In 1967, 22-year-old Joseph Edler was given an ultimatum: if he wanted to get married, his fiancée’s mother said, he would need to serve his time in Vietnam.
So Edler, who lived in Brooklyn, went to Fort Hamilton and did what any young man in love would do: he pushed up his draft.
“I think two days later I was in the service,” he said.
Edler, a longtime Riverhead resident and past commander of the Riverhead VFW post, served in Vietnam in 1967 and part of 1968 — the peak of the American involvement in the war. For his service, Edler received the Purple Heart, the military award presented to service members who have been wounded or killed in action, and the Bronze Star with Valor, which honors heroic acts during combat.
The war had been escalated by President Lyndon Johnson with massive bombing campaigns. U.S. troop levels were soaring to their 1968 peak of more than half a million. The number of American wounded was also sharply rising.
At the same time, anti-war protests were gaining momentum across the country.
“They didn’t want me to go,” Edler said of his family.
“But I went and I had no problem. I basically met friends from Brooklyn and stuff, and we got together and went all together,” Edler said.
Edler went to basic combat training and advanced individual training. “You didn’t know where you were going,” Edler said. “They gave you a choice,” Edler said: Vietnam or Germany.
“But everybody that put down Germany, they switched to Vietnam. Vietnam switched to Germany. They switched them right around,” Elder said.
“So I ended up in Vietnam, but it was part of the job,” Edler said. “We didn’t want it. We were obeying the law.”
Edler was suddenly split from his friends from Brooklyn. It was hard to make new ones, but he did.
“When we first got to Vietnam, it was scary,” Edler said. “We didn’t know where we were, where we were going.”
Edler served in the infantry in 1967 and part of 1968. The beginning of 1968 was the Tet Offensive — the major North Vietnamese military campaign that escalated the war. Casualties of American soldiers in Vietnam peaked that year.
He was part of a team that flew in to help and rescue other soldiers.
Edler carried a heavy pack on his back filled with a week and a half’s worth of food. When he was resupplied, “We got two beers and two sodas, and I used to trade one soda for two beers — so I ended up with a six pack.”
“But the only time you could drink it was early in the morning,” Edler said, “because it was so hot over there.”
Going through the villages of Vietnam, “you could see how poor they were.”
Mosquitoes and leeches were a constant problem, he said. “No matter where you went, you got leeches on you,” he said. “And they gave us mosquito repellent. We used to put them on the leeches, and leeches would crawl right up and fall off.”
“There were bamboo vipers… and we called them two-step choppers, because they bit you, you take another step and you’re going down,” Edler said. “There was no fast way of getting any medicine over it.”
Edler gets choked up and sheds tears when he talks about the battles where he lost his friends.
“It was tough making friends over there. I lost four of them. It was rough,” he said.
In January 1968, Edler and his squad were in a small valley in the jungle. “We were getting re-supplied by helicopter. So they send up outposts to just make sure we don’t get overrun. We went up on one side of a hill,” Edler recalled. He and his best Army buddy, Phil Cirrillo, were sent up as lookouts. Edler was halfway up a hill when Cirillo, who’d gone over the top, hit a booby trap, killing him and wounding Edler. “I caught the shrapnel right across my middle,” he said. He went down.
Next thing he knew, he was on a helicopter and was flown to a medical camp.
“It’s a hard moment,” he said. The injury resulted in his Purple Heart.
A few short weeks later, Edler rejoined his company. During a night mission that February, Edler and his squad were set up on a hill when his squad was ambushed by the Viet Cong.
“I was sleeping, and a friend in a foxhole pulled me down,” Edler said. “I went into the foxhole. They were mortaring us.”
Edler quickly returned fire as the mortars fell, deafening him and killing the friend who had saved him.
Edler ran up to another hill and was reunited with his sergeant, who was injured and had called in a gunship for cover fire and a medivac chopper. Edler laid down cover fire and helped the sergeant get into the medivac chopper.
“I was going back to lay down [fire] — I didn’t know what else to do,” Edler said. “So he told me, I can’t leave you out here; get on the chopper.”
As the medivac chopper was ready to take off, another unit’s sergeant jumped on the chopper and left his men on the battlefield, Edler said.
When Edler got back to the camp, his sergeant had died. Dozing off in a chair in the military hospital, the captain of his company came and woke him. “They had you down for missing in action. They had you down for dead,” he recalled the captain telling him.
One of the only survivors, Edler told his superiors of the battle and the actions of the other squad’s sergeant — how he left his men in the battlefield. The military police arrested the sergeant for his actions.
Afterwards, Edler was called upon to identify the bodies of his fallen friends. “That was rough,” he said.
His bravery in the battle earned him the Bronze Star with Valor. “Specialist Four Edler’s personal bravery, deep concern for the lives of his comrades, and devotion to duty are in keeping with the highest traditions of military service and reflect great credit upon himself, the Americal Division, and the United States Army,” the letter issuing Edler’s Bronze Star said.
The next night, passing time playing cards in a bunker, Edler fainted.
“Next thing I knew, I was getting carried up the hill on the stretcher, an IV in my arm.”
He was taken to Da Nang, where he was treated for malaria. It turned out he had pneumonia. Edler woke up on a plane headed for Japan, where he was treated for three months.
“I spent three months in Japan getting shots and medicine. I went from 200 and something pounds down to 130 pounds. Finally, I started feeling a little better,” he said. It was hard for him to stand for a while. He drank three or four milkshakes a day to get his energy back.
Edler is a religious man and his faith helped him get through the war. “I would pray that the war would be over,” he recalled. But it seemed “never-ending,” he said. “In ‘67 and ‘68, there was no talk about getting out of Vietnam.”
He believes surviving his shrapnel injury and later pneumonia was the work of God. “Somebody up there is watching over me,” he thought.
After his recovery in Japan, Edler’s remaining time in the service was short, so instead of redeploying him to Vietnam, in August 1968, the military sent him back to the United States.
“It was good going home,” Edler said.
But he didn’t get a warm reception.
By then, the Tet Offensive had damaged remaining public support for the war, the first “television war.” The nightly news brought graphic images of burning villages, wounded children and civilian suffering into American living rooms.
A growing number of Americans had begun to see the war as not only a strategic mistake, but morally wrong as well. Gallup polls at that time showed eroding support: only a slim majority still supported the U.S. war effort and a growing number said they thought the U.S. had made a mistake getting involved.
1968 was also a presidential election year and Democratic candidates Robert F. Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy both ran strong anti-war campaigns in an attempt to wrest their party’s nomination from incumbent President Lyndon Johnson. Growing opposition to the war and evidence that the enemy was far from being defeated led Johnson to end his re-election bid that March. In August, there were massive anti-war protests in the streets of Chicago, where the Democratic National Convention was being held. Violent clashes between protesters and police were televised across the country.
Edler’s plane landed in California, his first stop on his way home to Brooklyn. With time to spare before the flight home, he and some fellow troops went to a bar to grab a few drinks. They ended up in a fight, he said.
When the soldiers started to leave the bar, Edler said, they were confronted by a group of people who “started yelling and screaming and spitting at us.”
“We stacked up our duffel bags, and we went right through the doors. The hippies went back inside,” he said.
“[Military police] came. They didn’t arrest us,” Edler said, growing emotional. “They took us on a bus to a different bar, and they stayed outside.”
Back in New York, he faced more anger.
“There’s a woman with a kid, and she pulled the kid away and said, ‘Don’t go near him. He’s a baby killer.’ That was the first one.”
The people in the U.S. were “being lied to,” Edler said. The press covering the war in Vietnam “weren’t telling the truth.”
U.S. troop withdrawals began in June 1969; the Paris Peace Accords were signed in January 1973, ending the U.S. military’s involvement in the war. The last U.S. diplomatic, military and civilian personnel evacuated the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon on April 30, 1975, after North Vietnamese forces began an invasion, and eventual capture, of the city.
“I got mad when they pulled us out without even winning the war or losing the war,” Edler said.
He believes the American people didn’t understand the harsh living conditions of the South Vietnamese people. “They were living in rags, in mud houses,” he said. “They were good people who were threatened. I didn’t mind fighting for them.”
Edler became an assistant drill sergeant at Fort Dix, New Jersey, living off base. He considered re-enlisting, but decided against it.
“There was no way I was going back to Vietnam for a second tour,” Edler said. “I got the Purple Heart already.” He wasn’t going to press his luck, he said.
The reception American soldiers got back home was painful and remained that way for a long time.
“I let it go in one ear and out the other, because I know where I was. I know what I was doing. They didn’t,” Edler said. “They didn’t know what the war was like, because they were back here doing nothing.”
“I really had no use for them [anti-war protesters] at all when I came back and found out what they were doing and burning the American flags that I fought for. So I didn’t like it at all,” Edler said. “And I think a lot of veterans from Vietnam didn’t like it. We got treated like dirt when we came back.”
“We didn’t get treated the way World War Two got treated, how World War One got treated,” he said. “There was nothing for us. Matter of fact, I never wore a hat or anything for years.”
He later became involved with the local Veterans of Foreign Wars post. He became a Color Guard sergeant, a junior vice commander, a senior vice commander and then commander. He organized the local Buddy Poppy drive, which raises money for state and national veterans’ rehabilitation and service programs.
Edler said the treatment of Vietnam veterans has changed. “Since I wore my hat… certain people will buy you breakfast, thank you for your service. Little kids will thank you for your service.”
“It makes you feel good,” he said.
Officially, Vietnam was “a police action, not a war, but I don’t know about that,” Edler said. The death toll of more than 58,000 soldiers makes that clear, he said.
Edler supports reinstating the draft, which he said “should have come back a long time ago.” Military service “teaches you respect. It teaches you a lot of different things,” he said. “People would have been a lot better off, having to serve.”
Edler hadn’t talked much about his experience in Vietnam until recently. The anti-war sentiment and how he was treated after the war kept him silent. Even his family didn’t know the stories of his friends who died by his side.
He was quiet about it but he longed to find the family of his buddy Phil and visit his grave. In March 2012, Edler said, he finally got the paperwork with the information on Cirillo and the other three American soldiers who were killed at his side in two separate battles in the winter of 1968.
Then a random encounter at Star Confectionery in 2023 led to fulfilling his wish. He ran into a woman who grew up in the same upstate town as Cirillo and a little over a month later, he met his buddy’s family and visited his grave. It was an emotional experience.
“I wanted to go back to see Vietnam again, but on second thought, I don’t think I want to go back,” Edler said. “I understand it’s golf courses and hotels and everything all over the place. I don’t know if I would want to go back or not.”
“I don’t think so,” Edler said. “I think my life has had enough of Vietnam.”
This story is part of RiverheadLOCAL’s coverage of local residents and their connections to the Vietnam War, which ended 50 years ago on April 30. You can read more stories in the series here.
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