An Emotional Return to the Battlefields of Vietnam

Ed “Tex” Stiteler, 77, first went back to Vietnam to honor his Marine squad leader Charles Esters Jr. with a memorial service at Duc Pho, where Esters was killed in January 1967.

“I wanted to visit the site where we were in a day-long ambush for 10 and a half hours,” Stiteler told AARP Experience Counts, explaining that the fighting was so intense his unit ran out of water and ammunition. “The first time I went with three members of my platoon, to memorialize and to remember.”

He also brought along his wife, whom he met long after his service in Vietnam, as a way of helping her to understand some of the feelings he had been struggling with. At the time, Stiteler was a schoolteacher nearing retirement. By the end of the 2001 trip, he’d decided that arranging for Vietnam veterans to return to Vietnam was his new calling in life.

Stiteler, from San Antonio, Texas, who served in the 3rd Marine Division, started Vietnam Battlefield Tours in 2005 with five fellow veterans and some local guides.

You can subscribe here to AARP Experience Counts, a free e-newsletter published twice a month. If you have feedback or a story idea then please contact us here.

“As an enlisted infantryman going to Vietnam, your scope of the war was so small that you never knew what was going on over the next hill,” he said. “So, I think that’s one of the things that people go for, trying to see the global aspect of the Vietnam War and learn more about the command structure.

“What sets us apart is that once people tell me their special interest, where they need to go and what places they need to see, we augment the itinerary and that’s how we drive it.”

They use old maps, GPS and military coordinates to pinpoint exact places. “We don’t take it lightly,” he said. “We study hard. If a person gives us a location, we get it found.”

Dennis Coulter, 74, an Army veteran from Springfield, Missouri, made the trip in 2018 and again last year. He was only 18 when he enlisted and patrolled the roads and trails along the DMZ.

“The 2018 trip, I knew no one when we departed the U.S., but came home with 20 or so new brothers,” he told AARP Experience Counts. “The 2023 trip, a Fifth Infantry friend wanted to go, so I went again. And again, I came home with 20 or so new brothers.”