Not quite 18 years old and about to graduate from high school, Cortland resident Mike Loparco had a choice: Study in college at Cortland to become a teacher, or join the U.S. Army.
The Army paid better at the time. It was 1966, and there was a conflict under way in a country called Vietnam. Someone at the Army asked what he wanted to do. Serving in the infantry seemed like a good idea. His father had been an Army soldier stationed in Hawaii when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
Initially, the 17-year-old boarded a bus in Syracuse with a number of “people I grew up with.” He remembers scoring well on the initial tests he was given, so he was offered the chance to enter officer candidate school, a 12-week program in Georgia. He left that assignment as a first lieutenant – a platoon leader.
Not long after becoming a platoon leader, he remembers someone telling him the average lifespan of such a leader was five months. At the time, he had been in the service for about five months.
It seems obvious now that Loparco, working his way through a Thanksgiving lunch with an estimated 200 other veterans and family members at Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 1645 in Binghamton last week, was beginning to have second thoughts about the career path he’d chosen.
He remembered knowing the members of a squad who were chosen to be in an armored personnel carrier, on a mission the Army called “search and destroy.” The carrier struck a buried explosive. Members of his unit later estimated that the explosive was a 500-pound bomb.
All but one person in the armored personnel carrier were killed, Loparco said in a voice barely above a whisper.
Loparco was in the first platoon. Not long after the APC was blown up, the unit’s second platoon was tasked with another “search and destroy” mission. Eight men went out, Loparco said; two survived.
“October was a bad month – the worst,” he recalled. “I don’t have good memories of October.”
He struggled with those memories. He learned some lessons along the way: “Listen to what your NCOs (non-commissioned officers) tell you.” He also learned to listen to the medics in the company; he knew they were good at surviving.
Loparco, now in his mid-70s, married Alice Loparco of Cortland in 1979. They celebrated their 45th wedding anniversary earlier this year. They raised four children. Daughter Beth, son Lin and son John all live in Central New York. Another son died in 1991.
He embarked on his second career at age 19 – law enforcement. Eventually, he retired from the job in 1993. He had finished his career focusing on helping people – in this case investigating crimes involving domestic abuse or child abuse.
Eventually, he realized his dream of teaching, first with Onondaga-Cortland-Madison Board of Cooperative Educational Services, then later with Tompkins-Seneca-Tioga BOCES. He furthered his education at Tompkins Cortland Community College in Dryden, then at SUNY Oswego. He then embarked on a brief real-estate career, but decided the pressure was not for him.
Then he started focusing on himself. In 2010, he started counseling through the Veterans Administration in Ithaca. Now, he is happy to answer questions about his military experiences – including realizing he was lucky to avoid injury or death, to the point where colleagues told him one reason why he remained alive was “people used to tell me I had a guardian angel.”
Lately, he has reconnected with people he knew from the area. He knew Carl Bush – now a peer counselor with the Southern Tier Clear Path for Veterans support organization – from teaching in Ithaca and they reconnected 18 months ago over lunch. Loparco says he recently reconnected with a Cortland man he’d known in Vietnam 40 years ago, and had hoped that the fellow veteran from Cortland would be be at the lunch at Post 1645.
Alas, Loparco and his friend from 40 years ago could not make the lunch, But Loparco says he is enjoying his life, even though the symptoms of the Parkinson’s disease have lately grown stronger.
“I’m happy in life,” Loparco says. “I mean, I get to hug my grandkids. What could be better than that?”
Editor's note: This story was updated to correct an error regarding Alice Loparco.
