Home Front: Jim Kohlbeck

MARSHFIELD/AUBURNDALE – Jim Kohlbeck was raised on a farm in the Rozellville area.
“I had two older brothers — Kenny and Jerry. They’re both deceased now. I have a younger brother who’s 10 years younger than I am — Ray. He’s on our home farm just west of Rozellville. I have a sister, Mary, who lives in Stevens Point, and a sister, Elaine, who lives at Bloomer,” Jim said.

“I attended grade school at St. Andrew’s in Rozellville. I went to Columbus High School in Marshfield. And after high school graduation, I ended up being drafted into the service.
“I suppose they were apprehensive because it was in the middle of the Vietnam War when I went to Vietnam. I went in service in 1965, in Vietnam from 1966 through 1967.”
Kohlbeck was drafted into the Army and did his basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri.

“That was all that was available at that time when we went to the induction station,” he explained.

“After Fort Leonard Wood, I went to Fort Gordon, Georgia, and that was the MP (military police) schooling that I took down there. And then from there, they activated a new company up at Fort Lewis, Washington. They activated us up there and equipped us, and then shipped the company intact to Vietnam. When we got to Vietnam, they didn’t need the whole company, so I was sent on temporary duty with a transportation company for quite a bit of my time over there.

“We qualified with the rifle and the pistol for side arms, and I also, by the time I got discharged from the service, had quite a few different licenses for different vehicles, including the 16-ton crane truck in the Army. Also, I had a motor coach bus driver’s license when I came out.”

Kohlbeck said that he found it exciting and a challenge to learn new things.

“I hauled supplies to a lot of the combat units up at the Long Binh, Bien Hoa area to the north of Saigon,” he recalled.

“When I was stationed in Saigon — Saigon was called the Paris of the Orient at one time — it was a beautiful town, and it was devastated a lot by the war.

“One time, when I was over in uh Vietnam, I was sent down to the Saigon port to pick up some freight that had to be shipped to another company, and I went to the port and the fellow that I had to pick up the freight from at the port was a fellow I went to high school with at Columbus in Marshfield.”

Kohlbeck said that the hardest part of being in service was “being away from home and family,” but he said that the company had a “good camaraderie” and that they got along well and did a lot together.

“When I returned from Vietnam, I flew into Seattle, Washington, and I was discharged at Fort Lewis. And that was on a Friday, and it was in December of 1967. I was discharged from the service at 3:30 on a Friday afternoon, and I managed to catch a bus from Fort Lewis to the Seattle airport, and from there, I got a standby flight on Northwest Airlines to Chicago. And when we got to Chicago, it was about 1:00 in the morning on Saturday, and there were no more flights out of Chicago to Central Wisconsin or the Marshfield area. So, we both decided to catch a flight to Stevens Point because there was a flight leaving at 7:15 in the morning. So, we sat in the airport in Chicago until 7:15 Saturday morning and then flew into Stevens Point, and that’s where my family met me,” he explained.

“There was a lot of anti-servicemen feelings in the country at the time. We were somewhat despised because we had served, and we were made fun of — called baby and women killers — so the feeling in the country was not good at the time when we came back.”

Kohlbeck was exposed to Agent Orange during his time in Vietnam and is now diabetic and has had a couple of bouts of cancer, which were attributed to that exposure.

When he returned home, Kohlbeck returned to a job at Central State Bank — now part of BMO — where he spent 38 years.

But he said his time in Vietnam taught him a valuable lesson.

“We appreciate what we’ve got here more so now than we did then. I always remember having an older history teacher when I was in high school, and she always said wars were something that were created by old men with greed to gain more money or more resources, and they were fought by the young people of the country. And at the time, we thought she was foolish, but now that you think back on it, you realize how true her words were,” he said.

Editor’s Note: Thank you to Joren Anderson and the students of Auburndale High School for making these veterans columns possible.