MARQUETTE – Ishpeming resident Daniel Verville grew up in Detroit. In 1966, he was drafted into the Army, and eventually he was shipped to Da Nang, Vietnam.

“I just had got a good job at Chrysler, and when I didn’t have a job they wouldn’t draft me,” he said. They told him he’d have a job when he got back, but that didn’t happen.

He’ll celebrate his 70th birthday this year, unlike the people whose names are listed on the AVTT Vietnam Traveling Memorial Wall, which is currently set up near the Superior Dome on Northern Michigan University’s campus in Marquette.

Verville, no doubt like many other Vietnam veterans who survived, didn’t want to divulge the gritty details of the war he experienced decades ago.

“You never knew if you were going to come back,” he said.

When he was drafted, he was ordered to serve as a supply clerk, but when he got to Da Nang, he volunteered to be part of the security police-reactionary force.

“We were policemen in the daytime and reactionary at night,” he said. “Or if you were attacked in the daytime you were reactionary in the daytime.”

He had two friends who volunteered for the same force, but after they transferred to become door gunners – which Verville described as “sitting in a chopper with a .50 cal” machine gun – he never saw or heard from them again.

“I don’t know if they died, but I can’t find them,” he said.

When asked about any others he knew over there, Verville said, “Everybody else, I can’t even remember their names.”

He did get to come back stateside about a month and a half before his regular departure date because his brother, who was a Marine and served three tours in Vietnam, was sent there, and because multiple siblings weren’t supposed to fight the same war, Verville said.

“I wasn’t too happy about it. I could have waited for the next two months, but I didn’t have a choice,” he explained.

Eventually, he made it to Fort Lewis, near Tacoma, Washington, and “they treated us like crap,” he said.

“They threatened us that if we didn’t get a haircut we wouldn’t get our steak dinners, so we told them they could keep their steak dinner,” Verville explained. “Then they put a PFC (Private First Class) in charge of us, and he was scared to death. Get out of a warzone and you have a PFC tell you to go pick cigarette butts up? No way. So, they gave us a hassle, but finally they had to let us go or either pay us the civilian pay.”

Even though Verville and other Vietnam vets had made it home, their battle with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs was just beginning.

“I’ve been fighting the VA since I got out of Vietnam. All these rashes are all Agent Orange,” he said motioning to his forearms, “and they finally approved (my claim) in 2013. Put in for it in 1983. I put in for PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), but since I went over there as a supply organizer and they never changed the paperwork, I can’t claim what I did over there. I contacted the military board for the Army, and they said there wasn’t enough reason to change it. So, I was in the security police all the time I was over there, and they got me marked down as a supply clerk. They did that to a lot of people over there when they got into transit. They’d ask you if you wanted to volunteer for something, but they wouldn’t change your orders, and you didn’t know it till you got out. So, I had a claim in, well, they paid me for one year for Agent Orange. It’s supposed to go back to the day you filed it. So I got another letter of disagreement in there I’ve been waiting for three years.”

Verville also went through two bladder cancer operations. He found out the VA was considering making that condition a “presumptive” service connection, which is when the VA assumes a specific disability in certain veterans was caused by their military service.

“So I filed a claim,” he said. “Before it was even done, they denied it.”

Though the number has decreased from more than 611,000 in 2013, the VA still has a backlog of roughly 75,000 service-connected disability compensation and pension claims, according to its website.

Appeals to the VA’s decisions on those claims are tracked separately, though it wasn’t immediately clear how many appeals have been made of the more than 530,000 claims that have been removed from the backlog.

“How many died waiting (for their claims to be approved)?” Verville asked. “I’m lucky, I’m not ready to hit the ground yet.”

While Verville isn’t optimistic about future generations of veterans receiving any better treatment, he does have some hope for those Vietnam veterans and their family members who visit the AVTT Vietnam Traveling Memorial Wall.

“I think it gives a lot of people a closure that they couldn’t get, because there’s a lot of people that can’t travel to Washington (D.C.) to go see the wall,” he said. “But you have the same feeling here and it’ll give a lot of closure to the people here. Get the bad taste of the Vietnam War over.”

Ryan Jarvi can be reached at 906-228-2500, ext. 242.