Willmont Griffin – often called “Griff” – is a Vietnam-era veteran even though his tour of duty only required him to serve in that country for two days. He was one of the U.S. Marines pulling terrified people into a CH-53 helicopter just before Saigon fell in April 1975 after Communist forces captured the city.
Thirty-five years later and now an airman with the New Jersey Air National Guard, Griffin returned home from another war zone, Iraq, his second tour of duty to a combat zone since leaving the U.S. Marines in 1977. He was recently named Legionnaire of the Year at the Bayonne American Legion Post.
Descent to homelessness
A native of Hoosick Falls, N.Y., Griffin dropped out of school at 17 to join the U.S. Marines in 1972, went to Paris Island, and then took up duty in Hawaii. In April of 1975, he got the call to go to Vietnam, not for a year-long stint, but just long enough to help carry out people fleeing the capital. He said he cried the first time he saw the movie Miss Saigon.
“They told me I was too old. I had just turned 43.” – Willmont Griffin
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“I’m not proud of that time of my life,” he said during an interview in downtown Jersey City a few days after his return from Baghdad. “I became a kind of hobo.”
Perhaps he was self-medicating. He was later treated for post traumatic stress disorder.
He lived on the street and drank everything he could find, and then woke up in Boston Commons on Thanksgiving morning in 1980 on a park bench surrounded by a number of other veterans.
He was brought to the New England Center for Homeless Veterans, from which he was soon expelled for violating the basic rules against using drugs and alcohol. He had been caught with a fishing pole out the window and a bottle of vodka on the other end of the line.
Later, he went through detoxification and has been clean ever since.
“I’ve been clean for more than 19 years,” he said.
Then he went back to school.
Enlisting again
Griffin got an associate’s degree, then a bachelor’s. He landed a job as a construction inspector. Since then, he’s worked on a number of large projects, from the Metro West project in Boston to a tunnel project for Con Ed in New York. He’s currently slated to work on the new transportation tunnel under the Hudson River.
In 1998, he tried to rejoin the Marines.
“They told me I was too old,” he said. “I had just turned 43.”
He decided he wasn’t going to be stopped, and enlisted in the Massachusetts National Guard.
He called the 21 year gap “a vacation from the military.”
When terrorists attacked New York and Washington D.C. on Sept. 11, 2001, he was assigned to Otis National Guard Air Base in Cape Cod. As part of the field crew, he was among those who helped launch the F-15 fighters that soon screeched through the air space over Secaucus in a belated attempt to possibly shoot down the second plane before it struck the Twin Towers.
“We didn’t get there in time,” he said, looking back as if he had ridden in the planes with the pilots.
With the need for increased Homeland Security, some of the activities at McGuire Air Base in New Jersey were restored. In 2002, Griffin took up work there and moved to Jersey City.
When the military looked for volunteers to go to Iraq, Griffin got on line, and was shipped out to Kuwait as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom, where he worked in support of combat troops for four months. Younger soldiers called him “Pops,” he said.
It was not easy, he admitted.
“War is a young man’s game,” he said. “But we all had a mission.”
But he admired the younger men and their courage, and felt great compassion for those who gave up their time, and sometimes their lives, for a great cause – all of them putting themselves in harm’s way.
“These kids are brighter and smarter than any I’ve seen,” he said. “And they give up their college and their career to serve.”
Back to war
Late last year, Griffin got word that he was going back – not to Kuwait this time, but to Baghdad with his unit, the 108th Air Refueling Wing. He is 54-years-old and was going back to war for the third time.
“We left in January and we just returned,” he said.
While the conflict has scaled down some from earlier years, fighting continues. The base got hit a few times, but there was always smoke over the city of Baghdad, indicating the detonation of a car bomb. He saw the wounded coming into the Combat Support Hospital – the modern name for what used to be called a MASH unit.
With helicopters coming and going 24 hours a day, seven days a week, he said he had to get used to the quiet living back in downtown Jersey City.
He said while he hopes to serve four more years, he was injured while on duty and will not likely make it. But he said he intends to work for veterans by being very active in helping local veterans get their benefits
“There are 103,000 veterans in homeless shelters,” he said. “There is no reason any veteran in this country should be homeless.”
Al Sullivan may be reached at asullivan@hudsonreporter.com.