Dennis franz nndb1/23/2024 Now, when things get rough, I figure if I can do what I did in Vietnam and survive, I can handle anything.” It opened my eyes to government and truth and fair play. “There were friendships and the adventure of women in the military. “I left a Minnesota farm, went to Southeast Asia, and learned worldliness and a sense of compassion that otherwise I might never have had. “The war certainly changed my life, but made me a better person in many ways,” says Evans, 48. Satisfaction, and her private healing, peaked two years ago when the Vietnam Women’s Memorial was raised in Washington, D.C. But never enough “to make me jump off a bridge someday.”Īnd she exorcised these dark whispers by total involvement in a movement to recognize the service of 7,000 nurses in Vietnam. Sure, she felt some anger, some depression. There was a supportive family in Northfield, Minn., nursing to continue, then a husband and eventually four children. She served in Vietnam from 1968 to 1969 at places where the supply of incoming wounded was endless, and only a barbed-wire fence separated her from the hot war. “Maybe I was chosen to go over there and get those guys back.”ĭiane Carlson Evans was an Army nurse. like a bad marriage, you put it behind you and move on with life.”īut on occasions, just sometimes, he wonders what a nice boy from Brooklyn was doing in Vietnam. “I came back with my arms and legs, got all my guys back but for two, and that’s when you just look up and say: Thank you, God.”įranco was a partner in Alfie’s on Sunset Boulevard, built Mirabelle in 1976 and now owns the Pasta Grill in Newhall. “But I’ve never had one bad dream about Vietnam,” he says. An infantry company commander, his tour was spent in the jungle: 28 days in, three days out. “Then we slowed down, stopped, realized what had happened and just started laughing.”įranco saw and felt much in Vietnam. Ran as hard as I could with Franco following. “I began running at full speed to get out of there. “There was this odor of festering water, a Vietnam odor,” Meshad says. Yet, after recent storms, he and another veteran, Newhall restaurant owner Bobby Franco, were out jogging. But no nightmares, no drugs, no psychoses. Also an inspiration for postwar writings and his counseling networks. Meshad, 50, brought many things back from the war: a fearless, more focused approach to life. He returned in 1970 to found the National Veterans Center counseling facility, and then the National Veterans Foundation. He served in Vietnam as a mental health officer working from rear-area hospitals to isolated firebases. Shad Meshad of Los Angeles is the nation’s most voluble Vietnam returnee. If things got bad, I could always look in a mirror and say I asked for it.”Īlthough Lauria and several million Vietnam veterans are far from dysfunctional and have never suffered flashbacks or alcoholic rages, all who served have inner echoes that are the legacy of any vivid experience. “I always knew what I wanted to do, to act, and the love of that, the drive to succeed kept me going,” he says. Yet it was having a career, believing he could succeed as an actor, that sustained him in Vietnam. Lauria says he and friend Franz carry mild double doses of survivor guilt because, Lauria explains, “We not only survived a war where so many were killed, we came home and became successes.” He survived intact, he says, but not unstained. Then a platoon commander at An Loc near the Cambodian border. Lauria was a Marine Corps lieutenant aboard a helicopter assault vessel in the South China Sea. Also Dan Lauria who played the father in those “Wonder Years.” In addition, Franz also served as a trooper with the 82nd Airborne during the Vietnam War.If Oliver Stone hadn’t experienced Vietnam, he would never have directed a trilogy of watershed war movies, including his Oscar-rich “Platoon.” Nor would journalist Bill Broyles have developed “China Beach” for television.Īnd Peter Arnett, then with Associated Press, now with CNN, would never have earned the spurs-to say nothing of a Pulitzer Prize-that have made him America’s best-known war correspondent since Ernie Pyle.Įmmy winner Dennis Franz of “NYPD Blue” is a Vietnam veteran. He also has appeared in such films as The Package (1989) and Die Hard 2. Dennis Franz checks a Beretta 92FS as Captain Carmine Lorenzo in Die Hard 2.ĭennis Franz is an Emmy-Award winning American actor who is often recognized for his hard-nosed police detective roles, the best known being his portrayal of Detective Sergeant Andy Sipowicz for all 12 seasons of the series NYPD Blue.
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