During the summer of 1967, the streets of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district were filled with music and hippies denouncing the war in Vietnam. At the same time, Marine Corps 2nd Lt. Ron Burton was finishing up a tour of duty as an American infantryman in that war-torn Southeast Asian country.
Forty years later, America is revisiting “The Summer of Love” through the rose-colored glasses of re-released music romanticizing the era with songs by Cream, The Turtles and Strawberry Alarm Clock. And Burton, now a retired Marine Corps captain, recently found himself thrust back in time to those turbulent years in American history as he walked through the newly opened Vietnam Gallery in the Command Museum at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in Point Loma.
Reflecting, Burton patted a life-size replica of a tunnel dug by the North Vietnamese.
“Seeing this makes the hair on my neck stand up,” said the 72-year-old Burton. “This is exactly the way they dug the tunnels. Straight up and down. And deep.”
He spread his feet to strengthen his stance and emphasized his point by motioning his arms up and down.
“It could take a mortar hit and they’d be untouched,” Burton said. “They were the masters of digging.”
Burton also remembered the red clay terrain in Vietnam.
“It dyed your skin, your clothes, your hair,” he said. “We went on RR (recreation and relaxation) in the Philippines and we took baths and it turned the water red. We went to the steam room, took another bath, and it turned the water red again.”
The Vietnam Gallery opened July 20 and is the newest exhibit at the MCRD Command Museum, which houses one of the most extensive displays of Marine Corps historical items in America. The museum, free and open to the public Mondays through Saturdays, has been transformed from an old barracks and occupies more than 22,233 square feet.
Eleven years in the making, the gallery was made possible through a $150,000 donation from the MCRD Museum Historical Society and joins other permanent exhibits that include the War Room, the Medal Room and the Weapons Room. Created in a stark black-and-white motif, the Vietnam Gallery features uniforms, weapons, photographs and combat art from the war that claimed 58,179 American lives, 14,837 of whom were Marines.
“The gallery is way overdue, but worth the wait,” said retired Marine Lt. Col. Thomas A. Richards, the museum’s executive director, who served a year in Vietnam. “American society perceives its treatment of veterans from that war as unsympathetic. We now know there’s a difference between public policy and people who went off to sacrifice.”
Visitors are greeted at the entry of the Vietnam Gallery by a life-size display of a Marine in a fire base bunker defending his position. The back wall of the museum is instantly recognizable as the shape of The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C.
Black-and-white photos donated by the National Archives and Leatherneck magazine hang on the wall. In between the entrance and the wall mementos and photos document the war that ended April 30, 1975, with the fall of Saigon. There’s a uniform worn by American prisoners of war, an interactive table map that shows battle locations, an explanation of the draft that lasted from 1948 to 1973 and a list of the Marines who received the nation’s highest honor, the Medal of Honor. Of the 246 Vietnam servicemen who received the Medal of Honor, 58 were Marines. Of the 58 Marines, 45 of them were honored posthumously.
Recruit training during the Vietnam War was done at Parris Island, South Carolina and MCRD. At the height of the Vietnam War ” from 1966 to 1975 ” 382,839 recruits were trained at MCRD.
In 1966, Burton was a gunnery drill instructor at MCRD, when one day he found himself in officer’s shoes.
“It was May 27, 1966, and we were mustered into the theater and told how our country needed us,” Burton said. “I walked in a gunnery sergeant and walked out a second lieutenant, and 21 days later I was in Vietnam.”
The museum is designed to educate recruits training at the base, said Barbara McCurtis, museum director.
“On day 20 of their training, recruits tour the museum. Now they can learn about Vietnam,” she said.
The room next to the Vietnam Gallery and the last room on the tour is the Iraqi Freedom Room.
“In here recruits learn what life will be like in Iraq,” McCurtis said.