PORT ANGELES — While no longer on the hunt for the enemy in the dense jungles of Vietnam, Port Angeles resident John Nutting can never escape the horrific memories or the permanent damage done to his body.
After graduating high school at the age of 19, Nutting enlisted in the Marine Corps.
Upon completion of boot camp in 1966, he shipped out to Vietnam with “F” Company, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marine Division and served in numerous combat missions over the next year.
During that time, he suffered from various jungle borne diseases, got severely wounded by shrapnel and was exposed to nasty chemicals that affect him to this day.
Nutting has written a memoir about his military experience, “The Court-Martial of Corporal Nutting,” which has been published by Skyhorse Publishing.
The hardcover book is available online at http://tinyurl.com/PDN-skyhorse.
The title refers to the culminating experience of his time in the service.
At 21, Corporal Nutting was tried on suspicion of using marijuana outside of a Navy hospital in California, where he was a patient.
He had never dabbled with pot until sampling it for the first time just out of boot camp, but continued to use it to relieve stress during his tour in Vietnam.
“Nobody I ever went with took it out into the field,” he said, adding the tradition was to toke-up with his brothers in arms after returning from field missions.
“If you got back to the bunker” and smoked some pot, “you knew you made it back alive.”
The result of the court martial is described in detail in the climax of his book.
“Read it and find out,” he said.
Nutting, now 67, suffers from what he suspects to be Agent Orange poisoning.
Agent Orange is a defoliant used by the U.S. military from 1961 to 1971 to clear vast swaths of vegetation out of the Vietnamese jungles, with the intention of removing locations where enemy troops could hide.
“The guys like me, the grunts — if they defoliated the whole hillside, [and] you are filling up your canteen downstream [you are] getting a couple of good doses of that,” Nutting said.
And now almost 50 years later, that exposure is taking a toll.
“My feet and legs are on fire,” he said. “Sometimes my hands, I can hardly feel them. It comes and goes and depends on if I try to do too much.”
The symptoms grew so severe that Nutting was forced to retire from working as a chimney sweeper.
He had founded Top Hat Chimney Sweep in Port Angeles in the early 1980s.
In mid-February 1967, while in combat a few miles northeast of Cam Lo, Nutting was seriously wounded by mortar shrapnel in his lower right leg.
He recovered, but carries invisible injuries from the war to this day.
“You start thinking about all those guys that didn’t make it, and you get all welled up,” he said.
“I wish I could have done something, but you can ‘what if’ yourself right into the nut hatch. It is what it is, and I didn’t ever do anything [in Vietnam] I felt guilty about.”
No one can understand what combat is like until they have been there, he said.
Eventually “you realize there are a whole bunch of people that want to kill you.
“And then after you are there for a while . . . and survived your first fire fight. . . then you start being an ‘old salt.’ How do I stay alive? How do I keep somebody else alive?”
Those survival instincts, honed on the battlefield, cannot be turned off with the flick of a switch, he said.
Returning to civilian life back home in the states, Nutting “was still dealing with nightmares,” he said.
And during the day, loud noises would make him jumpy.
Even movies about Vietnam, which Nutting describes as not entirely accurate, could cause a flashback.
Nutting said post-traumatic stress disorder is a very real thing for combat veterans.
He said it has faded somewhat for him over the years.
“You’ll never forget it. All the things you see, you can’t erase them. You’ve got to learn how to live with them and keep moving on.
Nutting, a native of Idaho, and his wife, Laurel, found their way to Port Angeles in about 1974 after reading an article about the Olympic Peninsula in National Geographic.
They hiked along the Pacific coastline, eventually hitching a ride to Port Angeles from a log truck driver.
Nutting became a surgical tech, aiding surgeons during medical operations.
“I felt I was real good at what I did, but eight to 12 hours sometimes in a windowless room, with your eyeballs sticking out and standing there at a table” takes a toll.
In about 1979, deciding he needed some fresh air, Nutting and his wife embarked on a motorcycle tour of the United States, eventually ending up in Germany.
While there, he met and was inspired by the local chimney sweepers.
“It is really connected with their heritage and history,” he said.
When he and his wife returned to Port Angeles, he noticed an advertisement in a print publication that offered a chimney sweep starter pack.
He bought it and got to work. The rest, as they say, is history.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Chris McDaniel can be reached at 360-681-2390, ext. 5052, or cmcdaniel@peninsuladailynews.com.
