Home At Last

Joel Dean Smith loved Waitsburg. It's where he spent many boyhood summers, visiting his grandparents - fishing, hunting, trapping and searching out morel mushrooms.

And when he returned stateside from Vietnam in 1970, a double amputee at 22 years old, it was Waitsburg that welcomed him home. It was the local newspaper and the community who followed his progress as he was transferred from a field hospital in Saigon to one in Japan, and eventually to the U.S.

For all those reasons, his wife, Bonne Smith who now lives in Port Angeles, chose to bury his ashes here in the city cemetery on Memorial Day, on the 20th anniversary of his death on May 31, 1990.

"It's a love story about a town, about a family and lots of childhood memories," she said. Monday morning arrived with wind and spitting rain, but the family and friends who gathered around Smith's final resting place remarked only that he had a beautiful spot on the hillside overlooking wheat fields and the racetrack at the fairgrounds. And since her husband had very much enjoyed Days of Real Sport, the location was perfect, Bonne Smith said.

As a song written and sung by a friend played from a car stereo, members of the group took turns reminiscing, telling stories of a young, "cocky" Joel before Vietnam and of the man who came home and, despite the loss of his legs and the pain he suffered, was determined to live a full life.

An old friend, Larry Mc- Connaughey, who brought Smith's ashes from Auburn to Waitsburg on his Harley Davidson motorcycle, remembered rebuilding a 1932 Harley with his friend in the Smith family garage in 1968.

Caroll Smith, Joel's uncle, recalled how his nephew loved spending time in Waitsburg. Even after the loss of his legs, he visited his grandmother, Edith Smith, and his uncle, Lloyd Smith.

A Times article from the early 1970s tells of Joel pheasant hunting with his dad, Mayes Smith, from a military wheelchair friends had painted in camouflage colors for him.

A Long Road

Smith had been in Vietnam for four months when he was leading a platoon and one of his men tripped a booby trap wire. The force of the blast blew his legs into the top of a tree. Metal fragments melted into his back, and part of the muscle of his right arm was blown away.

Most of the soldiers with him died, and Smith was not expected to live. But he survived the journey from field hospital to field hospital, where doctors struggled to save his legs. And after the final "debridement" of his legs up to the hip, he lived on with courage and humor despite being plagued by phantom pain from his missing limbs.

The injuries he sustained in Vietnam on January 3, 1970 eventually killed him, Bonne Smith said. His death caused by respiratory failure brought on by a stroke was ultimately ruled a "combat death" by the U.S. Army.

On Memorial Day in 1997, Joel Smith's ultimate sacrifice was recognized at a ceremony in Olympia during which an engraved panel with the following inscription was added to the Vietnam Memorial Wall.

It took Bonne Smith years of bouncing from government agency to government agency before achieving this recognition of the state's soldiers who returned from Vietnam but ultimately died of injuries sustained there.

She had asked for her husband's name to be placed on the wall, along with those of his fellow soldiers whom he served with, but no names were included. She was told there was not enough room.

"I had no idea when I started that process how many soldiers had died since returning without receiving any recognition," she said.

One spokesman for the Vietnam War Memorial Committee has estimated that as many as 70,000 Vietnam veterans have died in this state as a result of physical injuries and mental disorders sustained in the war.

No Whining Allowed

Bonne and Joel met in Seattle and married in Waitsburg's Preston Park 1976. During the late seventies and early eighties, they ran an organic farm near Walla Walla, where Joel raised black sheep and Bonne sheared them. The wool was sold to hand spinners.

There was a lot he could do on the farm and he did it without complaint, although the work fatigued him greatly and often increased his discomfort, Bonne Smith said. "He moved irrigation pipe, he operated the tractor."

A front-page photograph from a 1979 edition of the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin shows Joel climbing the steps to city hall on his hands. The caption read, "Joel Smith, a farmer who lost both his legs in Vietnam nine years ago, is one of few handicapped persons who can gain entrance to city hall. But he needs someone to carry his wheelchair inside."

A longtime friend, Larry Schneider, who came to Waitsburg for the burial service, shared a house with Joel before he went to Vietnam and again after he returned.

"He was a wiry, cocky kind of guy before Vietnam," Schneider recalled. "He had the world by the tail and was going to shake the living daylights out of it hellip; all the guys had muscle cars, and he was no exception.

"When he came back, he was a lot mellower. He didn't carry any baggage about anything."

A family member recalled how as a child she asked Joel where he put his socks, and he replied, "In my shoes."

Schneider attributed Smith's stoic nature in part to his military training. "They couldn't admit to any weaknesses hellip; they were conditioned for going over there. But they didn't uncondition them."

Because her husband's injuries were so massive and so visible, they often startled people, Bonne said. They became uncomfortable around him.D

uring his lifetime, she said, Joel received only one public acknowledgment - from a young boy in the Kitsap Mall.

"The boy walked over, shook his hand and thanked him for his service."