Jim McKillips still isn’t quite used to being heralded as a veteran.
“Let’s put it this way,” he said. “Would you like to know how we were received coming home from being in a war zone for 11 months with people dying on our flight deck?”
The Vietnam veteran, who saved lives in the Navy as a hospital corpsman, rattled off horror stories. Lots of them.
When he came back to the United States in February of 1970, and his crew were greeted as they passed below the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.
“The hippies went around and collected garbage from the restaurants, slop,” he said. “Rotten vegetables and grease, and they poured it on us as we came back.”
It got worse. Once his crew docked and McKillips went out with his wife for the first time in almost a year , he was heckled.
This didn’t just happen for years, it happened for decades. It made McKillips want to hide his military participation from others.
“When I got home, I donated my sea bag with all my uniforms,” he said. “Because why would I keep it when they treated me that way?”
The first time McKillips can recall being applauded for his service, which ended almost 45 years ago, was in 2006.
“They cheered us,” McKillips said of the crowd at a Flag Day event he attended eight years ago in South Dakota . “That was the first time, as a Vietnam vet, I got thanked.”
But McKillips, a 1975 graduate of MSU and employee of MSU for 27 years , acknowledges things have changed for the better. He walked out of HopCat on Tuesday afternoon after enjoying a free meal on behalf of the restaurant available to active and retired military veterans.
“We’ve had quite a few (vets),” said East Lansing HopCat’s General Manager Rick Smith . “Though I haven’t had a chance to talk to most of them directly.”
HopCat was just one of several businesses showing thanks to veterans, where service members can get anything from a free haircut at Great Clips to free pancakes at IHOP .
“It’s been a halfway decent lunch (crowd), though it’s not an exorbitant amount of a difference,” Smith said.
But for someone who’s been a veteran for almost four and a half decades, receiving thanks and generosity for past military service is still a new concept to McKillips, and he’s grateful to see the very discernible difference.
“It’s different today,” McKillips said. “Now, I get hugged.”
