When he arrived at Bien Hoa Air Base, he got off the plane and had to run to the safety of some bunkers because mortar rounds were landing on the base and exploding. It was a scary introduction to what would become 15 months in South Vietnam during 1968 and 1969.

The Fort Dodge man spent that time working on a base with South Vietnamese troops. He went out on regular patrols and was in frequent battles with the communist enemy.

According to Wuebker, the South Vietnamese people living near the base liked having the troops nearby. He added that he always remained proud to be an American soldier.

“When I put on that olive drab outfit from the United States and went overseas, I wore that with pride,” he said.

Wuebker, who grew up in the Rockwell City area, received a notice in late 1967 directing him to report for a physical exam in preparation for military service.

He and 10 other men from Calhoun County were drafted into the Army on March 5, 1968. He recalled that there were 307 draftees gathered at Fort Des Moines. It took two planes to transport them all. Wuebker was on the second flight and went to basic training at Fort Bliss in Texas.

Although that base is in the desert, he remembers that it was surprisingly cold there and that it even snowed a little bit.

After completing basic training, he went to Fort Polk, Louisiana, for advanced training. The area around that base, he said, was like a jungle. Being there was good preparation for going to South Vietnam, he recalled.

After all of his training was complete, Wuebker had a 20 day leave.

Then he was assigned to Military Assistance Command Vietnam and took that long flight from Oakland, California, to South Vietnam.

He was assigned to a base in Binh Duong Province. He was initially assigned to night security duty at the base.

“I didn’t like that at all,” he said.

He volunteered to be a radio operator. That meant he carried a backpack radio known in Army lingo as a PRC-25. He had the radio on his back whenever the soldiers left the base. It was used to contact other units and to call in helicopter gunships or planes to support the troops on the ground.

Wuebker said it was used a lot to call in air strikes.

“We would have contact almost every time we went out,” he said.

During his second trip away from the base, his unit got into a particularly vicious battle and had to retreat.

“They were just all over us,” he said. “I realized this is pretty serious business.”

Sometimes the troops went out in trucks; other times they traveled in helicopters. Wuebker said he went out on a Navy river patrol boat on at least one occasion.

Reporters and photographers sometimes accompanied the troops. One result of that, Wuebker said, was that he was in a photo that appeared in a Vietnamese magazine.

One day when he was at the base, he heard a bell ringing. He discovered that the bell was in a Catholic church in the nearby village. He started going to Mass at the church whenever he could. He didn’t speak Vietnamese, but the service was basically the same as it was in the United States, so he felt comfortable worshipping there.

There was never any trouble between the troops and the people living in the village, he recalled.

“Those people loved to have us there,” he said.

Wuebker volunteered to extend his tour of duty in South Vietnam to 15 months instead of the usual 12 months. By doing so, he was eligible to be discharged as soon as he got back to the United States.

Just before his tour of duty was to end, he was notified that he would be moved to Saigon in a couple days to prepare for the trip home.

He flew from Saigon to Oakland, California, in October 1969. He stepped off the plane and into a country where people were fed up with the Vietnam War.

“We didn’t know the United States had changed so much,” he said.

On the airport grounds, there was a crowd watching the returning troops from behind a chain link fence. Those in the crowd weren’t just watching, though.

“They’re spitting through the fence, spitting right on us,” Wuebker said.

He would soon fly from San Francisco to Omaha, Nebraska, and then travel into Iowa.

Because farming was in his blood, he moved onto a 240 acre farm in 1970. Immersing himself in the work of farming was the therapy that helped him deal with his Vietnam War experience, he said.