take care of me,” he said.
Mason recalls being happy when the U.S. finally pulled out of Vietnam. “I felt like it was about time we got out because we were in a war we never should have been in,” he said. “I hoped everybody came back safely to their families.”
Frank Mason, a parishioner of Sts. Joseph and Paul in Owensboro, was drafted in 1968. During the Vietnam war he ended up as a tank commander in Germany, part of NATO’s line of defense in the case of an invasion of Europe by the Soviet Union. COURTESY OF FRANK MASON
Originally printed in the May 2025 issue of The Western Kentucky Catholic.
