Parks commands ‘100% respect’ among his veteran peers

The Marines called him “Gramps” – Gordon Parks was only 23 – but the moniker was respectful. After two tours in Vietnam, Parks carried himself with authority and even his commanding officer took note.

Today, the La Salle veteran is 76 years old and is an actual grandfather. He still commands the respect of his peers, too. He co-founded a support group for veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder and under his guidance, membership mushroomed from single-digits to dozens.

Joe Navarro, a fellow Marine and Vietnam veteran, said he wasn’t at all surprised so many veterans in need gravitated to Parks and opened up about their difficulties. Parks, he said, commands “100% respect” from combat veterans.

“He genuinely conveys a desire to give them a hand,” Navarro said, “and I think they understand his combat background which gives him credibility.

“He’s very concerned with the well-being not only of Vietnam-era veterans but with veterans of other wars.”

When it comes to combat duty, Parks does indeed speak with authority. He survived no fewer than three close shaves during his six years of service in the U.S. Marine Corps, including two tours of duty in Vietnam.

Parks survived a mortar attack that left him with shrapnel in his back, a piece of which still remains. A close comrade was felled while Parks stood a few feet away. There was a slow crawl upriver where his unit traded gunfire with the enemy in low-lying boats.

Despite the near-misses, Parks is unflinching in his love for the USA and harbors no second thoughts about enlisting in the U.S. Marine Corps during the Vietnam War.

“Best thing that ever happened to me,” Parks said, acknowledging that the Marines gave him structure and discipline that he never had during his formative years in La Salle. “I was one of those kids who was always in trouble and I figured if I didn’t get my mother to sign me up when I was 17 then I’d wind up in prison.”

Parks was 12 years old when his parents split up, leaving Dorothy Parks with four rambunctious sons to raise with no child support payments. With no father figure around, the Parks boys all found their way to the principal’s office and later caught the ire of the local police.

Young Gordon recognized he needed major life changes. He persuaded Dorothy to let him drop out of La Salle-Peru High School and enlist in the Marines on his 17th birthday.

It was 1965 when he was enlisted and he arrived in Vietnam in May 1966, when the war was escalating. His first assignment was to a combined action company, a small unit tasked with protecting a small village from the enemy while bolstering their quality of life. A major attack was launched six months after his arrival.

“We got hit from three sides and they mortared us from the other side of the river,” recalled Parks, who bears a small piece of shrapnel too near his spine to safely remove. “It felt like I got hit in the back of the head with a sledgehammer.

“It was scary. Anybody who tells you they weren’t scared is probably lying.”

He would emerge unscathed from the skirmishes that claimed his friend’s life and from the nighttime battle on the river. None of that diminished his love for the Marine Corps, however. He renewed his enlistment and was gunning for a military police post when he became a drill instructor at an officer candidate school.

There, he ran into a problem. While dressing down a candidate, he thrice pressed his finger into the candidate’s chest. He soon learned that was a no-no.

“You can’t treat officer candidates the way they treat enlisted guys,” Parks said. “They know too many powerful people.”

Indeed, the young man was politically connected and Parks only narrowly avoided getting busted. He was given a desk assignment, instead. That didn’t last long, either. He accidentally brushed a major on the nose. The resulting dispute was settled in Parks’ favor, but it cooled him on stateside assignments.

On a fateful day in 1970, he walked into an office where a young married man was getting his orders into Vietnam. On the man’s arm was a small child and next to him was his expectant wife. Parks decided on the spot to swap places with him.

“Pick me,” he told the officer on duty. “You give me his orders, he’ll take my orders. I’ve already been to Vietnam and I know what the hell I’m doing.”

His second tour in Vietnam lasted seven months and was somewhat less eventful.

“I was a lot smarter,” Parks said of the time when he earned his “Gramps” moniker. “And I had a smart officer who asked me what I thought because I’d already been there. If he was right, I’d give him a thumbs-up and if I thought he was wrong I’d say, ‘Nah, I think we need to talk about this.’ And he listened.

“We had some skirmishes and a few guys wounded, but nobody killed.”

Adjusting to civilian life was difficult. Employers weren’t much interested in combat veterans and he pumped gas for a year before he returned to La Salle in 1972. He was hired in 1973 at Foster Grant, which had become Huntsman Chemical when he retired 30 years later.

It was in retirement he first experienced PTSD.

“It’s amazing what your idle hands and mind do when you’re not working,” he said. “I had things come out of nowhere: the ambushes, the killings and so forth.”

He found relief in staying active in the veterans’ community. He was commandant of the Marine Corps League and an active member of veterans organizations. His main outlet is helping others overcome the same afflictions from combat service.

“We put our uniforms away and then we were at war with the people at home,” he said in a 2017 interview. “That’s why we help the other ones now because it took all these years to get our benefits for our PTSD.”