Ralph Bozella signed a teaching contract on a Friday in the August of 1970 at a school in Pennsylvania. He got his draft notice for the Vietnam War that Monday.
Bozella had just graduated college, which was why he hadn’t yet been drafted. There had also been a drafting deferment for teachers, but that went away the previous May.
Bozella turned 22 in basic training, receiving advanced infantry training in Louisiana before 30 days of leave to visit his family and girlfriend. Then he was on a plane to Vietnam.
Bozella has now lived in Longmont for over 50 years and has been an active member of the American Legion at the city, state and national level for nearly as long. He shared his story for Veterans Day.
The 74-year-old veteran recalled the immediate chaos upon arrival in Vietnam and the fear he felt as an infantryman at the tail end of the war.
“There’s smoke grenades, there’s explosions, there’s people getting off the helicopters, there’s people yelling orders,” he said. “There’s noise everywhere. It’s very frightening.”
The violence and fear Bozella experienced in his first few months of service led him to an adult education center on base, where he was able to get a role educating soldiers working on their GEDs rather than being out in combat.
“I didn’t want to go back out there, honestly,” he said. “I remember writing letters to my buddies back home, telling them to get out on the street and protest. This is awful. We should never send people to do this again. There’s no real purpose here. There’s no real mission. It was madness … Our own mission became to get each other home. That was our mission. We never understood what the real mission was by 1971.”
Bozella spent 11 months and 15 days in Vietnam, serving in the Army for just under 18 months but still receiving many of the benefits thanks to the Early Out program. Returning from serving was just the beginning of his challenges, though.
“Coming home was the worst thing ever,” he recalled. “The coming home experience was so bad, the changes I went through, the changes a lot of veterans even to this day go through when all of a sudden you’re through that and now, now what? It’s like being in a fog. You don’t think clearly.”
Bozella began having unsettling nightmares to the point where he didn’t want to sleep. He started drinking as a form of self medication to avoid the terror.
When Bozella went to the dentist soon after returning, he was told he was grinding his teeth in his sleep. That was one of several symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder that Bozella experienced, though he didn’t know it at the time — PTSD wasn’t added to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders until 1980.
Bozella went to the superintendent of schools that he had signed a contract with before he was drafted, asking for him to honor the contract and give Bozella a teaching job. As they spoke, it became apparent that the superintendent did not want to hire Bozella.
“Then he said, ‘Did you ever kill anybody over there?’ He asked me that,” Bozella said. “I blew up. I don’t remember exactly what was said, but I do remember that I stood in front of his desk and knocked everything off of it.”
It became clear to Bozella that he would not escape the self-destructiveness he’s found that many veterans struggle with, unless he got out of Pennsylvania.
“I needed to get out of that environment where I was in a trap trying to self medicate to deal with my own problems,” Bozella recalled, growing emotional. “It was destroying who I was as a person. I knew that.”
Bozella convinced a friend of his with a car to drive west. They made it to Denver, where Bozella was enchanted by the October weather. He eventually convinced his girlfriend — and now wife of 47 years — to move out with him.
Bozella began teaching his own course on job and life skills to adults on welfare, and his wife gave birth to their first of four children, but still he struggled to adjust to civilian life. He went through another rough patch in the spring of 1979 after leaving his job, but a former advisor found him and told Bozella about a job at the Longmont Community School.
The advisor instructed Bozella to get himself together and take this job that suited him perfectly. The family moved to Longmont that fall, where Bozella and his wife both would eventually retire out of the school system.
However, it was through the American Legion Post 32 that Bozella said he really began to heal. He said he was first “talked into” running the American Legion National High School Oratorical Contest.
Bozella eventually got involved at the national level and over the years he was elected the state commander and to the national executive committee representing the National Legion in Colorado. He was also chairman of the Legion’s Veteran Affairs and Rehabilitation Commission, which was made up of committees focusing on the VA and healthcare benefits for vets, claims, memorials and PTSD and suicide prevention.
He led impressive efforts to expand benefits for veterans, most recently getting Congress to add 23 new presumptive causes for veterans with cancer this year. Bozella even met privately with the Secretary of Veterans Affairs more than once.
He left the position just last month after a decade advocating for veterans. He noted that veterans all believe in service and that serving the community can be a way to heal after the trauma associated with military service.
“We have a heart for service, and whenever you have mental health issues because of your trauma in service, the more that you get involved and the more you help people, the more healing you get,” Bozella said. “That’s the main thing I’ve learned.”
Veterans of all forces can get involved at Post 32 through their website, www.post32.com. Bozella also encouraged everyone to support veterans with their votes and voices.
He recognized how difficult it can be to recover from what happens in war and that the process of forgiveness will be a long one.
“You don’t even know what you’re capable of doing, even on the dark side, until you’re thrust into that and sometimes it’s really hard to get rid of that,” Bozella said. “Then you realize — I realized, you don’t ever get rid of it, but you get forgiven. I am a Christian. I believe in Christ and he’s forgiven me. Knowing that enabled me to forgive myself for some of the things that I’ve done. I do sleep better these days.”
