TOMS RIVER – Ron Fazio didn’t want to go to war. But he also didn’t want to flee to Canada or risk arrest for defying the draft.
“I was a drafted teacher,” he said. “That proved I didn’t like the war. But I didn’t want to not serve. I didn’t want to go to Canada, and I didn’t want to go to jail. So, I took my 10, 15, 20 percent chance of either being killed or wounded, and I said, ‘I’m going in. I can’t take it anymore.’”
For decades, Fazio, who taught US history and economics at Manalapan High School, pushed his Vietnam experience to the side. He kept his recollections tucked away in journals, letters, and photographs but rarely spoke about them. This February, the 80-year-old Toms River resident finally gave those memories a permanent voice with the publication of his book, “Years Later About Vietnam.”
Years In The Making
Fazio’s book began with a journal he kept in a small notebook he carried with him in the jungles of Vietnam.
“Most guys threw their memorandum pads away,” he said. “In fact, nobody in my whole company or battalion took notes. But every day I’d have a date and what happened. I wrote letters home, too – 110 letters to my parents. And I told my mother early on, keep the letters.”
Those scraps of history became the backbone of “Years Later About Vietnam,” which blends Fazio’s daily entries with the letters and more than 200 photographs he took on a Kodak Instamatic camera.
“If I wrote that I built a hooch, I had a photo,” Fazio said. “If I mentioned carrying an M16 with the radio, I had a photo. I wanted people to see what I saw.”
The result is a rare, day-by-day account of a draftee’s journey. Fazio began as a young novice and became a soldier who adapted to combat. He served as a radio telephone operator, a mortarman gunner and a forward observer at Firebase Jamie. He later became a headquarters and headquarters company clerk for his entire battalion. His job was to keep track of everyone, whether they were on the base, in the jungle, had been injured, or had gone AWOL.
“I had to know 1,000 guys, where everybody was on my board,” explained Fazio. “And every day I had to open up the camp. I was the ‘go to’ guy.”
Fazio returned from Camp Husky at Xuan Loc to Camp Frenzell-Jones, where he’d originally only been a Private First Class (PFC) with the previous 199th. “I’d been a nobody there,” he said. “Now I’m in charge of all the withdrawals for the second of the twelfth battalion because I’m in the orderly room. I had to keep a journal of whoever comes and leaves and where they were going.”
Why He Waited
Although he knew his journals and letters held something special, Fazio resisted writing for years.
“I finally thought that I was old enough to look back at myself, from how I was from 1968 when I graduated from college to the time I left Vietnam in 1971,” he said. “That’s 39 months. I basically wrote the book for me, but not this me. That me back then – the young guy, what I had to go through.”
When he returned home in 1971, the political climate was still deeply divided. “Very few people knew I was a Vietnam veteran,” Fazio admitted. “People were still moving around. Half the country thought the war was horrible. The other half thought we weren’t doing enough. I just went back to teaching and kept quiet.”
It wasn’t until 2024 that he began to seriously consider pulling everything together. The process required revisiting the hardest parts of his journals and deciding how much to reveal.
“The hardest part was trying to explain how hard it was to be a combat grunt,” he said. “Sometimes I used humor, like stopping to drink Kool-Aid while we were getting shot at. But other times I had to pause. The hardest part was remembering what it felt like to finally see my parents waiting at Newark Airport when I came home.”
The Teacher In Him
Fazio’s background as an educator shaped how he chose to present his story.
“Since I was a history teacher, I figured I better keep this,” he said. “I wrote the book the same way I wrote in the jungle. Day by day. I didn’t want to change it. I just upgraded the vocabulary and punctuation.”
His goal was to create a resource that blended the emotional truth of a soldier’s life with the structure of history. “What makes my book different is that it’s not just a story of one battle or one heroic act,” he explained. “It’s a story of living, marching in 100-degree heat, writing letters home, getting reassigned from one role to another, and finding ways to survive.”
Readers have responded to the authenticity. “One woman told me it felt like she was a fly on my shoulder, walking through the jungle with me,” Fazio said. “That’s the kind of reaction that makes it worth it.”
“Years Later About Vietnam” is not only about combat. It is also about the transformation of a young man whose life plans were interrupted.
“You’re going to graduate college and you want to be a teacher,” he reflected. “Instead, you can’t be a teacher. You see all your friends get jobs, get married, have kids, and you can’t do any of that. I didn’t even want to date seriously. I didn’t want to get someone involved in what I was going through.”
In the end, it was his teaching career that gave him the stability to move on after the Army. Fazio was discharged after 20 months instead of two years because he had a job waiting. “I was fortunate that I could get back to teaching where a lot of guys couldn’t,” he said. “That helped me put Vietnam aside for many years.”
Recognition At Yankee Stadium
On September 10, Fazio’s service was recognized in front of thousands when he was honored as “Veteran of the Game” at Yankee Stadium.
“You have to be nominated, and I didn’t even know who did it at first,” he said. “Suddenly, I’m on the Jumbotron, answering questions about my favorite memories and ballplayers. It was an incredible honor.”
For a lifelong Yankee fan who once caught a home run ball from Yogi Berra, the moment was especially poignant.
Want to learn more about Fazio and his time in Vietnam? “Years Later About Vietnam” is available in paperback and hardcover at Barnes & Noble and Amazon.
