I met Bill Furan as a friendly counter clerk at the Marshall Post Office. When I learned he was a Vietnam veteran, he agreed to a January 2006 interview at his Tyler residence about that experience. I mourned his passing in 2017 and wish to share his Vietnam service as part of commemorating the impact of the Vietnam War on persons in our region.

Bill Furan was born in 1944 to Gilbert and Reva Furan in Tracy, Minnesota. The family moved to Marshall where Bill attended Marshall High School. He participated in band and played football, basketball, and baseball before graduating in 1962.

He married and worked in California until the draft reached him in 1967. He returned to Minnesota. He recalled the Army entrance process.

“When we went up to Minneapolis, they put me in charge to put them on the bus and make sure they got signed up. From then on I knew I wanted to be a leader instead of a follower. I was going into combat and I wanted to have as much say in that as I could. I wanted to be the boss of what I was going to do and how I was going to do it. I was drafted, but I enlisted and was going to go to Officer Candidate School after advanced infantry training,” he said.

Bill’s uncle had retired as an Army officer. So Bill wanted to be an officer, but first had to complete Basic Training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. He recalled it was a lot of training crammed into a short time. He also remembered having no problem getting used to Army discipline.

“You know, in the Midwest you followed orders and did what you were told. Most of those that got in trouble (in Basic Training) were from the Deep South. (Bill chuckled) I was one of the trainee NCOs, so, I ran a squad there. After Basic Training, I went to Advanced Infantry Training at Fort Gordon, GA. Before that I had two weeks of leadership school to be one of the NCO trainees,” he said.

The Army was preparing him for leadership at the same time Advanced Infantry Training trained him as a mortar man.

“There was a forward observer and then there was a (10-man) gun crew. There were ammo bearers; a guy to carry the base; and a guy to carry the barrel. Everybody in the infantry company carried a round so we had plenty of ammo. But it weighed 14 pounds, so we didn’t use them often in Vietnam. Learning to do it was fun because you got to learn every aspect of it,” he said.

As he finished Advanced Infantry Training, he got bad news about becoming an officer.

“(T)hey said, ‘We don’t need any high school graduates who are qualified for OCS because we have plenty of college graduates now.’ So, I was sent to Fort Benning, Georgia to Non-Commissioned Officer Candidate School,” he said.

Airborne School was his first stop at Fort Benning where he learned to jump out of perfectly good airplanes. The physical training was grueling.

“Every day running everywhere you went. Push-ups. Knee bends. That’s the strongest I ever was. I could do a hundred push-ups,” he said.

He well-remembered the actual training jumps.

“Oh, that was scary! My first jump – as we exited the plane I was on top of another guy’s chute. (H)e was taking my air. I had to holler down to him to pull a slip to the left and I pulled a slip to the right and we got out of the way. We were trained to do that, but that was kind of scary because you hit this pocket and “ZHOOM” you fell down real fast all of the sudden. (O)nce he got out of the way I was all right,” he said.

The landings were also tricky.

“You hit the ground real hard with those chutes. You’ve got to do a parachute landing fall (PLF) and if you don’t, you can get hurt. Some guys got hurt. Their chutes wouldn’t deploy. They’d pull their reserves and their reserves wouldn’t fully deploy. They hit the ground real hard and got hurt,” he said.

Bill’s uncle attended Airborne School graduation and pinned on Bill’s jump wings. Then Bill entered the six month, Non-Commissioned Officer’s Course, the fifth Army training course of his young career. He smiled ruefully at the memory.

“We went through basically the same things as the officer candidates — same training, only we became NCOs when we got out,” hes aid.

The training included lots of map-reading and small unit tactics.

“(We learned) platoon and squad-size maneuvers. We’d go out and play war in the hills of Georgia in the wintertime and your feet would get cold. (Bill chuckled) They had airplanes. (W)e’d give them a vector and an azimuth and they’d drop things to us to see if we could do that in the woods. That’s what they had to do in Vietnam. Choppers come and if you’re in a triple canopy forest, they can’t land so they have to throw the stuff out,” he said.

As Bill absorbed his training, he realized his motivation for his focus.

“I was going to make sure that I was going to stay alive and anybody that was under me, if at all possible. That was the most important thing. Nobody ever got killed under me. There was a lot of wounded, but nobody got killed,” he said.

The Army sent Bill to Fort Lewis, Washington for his final training.

“I had to go through a cycle with an advanced infantry training unit. During that time I got orders to the 173rd Airborne Brigade. This was in February ’68,” he said.

Bill’s Vietnam assignment was one of many casualty replacements for an infantry company that had been decimated in combat during the 1968 Tet Offensive.

The Lyon County Museum is organizing an exhibit about the impact of the Vietnam War on Lyon County. If you would like to help share stories of the war’s impact or help with the exhibit, please contact me at the email address below or Jennifer Andries at the museum at 537-6580.

I welcome your participation in and ideas about our exploration of prairie lives. You may reach me at prairieviewpressllc@gmail.com.