John Haven: From Freeport to Vietnam, and back
The community knows John Haven as a member of the Freeport Area school board and former member of the Buffalo Township board of supervisors; but before serving his community, Haven served his country.
Each Veterans Day, Haven speaks to students in the Freeport Area School District about his experience in the armed forces and during the Vietnam War. He will do so again on this year.
“I personally think that every high school graduate should spend one year in the service,” Haven said. “They need to learn responsibility and duty to their cohorts, as well as teamwork and work experience. The military services have some of the finest training facilities in the world for engineering, transportation, logistics, statistics, computers, aeronautics and electronics.”
Haven set off on his military career in the mid-1960s, when he enlisted in the U.S. Army to join the military police after his civilian career came to an unexpected end.
“I left Youngstown University to work at U.S. Steel in Gary, Indiana. After one year, I was laid off,” Haven said. “I came back home to Freeport and enlisted into the Army.”
After graduating from the military police school, Haven was assigned to the Fort Myer Army base in Arlington, Va., where he had the responsibility of guarding the tomb of President John F. Kennedy. Over the next few years, he bounced from base to base, including some time at Fort Bragg, N.C., where he taught a course to troops going through basic training on how to fire the M-16 rifle.
“I qualified approximately 15,000 troops in the three months I was there,” Haven said.
Finally, in mid-1969, Haven received his orders sending him to Vietnam for a short stint. While there, he served as a first lieutenant and was later promoted to captain of the 1st Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division in Pleiku.
Haven says the most memorable experience of his six-year stint in the armed forces was working with people of South Vietnam.
“They were wonderful, hardworking people with a sense of humor,” Haven said of the experience. “(They were) dirt poor, but happy. They were glad to have us there.”
On the other hand, his most harrowing experience was taking part in a combat assault in which he had to jump out of a Huey helicopter into a landing zone under enemy fire.
“The life expectancy of a platoon leader was two weeks, but only seven seconds in combat,” Haven said. “Let that sink in.”
While he returned stateside in 1970, his time in the armed forces was far from over. Shortly after leaving Vietnam, he returned to Fort Bragg, where he was assigned to the 1st Brigade of the 15th Psyop Battalion. There, he served as an intelligence and operations officer.
“Our operations area was the Middle East,” Haven said. “I had interpreters who spoke several different dialects in Arabic.”
Haven eventually left the armed forces in 1972 and settled into a career with ATI Minerals, where he spent 34 years as a senior production supervisor until he retired in 2006.
He says he’s taken one lesson above all from his military life into his civilian life and he hopes to teach that to student of Freeport Area School District.
“Take all of your training and education seriously. There are people and lives depending on your decisions and judgment,” Haven said. “Each person has a job they must do to complete a mission. You have to depend on and trust each other.”
