Honoring those who served - a road warrior

Tom Murtha's pride and joy is a 2007 Heritage Softail Harley, gleaming white with copious chrome.

In a month, Murtha will turn 75, and some may consider him a little stiff in the bones to be straddling a thundering motorcycle.

But Murtha's Harley is more than a plaything. It's also a vocational tool, a military vehicle of sorts. As a member of the Patriot Guard Riders, Murtha rides his Harley to funerals for U.S. troops. He uses it to escort soldiers or their remains home, to pay tribute to them in parades, to participate in demonstrations in support of the nation's fighting men and women.

"I feel like I have an obligation to all veterans, anybody and everybody who served," says Murtha, a decorated Marine and a veteran of Korea and Vietnam.

Today is Veterans Day, when we honor the sacrifice and bravery of those who have served in the military and done duty in battle - Belleau Wood, the Ardennes, Iwo Jima, Normandy Beach, Frozen Chosin, Tet, Fallujah - to protect the country's freedom and way of life.

For Murtha, who was scarred by war inside and out, every day is Veterans Day.

Around his neck he wears a Marine Corps dog tag and colorful beads representing Americans who are prisoners of war or missing in action. A homemade flagpole is lashed to the railing of the front steps of his brick rowhouse in Tacony. Every morning, he raises an American flag and a POW-MIA flag. Over the porch hangs a banner that reads: "We Support Our Troops. Come Home Soon."

In a corner of his bedroom, which he calls his "bunker," is a computer where he spends hours each day researching military matters, answering questions, and corresponding with other veterans.

Besides riding with the Patriot Guard, he is a five-term president of the Philadelphia chapter of the Vietnam Veterans of America.

A courteous man who listens patiently and speaks deliberately, he attends all the military dedications and commemorations, reunions, and social gatherings. He campaigned for memorials to vets of both Vietnam and Korea at Penn's Landing, and he's working to erect a statue there honoring Gold Star mothers, whose sons or daughters perished during military service.

But most of his work is conducted with little notice. Lately, he has been helping young veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who are struggling with psychological problems. He drives them to the VA hospital in West Philadelphia, makes sure they register and get their ID cards, connects them with a staff psychiatrist.

"I want to see them recognized and respected," Murtha explains. "That's just the way I am. That's what I do for a living."

"Tom exemplifies the veteran-patriot," says Wayne Lutz, 53, a fellow Patriot Guard Rider and an Army veteran. "After a lifetime of service that most people couldn't even wrap their minds around, much less match, Tom continues to serve his country and his fellow vets and this generation of troops.

"Tom served two tours in Korea and four in Vietnam. After a life like that, he'd be more than justified in sitting back now and taking it easy."

Murtha's devotion is fueled by a profound reservoir of empathy. He is a tall, lanky man with a deep, gravelly voice and a face that shows some rough mileage. He walks with a limp because a rocket-propelled grenade shattered his left leg in Vietnam. His femur is a titanium rod. A scar runs from his knee to his hip. The ghastly wound earned him a Purple Heart.

Rarely does he sleep more than three or four hours. Nightmares stalk him relentlessly. "Guilt and turmoil" are how he describes his nightly ordeal. Officially, he is 100 percent disabled from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Much of his guilt and turmoil centers on his younger brother, Charles, 60, who exists in a wheelchair in Glassboro. A radio telegraph operator in Vietnam, Charles Murtha was paralyzed from the waist down when a sniper shot him while he was atop a telephone pole making repairs.

Tom Murtha grew up in Tacony, the second oldest of six. His father was a steelworker who toiled at Disston. Tom went to St Leo's Catholic School and dropped out after eighth grade to help his family pay the bills. He worked at a gas station for a few years and then, in 1951, when he was 17, enlisted in the Navy. "I thought it would keep me out of the Korean War," he says.

Because of a shortage of medical personnel, Murtha was trained as a hospital corpsman. He was assigned to Fox Company, Second Battalion, Seventh Marines, and sent to Korea, to the demilitarized zone just below the 38th parallel.

He describes his job with typical economy: "Saving lives, bringing wounded people back to safety. Sometimes I had to play a double role as chaplain when men were dying and we had to move on and leave them."

Sprinting onto the battlefield, dodging enemy fire, Murtha ministered to dozens of Marines whose bodies were mangled and mutilated by land mines and exploding ordnance. He remembers rescuing one Marine whose leg was nearly severed by shrapnel.

"I drew all his skin and muscle back together, put dressings on him, and taped him real good. They got him back to the battalion field hospital and saved his leg. I felt good about that." Murtha was all of 18 at the time.

The Korean War is often referred to as "the forgotten war," a brief, inconclusive conflict sandwiched between the nobility of World War II and the agony of Vietnam. In

The Coldest Winter,

published posthumously this fall, David Halberstam describes Korea as a "grinding, limited war" that asked men to "die for a tie" and that was "orphaned by history."

When Murtha came home to Tacony, he was, in his words, "no good."

"I turned to heavy drinking. I couldn't hold a job. I accumulated debts. I had what they called back then 'battle fatigue.' I had nightmares and depression. I was rehashing things I had seen. I had guilt feelings about why a lot of guys died and I survived."

Help came in the form of a neighborhood girl, Ellamaria Burkett. "She straightened me out," Murtha says. He was so grateful for her love and understanding he married her; eventually they had five children.

Despite the trauma of Korea, Murtha, in 1960, enlisted in the Marine Corps. He was 27, newly married. His motive was more mercenary than patriotic. "I needed a steady paycheck," he says.

In 1965, he was sent to Vietnam, where he served as a "recon man," doing "snoop and poop" in enemy territory. It was risky work with a short life expectancy.

"You'd wander around in your grid location, trying to find out how many troops the enemy had, what equipment they had, who their officers were. Then you'd hunker down in the jungle and hope they wouldn't catch you."

During his four years in Vietnam, he earned a Bronze Star with a combat V for valor. In one heroic episode, he rappelled 100 feet from a swaying helicopter to reestablish a radio relay station on top of an inaccessible jagged peak called the Rockpile.

The proof of Murtha's combat experience is that he doesn't romanticize war.

"War is not a pretty thing. It is hell, and if you've never had a man's brain on your shoulder or tried to tie together a wounded leg that's pulsating blood all over your face, then you can't understand just how ugly it is."

And yet, in both Korea and Vietnam, Murtha "met a lot of good people and made a lot of friends." In the years since, those friendships have endured and created new ones, making his life for all its pain and tribulation fulfilling. Those who served in Korea shared dangers "that set them apart from almost everyone else for the rest of their lives," Halberstam writes.

For Murtha, those bonds still hold, transcending wars and generations. When he returned from Korea, "there was no fanfare. There was no band playing. We just got off the ship and on the bus for our next deployment." Fourteen years later, when he returned from Vietnam, "I was never spit on, but I was harassed."

Murtha never forgot those chilly receptions. Which is why, on the eve of his 75th birthday, he gladly revs up his Harley and joins the Patriot Guard Riders when they escort a veteran of Iraq or Afghanistan back home.

"No one should go through what we went through when we came back from Vietnam," Murtha says. "The troops serving now deserve a welcome home, because we never got one."