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Price column: Friendship cemented in jungles of Vietnam
| Saturday, Apr 28 2007 8:45 PM
Last Updated: Saturday, Apr 28 2007 10:48 PM
Some veterans return home from war zones with medals, some with nightmares. Some return home with a clearer sense of who they are.
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Patrick Blake returned with something even more meaningful: a home he never knew existed. Marv Rohlfing, who'd helped Blake make his way through steamy, treacherous jungles, helped him find his way home too.
You won't hear their story at History of Heroes, a two-day event that concludes today at the Kern County Museum. Actor-historians representing various moments in time, including the Civil War, World War I, World War II, Korea and Vietnam, have been telling tales of valor and tribulation all weekend.
Among other things, wars seem to have this in common: Place men together in close, prolonged proximity under the most stressful of conditions and you compel them to trust each other. That trust often sows lifelong allegiances.
None more evident than that of Blake and Rohlfing, who are 100 years and a short stroll across the museum grounds from the Civil War re-enactors. Their mission is a quiet, humble one: supply food and cold beverages to the volunteers this weekend.
They work well together. They've been at it a long time.
For seven months in 1966, Rohlfing was an assistant machine-gunner for Blake's reconnaissance team, a part of the U.S. Army's 25th Infantry, third brigade task force -- base camp Pleiku.
As members of a force known as Cacti Blue or LuRRPS (for the Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol), they ran covert missions -- "black ops" -- in areas of Southeast Asia that Americans weren't supposed to be in.
It was here that Rohlfing, born and raised in Bakersfield, got to know Blake, who'd grown up in a succession of foster homes in Arkansas and Oklahoma.
Blake's parents were abusive alcoholics, so it wasn't altogether bad when they abandoned him.
"My dad just disappeared one day," Blake said. "I didn't have much choice."
Blake joined the Army at 17 and was shipped to Vietnam in 1966, the year after Rohlfing arrived.
Rohlfing received his share of letters from home. It soon became apparent that Blake didn't. "My mom had died right when I was about to join," Rohlfing said, "so for a while I was in that position of not getting letters either. I knew what that felt like."
He did something about it.
"I set him up with a family I knew back home," Rohlfing said. "They became pen pals. We weren't expecting it to work out the way it did."
When their hitches ended in the late 1960s -- Rohlfing by this time had lost his father too, and then served a second tour of duty as a Marine -- Blake followed his friend to Bakersfield. Or, more accurately, he came home.
His pen-pal family wanted him. Though he was in his early 20s, Blake moved in with the family of Imogene Hall until he got himself settled. That was 40 years ago.
Rohlfing, 61, worked as a softball and baseball coach for decades, and he wrote a book on surviving Little League. Blake, 60, worked as a truck driver. They weren't always close. Blake endured drug and alcohol problems, and Rohlfing had little tolerance for such things. But they remained casual friends, and when Blake cleaned up a few years ago, they got close again.
They've found common ground working to help fellow veterans.
This weekend's event, a fundraiser for the $1.3 million Kern Veterans Memorial going up near the Bakersfield Amtrak station, is one such cause. (It's set for unveiling on Veterans Day, but organizers need to raise another $150,000 -- ideally this weekend.) Rohlfing and Blake are also involved in Rolling Thunder, a national organization that addresses assorted veterans' causes, including POWs and MIAs.
Rohlfing is the state organization's vice president; his wife, Susan, treasurer; Blake sergeant-at-arms.
Rohlfing, a motorcycle guy, will honor POWs and MIAs at today's History of Heroes bike rally. He's having his 2006 Harley-Davidson outfitted with a "trike kit" and dressed out with artwork depicting the local memorial and POW-MIA themes.
It'll be unveiled today.
It's all part of Rohlfing's personal effort to honor the memory of the men he served with -- including those he had to leave behind.
The lucky ones made it home. Some of them found homes they'd never seen until they got there.
Robert Price's column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach him at 395-7399 or rprice@bakersfield.com.