Thomas Dietz

Milwakie Vietnam Memorial-Dedicated 11-11-2017

Cathy Waldien (Schmidt)

Thank you

Ronalee Knepper (Moore)

Bill,

I only know of the fear, sadness and anger I witnessed as the wife of a man who also served during the time of the vietnam war.  I wondered each day if my loved one was safe and would he be coming home to his family. He also fought for the same ungrateful people and nation. For him he believed with all of his heart his actions were right and justified. He did come home to his loving family as a different person. He brought home all the pain and suffering he had gone through with him. No one can ever understand what you went through. You must know how much I appreciate and respect you for all the pain, for the lack of respect and rejection from an ungrateful nation and an ungrateful neighborhood. You fought for these people by giving the ultimate sacrifice of your life so they could  feel safe in their homes, for their continued freedom, to have the right of free speech to express their feelings of hate, disrespect and ungratefulness of the war. No words can express my feelings and heartfelt thanks to you, your brother, and your family for all you sacrificed so we as a nation can continue living in the comforts of our homes, for our family and friends to love and enjoy. I am eternally grateful.

Ronalee

Thomas Dietz

Thank you, Ronalee

Rev. Larry Hansen

Thanks so much for your note, Ronalee.  Even after 50+ years, the memory of that time brings me sadness.  People seem to love it when Johnny goes marching off to war, but they don't want to know him when he returns battered and broken.  This is to the continuing shame of our nation, then as well as now.

Blessings to you and yours. . . .

Larry

Fran Ostlund

Nice comments by all of you. Bill and I were best buddies at Oak Grove grade school and played little league baseball together. Always thought of him as a life long freind. The memories of him still are with me . The Block  family trated me with kindness and respect. Pass along mw kindest thoughts to his brother Jim.

Kenneth McGahuey

Well said Ronalee, I add my name to the list of disgusted and disappointed people at our nation's response to our military veterans. Bill was one of my "buds" growing up in Oak Grove. Died way too young.

Thomas Dietz

From the Virutal Wall - Vietnam Veterans Memorial

Thomas Dietz

Ken Buckles, former MHS teacher and coach has written three books about Living History Day at MHS and his work with Vietnam veterans.  The following remembrance of Bill Block appears as an entry in Buckles, Ken, and Blair, Benjamin, Remembrance Volume III: Service, Valor and Sacrifice Honoring Vietnam Veterans, Amazon.com, 2023:

I was able to talk with Dr. Jim Block, Williams’s older brother.

“I need to start with my parents to lend some understanding about our family. My father, Harold, flew a B-17 Pathfinder during WWII out of England where he met and married my mom, Lilian, an English war bride. She was from the Cockney area, which was heavily bombed. Her family’s first home  was  destroyed  during  a  bombing  raid.  The  area  is  now  a  Memorial  Park  I was born in September of ‘45 in London. My mom was pregnant with me while living in the subway tunnels during the bombing raids. 

“In May of 1946, after the war’s end, when I was six months old, we boarded the Queen Mary for New York. We traveled all the way to Oregon moving in with my dad’s parents’ house on River Road. My brother, William John Block, was born on July 13, 1947. His middle name was chosen to honor our mom’s dad and her brother who was in an elite Irish unit who landed on beaches ofAnzio where he was killed in action.

“Bill was a typical, playful, happy-go-lucky boy. My parents eventually bought a home in Oak Grove. Mom stayed at home until we started school and then she worked in Katzan Watch and Jewelry. It was my job to prepare meals to be cooked after Mom or Dad got home. Dad worked at a bakery and was allowed to bring home the donut holes. This was before they started to sell them. But Bill preferred eating out at the first fast food restaurant. They had a Wiz Burger hamburger that only costed nineteen cents. We would go there after sports to get one.

“On a side note of interest, my dad helped his friend Art Lacey bring the B-17 to Milwaukie.  I remember playing in the plane above the Bomber gas station. Being two years older, I was always looking out for Bill. We  loved playing sports and played basketball and baseball for Oak Grove School. We played on many great teams. We both lettered in baseball at Milwaukie High School.

“Bill was loved by many at MHS. He was drafted along with older classmate Rick Whelan, the great high school player and freshman OSU college player. Rick and Bill took basic training together, but then their paths split. Rick played basketball after basic training, while Bill, a trained mechanic, was assigned to Fort Polk and the light infantry.

“Bill was really good at working on cars. He loved cars. His first car he bought by saving his own money was a ‘64, 357 Chevelle SS

 “He was drafted and inducted on August 2, 1967. Our grandma was so upset with the news she had a heart attack on her drive over to say goodbye. Our grandpa offered to drive him to Canada or just join the Coast Guard. But Bill refused. He felt it was his duty.

“He was assigned to the 25th Infantry Division, 1st Battalion, 27th Infantry, B Company. The 27th were  called  the  Wolfhounds.  Bill  was  killed  during  the  Tet  Offensive  at  12:00  on  the  12th  of February 1968 in the Gia Dinh province near the Cambodian Border.

“Mom was visiting grandma’s grave site when Bill was killed. She collapsed and knew at that moment her son was dead. We have no explanation for this.

"I was attending college at the University of Chicago when a Chaplin and an officer came to tell my parents. My parents had fought Bill’s going to Vietnam as he was scared of guns. They even took him to a psychiatrist to confirm this. My dad contacted Oregon Senator Wayne Morris to help, and he tried. We all felt since he was a mechanic, why couldn’t he do that?

“We believe the Army retaliated by putting him into the infantry. As soon as he got there, he was assigned to Point. His best friend from basic training learned about Bill’s death in the Stars and Stripes paper before we knew.

“My WWII Silver Star veteran dad was really stunned by Bill’s death.  So, a friend of the family, Les Peake, who owned Les Peake Memorial, handled everything. Then, my dad found the strength to force Les into opening the metal casket to see Bill’s face and body for one last time.

“It was the first time I saw my dad cry. We really couldn’t tell from the body how he died at all. His face and upper body had no visible wounds, but his lower body seemed light.

“How did your mother handle this?” 

Without any hesitation, Jim responded, “She’s English,” and then laughed. “You know ‘stiff upperlip’. She never cried in public only in private.

“To this day, I’m haunted by what he could have become had he not died. This just tore our family apart in terms of our future, but we lived. Bill gave me a gift to look to the future, and I pushed myself to get my doctorate and pursue a career in Academics.

“Both mom and dad went into a long very quiet period. Dad was never the same. Mom eventually recovered when she became a godparent to my best friend John Parry’s son and especially when she became a grandparent to my son Bill, who was named after my brother.

“Later, I was drafted, but refused to go, and I believed they were going to arrest me, but I was given a sole surviving son deferral. Finished my A.M. in 1968 and my Ph.D. in 1970.”

I was able to speak with Tom Dietz, Class of ‘65, about Bill.

“Bill and I both attended Oak Grove Elementary. We played baseball together in grade school and he was good enough to continue playing at MHS, where he lettered. Besides baseball, Bill’s other love was cars. After graduation from Milwaukie, he attended Multnomah Junior College, which we all called MIT; Multnomah in Town, and received a degree in auto mechanics.

“My high school memories of Bill are deeply rooted in his basement. His family had a pool table, and we all spent many hours after school honing our pool skills. It also helped that his mother was such a  welcoming  presence. She always made us  feel at home whenever we came over. On the weekends a favorite pastime was cruising Yaws, the Speck, and Broadway. The fact that Bill had a car made this possible.

“Bill, Delmer Furrer and I all became eligible for the draft at about the same time in ‘67. Del and I joined the Navy reserve, which had only a two-year active-duty requirement, and more importantly, no waiting list as the reserves did. 

“We urged Bill to join up with us, but he had some pretty strong feelings about the Navy uniform and opted to be drafted instead. I do not have any details of Bill’s time in Vietnam, except that he was there for a very short time before being killed.”

I spoke to Loren Gramson, Army, Vietnam about Bill

“Bill was a typical young man of the early ‘60s. I never met a nicer guy. I was drafted and met Bill at Portland’s Induction Center on August 7, 1967. We became best friends. Hell, we were just kids.

“Also with us was Milwaukie High School great basketball player Rick Whelan. He was drafted with us, and we all reported together. Rick was a great basketball player at OSU. But Rick was not sent to Vietnam because the Army wanted him to play basketball for them. I actually walked-on at OSU freshmen’s basketball team and made it. I walked away from school later that spring as I was all shook up over several friends who had been sent to Vietnam.

“We spent nine and half weeks at Fort Lewis together. And we would sit around and talk about cars and girls and lament where we were. It seems like it was just yesterday.

“When he was told he was going to Vietnam, Bill told me, ‘I’m going to get killed, I just know it.’ Of course, I would tell him not to talk like that, that’s not the right attitude to have, but he repeated it again. Bill was just not cut out to be a soldier, he was real quiet and fun loving. Such a tragedy.

“I still have the picture of me, his mom and dad, his brother Jim, his girlfriend Gay, and Bill looking sharp in his uniform. We were all saying goodbye as he boarded the plane. Everyone is smiling. The last picture I took was Bill and his mother hugging. Little did we know, this would be their final goodbyes.

“Bill told me again, ‘I’m not going to make it home.’

“The day I arrived in Vietnam was the same day Bill was killed, February 12, 1968. It would be six weeks until I found out. This has haunted me for decades. One day I started reading the names of KIAs in Stars and Stripes. It was right in the middle of the Tet Offensive, and it was getting really nasty. Then I saw Bill’s name, and it hit me like a sledgehammer. In 1975, I sent a letter to his family home to which his parents did not respond.

“It wasn’t until four or five years ago that I contacted the Class of 65’s reunion committee. That request reached Tom Dietz, from whom I learned that Bill’s dad had died in 1980, and his mom had  moved  to  Santa Barbara in 1996.  Tom also reached out to Bill’s older brother Jim in  Santa Barbara and helped to connect with him. We’re close friends to this day.

“About my time in Vietnam, when it was my time to go, my parents could not take me to the airport, my brothers took me. My parents were never the same. Getting on that plane was the hardest thing I ever did. I was in the Mekong Delta, and it was wet and damp all the time.

“I remember walking over brown leaves and seeing all these dead trees. Twenty-five years later, Ihad a VA doctor tell me why I was having health issues, but if he wrote down the truth, he would be fired.

"Coming home, I landed at Portland Airport around one in the morning. There were no protesters, but I'll never forget this little girl about two or three years old looked at me and smiled. I smiled back. Her mom jerked her daughter around and she turned their backs to me. Then it hit me I was wearing my uniform.

I received a letter from Bill’s girlfriend at the time Gay (Lively) Adams. She gave me permission to have it in the book.

How do you boil down what you remember about someone into a few paragraphs? I don’t know. I will do my best to be brief. And I can’t help but include some thoughts about that time and place and a comparison to today.

William J Block was a young man with hopes and dreams. I’m sure that all young men and womendo.  He  was  a  guy  who  always  took  responsibility  for  himself.  He  had  brown  hair  and  a  ruddy complexion from his English ancestry and wonderful eyes. He was tall with broad shoulders, built for strength that was all the more evident after he came home from basic training.

He mirrored his dad in that way. He held himself to a high moral standard and had strong ideas of right and wrong. He was not boastful or conceited. But he expected himself to do things in the rightway.

That said, if he made a mistake, he didn’t try to blame it on circumstances or someone else. He stood tall, squared his shoulders and faced it. Nor did he dwell on it. He learned his lesson and moved on. He was an easy person to talk to and to know. Very honest and straight forward with an easy humor.

He was very tuned in to other people. We didn’t go to school together, but I surmised he was at least somewhat popular in high school. We couldn’t go anywhere in the city together without someone honking their horn at him to say hi. And he had several tight friendships.

 Bill knew he had a duty to serve in the armed forces and that he would need to complete that. In those days, the draft left no real choice on that matter. You could go to college or try to use some other loophole to delay it, but you were obligated to go thru the physical for the draft – and if you  passed, you were given a number and had to serve when called.

You could claim to be a conscientious objector or try to escape to Canada to avoid it all - there were many who did that. But that was not something Bill would do. Bill never had a desire to be a warrior nor any idea of glory from being in the service. But he never shirked from his feeling of responsibility to serve either. 

He wanted to do his duty and come home. His dream for after he came home was to settle down and have  a  family, and  to  build  a  house with a round  door.  As to making a living, he  wanted  to  do something with his hands – maybe become a mechanic as he liked to work on cars. 

He told his mom that I was the girl he wanted to marry. I knew his time in the Army would change him, but that was not what I worried about. I wanted him to come home safe and sound. I wrote him a letter almost every day starting with when he went into basic training, and I promised to wait for his return. In one of his letters to me written during basic training he wrote “They are trying to change me into an animal, and I won’t let them.” In my reply I said, “Learn what they are teaching you about how to survive and come home to me.” He was always on my mind. Like many soldiers, I know he knew fear and worried he wouldn’t make it home. But he still would not turn away from his duty. Courage is not the absence of fear. It is what you do in spite of it.

Bill’s parents went to the Governor of Oregon for help to get their son reassigned from infantry to another area. They were successful, and Bill was offered a chance to move to a different division. But he refused. By that time Bill was bonded to those he served with. I’ve learned a lot since then about the brotherhood that grows between soldiers. He was dedicated to standing with his unit no matter what the cost.  Brave, loyal,  responsible, dedicated. Who knows what Bill  might  have accomplished in his life had he lived. 

When Bill’s mom called to tell me he was missing in action, I fell silent. I went numb. I thought about that empty place the world would have by not having Bill still here. In that moment, I didn’t let myself feel. I held on to the hope that he was still alive somewhere. I stayed in that state of mind right up to when they found his body and brought him home. I think I went into a sort of shock after that. It took a long time for me to deal with my pain. 

I am told Bill got to Vietnam right in the midst of the Tet offensive. It was February 1968. At the time, I don’t think anyone realized what a turning point that was in the war. From the time he left to go there, I watched all the newsreels looking for his face.

I think he was only in Vietnam a week before he went missing. And the protests against the war were at full force. People who showed no respect for our country treated those who served with disdain. It caused unbelievable pain to those who served and to those who loved them. 

The protestors called the soldiers all kinds of names and chanted “down with the establishment,” and men were often referred to as “male chauvinist pigs.” It was as though the protesters blamed all those who served for the war. It is not the soldier who makes that decision. And with the draft in place, other than turning against their country, those young men had no choice on serving or not. 

The actions of those protesters showed me they did not understand the courage and character of a man who would live out his duty to his country. The things they said will always hurt my heart. They were out in full force at Bill’s funeral, too. A huge crowd, yelling, jeering, pushing. It was all a blur to me. Still is. It took years for me to get my balance back after Bill died. For a long time I thought I would never return to myself or fall in love again. I will never forget him and the love we shared. Bill taught me a lot about what to appreciate in a man. 

There are many Vets from the Vietnam war who now do all they can to ensure there is support for our soldiers when they come home from war or even just from serving in the armed forces. They don’t want our service men and women to ever go thru what they did when they came home from Vietnam. I see It as a part of the legacy of all who served in those days - and as a tribute to them. I hope it is a tradition that will never fade. I see it as a reflection of at least some of the lessons we learned from that war. 

I pray our leaders, military and civilian, do not take the decision to send our young people into danger lightly.  And  we  need  to  do  all  we  can  to  protect  and  honor  our  soldiers.  The wa  ou  exi  from Afghanistan was handled fills me with anger. It was so disrespectful of our service personnel. These people who serve are surely one of our most precious and valuable resources. 

Today, our military people are not in harm’s way because of the draft. They are there because they feel  a  responsibility to  serve and  protect  the  country  they love even  if  it  costs  them  their life.  My father served in World War II and used to say, “I may disagree with what you are saying, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it.”  They were willing to give their life so we will continue to be free and so we will not have another World War or another 9-11. When all is said and done, Bill and those that served in Vietnam all share that same level of dedication. My husband also served in Vietnam. All who serve whether in the past or today, deserve our respect, our thanks, and our admiration. We are all forever indebted to them. 

William Block is buried at Wilhelm’s Portland Memorial Mausoleum. 

Eileen Filsinger (Long)

I personally didn't know Bill Block all that well in my years at Milwaukie High School. I would say hi to him if I passed him in the halls or if he was in one of my classes.  I'm sorry I didn't know him better but by the writings he was a great, fun loving guy and.a friend for life. Now life is different and Bill and I do speek if it's only a one-side conversation, you see he is burried at Wilhelm's Portland Memorial Mausoleum right across from my parents and when I visit them, I also say hello to Bill.

Eileen-Filsinger-Long