The Brainerd Real Estate Blog

My Friend Had Three Purple Hearts

Yesterday i sat in a church and listened to the words of  friends telling  stories of this man and what he had done in his short life. Age 63 seems so young to be taken from here after all the things that he did that were just plain right. What a loss for me. Ron “I loved ya man” ….I will miss you everyday.

Ron Kristofferson was a 22-year-old Marine in 1967 when he boarded a plane and left Vietnam, eventually bound for his Baxter home. He had been wounded in action and “was pretty well decorated,” but military officials advised him not to wear his ribbons for fear he might stir up a negative reaction.

“I came home bare-chested,” the Fairview Township (Cass County) resident recalled of his homecoming almost 40 years ago. “I melted into the populace.”

It was a different time and a different war. The nation was bitterly divided and the young man who would later serve a decade on the Baxter City Council, including a stint as mayor, sought to go unnoticed.

That desire to quietly blend in continued as he started college at what was then Brainerd Junior College and later at Bemidji State University, where Kristofferson earned a degree in social work. It was at BSU that a professor pulled him aside and complimented Kristofferson on his work but asked why the young man had difficulty looking people in the eye. Kristofferson said later that he wasn’t even aware he had been avoiding contact.

After seeing the horrors of war and watching friends die his pre-war friends seemed different. In his eyes, they were still young and concerned only about having fun.

Little things would bother Kristofferson. Military-style utility field jackets were the fashion for many young people in the United States then, even for people who didn’t know the first thing about the military.

“They were so young and childish,” he said.

Kristofferson spent his 21st and 22nd birthdays in Vietnam. He served in the infantry with the G/2nd Battalion 26th Marines and with the Fox/2nd Battalion 4th Marines from August 1966 to September 1967. He remembers a Marine named Rinaldi who was 24. Rinaldi was the “old man” of the squad.

A recipient of a Purple Heart, Kristofferson served as Military Order of the Purple Heart aide-de-camp when Bill Wroolie of Brainerd was national commander of that organization.

He said he still suffers residual effects from his injuries but declined to discuss his wounds or the incident that led to them.

“I don’t talk about it,” he said.

He said when he returned home from Vietnam he usually didn’t tell people he was a Vietnam veteran. He hasn’t even shared many war experiences with his own family and he said they’ve responded to his unspoken hints to “not go there.”

After college, Kristofferson worked for the state in the Brainerd area as a veterans employment representative and as a rehabilitation placement specialist for the disabled. He tried not to carry the problems he encountered at work home with him.

Post-traumatic stress disorder has affected many Vietnam veterans, Kristofferson said, sometimes not surfacing until they reach their 50s. He explains it to non-veterans by asking them to think of when they’ve been in an auto accident and how detailed their memories of that incident are. The effect of a continual series of stressful incidents can create something similar to a disturbing tape that plays in one’s mind, he said.

“In the back of your mind – you still have those feelings,” Kristofferson said. “Traumatic events are traumatic events.”

He recalled addressing a Brainerd High School class on the topic of the Vietnam War and temporarily breaking down, in part because the students he was addressing were a similar age to some of the young men he served with in Vietnam. Kristofferson composed himself and finished the presentation but hasn’t spoken to another class since then.

Immediately after Vietnam, support for returning service personnel was virtually non-existent, according to Kristofferson. He said it felt as if he went straight from the jungles of Vietnam to Brainerd.

“The military didn’t do anything,” he said.

In contrast, he said, the military is doing a much better job of supporting service personnel and their families today. And he thinks the Iraq veterans will be better off in later years because of the military’s efforts.

“I think this is going to show well down the road,” he said.

Kristofferson didn’t participate in any of the homecoming ceremonies for the returning Iraq soldiers but followed the story through the media. He said the group ceremonies that soldiers from Company A, 1st Battalion, 194th Armor took part in provided a degree of closure that wasn’t there when Vietnam soldiers returned home individually.

“I think they should also talk with any counselors that are available and maybe group activities,” he said.

Another distinction between the Vietnam veterans and the Iraq veterans was the presence of women near the battle lines. He noted that a woman technical sergeant in the U.S. Air Force was on the cover of one of his Purple Heart magazines. Kristofferson made up for the mostly male environment of his service days by marrying after he returned home and having two daughters. After a divorce, he remarried and had three daughters. Retired, he goes fishing when he can and now lives near the Pillsbury State Forest. He now serves as an at-large director on the Crow Wing Power Board.

There were those who did support the returning Vietnam military personnel, Kristofferson recalled. Heading to Camp Pendleton, Calif., in uniform, he flew on standby from Minneapolis to Los Angeles and was lucky enough to get a seat in first class. On that flight a woman struck up a conversation with him and offered to buy him lunch and give him a ride to the bus station.

He noticed the initials “AVB” on her carry-on luggage but it wasn’t until he overheard the comments of a flight attendant who commented on the woman’s discarded newspapers that he realized the name of his benefactor.

“‘Dear Abby’ sure is messy,” the flight attendant said.

The woman who had offered him lunch and a ride was advice columnist Abigail Van Buren.

Kristofferson’s public service in the military and on the Baxter City Council parallels that of his father, Oscar Kristofferson, an Ellis Island immigrant who came to the United States at 20. The elder Kristofferson, who died in 2003, was a longtime Baxter building inspector and served on the city council for 17 years.

Ron Kristofferson said he thought his father’s example of public service probably had something to do with his own willingness to serve his nation and his community.

“He was Norwegian, but he was an American,” Kristofferson said of his father. “He thought it was your civic duty (to be involved).”