During Vietnam, Army Sgt. Tim Woodruff and others in his platoon were looking for respite from the atrocities of war. They spotted some large dirt mounds surrounded by soft grass in the country’s north.
Not comprehending where they were, they lay on their backs and momentarily found repose on the cool, lush blades — in a graveyard.
He wanted to sleep there.
Suddenly, he heard “pfft, pfft, pfft” in the distance and then a whistling sound. Soon a mortar round landed near his leg, wounding other soldiers. The blast tossed him, and his leg burned like crazy but was still intact.
The Viet Cong, learning that the patch of comfort sometimes beckoned soldiers, put the U.S. troops in their crosshairs.
He dodged death yet again, and the unit never sought refuge in a graveyard again.
That was but one of many war memories Woodruff has stored deep in his mind, affecting all areas of his life up to now.
Last fall, Woodruff returned from an Honor Flight San Diego trip to Washington, D.C. And now he’s a changed man.
A Healing Journey
And as the nonprofit group prepares to take about 90 other veterans Friday to the nation’s capital, Woodruff wants to help as many veterans as he can also take that healing journey.
For about 55 years he has kept inside almost all of what he endured during war. Woodruff didn’t even talk about his three Purple Hearts.
“I think there were a couple of times that I tried to share some stories,” he said. “Usually in the first minute or two, I can tell that nobody really wants to hear what I have to say, and I stop talking. I became close-lipped.”
When the 76-year-old Spring Valley resident signed up with Honor Flight, his life was very painful.
But he recalls a visit to the Vietnam Veteran Memorial a decade ago, and how emotional that day was.
“I don’t share emotions, so allowing myself to feel was something I wanted to experience” again, the veteran said.
He wrote to Honor Flight volunteers after his trip to the nation’s capital, admitting that before going, he seriously considered suicide. The flight was to be his last hurrah.
“I was giving up on life,” he told Times of San Diego recently. “I didn’t care anymore. I didn’t think I was here to help or do anything functional. All that I could see was that to be around would be just hanging on to a failure.”
But the unexpected altered his perspective.
Honor Flight San Diego “Guardians” — who he now calls Guardian Angels — on the November flight gave him new hope, and he now feels he has much to share and do with his life.
(Guardians are volunteers who accompany veterans on the trip to monuments, ensuring their safety, and seeing that medical and transportation needs are met as well as offering emotional support.)
The experience helped him accept himself as he is. And find some closure.
“If it wasn’t for those Guardian Angels, and the experiences and the camaraderie with the other vets, I would not have this wonderful, wonderful, good feeling inside that I do today,” he said sitting in the shade of a park.
Kept to Himself
Guardian Diane Bucci and team leader Lisa Gary recall that Woodruff was anxious about the trip and kept to himself throughout the first day.
Woodruff said he had grown tired of people saying, “Thank you for your service” because he felt people were insincere. After all, they didn’t know him.
He grew agitated and later numb to the remark because he thought it was hollow.
“Prior to the Honor Flight, many of us had accepted a pessimistic type of fate we laid upon ourselves,” he wrote in a letter after the flight, “believing that no one really cared about us, our military commitment, the Vietnam War, our battle actions or the consequences we incurred, where many of us, especially myself, became bitter, untrusting and negative, which just increased over the years.”
Upon arriving at San Diego International Airport, the veteran said he thought: “Oh, crap. It’s going to be the same old stuff again where they are going to give us this bull about how much they care.”
“But, you see, Lisa got to know me. She asked questions about me. She would put her arms around me and say, ‘Tell me about this.’ I found myself opening up for the first time in 55 years.”
The veteran said it felt so good to share and praised Gary: “Lisa can make a believer out of a stone wall.”
Guardian Bucci said: “I think the big turning point was the Vietnam Wall” that Saturday. Woodruff traced a fallen friend’s name from his platoon. After leaving the wall, he sat on a nearby bench with Bucci.
“He just started talking about his buddy who died who he thought didn’t need to die,” she said.
By dinner that November 2022 night, he found another veteran in his division at the same time who lived not far from him, and they had a lengthy conversation, she said.
“What a difference it made in him,” the Guardian said. “Sunday morning, he comes down and he’s all smiles and happy and just totally different.”
Recalls Woodruff: “All of a sudden … I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. That’s the amazing part. That’s why I will do anything I can to encourage people to go on that flight. Because it’s not the flight there — it’s the people, those Guardians.”
Team leader Gary said that because he was “so quiet and so standoffish,” a lot of people would have let him be alone — which “would not have made anything easier for him or better for him” that weekend trip.
“I think that perseverance of ‘We’re going to let you know that we care about you, whether you want to know it or not’ is what we do,” Gary said.
And then came the letter.
After the November flight, Woodruff wrote to Bucci, expressing his gratitude for the trip.
“This was dramatic, dramatic to the point of being life changing, and it was all due to the individual Guardian’s Love, Care, Respect, Support, and Positive Encouragement continually offered & freely given,” he wrote.
Woodruff called the flight a “Voyage of Happiness & Delight.”
Gary said: “It warms my heart to think that one group of people, Honor Flight San Diego, could have changed his life that much. It makes it all worthwhile.”
“It makes me once again know why I do what I do because whether it be in a big way or a small way, we affect so many people’s lives, and I think our only goal is to honor these men and women and to let them know that they are appreciated,” Gary added.
Woodruff recently talked about his frame of mind and dark times.
Audie Murphy Fan
Born in Seattle Woodruff and grew up in what he believes was a dysfunctional family. The family moved to San Diego, and he went to Hoover High School.
Audie Murphy, one of the most decorated American combat soldiers of World War II, was his hero.
“I wanted to go into the Army and win the Congressional Medal of Honor,” he said, “and be honored and praised and looked up to and wanted to prove my manhood,” he said. “Put those things together, and out of plain stupidity, I went into the Army.”
What he concluded recently was he entered the Army in March 1966 for the wrong reason.
“I think if I had had a different upbringing, I would have been strong with my manhood,” Woodruff said.
Instead, when he was in his late teens, he wondered: “Would I be able to fire back? Would I be able to be effective? Would I be a coward?’
He wanted to put those doubts to rest and would prove his manhood.
“But every time I did something, it never accomplished that goal,” he recalls. “The only thing that accomplished that goal was me realizing that sometimes I’m a boy, sometimes I’m a little kid, sometimes I’m an old fogey, but I’m always OK.”
But he never thought he was OK, Woodruff said recently. There were times in his life that his acceptance of himself improved, but his Honor Flight has given that feeling permanence, he believes.
After training, Woodruff served in the Green Berets for over a year stateside. Loving the ocean, he hoped he could be a warrant officer and captain a small boat.
Instead, he was transferred to the 101st Airborne and signed up to be a paratrooper because he would get paid more.
One month before his 21st birthday, Woodruff and his platoon landed in Cu Chi near Saigon, and they made their way up to Hue, Phu Bai and mountains around A Shau Valley in North Vietnam. Firefights became more frequent as they moved north.
His time in Vietnam swung from “painful monotony” to ever-increasing intense firefights.
They did search and destroy missions along the way during his eight months in Southeast Asia.
“When I got to Vietnam, it only takes you a week or less to realize combat is not glorious; there’s no romance there,” the veteran said.
Woodruff was wounded three times – in the leg, arm and back. His last wound to his leg occurred when the vehicle he was in hit a land mind.
The injury led to a life-threatening pulmonary embolism.
But he is quick to say that didn’t make him a hero. The abundant shrapnel hit anyone in its way and wasn’t targeting heroes, he said.
One soldier in his platoon was hit by shrapnel 22 times – all minor injuries. “The guy was just an attraction for shrapnel,” Woodruff said.
Woodruff spoke about a medic who was a good friend of his.
“He was the one who would, when someone was calling out for help, … drag them back,” Woodruff said. “There were things that he did, heroic things. … Is he not a hero? He was there to back us up. He was there for us.”
Woodruff recalled his medic friend’s death.
“It’s funny after 50-plus years, my chin still quivers, and I have trouble talking about him. I remember watching old war movies and thinking, ‘That’s silly. How could somebody hold on to a feeling that long?’ They stay with you. They really do.”
Fear was a constant companion until he was in a firefight. Then adrenalin and his training kicked in. He became hyperfocused and knew what he needed to do.
“It’s horrendous when you get into a firefight,” the veteran recalled. “You lose all your gear, you have to drag your wounded, get your dead back. You go through the trauma. It’s a big emotional thing.”
He recalled the first death he witnessed in his first firefight.
Soldiers had to dunk their faces in a pond laden with leeches as bullets sung by. A comrade was shot in the head.
He approached the man after the battle and all of a sudden “I picked him up and grabbed his shirt around the collar and was shaking him, screameing at him: ‘Tell me what you know! Tell me what you know!’ Because I was curious about what happens when you die.”
He did that only once.
Fetching Body Parts
Friendly fire played a role in another traumatic incident.
U.S. artillery missed its mark and killed 14 service members and wounded 34 others. Woodruff’s Third Company was called in to retrieve body parts.
The hardest part was recognizing one of the dead as a friend. His face looked like a deflated mask.
He picked up the fallen man’s backpack and noticed the soldier hadn’t eaten two cans of sardines.
“I hadn’t eaten in a couple of days,” Woodruff explained. He noticed a red streak on the first can. The second one had a dent. Then he saw a little piece of shrapnel with a little blood on it inside.
The shrapnel “went through my friend, through both of his sardine cans. But because I was so hungry, I ignored all of that and ate it anyway,” he confessed.
Woodruff said he got wiser as his tour progressed. Halfway through, he wrote home, saying that he learned how to survive amid trauma. “The only thing that will kill me is an accidental thing,” he wrote.
In the beginning of his military service, “I was very immature and not realizing that I was,” he said. “Like most 20-year-old boys, I was thinking I got it all together; I don’t need any help. As I look back, I realize I did a lot of stupid things.”
As a sergeant, Woodruff received replacement soldiers when men died or were wounded.
One such soldier was with Woodruff’s unit for one week.
“We were behind this little mound, and I was laying and kept saying, “Get down! Get down!’ and physically pulled the soldier down several times. The soldier rolled his eyes at him.
The new soldier was convinced he was safe because no bullets were kicking up the dirt.
“Out of the blue, shrapnel from somewhere. No enemy around. He died” from being hit in the chest, he said.
“I was covered with his blood and he just died in my arms,” Woodruff said. It was a day and a half before he could change out of his blood-soaked fatigues.
For years afterward, he went though anguish, blaming himself for the young man’s death. He feared he didn’t properly affix the bandage. Later in nurses training, he understood that the wound was so grave, the new solider was going to die no matter what he did.
He recalls the biggest lesson he learned about himself during the war: If placed in any situation, he could work his way out of it in a positive manner. “It may be that I fail, but I will learn from that failure to move on to something where I won’t fail,” he said.
After a year in the hospital amid five operations, Woodruff left the Army in March 1969 and went back to college. He attended Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, where he got a degree in respiratory therapy. Also Idaho State University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in nursing. Finally, he studied at Wheeling College in West Virginia, where he got a degree as a CRNA (Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist).
He served as a nurse for 10 years before he lost his job.
All along, the war didn’t leave his side, and he developed post-traumatic stress disorder.
“I didn’t know I had PTSD.” he said. “(The Vietnam War) has always been ever-present on my mind. The first two years were pent up with constant nightmares. After that, the nightmare wore off, but if I heard a car backfiring in the first year, I would fall on my face.”
Certain things still bother him today. “Some things stick with you forever, a lot of things,” he said. “I periodically have nightmares about failure; I used to have constant nightmares.”
PTSD came with a huge price — he turned to alcohol and drugs, which cost him his career. Finding it hard to share emotions, several relationships didn’t last.
“I was doing anything to diminish the pain that was in the background. I wasn’t able to share and dissipate or dispose of it somehow.”
A lot of that had to do with self condemnation, he said.
But since his fall trip with Honor Flight San Diego, he feels his PTSD has lessened.
“I feel so much better about myself and I think it’s too easy to fall into the victim mode,” Woodruff said. “The flight will open your eyes and your mind and your heart to things that you didn’t realize could be there and are.”
Others Suffer PTSD
People have told Woodruff that nothing can be done about PTSD — that it’s incurable.
The veteran doesn’t agree.
Also: “I have too many guys that have told me, ‘It’s better not to talk about it.’ I disagree. In my case, I needed the sharing part. I needed not only to share about the experience there (Vietnam), but what I experienced after too,” Woodruff said.
He rejects the notion that only those who were on the battlefield had PTSD.
“I realized when talking to a number of vets that the guys in the background can have just as much PTSD as we did because of their lack of inability to express themselves, expose themselves, be out there and be active in the actual fighting,” he said.
He praised non-combat soldiers who kept all of the operations of the military going, from replenishing supply to choppers who brought them food, at great risk of being fired on.
Woodruff’s advice to other veterans?
Be open and listen to others and go on an Honor Flight trip.
Team leader Gary said: “There’s people on our trips that still don’t let you in” — sharing their stories — “so I’m just grateful that he did. He lived to tell his story and he still is, and we hope he will continue to for a lot of years.”
Said Woodruff: “The flight just brought all kinds of hope to me and a realization that I can still do some good. … The flight will do that to anyone who goes. They may not get what I got, but I guarantee that they will go away saying, ‘That was wonderful.'”
First in a series
People in crisis can call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 or text HOME to 741741. Services are free, available 24/7 and confidential.