Editor’s note: This story is reprinted with permission from Honor Flight Chicago.
Bob Walker’s father was a career Navy man who served on a minesweeper clearing obstacles before D-Day and then spent the days after the invasion recovering bodies and parts of bodies from the water.
Bob graduated from Oak Lawn Community High School in 1965 and then went to work at Goldblatt’s department store. After a year there, the Vietnam War was heating up, and Bob decided he didn’t want to risk getting drafted into the Army, so instead he volunteered for the Navy. By this point, his father had retired from service, but his older brother had enlisted. Bob joined the Navy in June 1966.
He initially wanted to be a Navy pilot and was accepted into Naval ROTC at New Mexico State University, but those plans fell through due to tight family finances. Instead, he went to boot camp at Naval Station Great Lakes, the same place where years earlier he had helped his dad teach recruits how to swim.
After boot camp, his initial plan was to be a naval electronics technician, but since that required a six-year commitment, he instead went to A school to be qualified as a gunner’s mate. He requested to serve in the Atlantic, but he and everyone else from his class who requested this posting were instead assigned to Vietnam.
In 1965, in response to the fighting conditions in Vietnam, the U.S. Navy had formalized a “brown water” navy for the first time since the Civil War. Its purpose was to patrol the inland waterways of the Mekong Delta, using several different types of boats, most famously the Swift Boat. Swift Boats were fast and well-armed, but as Bob would find out, their aluminum skin did not provide much protection. Bob was sent to Coronado, California to train on this vessel, and while in California he also did SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) training, which he says was very tough and physically demanding.
Bob was stationed at a naval base in Cat Lo, on the southeast coast of Vietnam. The Navy was in the midst of conducting Operation Market Time, which was an effort to halt the flow of troops and supplies into South Vietnam by stopping and searching any Vietnamese boats they encountered.
Whenever they stopped a Vietnamese boat, one or two men would board and search it while the rest of the crew of six would keep their weapons trained on the people on the boat. Bob was usually stationed at the twin 50-caliber machine guns near the front of the boat.
Occasionally, the Vietnamese boat would try to flee and the Swift Boats would give chase, but this was the exception. In most cases, the occupants of the Vietnamese boats were just fishermen trying to feed their families, but sometimes they’d have Viet Cong hidden among them. Whenever they found suspicious characters, they would turn them over to the South Vietnam navy, in part because in most cases nobody on the Swift Boats spoke Vietnamese.
On June 25, 1967, Bob’s Swift Boat was ordered up a river because of reports of significant sampan activity. When they reached the location, they were almost immediately ambushed. A rocket penetrated the boat near the bow, resulting in Bob receiving a shrapnel injury in his hip and the boat officer having most of his shoulder blown off. The boat officer was incapacitated, but Bob managed to get the boat underway and raced back down the river, pursued by enemy sampans.
Both of the main radios had been damaged, but a new, small radio had recently been installed. They put out a distress call as the boat started sinking, and fortunately another Swift Boat happened to be nearby. As the boat sank, Bob helped several crew members into life rafts before climbing aboard himself. He’s thankful that the third radio worked and that another Swift Boat was nearby. If not, he and his crew would’ve almost certainly been killed or captured.
While Bob credits their survival to luck, his boat officer credits his survival to Bob. The citation for Bob’s Bronze Star reads “By the exceptional performance despite his wounds, Seaman Walker served as an inspiration to his entire division.”
Bob spent two days in the hospital and then went back to Cat Lo where he joined a different Swift Boat with a different crew. After one year in Vietnam, he was assigned to a naval base in Naples, Italy, where he served for three years. Upon returning to the United States, Bob joined the Naval Reserve, and between that and his active duty he served in the Navy for a total of six years before leaving the Reserve in 1972.
Bob returned to Chicago and studied electronics at DeVry with financial support from the GI Bill. He then worked for a small electronics firm for a while and then got a job doing communications work for the Illinois Central Railroad. He started in 1973 and wound up working there for 36 years.
One night while still in Navy training in the mid-1960s, Bob and a friend went to a bowling alley in Oak Lawn. Even though the facility was nearly empty, they were assigned to a lane right next to two young women.
The four of them decided to pair up into two boy/girl teams. One of the girls, Nancy, originally wanted to be on the team with Bob’s friend but says she “got stuck with Bob.” They began dating, but shortly thereafter Bob was sent to Vietnam. They wrote to each other frequently while he was there but were only able to speak to each other once.
It was on a “MARS” radio phone which required them to complete each statement with “Over” and they both recall saying, “I love you. Over” and “I love you too. Over.” In the weeks between his tours in Vietnam and Naples, they were married. The boat captain whose life he saved attended their wedding.
Bob retired from the railroad in 2010. He and Nancy, who’ve been married 56 years, have lived in the same house in Lombard for nearly 50 years.
Honor Flight memories
Bob can sum up his trip to and from Washington D.C. on Honor Flight Chicago Flight 115 in one word: awesome.
“From the moment my wife dropped me off at Midway and I was scooped up by an orange shirt volunteer it was awesome,” he said. “Just getting into the line at the baggage claim and seeing so many people helping, unbelievable.”
He said the most meaningful part of the trip was visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial—especially seeing the wall on which the names of 58,000 U.S. service men and women who lost their lives in the Vietnam War are inscribed.
“The visit to the wall, the place where my name could and should have been,” he said. “Everyone involved was so welcoming. All of their smiles were so genuine a fabulous wonderful greeting more than 50-plus years late but so appreciated”
