Delbert Wood (1950 - 1972)

Born 21 Nov 1950 in Los Angeles, California, United States

Ancestors

Died 31 Oct 1972 at age 21 in Vietnam

Problems/Questions Profile manager: April Post [send private message]

Biography

Delbert Roy Wood was my 1st Cousin. His mother, Gloria was my father's sister. He was 3 years older and for some time we lived in the same house. His mother was separated from father (she eventually went back to him) and my father was at sea with the Merchant Marines so our mothers decided to set up house together. I have pictures of us together as very little children. Needless to say, Delroy, as I knew him and will always remember him, and I grew up very close. Even my little sister, 3 years younger than me was unable to break into that tight knit little club between us.

Eventually his family moved to Arizona and my family stayed in California. I missed Delroy terribly and so my parents would send me to Arizona over school holidays. They would take me to the bus stop and I would get on the big Greyhound bus my Uncle Del would be driving and I would go with him to Arizona and spend the time with Delroy.

It went this way until my early teens. I have the most wonderful childhood memories of us, hiding under the stairs in the storage space at Grandma's big house in Oregon, sliding down her stairs, bump, bump, bump all the way to the bottom, side by side. Sleeping, or rather not sleeping, under the ping pong table at his parents home and watching kangaroo mice outside the big sliding glass window, whispering and giggling together when we were supposed to be sleeping. And as a young teen walking down the street, Delroy, his 3 years older and much taller self protectively making sure I was walking on the inside and explaining to me that he had to walk on the outside to protect me because he was a man. And I remember going to see "Barbarella" at the drive in movies with Delroy driving his car and how cold it was that night. That's pretty much the last memory I have of him.

My mother moved back to her native Australia in 1969, taking my sister and myself with her. The next time I even heard anything about Delroy was when my Aunt Gloria, his mother, called me in 1973 in Singapore where I was living at the time with my husband who was stationed there with the Army after his own tour of Vietnam. She called to tell me that my father was dying of Brain Cancer. It was then that she told me about Delroy's death. It was a double Whammy for me.

I went home. I stayed with my Aunt Gloria. I spent time with Delroy's little girl, with the rest of my father's family and spent as much time as I could with my father but I was pregnant at the time and had to return to Singapore before I was too far along to fly.

The 70s were very hard for my family, Uncle frank was killed in a motor cycle accident, Delroy was killed in Vietnam, my father died of Brain Cancer in 1973, Aunt Gloria never got over Delroy's death and blamed herself for the rest of her life. She died almost to the day, 5 years later.

The following is a story in an Arizonan Newspaper about Delbert Roy Wood, his life and his death:

The Arizona Republic Sunday, Dec. 17, 1972 (Section B) Page 1 By Paul Dean

War made parents proud but for the wrong reasons

They are parents without pretense, who know their son stumbled because they failed.

Hear the mother, Mrs. Delbert Wood, a woman with eyes exhausted from being a single thought away from tears.

"He was our only child, a good baby with terrible parents becasue we were too strict, we expected too much of him," she said.

Listen to the father , a man who has known war and hardship and loss, so can bury his sorrow deep.

"Woody grew up among adults and we expected him to act like a grownup from the age of three. We didn't know, we just didn't realize," he said.

Now know that son, Delbert Roy Wood, Delroy or Woody, the boy they loved and lost becasue love can be devastating.

He was born in Huntington Park, a Los Angeles suburb, to a childhood where gifts were painted-up, second hand bicycles, because his parents believed easy affluence is corrosive and their son should work for new things.

His mother, spoiled as a child, allowed him none of the freedoms she feared might reproduce her young tantrums. His father, without a dad of his own since the age of 15, spared no rod to raise his son.

Inside the family home, Woody became a disciplined model.

Outside, he rebelled against all authority.

He floundered through Christian kindergarten and was disinterested and remote in grade school. A lack of coordination kept him from athletics.. He even failed the lesser league of Kiwanis' baseball for youngsters who couldn't make Little League.

He tried Boy Scouting for a few months. Mrs. Wood remembers picking up her son from one meeting.

Her lad was sitting alone in a dark hall. The rest of his troop was outside playing "King of the Mountain."

"Let's face it mum," said Woody. "I'm just not good enough."

Delbert Wood's job, as a senior driver of Greyhound buses, brought the family to Arizona in 1964. The move did not improve Woody's years at school.

His mother has a stack of report cards from Maryvale High. There isn't one without painful cliches written inside. "Delbert has the ability to work... but he won't study... he doesn't apply himself."

This teen-ager fell for all teen-age temptations. Girls. Cutting classes. Experiments with marijuana. Long hair. Revolts against faculty rule.

In his 5th year, Woody became an ally of a walkout against Maryvale High's dress code. The whole school bragged it would walk out. Only three did. Woody was one of them. Woody became a dropout.

He skipped between a dozen jobs in the next two years. Pasting rubber panels at Goodyear Aerospace. Pouring ingots at Allison Steel. Working as a carpenter's helper on a construction site. Always a new job, always a new firing, always a new failure.

He tried marriage. He was 19. She was 16. There was a daughter, Tammie Lee. But divorce ended the marriage that was a hopeless, 18-month-long argument.

The divorce dissolved Woody's mentality. He drifted to San Francisco, odd-jobbed for meals, ignored the right people, followed the wrong ways. Occasionally, he would call his mother. Always collect.

In the end, she had only one bitter message for him.

"Someday, before your father dies," she told her son, "I pray you'll do something to make him proud."

There was shock in that challenge. Woody reacted.

And a few weeks later he telephoned his mother, said he had enlisted in the U.S. Army and volunteered for service in Vietnam. Despite his membership in a cult that rejected war and the military. Despite flat feet and asthma, that, had he chosen to reveal them to examiners, could have kept him out of the Army.

Woody went up from there. He was a top man in infantry boot camp, a squad leader. The young man who had once shot his own foot with a BB gun, became a marksman on most weapons and expert on some. Only a fear of heights kept him from jump school and the Green Barets.

In April, Woody went to Vietnam. Before leaving he sent his parents a standard military photograph; a color portrait of their son, handsome in Army greens alongside the American flag.

"Always remember me like this," he wrote on the photograph. "Now dad, I hope you'll be proud of me."

On Oct. 31, the United States and South Vietnam should have signed a peace treaty with Hanoi.

That same Halloween Day, Spec. 4 Delbert Wood, 21, was aboard a CH47 Chinook helicopter returning from Saigon to his combat aviation unit in Can Tho.

Diplomacy's pen failed to hit that treaty.

But at 5:30p.m., a Strela missile rose from a guerrilla's hand-held launcher and hit the big helicopter.

Woody died with 21 other soldiers.

He died before achieving whatever big thing his life had begun searching for. Yet in death, he made one ironic and unenvied achievement, a moment of hometown history that his parents could live without.

For with American combat casualties falling to zero or near zero each week, Woody may be recorded as the last Arizonan to fall in Vietnam.

He passed away in 1972.

Sources

See also:

• "California Birth Index, 1905-1995," database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:V2T4-6HH : 27 November 2014), Delbert Roy Wood, 21 Nov 1950; citing Los Angeles, California, United States, Department of Health Services, Vital Statistics Department, Sacramento.