“I was there a year and a day,” Sonksen said. “I got an extra day because it was leap year.”

But at least he was getting out just as the war was sinking to its lowest point. Sonksen had arrived in South Vietnam in the spring of 1967. In that year, U.S. casualties would nearly double from 6,350 in 1966 to 11,363 in 1967. The year 1968 would be the deadliest of all, with 16,899 Americans killed.

Sonksen counts himself lucky to have come home at all. He got his ticket out of South Vietnam in April 1968. The following month would be the single worst month of U.S. casualties of the entire war.

“I didn’t think I was going to make it,” Sonksen said. “I didn’t think I was ever going to get out.”

Sonksen, who grew up on a farm southeast of Stratford, said he would never again let the Army know upfront that he was a farm boy comfortable with a gun.

“They liked farm boys,” Sonksen said. “And don’t tell them you hunt and fish. You don’t get to fish, but you do get to camp every night. I was a Boy Scout and all of that, and you just shouldn’t tell them that when you go in. They’ll find it out anyway.”

Sonksen was still a newlywed when he got his draft notice in the fall of 1966. “I was renting a farm, had bought some machinery,” and then Uncle Sam came calling with other plans.

Sonksen did his Army Basic Training at Fort Bliss, Texas, and then got a month at home at Christmas. It was a wild trip with fellow soldiers on a chartered bus for the long trip from Texas back to Iowa. He opted for a quieter ride on a train when it came time to head back to Fort Bliss.

In his original testing with the military, Sonksen had been identified as a candidate for mechanic’s schools. But that was not to be.

“At the last hour, they changed my orders,” Sonksen said. “That was a bad day because I knew what was coming. I knew I was going to Vietnam.”

Sonksen was sent for “jungle training” at Fort Polk, Louisiana. It was a place designed to prepare young men for the worst kind of warfare.

“The only good thing is that I was in good shape when I got out of there,” Sonksen said. “We would run five miles every morning with five-buckle overshoes on. It was still dark out when we got done, and you have the dry heaves waiting for breakfast.”

Nicknamed “Tigerland,” the training at Fort Polk (now renamed Fort Johnson) was brutal and designed to prepare soldiers for even worse conditions when they reached South Vietnam.

After a 30-day leave back in Stratford, Sonksen shipped out from San Francisco on a 23-hour flight to South Vietnam. They had a stop-over in Guam before arriving at Cam Ranh Bay, South Vietnam.

“They have to find a place clear across the world to fight,” Sonksen said.

His stay in Cam Ranh Bay would be short-lived, just two or three days before being literally dropped into the middle of the fight.

“They put us on a helicopter and took us to the middle of the jungle near the Cambodian/Laos border, and that’s where I was for the next 90 days,” he said.

Sonksen was part of a rifle company in the 4th Infantry Division. Those first three months were spent in the jungle in extremely rough conditions.

“Every three days they would bring us out nine meals, that’s all we got,” Sonksen said. “We never seen a shower. We would wade in the rivers, sleep on the ground. We had a poncho for covering up and to keep some of the rain off of you. It was not a good thing.”

The battles were even worse.

“We were in big fights several nights,” Sonksen recalled. “The Chinese were coming in over the border in big numbers. They finally put three of our companies together so we could get more people because they knew we were going to get attacked.”

Fatalities were high, but Sonksen also remembers some brave survivors.

“A whole platoon had been wiped out one night,” Sonksen said. “We went in and got those people out. There was one survivor. He had played dead all night because the Chinese were camped around him … That was a bad night.”

Three months into his stint of jungle warfare, Sonksen would get an important break when a fellow soldier was due to be helicoptered out for, of all things, a dental appointment.

“I had put in a request to be a mechanic, and I must have had a friend somewhere,” Sonksen said. “Here comes a helicopter to get a guy who had to go to the dentist, and they took me, too, because they needed a mechanic. Vehicles weren’t running and I suppose some general didn’t have a jeep, so they grabbed me to be a mechanic.”

It was supposed to be a temporary assignment, and then back to the jungle, but Sonksen is thankful that the rest of his tour would be spent as a mechanic at the 4th Infantry Division headquarters in Pleiku.

“So at least I had a cot to sleep in, a mess, a table to set at, and a concrete floor,” Sonksen said. “We had a meal and a shower any time we wanted. It was a hundred times better.”

Sonksen was able to break up his time in Vietnam with two R & R’s in Hawaii. One of them came on very short notice.

“I couldn’t even call my wife, because we had to call over the radio from Vietnam and you had to wait in line for hours,” Sonksen recalled. “So, I called her from Guam and told her I that I was going to be in Hawaii in eight hours, if there was any way she could meet me.”

And that’s when small town Stratford sprang into action. His then-wife was living in an upstairs apartment in Stratford and worked at the local grocery store.

“People were going up and down the street giving money so she could come to Hawaii,” Sonksen said. “They got her to Des Moines and she got a ticket. I got there first, but she got there the next day … Those were good memories.”

When his tour in South Vietnam was finally over, he had his pick of duty and chose Fort Campbell, Kentucky, because he had family there. The couple had a small trailer on base and his parents even came to visit.

“We were about 50 miles from Nashville and went to the Grand Ole Opry at the Ryman Auditorium,” he recalled.

After his discharge, the couple returned to Stratford, where they would raise two sons and build a successful farming operation. Sonksen enjoys being part of the community and today farms with sons Travis and Shane. While many Vietnam veterans were often treated poorly upon their return, Sonksen said that didn’t happen to him.

“I did not have anything negative,” Sonksen said. “People always treated me pretty good.”

He is grateful for Stratford, his family, and that his sons never had to serve, never had to see what he had to see.

“Thank God, they didn’t have to go to something like that,” Sonksen said.