Restoring and Remembering

John Reichenberg, known to his friends as Lil John, never slept well during his tour of duty in Vietnam.

“I was always listening,” he says. 

That was good news for his bunkmate Bobby Cole, who loved to sleep with his headphones on and listen to loud music. 

“I heard the first boom way out at the green line, then another getting closer,” John said. “So I yelled ‘incoming,’ put my flak jacket on, and with everyone scrambling and running around, I see that Bobby’s still sound asleep. I grabbed him, pulled him out of his bunk, threw him on the floor and laid on top of him. Shrapnel came through the ceiling and the screens, and once things settled down, all Bobby could say was, ‘I ain’t heard nothin.’”

John and Bobby both made it out of Vietnam, but Bobby passed away at age 53 in the early 2000s. “They opened him up because of back pain and they closed him back up and told him he’s got less than six months to live. Agent Orange had taken over his body.”

Lil John is not little. At 78, he’s 6’ 1” and retains the bear-like physique honed from his post-Vietnam days as an award-winning bodybuilder. 

An 11-year Marco Island resident, John spends most days, about 40 hours a week, working on the 1933 Ford five-window coupe he’s rebuilding in his garage or toying with the 1968 Corvette he’s already rebuilt and tricked out into a bowel-rattling, black and purple beast resembling the Batmobile. The Ford, in particular, has deep sentimental meaning for Reichenberg.

In 1963, while in high school, he asked his dad for $150 to buy the car. When he got home and his dad saw it wasn’t really a car at all, just pieces of one, he wasn’t happy.

“It had four fenders, no running boards. The frame was completely bare. I had the doors, the trunk deck, the hood and grill. Nothing else. My dad said, ‘You’re kidding me! I thought you were buying a car to drive.’ He got sort of pissed.”

Two years later, John had rebuilt the car and drove it to college.

The car stayed in his family and he’s back to rebuilding it once again. “That’s the end of my bucket list,” he says.

And what a bucket list it’s been. In addition to being a former bodybuilder and professional-level mechanic and machinist, he’s an avid metal detectorist, having unearthed treasures on beaches all over Florida and Europe and at Civil War sites here in the U.S. He showed me dozens of gold and diamond rings he’s found; Civil War era coins, bullets and other war-time items; even a coin dating to 240 BC.

When we met, he put two pieces of gnarled, misshapen lead in my palm and asked me to identify them, which I couldn’t. “You’ve heard the term ‘bite the bullet, right?’” Sure enough, each was a Civil War bullet with two distinct indentations that were clearly a human bite mark.

“I love Civil War hunting because I’m walking on ground that those guys were on in the 1860s,” John said. “I mean, you almost feel them.”

After graduating from the University of Baltimore in 1967 with a Bachelor of Science degree, and while pondering his path in life, John received his draft notice. It was never a question of whether he’d serve. He says he loved his country and was eager to help.

His superior mechanical skills landed him in helicopter school, which eventually led to his role as crew chief on a UH-1 Huey helicopter in the Army’s famed 1st Air Cavalry Division, stationed at the Camp Evans landing zone in Vietnam, 16 miles south of the demilitarized zone. He racked up more than 1,500 hours in the air, flying low-altitude combat assaults and transporting troops and supplies in and out of active fighting. He was never shot down but did crash after colliding with another helicopter in mid-air. He wears the chain from the rotor blade as a bracelet.

When Lil John’s tour was nearing an end in 1969, he contemplated re-enlisting, even considering going “mercenary. “I hated to leave,” he says. “You can’t help but to have friendships, right? It was just one big, large family, but then to lose those guys in battle was really tough.”

In the end, he came home for his family. “My mom and dad took it so hard. I could see it was tearing them apart, me being over there.”

In 1990, Lil John made his first pilgrimage to the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial in Washington, D.C., while still living in his home state of Maryland. He took a friend - a former green beret - to “the wall,” as he and other veterans call the memorial, and said they stood for several hours at the entrance to the memorial, unable to work up the strength to walk along the wall bearing the names of the fallen. Over time, other veterans gathered around Lil John and his friend for support. “You gotta go,” John said they told him, and they did.

“So we walked down and it was really tough,” he said. “Really hard.”

He and his wife Kay have been back to the wall nearly twenty times. “It’s a form of therapy,” Kay says.

As John likes to say, “I left Vietnam, but it didn’t leave me.” He was diagnosed with PTSD and has “good days and bad days,” as he puts it. His family and service dog, June – a spunky standard poodle – are the keys to maintaining his mental health, along with his hobbies, particularly the time he spends working on his cars.

“My garage is my bunker,” he says. “I’m at peace here. Everything is in my control.”

John lost good friends in Vietnam and more in the years since. But for someone who’s lost so much, he just can’t seem to stop giving.

“John likes to help people,” says Kay. “He’s a very genuine person and he’s genuine in his heart.”

Lil John met a fellow “1st Cav” Vietnam veteran helicopter pilot who was working as a cashier at Lowe’s. The two struck up a relationship, and when the man’s wife told John how much her husband admired his rotor chain bracelet but couldn’t afford the ones being sold online, Lil John made the man one with spare chain from his chopper’s tail rotor.

One of these local friends, Fred Steiner, lost his wife in 2017. John sensed he was struggling and told him to bring his cars over to the garage so he could help Fred make some adjustments. It has turned into a near-daily ritual, with the two working together to restore John’s 1933 Ford.

“Fred’s daughters called Kay the other day to say how much our time together means to him,” John said.

On most Saturday mornings, John drives his Corvette to Marco Lutheran Church to hang out for a couple hours with seven or eight other car buffs, mostly fellow Vette guys. I rode with John one Saturday in late July. He considerately brought me a bottled water and a folding chair and gave me a towel to put on the exhaust pipe running the length of the car under the door to keep from accidentally burning my calf on the 1500-degree pipe.

The banter in the church parking lot was exactly what you’d expect from a group of dudes in their seventies and eighties sitting on folding chairs in a circle under a shade tree: a mix of politics, car stuff, sports, and the occasional bawdy joke.

Random people stopped by to take photos of the various cars, but Lil John’s Corvette was the showstopper that got the most action. He fired up the massive 502 horsepower big block Chevy engine at the request of one young man who looked to be in his twenties. After the thunderous roar, the guy thanked John for obliging him, then, seeing his vest festooned with Vietnam patches, reached out his hand and thanked him for his service.

I asked Lil John how it felt to hear those words today in the context of the scorn that was heaped on Vietnam vets when they returned home at the time. 

“It feels good,” he said. “Like we didn’t waste all those lives trying to bring democracy to South Vietnam.”