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“Tom was always this very distant figure to me, but one I have thought a lot about throughout my life,” says Sweetnam’s youngest sister, Jacky, a civil servant in Toronto. “When I was younger, the boys in my family always described him as this heroic figure because of his military experience, but I always just felt sad, because of how disconnected we were.

Tom Sweetnam, 1970, Vietnam (Courtesy Mike Sweetnam)

“I am not even sure who, or what, I imagined Tom to be because, for me, he always existed in the abstract.”

Sweetnam was a Green Beret, who earned a Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts fighting with the Americans in the Vietnam War.

The Vietnam story, as typically told in Canada, focuses on U.S. draft dodgers streaming north, hippies haunting the Yorkville scene in Toronto, student anti-war marches in Ottawa and Vancouver and Canadian songbirds, like Joni Mitchell and Neil Young, heading to California to write the anthems of the age. But there is an alternative narrative. It involves Tom Sweetnam and about 20,000 other young Canadian men who crossed the border and volunteered to fight with the United States army; 133 of them died.

Sweetnam came back, but he never really came home.

Thomas George Sweetnam was born in 1950 in Wetaskiwin, a farming community 70 km south of Edmonton. He spent his youth in Calgary, made friends easily, was funny, gregarious and kind, seldom got angry and had a smile capable of making the girls swoon.

Tom, in the middle, holding his little sister Anna-Marie. His older sister Theresa is to his left and Mike and Pat are to his right. (Courtesy Mike Sweetnam)

His best friend was Bruce Van Raalte. He was a year older than Sweetnam, and he had a car. The boys’ high school summers were spent taking road trips to Banff — where they cruised the strip for girls, unsuccessfully — and Lake Okanagan, where they did the same, unsuccessfully, at the beach.

“We thought we were pretty cool,” says Van Raalte, now a financial adviser in Lethbridge.

They went to Washington state in August of 1966 and wound up by the side of the highway near Spokane, thumbing for rides in a summer downpour. A bus came along and its door popped open.

“It was a U.S. army bus,” Van Raalte says. “We sat right up front with the driver — we were freezing — and he cranked up the heat and began talking to us about Vietnam and the American military.

“Tom was absolutely glued to this guy. I knew right then that he was going to do something.”

David Hazelton is a retired Ontario police officer, but 45 years ago he was a young man in B.C., not so different from Sweetnam. He refers to him as a “friend,” but that word, he says, could never capture the strength of the bond they forged in Vietnam.

The two Canadians didn’t simply join the U.S. army, they became Green Berets and, later, members of the L Company Rangers, an elite special forces unit that operated in small teams deep inside enemy territory.

Sweetnam, centre, in his first mission back with the Rangers after being wounded multiple times. Dec. 28, 1970. (Courtesy Mike Sweetnam)

Hazelton was a team leader whose nickname was Lazy Day for his calm demeanour under enemy fire. Sweetnam was his second in command and known as the Hobbit, a Ranger who read J.R.R. Tolkien and prowled through hostile territory, like the fictional Bilbo Baggins. Dangling from Sweetnam’s neck was a grenade pin, twisted into the shape of a peace sign. Their American comrades sometimes referred to the pair as “Team Canada.”

“Tom was funny, and he was solid,” Hazelton says. “I trusted Tom with my life.”

That trust was mutual — and tested on Aug. 28, 1970. Hazelton remembers the day as being “f—ed up” from the start. Sweetnam had packed extra chewing tobacco for the mission in the Roung Roung Valley but never got the chance to dip into it. The Rangers had a bad feeling going in. The morning was bright and clear. As their helicopter neared the landing zone — a bomb crater on a ridge — the North Vietnamese guns erupted, blowing them from the sky.

“I very nearly fell out of the aircraft,” Sweetnam recalled 30 years later in an unpublished essay he shared with his younger brother, Mike.

The helicopter that was ambushed in the Roung Roung Valley, August 28, 1970. Four men were killed, three wounded. (Courtesy Mike Sweetnam)

“Then a second explosion rocked the (helicopter).” The pilot was killed instantly, along with two Rangers. The co-pilot died three hours later. Sweetnam was shot once and spattered with shrapnel, a dime-sized chunk of which punctured a hole in the femoral artery in his right leg. His shirt was in tatters, his right boot and pants soaked through with blood.

“The last thing I remember before leaving the helicopter was the co-pilot moaning, ‘Mama,’ three or four times, before losing consciousness,” he wrote. “Of any aspect of this story, that memory is engraved in my consciousness like it happened yesterday.”

He describes a tense wait for rescuers, with North Vietnamese bombs falling around them. He was bleeding from multiple wounds. Hazelton refused his pleas for morphine because he wanted his friend “conscious enough to do battle if it came down to that.”

Help finally arrived, too late for some. Four men were dead, three wounded. Hazelton was unscathed, as was a helicopter door gunner. Sweetnam’s account of the doomed mission concludes with a description of his time with the L Company Rangers as the most “ominous, exciting and eventful period of my entire life.

The wreckage from the crash. (Courtesy Mike Sweetnam)

“I was alive there every minute, more alive than I’d ever been before, and more alive than I would ever be again.”

War produces an incredible high, an intoxicating brew of adrenaline, emotion and memory unmatched in intensity, thereafter, in everyday life for those who survive it. It is how those memories and emotions fit into a life, once the danger has passed, that can prove as deadly to some as the war itself.

“Coming back home from that and packing groceries, or doing whatever, is a real cultural shift,” Hazelton says. “A lot of people struggle with it.

“Tom struggled with it.”

Sweetnam would fight a deeply private battle to make peace with the ghosts of Vietnam. Hazelton fought a similar battle. All the men in L Company did. Some are still fighting. Hazelton believes that the war that couldn’t kill his friend in 1970 was ultimately responsible for his death 45 years later.

Sweetnam spent 10 weeks in an army hospital in Japan recovering from his wounds. On Boxing Day 1970 he wrote a letter to Cheryl Bolton, a cousin in Calgary. She had asked the 21-year-old Sergeant to be the godfather to her newborn son.

In the letter, Sweetnam expresses a desire to get back to “civilian” life, to be in a classroom — at UBC or the University of Washington — to come home.

“Life is really beautiful, and sometimes you don’t realize it until you almost lose it,” he wrote. “I don’t think anyone has ever been able to give an accurate description of war, so I don’t think I’ll even try.

“I guess to put it briefly — I can say that there are a lot of people dying over here and I hope it stops soon.” He signs off: “Pray for peace. Love Tom.”

Sweetnam returned from Vietnam in 1972, a decorated soldier with nowhere to go. His father, John, was an oilman. Shortly after his eldest son went to Vietnam he was transferred, first to Africa and then to England. The family home in Calgary had been sold.

He never did make it to UBC. He took some college courses, here and there in the States, and eventually settled in Atlanta, which is where he reunited with his kid brother, Michael, in 1982. The younger Sweetnam moved to Atlanta to go to law school at Emory University, mostly because it was where his ex-Ranger-of-a-big-brother lived. (A third brother, Pat, was the commander of the Canadian Special Forces and retired as a Lieutenant-Colonel after 25 years in the military. He currently works for NATO.)

The Sweetnam boys lived together and grew extremely close. After graduation, Mike — who was almost 10 years younger than Tom — built a thriving law practice while his brother worked as a luxury car mechanic, fine-tuning Mercedes and BMWs. If he was struggling with any mental scars from Vietnam, they weren’t obvious.

He was still funny, still gregarious, had a great voice and a big laugh and plenty of girlfriends. He had a moustache and wore Hawaiian T-shirts like Tom Selleck in Magnum P.I., while tooling around Atlanta in a 1960s era silver Mercedes.

But the outgoing exterior concealed inner cracks. In Vietnam, Sweetnam would hide in the jungle for days in silence, knowing that a wrong move meant certain death. In Atlanta, there were no bad guys to hide from and no real silences to keep — and without the life and death stakes nothing seemed capable of holding his attention. He grew easily bored.

“I wouldn’t say Tom was secretive or reluctant to talk about Vietnam,” Mike Sweetnam says now. “But he certainly never pushed it with me.”

When the past did reveal itself, it was only in glimpses.

Mike Sweetnam remembers one July 4th when Tom fashioned a mortar out of a car exhaust pipe, planted it on his front lawn and sent homemade explosives soaring skyward. The experiment attracted the police and a warning. Another time they were leaving a park following a concert. A group of men directed some remarks at Sweetnam’s girlfriend. He froze. Peering up at them. Eyes narrowing.

He was badly outnumbered. He wasn’t backing down. “I thought, ‘OK, someone is going to die here,’” Mike Sweetnam says. A passerby defused the situation. But the chill from it — of seeing a potential for violence bubbling just beneath his older brother’s placid surface — stuck in Mike’s memory.

Tom left Georgia in 1989 after his mortgage business floundered. Eventually he pulled up in his vintage Mercedes at Gib Halverson’s front door in Madison, Wisconsin. Halverson, now a retired firefighter living in Arizona, was a fellow Ranger.

“Tom was living out of his car,” he says. “He stayed with me for about a month.”

Halverson suffers from post traumatic stress disorder. He has tremors in one hand and perceives innocuous situations — say, a stranger on the street in daylight — as potential threats.





“I have never been robbed, had my car stolen, been in a fight, and I have lived peacefully ever after since the war,” he says. “But I am always on the lookout, thinking something bad is about to happen.”

Two of Halverson’s Vietnam buddies drank themselves to death by age 40. A third died of a heart attack at age 32, while a fourth was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease at 38. The one thing all four men had in common was the war. “We all left a part of ourselves in Vietnam,” he says. “But some of us left more than others.”

Sweetnam sometimes talked about the mission in the Roung Roung Valley. Halverson knew the nine men who were on the chopper, and remembers the aftermath at the Rangers base camp. The mood was morose. He wept for the dead. Another Ranger slapped him, hard, telling him, “This is Vietnam, and people are dying everyday, and if I didn’t get over it I was never going to make it.”

Halverson never cried again.

Tom Sweetnam during a break in training. U.S. Army Airborne Camp Crocket, Fort Gordon, Georgia. (Bruce Van Raalte)



“It is like taking a baseball bat to the face,” David Hazelton says. “And then trying to continue on like it is all normal.”

Halverson is convinced that the terror of that August morning left an indelible mark on his friend’s psyche.

“I think, with Tom, that it comes down to that one particular incident,” he says. “That one moment was frozen in time for him.”

Sweetnam sold Halverson his Mercedes, bought a pick-up truck and moved on. He spent time in California, Oregon, Colorado, New Mexico, pushed across the border into B.C., worked briefly in high tech and briefly owned a house in Eureka, Calif. He would go on gruelling, multi-day hikes, with only his dogs for company. Like a good Ranger, he kept toothbrushes and toothpaste stashed in drawers, cupboards, empty camera cases, even the glove compartment of his pick-up.

He stayed in contact with his brother, Mike — and Mike alone among his eight siblings — for several years after leaving the South. He also wrote, mostly for himself, composing essays and poems including one titled, Marvon and Brandi. It was chosen by the Planetary Society to be included in a CD ROM aboard the Cassini Mission to Saturn. Sweetnam’s words were launched into space in October 1997. They are still orbiting the ringed planet.

on black nights like this

alight on the rocks of your resting place

when waves lap the sand

I pale in heaven’s beauty

and hope that I might send you there

to await me on that day

when my ashes join you there

that our spirits can sail the stars

on our last great adventure

L Company Rangers reunion, Fort Campbell Kentucky

Sweetnam was diagnosed with PTSD in 1995, during a stint at a Veterans’ hospital in Palo Alto, Calif. A Department of Veterans Affairs report on his case describes him as “suffering from depression, insomnia, nightmares, exhibited avoidance, hyper-vigilance and isolation, resulting in estrangement from society as a whole.”

“He … describes heavy combat, prolonged for many months, with helicopter crashes, the deaths of many comrades, and personal wounds received…”

Doctors deemed Sweetnam to be “totally disabled,” and prescribed an array of medications to help keep his nightmares at bay. Gradually, Sweetnam faded from view. He stopped calling his brother with updates. Years passed between his emails. Even his old Vietnam buddies lost touch.

The United States Congress ordered an investigation into PTSD among Vietnam veterans in 1983. The results were startling: Nearly 30% of veterans who spent their tour in the active war-zone suffered from it. The National Center for PTSD revisited the Vietnam veterans in a new study published in February in the PTSD Research Quarterly. Forty years after the war, 10-15 per cent are still struggling with PTSD.

Tom Sweetnam, 2000. (Courtesy Mike Sweetnam)

There is a random quality to the disorder. David Hazelton saw the same things that Sweetnam did in Vietnam, but he never experienced any debilitating aftershocks.

“I often wondered what made me different,” he says. “When I got back from Vietnam I flew for Air Canada for a couple years but I got bored, and so I joined the police and spent 35 years with them — and a lot of that time in the tactical unit.

“I went to Iraq for a year in 2004 and worked with international policing in high stress areas — and so maybe I just always had the need for that adrenaline rush.

“Or else maybe I am just a little bent.”

Studies since the war have shown that social supports — family, a social network to lean on — are among the greatest protective factors against the development of PTSD. Sweetnam came home from Vietnam to a family that was already scattered. He was untethered and, as he aged, increasingly alone, and left to the company of whatever demons he harboured.

Bruce Van Raalte, the childhood friend, remembers getting a phone call from Sweetnam some years ago. He wasn’t home to answer it but his wife, Gwen, was. She had never met Tom, but they spoke for about 20 minutes. The call ended with Sweetnam promising to call back later that night. It was a beautiful summer’s evening on the Prairies. Van Raalte sat beside the phone, hoping it might ring.

Tom Sweetnam (Courtesy Mike Sweetnam)



“Tom never called back,” he says. “I knew Tom was troubled, but I always had this idea that, somehow, I would see him again.”

Mike Sweetnam doesn’t know why his brother began to drift away when he did.

“I really don’t know what changed,” he says. “But I think there came a point in Tom’s life when he decided that dogs were far more worthwhile companions than humans.”

Tom continued to write. His name would occasionally pop up on the Internet, often in Vietnam-themed chat rooms, but also in the comments section beneath National Geographic articles.

“They really are beautiful little creatures,” he wrote beneath a story about butterflies in August 2014. “Time to drag my macro-camera gear out of the closet and start making a record of all this.”

Mike Sweetnam used to hunt for traces of his brother online. Spotting his name in this or that web forum was his proof that Tom was still out there: alive, but increasingly, he wasn’t doing well.

He was 65, had PTSD, diabetes, hepatitis — he was convinced he contracted it from one of his many blood transfusions in Vietnam — and high blood pressure. He was no longer the rugged soldier-turned-solo hiker that he had once been.

Mike Sweetnam received a phone call from the University of Colorado Hospital last September. Tom had been admitted two days before suffering from diabetes-related complications. Doctors would have to amputate part of his foot.

The brothers had not seen each other in more than 25 years. They spent two days together at the hospital. They swapped stories, shared laughter and, at one point, snapped a photo of themselves in the patient’s room.

The former Army Ranger had become a husky bear of a man. He was dressed in a hospital gown. Looking at the image, Tom Sweetnam grinned in mock alarm.

“People are going to look at this picture and think that that guy rips the heads off of rabbits,” he said.

Mike made Tom an offer before he left Denver: move back to Atlanta and rejoin the Sweetnam family-fold. He and his wife, Anita, would look after him at their house. He could stay as long as he wanted while he got his health back and whatever came next would be up to him.

“I knew what the answer was going to be before I even asked,” Mike says. “This was my older brother, the L Company Ranger, and I knew that there was no f—ing way Tom was ever going to say yes to his little brother, because it just wasn’t him…”

Gib Halverson also made an attempt to reel his old army buddy in, travelling to his home outside Monte Vista after his surgery. He tried to convince Sweetnam to sell his trailer and move into town, so that he could live out his days walking his dog and looking at the pretty girls at the local coffee shop. Tom wasn’t budging. So they hugged goodbye, said — “I love you, brother,” — and parted.

“I fully expected to see Tom again,” he says. “We’re survivors.”

Three months later, Thomas George Sweetnam was dead.

The Rio County Coroner’s Office called Mike Sweetnam on Jan. 1. They had found his name on an envelop in the trailer. It was the only family contact they could find. Sweetnam flew back to Colorado with his daughter, Megan, younger sister Jacky, and oldest sister Terri Hohner.

Hohner lives in Calgary. She is about a year older than Tom. A photo of the siblings from 1966 shows them clowning around in the kitchen of the family home in Calgary. They are young. Smiling.

Tom, age 16, and his older sister, Terri Hohner in Calgary, March 1966.

Hohner hadn’t seen Tom since 1983.

“I really felt the need to go to Colorado,” she says. “Tom, he didn’t really die that young — we’ve had two friends die here in the last few weeks, one was 68, and one was 58 — so it’s not like he died particularly young.

“But it’s that I had never really gotten to know him. I just wish I’d gotten to know him.”

Tom Sweetnam’s trailer was set on a nine-acre property with snow-capped Rocky Mountain views in every direction. The high-altitude desert landscape is spare; painted by reddish-brown soils, tumbling grasses and rocks that seem to hold onto the sunlight, shifting colour as the day fades to dusk. As the Sweetnams drove through the natural wonder of it all they spoke of how much the place reminded them of Alberta, where their brother’s story began.

“It was like Tom had tried to return home,” says Jacky Sweetnam. “But he didn’t quite make it.”