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Viet veteran’s song strikes patriotic chord
By Mary Ann Mazenko
The Telegraph
February 20, 1991
ROXANA -- A Vietnam veteran remembering the pain of fighting an unpopular war wants Desert Storm soldiers to be spared that feeling.
And he's singing about it.
Les Reader, 39, of Roxana, wrote and recorded a song to tell U.S. troops they're supported by the veterans of that other war.
His tune, "United Once Again," aired Friday on Godfrey radio station WLCA at Lewis and Clark Community College, and Monday on St. Louis station KIX.
Reader sings: "I'm here to say for the folks back home./This time, boys, you're not alone."
WLCA disc jockey Clarence Smith said listeners responded immediately to the recording when he played it Friday night.
"After the first time I played it, not even two minutes later I got calls asking me what it was," Smith said. In his four-hour program, Smith played the song six times in response to listener requests, he said.
KIX program director Mike Anderson said the song would be played at random with others about the war.
Reader is accompanied on the recording by Gary Will of Alton on guitar; Don Mitchell of Wood River on bass; Dick Stewart of Wood River on piano; Rick Perez of Delhi on drums, and Kevin Lyle of Rosewood Heights on fiddle.
Reader said he didn't want to see Desert Storm troops "go through the isolation we went through. And no war is a quick war when you're in it."
He said he is glad support is being shown here for the men and women in the gulf.
"It's great to see people doing all this now," he said. "In Vietnam, we knew the country wasn't behind us. We were an isolated bunch of people just stuck over there."
When Reader and his fellow soldiers returned home, the sting of unpopularity stayed.
"It really added salt to the wound when we were isolated in our own country when we came back," he said.
He served in Vietnam in 1968 and 1969 and learned to play the guitar when he came home, "to hear how my songs would sound with music behind them," he said.
He'd written tunes since he was 14, he said, but had to hum them since he didn't play the guitar. "The words and notes are in my head," Reader said.
The war has brought him some bad moments.
"They don't realize what these boys are going into. It's giving me some bad nights and bad dreams, like I had when I came back from Vietnam."
Writing a song of support is the way he felt he could help.
"The least I can do is tell them the Vietnam vets are glad America is behind them, and that we're behind them, too."
Reader sings:
"Were pround of our country, can't you understand,
From the trenches to the jungles to the desert sand,
America, I'm proud to see,
We're united once again."
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