Jack Rafferty Pens a Vietnam Memoir
By Katie McFadden
At age 21, many celebrate having their first legal drink. In June 1968, at age 21 is when local resident Jack Rafferty was commissioned as an officer in the U.S. Army. By August of that year, he was reporting to Fort Knox for training. He served as a platoon leader for a while before heading to flight school in February 1969 to become a helicopter pilot. And on August 1, 1970, he was on a flight to Vietnam to fight in the war. Fifty-four years later, after years of watching movies and reading books on Vietnam that didn’t quite get it right, he’s published his own book about his time there and the journey to make it back home. “Back to Brooklyn: A Vietnam Memoir” is now available.
Rafferty didn’t always call Belle Harbor home. In 1976, it’s where his now late wife, Anne, wanted to move. A friend made it sound even more ideal—“It’s Brooklyn with a beach,” one of Rafferty’s buddies who had already made the move said. But Brooklyn is where his story begins, in East Flatbush, near Little Flower Parish and Holy Cross Cemetery. He attended Brooklyn Prep and then went off to St. Peter’s, a Jesuit college in Jersey City—a school that had mandatory ROTC training for two years. Rafferty stuck around for two more. Logistically, as the war in Vietnam raged on and word of the draft spread, it would set him up with an advantage—being commissioned as an officer with second lieutenant pay. “Everyone was going to Vietnam,” Rafferty said. “You might as well go as officers.” But after training and before that deployment in 1970, he got about a month home in Brooklyn, where, after a brief historical recap and commentary to set the scene for young readers, Rafferty’s story begins.
“Back to Brooklyn: A Vietnam Memoir” is described as “the story of a citizen soldier, a journey seen through one person’s eyes highlighting the anticipation, loneliness, separation, excitement, successes, and failures, as well as dealing with friends and fellow soldiers dying around him. In the end, there is the final joy and satisfaction of having fulfilled an obligation he would have preferred not to have been compelled to undertake.”
Rafferty’s book details his time assigned to an air cavalry troop as a pilot on “Huey” helicopters, with the mission of hunting out enemy camps near Saigon and bringing the 15 Infantry to these areas. “Occasionally we got into firefights and people died,” Rafferty said. He also participated in some special missions, bringing small groups of long-range reconnaissance patrol (LRRP) teams on the ground and retrieving them. “I spent a lot of time on fire bases,” Rafferty said. But overall, Rafferty said, “I didn’t really have any bad experiences. Compared to the infantry that had to be out on the field and in the rain, we could go back to our basecamps every night to a hot shower, maybe a movie. We worked six days a week and were only really in danger for an hour and a half each day,” he said. But there were some close calls. “One rocket came in on a Saturday night and landed about 100 feet from our officers’ club. It would’ve killed a lot of guys,” he said. And Rafferty knew many who didn’t make it home throughout the war. But he also recalls memorable moments of camaraderie, like getting to celebrate Thanksgiving on a fire base, with a turkey and all the fixings, and even a quart of eggnog. “Then one day we were coming back from a mission, and I saw Bob Hope from 1,500 feet above. I said, ‘men, take a look, you can tell your people you saw Bob Hope,’” Rafferty said.
But the biggest hope, was making it home. After 365 days in Vietnam, fulfilling his tour, Rafferty made it back to Brooklyn in August 1971. As did his two brothers, Joe and Jim, who survived two tours in Vietnam and continued with careers in the military. “It was euphoric landing home,” Rafferty said. “Euphoric.” Rafferty went on to get married, left the Army and started working for Bankers Trust, all in the same week in 1972. “I took off my uniform and put on a pinstripe suit,” he said. In 1976, he and Anne moved to Rockaway. Together they had four kids, 11 grandkids and Rafferty even has five great grandkids now—all among the youth that he hopes one day reads his story.
After a 40-year career in banking, Rafferty retired in 2015, and found some free time to put his memories on pages. “That was a tumultuous time with the draft, the antiwar sentiment, race problems, assassinations and the Vietnam War, and I felt it didn’t get the proper representation in books and movies. They were slanted and I wanted to get my thoughts out there about how I viewed this time, so I tried to cover all the things that were important as they were happening in the story, but I didn’t write this for veterans, and I didn’t write it for people my age,” Rafferty said. “I wrote it for younger generations. This is all ancient history now, but I’d like for the younger generations to read this and have an understanding from a firsthand account of what this was all about and how we deal with this even now with the war in Ukraine and Russia and what it means when we send our sons and daughters off to war.”
In mid-June, “Back to Brooklyn: A Vietnam Memoir” was officially published, bringing with it a feeling of accomplishment. “I was just amazed that I actually got it done,” Rafferty said, adding that he had a lot of help from his nieces, granddaughter, and his editor Ethan Casey at Blue Ear Books. “Now the only question is… who’s gonna play me in the movie?” Rafferty joked.
“Back to Brooklyn: A Vietnam Memoir” by J.D. Rafferty is available on Amazon.
