Vietnam: Soldiers’ Stories - John Laemmar
Vietnam Veteran Sent Movie Film Home to Dad
Reels Show War to TV Viewers 32 Years Later
John Laemmar, Evanston, Illinois Manufacturing company executive
He joined Navy in 1967, landing in Saigon in May of 1968 to begin the first of three Vietnam tours in the Navy’s Mobile Riverine Force
John Laemmar grew up in a family where his mom and dad filmed every holiday, family birthday and vacation with a 16-millimeter movie camera. So when he arrived in Vietnam and saw an Argus Super 8 movie camera for sale in a ship’s store, he plunked down the $70 to buy it without much thought.
“It was a kind of surreal world for me in Vietnam,” said Laemmar. “I guess I realized that someday, I’d wonder if this all really happened.” The hour’s worth of video footage, shot during his first tour in Vietnam, includes firefights, flame throwers, and beach attacks, showing in very real terms what war was like.
His film provides a backdrop for WILL-TV’s new documentary, Vietnam: Soldiers’ Stories. Laemmar’s combat footage is woven with other archival footage and photographs to set off powerful stories told by 13 Illinois and Indiana Vietnam veterans, including Laemmar.
Laemmar, 52, of Evanston, Ill., said now he regrets not doing more filming. “I wish I had shot more of the routine daily stuff,” he said. “We’d spend three or four hours on weapons maintenance. It was just like breathing or eating, so I didn’t think of filming it. I wish I had film of us cooking C-rations over C-4 plastic explosives.”
All of the footage is from the first of three tours he spent as a gunner and boat captain on a Navy armored gunboat in Vietnam. “I experimented with ways to film while I was firing. I’d hold the camera on top of the gun, and that finally just totally destroyed the camera,” he said. He frequently filmed when he couldn’t return fire for some reason, such as not wanting to endanger friendly personnel.
He sent his film home to his dad, who had it developed, along with 300 to 400 slides Laemmar took with a still camera. After Laemmar came home, it was several years before he looked at the movie film. “I was busy with other things and there was no urgency about looking at it,” he said. Several minutes of Laemmar’s film was used in a recent Discovery Channel special on the river war in Vietnam. The rest has never been televised before.
Laemmar has now found a different medium to communicate what the Vietnam War was like. He’s one of the contributing artists for the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum in Chicago. Two of his paintings, “Last Patrol,” and “The Aftermath,” hang in the museum. “It’s a way to express things that can’t really be put into words,” said Laemmar.
Quotes from John Laemmar:
“I know it took a tremendous toll, especially on my mother. I wrote a letter home after our first fire fight, and my dad asked me to never write a letter like that home again. He said, ‘If you want to write, write me at the office,’ because it just devastated my mother. We had some guys wounded severely in the boat in front of ours and by then it had become an everyday thing. You go out, you get shot at, you take some casualties. It was like getting up in the morning and going to work, and it was just extraordinarily difficult for her.”
“I think for me, I can acknowledge that Vietnam was the most defining moment of my life and today I count it as the most valuable experience of my life. I wouldn’t trade it. I think it pushed me beyond anything I could ever have imagined that I could have done or accomplished. … I think even in Vietnam I felt, ‘You know, it’ll never be worse than this, and it’ll never be better than this.’ By better, I mean the interaction with each other, all my buddies. There was a great simplicity to life back then. You had very little to worry about other than staying alive and doing your job. I think because of the simplicity, you saw the extremes of what one person can do to another person.”
