Almost 60 years later, the war goes on.

The Vietnam War is technically over. Soldiers returned from their tours of duty decades ago. However, if you probe deeper into these men, you may find the soldier still there. And for that soldier, the memory of war and its consequences might still be raging.

The soldier is still with retired Col. Erhard Opsahl, a Vietnam Veteran who served 26 years in the military.

“The PTS [post-traumatic stress] is something that took 40 years to finally get to me,” Opsahl said.

It’s a struggle that his younger self probably would’ve had difficulty imagining. Opsahl was born in 1943 and grew up in Thiensville, Wisconsin, as the youngest of six kids. During his childhood, he could get to pretty much anywhere he wanted on foot. Family, friends, church, school, places to play — all were within walking distance of his house. “From my perspective, it was the best childhood a young boy could have,” he said. At high school on the Northwestern College campus in Watertown, Wisconsin, Opsahl excelled in classes and sports and was class president for three years.

After college, also at Northwestern, Opsahl had a choice to make. His education at Northwestern prepared him for entering into ministerial studies, but despite his successes in school, he didn’t feel ready to take that route. “I went into the Army because I didn’t think that I had experience enough to become a pastor in four years and counsel married people and people with money problems and things like that,” he said, “so I thought I would go into the military for a few years, get experience, and then maybe come back and be a pastor.”

Opsahl also credits former President John F. Kennedy’s famous quote from his inaugural speech, in which he encouraged Americans to consider what they could do to serve their country, as “the big push” behind his joining the military. In addition, he and a college friend, if they enlisted in the Army at the same time, could go through basic and advanced individual training together.

Opsahl attended basic training at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri and was assigned to C-3-3: Charlie Company, 3rd Battalion, 3rd Brigade. He soon became the leader in his company, the “top” enlisted trainee. In his autobiography, Opsahl writes, “I marched the trainees wherever we went to train and wore a shoulder sleeve to show I was the trainee ‘point of contact’ for all matters” (Chapter 3, p. 1). At the end of training, he was named Trainee of the Cycle.

After basic, Opsahl went to Fort Holabird in Maryland to study military intelligence. He then was sent to the 116th Intelligence Corps Group at Fort Lesley J. McNair in Washington, D.C., where he worked in background investigations. This was followed by Officer Candidate School at Fort Knox, Kentucky, where upon graduation he received his commission as a second lieutenant in the armor branch and became the commander of Troop A in the 1st Reconnaissance Training Squadron. 

In September 1967, Opsahl arrived in Vietnam. He was originally assigned to a cavalry regiment but was sent to a mechanized infantry battalion to replace a lieutenant who had been killed in action. While he was in the 2nd Battalion of the 22nd Infantry, also known as “Triple Deuce,” Opsahl served as second platoon leader of Alpha Company and, later, recon platoon leader of Headquarters Company. As part of a mechanized battalion, he and his men used “tracks” — a slang term for the armored personnel carriers they used — to carry out their assignments. These assignments, according to Opsahl’s autobiography, included assisting a “leg platoon” in danger, finding and disarming mines, and defending bases from enemy attack.

One such attack, on a fire support base called Burt, occurred on the night of New Years’s Day, 1968. Opsahl writes: “Some of my men were listening to the Rose Bowl on Armed Forces Network and were disappointed when O.J. Simpson and Southern Cal beat Indiana. Then, we spent the next seven or eight hours trying to survive an attack of two NVA/VC [North Vietnamese Army/Viet Cong] regiments, partially overrunning our perimeter” (Chapter 4, p. 5).

A newspaper article written after the attack reported that the Americans were successful in defending Burt and specifically cited Opsahl and his men for contributing to the victory. However, death reared its face on both sides in the aftermath. In regards to the enemy, Opsahl recalls in his autobiography: “The bodies of the attackers had been mutilated…Some estimated more than 600 enemy dead. The engineer bulldozers dug a huge hole; the dead bodies were tossed in” (Chapter 4, p. 5).

During his year in Vietnam, Opsahl witnessed the violent deaths of enemy soldiers as well as comrades and friends. Opsahl said he wrestled with the Fifth Commandment during this time. The internal struggle only continued when he returned home and made the transition to living among civilians again.

“In the civilian community…killing and murder was wrong,” Opsahl said. “But then you join the military, and no matter what branch it is, the first thing you learn is how to kill. That’s what a military person does; that’s their job.”

He admits that he experienced symptoms of post-traumatic stress early on, but he didn’t do much about it. “Almost from the beginning I had nightmares and yelling and things like that in my sleep, so I just thought that was normal,” he said. “All of us who came back did that kind of thing, so if it was normal, then it must be acceptable, or [I] deal with it the way I have to deal with it.”

As far as his career after Vietnam, Opsahl thrived. After he served as a battery commander in an Army Reserve artillery training battalion in Milwaukee and earned his master’s degree in history from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the Wisconsin Army National Guard brought him onboard with its public affairs detachment. Upon hearing Opsahl speak on the radio about a standoff between the Menomonie Indians and the police and National Guard in Gresham, Wisconsin, the National Guard Bureau offered him a two-year tour as a spokesman for its public affairs department at The Pentagon in Washington, D.C. A couple of years after that tour, Opsahl returned there to serve as a public affairs spokesman for the Office of the Secretary of Defense. “I was the first National Guard guy as a spokesman in that office,” he said. Later positions included training liaison officer in Fort Hood, Texas, and director of training and readiness for the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense, Reserve Affairs, again at The Pentagon. He officially retired from the military in 1991 as a colonel.

His retirement years brought more blessings. He gained a “trophy family,” wife Carla and stepdaughters Kellie and Kaitlyn. (Kaitlyn also joined the Army and ended up being in C-3-3 at Fort Leonard Wood as well and having the same military occupational specialty as Opsahl.) He completed his PhD in history and taught at Luther Preparatory School in Watertown — formerly his alma mater, Northwestern. However, these years also came with the resurgence of a long-held burden.

Opsahl became aware of friends and members of his church who had also been in the military and were suffering from similar post-traumatic stress symptoms as he was. He said he learned of a VA report that stated that approximately 22 veterans died by suicide per day, and that the average age of those who committed suicide was the same as that of a Vietnam veteran. In addition, he noticed that nonmilitary citizens, even leaders in government and in the church, didn’t seem to understand the struggles of past and current military members and, as a result, couldn’t effectively help them.

“It’s just a shame that we…still don’t have a handle on how to deal [with this] or help. We don’t have enough programs with peer support,” Opsahl said. “For instance, I go once a week for three hours with a group of…about a half dozen of us, and we just sit together for three hours, talk to each other and then say, ‘Okay, we’ll see you next week.’ So we live one week at a time, and that’s an approach that we think has been successful for us. It’s an important thing, because we share so much that others don’t.”

Opsahl took a proactive approach to the problem he saw, digging deep into the Bible and other religious writings to unearth what God says about governing, war, and the soldier’s role in it.^[i] “[I have been] trying to clarify…to at least the people in our pews, the WELS, that St. Augustine and Luther and Christ actually supported the military, trying to keep government strong enough to allow His church to flourish in peacefulness,” he said.

Opsahl has also gotten involved with organizations whose aim is to support veterans and current military members, including Dry Hootch in Madison and Lutheran Military Support Group (LMSG). He is a founding member of the latter and served as its president for a year. He credits LMSG and the people behind it as a “big part” in making the WELS more aware of the challenges men and women in the military face.

“There has been progress,” he said.

Perhaps, as a young boy, Erhard Opsahl didn’t think any of this would happen to him. Perhaps, for the soldier in him, the memory of war will always maintain some hold. However, in his autobiography, Opsahl concludes that “God has been and still is GOOD” to him (Postlude, p. 6).

“God has blessed me with a lot of adventures, successes and failures,” he writes in his autobiography’s preface. “Many are sometimes difficult to differentiate, even for me.”

Written by Jenni Mickelson, 2025


Footnotes:
^[1] Opsahl wrote an article in 2017 for the WELS magazine Forward in Christ that explains the Lutheran Christian’s view on government, war, and the soldier in more detail. The article can be found here: https://wels.net/does-hating-the-war-mean-hating-the-warrior/