Vietnam vet spent career helping bring soldiers home

By TERESA BYRD

Hungry Horse News

Getting drafted to fight in the Vietnam War is what got First Sgt. Rick Huston into the Army, but a unique and promising career is what made him stay for nearly four more decades.

It was Dec. 2, 1968, nearing Christmas, when Huston, a Columbia Falls High School senior at the time, received the letter conscripting him for military service. He said it “felt a little lonely” to receive, but as a teenager on the wilder side who had fallen out with his parents and recently dropped out of high school, it wasn’t entirely unexpected.

It only took two weeks after declaring his high school status as “unenrolled” for Huston to be summoned to serve.

And Huston was not a unique demographic among the other drafted soldiers he fought alongside in Vietnam, he said.

“The draftees were tough. They carried the ball,” he said. “And I think a lot of it had to do with, they were picking up the kids off the street, the kids that didn’t think they had anything else. [...] So when they got to Vietnam, they were tough, and they were proud. They [the draftees] made a lethal weapon.”

Huston and a fellow Columbia Falls classmate, also drafted, were bussed to Butte for their physical examinations that winter. Assuming they would head back home before officially getting called to duty, both were surprised to learn they were not returning, but would be boarding a train in Butte headed directly for basic military training in Fort Lewis.

“I went,’What?! How do I get out of here?!’,” said Huston. “We didn’t even get to come back to Kalispell.”

But it wasn’t long before the mood was lightened and whoops and hollers were heard as the train passed over the Idaho border — into a state with a lower drinking age — and the passel of young recruits began keeping the bartenders on board busy.

“We got snockered before we hit Washington state,” remembers Huston with a laugh.

Huston stayed stateside until 1971, when he was sent to Vietnam and finished a 14 month tour (slightly longer than the 12 month average) fighting in Long Binh and Bearcat.

In 1973 he returned to Fort Campbell Army installation in Kentucky. It was shortly after, back in Columbia Falls while on leave, that Huston met a blond, hair-to-her-hips young woman who strolled through his parents door seeking guidance concerning a girls youth organization.

Little did he know that she was the granddaughter of the Duvall who owned the shop on Nucleus Avenue where he’d bought his first fishing rod at seven years old.

Three months and several-dozen covert dates later, Rick and the young woman, Karen, were married.

Finding himself newly wed with no official skillset other than military training, Huston decided to reenlist.

A few years later and a couple ranks higher, Huston was selected as a specialist for a brand new program based out of Hawaii called the Central Identification Laboratory (CIL). It was an organization to oversee the research, search and recovery, and identification of POW/ MIA remains of Vietnam servicemen.

Huston was just one of 16 people chosen to launch the fledgling program, so the Hustons packed for the tropics and moved to the island in 1976 where they would make their home until 2014.

His work as an investigator to reclaim and identify U.S. POW/ MIA remains began less than a year after the Vietnam war ended.

The newly-formed Socialist Republic of Vietnam was willing to collaborate with the U.S. in its efforts to reclaim its fallen, but at first had strict parameters including not letting investigation teams stay in the country longer than 10-day stretches. In addition, all U.S. investigations had to be sent to the Republic and pre-approved in advance.

Plus, all U.S. investigation teams which consisted of three people, a team leader-usually a linguist, an intel analyst and a recovery specialist, had to be met by an equivalent Vietnamese team of investigators.

Despite the initial touchy relations, Huston said his Vietnamese counterparts began to relax over the months and soon his teams were able to stay longer in the country. In fact, the two country’s working relationship became quite strong, despite some initial misgivings from the U.S. side, said Huston.

“But we, the investigators, proved early that they weren’t pulling anything on us, they really were lining up witnesses that may know something about the cases that we worked,” said Huston.

“I can tell you that they were very forthcoming, as far as giving us some kind of information about each set of remains ... or something that my team could correlate and then go back to the records and then start searching,” said Huston.

Huston said he even developed a friendship with his Vietnamese counterpart, often getting into contests about who could read a geographical map the fastest and most accurately.

One day while eating lunch on a hillside, Huston’s counterpart, a man who had fought as a Lieutenant for the North Vietnamese Army against Americans just years earlier, turned and uttered a few sincere words about the conflict that deeply affected Huston.

“At that moment I realized that those men that we were fighting were ordinary people, just like us. They were doing what they were told to do. They didn’t like it any better than we did, they were scared just like us. And he and I formed a pretty good friendship,” said Huston.

About a decade into his career, Huston had another experience that would prove to be helpful in mending some of the wounds from his time in combat.

His team was going to conduct an investigation in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon. All three of the crew were Vietnam veterans and had fought in the war in and around the city. Everyone, who had heard terrible rumors about what had been done to the city after it had fallen, was nervous of returning and what they would see. All of this was heightened by flying into the city at dark during a lightning storm, said Huston.

But in the morning, the team was greeted with the unexpected scene of a friendly, bustling city that had rebuilt itself and was fully starting to recover.

“Vietnamese people were smiling and waving at us, and it was just really something. So for us, that was kind of a healing process for us,” said Huston.

“It was just the fact that we were back there, we were on the same ground, we were seeing the same people, some of whom were our enemies at one time,” he added. “I think those of us that got to do that mission, it was finding a healing that we didn’t know was there.”

During his work on investigations, Huston had many rewarding experiences recovering the fallen.

One especially memorable occasion occurred when his team was led to a previously unknown gravesite of two soldiers, shown to them by local Vietnamese farmers.

Upon investigation, by cross referencing records and using forensic data, all evidence suggested they had found two Marines, a black man and a white man, who had formerly been marked as AWOL and were presumed to be deserters.

However, the locals provided anecdotal evidence that stated the two soldiers had been captured nearby and after attempting to escape were shot in the back and buried.

Interestingly, there were also old reports from U.S. soldiers recounting that several offensives near the area had been courageously led by two unknown men, nicknamed Salt and Pepper due their opposite skin tones, possibly the two Marines found in the gravesite.

Huston, who had been instrumental in pushing to solve the case --despite contradictory commands from a superior-- was able to amend the record for the two servicemen, from deserters to heroes.

As time went on, the program began to expand to include the search and recovery for Korean War and World War II POW/ MIAs, first throughout the Pacific, then the entire world.

Later in his career, Huston even traveled inside North Korea, becoming one of the scant amount of Americans to have done so.

Eventually, Huston retired from his military career in 1993, but shortly after was called back as a civilian servant, deputy operations officer. By the time he finally retired from his civilian career in 2013, he and one other individual were the only personnel to have been with the organization since its inception.

It was shortly after retiring for good that the Hustons packed up and returned to their roots in Columbia Falls.

“I always told Karen, we’re going to move home, this is home,” said Huston. “I don’t care how long we spend in Hawaii, Columbia Falls is home.”

Huston still has a deep connection and compassion for fellow Vietnam veterans, especially those who may not have had the healing closure that his career helped afford him.

“I still go to my Vietnam Veterans luncheons once a month and I wish so bad I could reach out to some of these guys that I know are still suffering and just try and help them,” he said.