Jerry Norton
 

This is Jerry Norton. I've been reading the reunion material with great interest and before I say anything else let me say thanks to you for the incredible amount of work you personally have obviously put into the project.

I won't be attending, primarily because of the distance involved and having already taken my annual home leave to the U.S. for my son's university graduation. If I were anywhere within a few thousand miles I would be there with bells on.

Your current list has just my name and e-mail address. Here are other details if you send out a revised one: PIO dates 12/69-8/70; street address c/o Reuters, Wisma Antara 6/F, Jl Medan Merdeka Selatan 17, Jakarta 10110, Indonesia, phone (62 811) 830 042.

Below is the brief bio you suggested.

I started my First Cav career in the FDC of a 105 firing battery, got transferred to battalion HQ at Phuoc Binh as a clerk because I could type more than 10 words a minute, and joined the 42nd PID (or as I say when telling war stories, the Fighting 42nd) after responding to an ad.

I was there from December 1969 through August 1970 and my jobs included attending TOC briefings so I could handle calls from correspondents looking for their daily combat stories. and working on the paper, writing for the history book and editing one issue of the magazine, which earned me a TDY stint in Tokyo. I stopped taking the pills there and came down with a case f malaria that put me in a Long Binh hospital for a couple of weeks shortly before my September 1 DEROS.

Since then there are entire years of my life for which I be hard put to come up with any memories, but the time in Vietnam remains vivid, with Major Coleman, as I always think of him, looming as a larger-than-life figure.

Who can forget the color, the competency, the PIO empire, and above all the sayings, words to live or at least laugh by. I also often remember a night when we had incoming and I hit the floor, but the Major just kept on doing what he was doing. Given what he had already seen I guess it was hard to take the odd 122mm rocket seriously. What an example and inspiration he was in so many ways.

Back in the States I spent most of the '70s in Washington, D.C. in a variety of jobs, interrupted by a year in New York to get a master's; returned to Asia for an economic news agency in 1979, working for them in Hong Kong and London; came back to Hong Kong as business editor of the South China Morning Post; and joined Reuters in 1986, with positions since in Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and Indonesia. I've been the Jakarta-based Indonesia bureau chief since 2001, an interesting time, as the Chinese curse says.

I've returned to Vietnam several times (once for graduate work shortly before the fall began and then on business and tourism trips in the 1990s onward). My wife (an ethnic Vietnamese, as it happens) and I have one son who just graduated from college. Retirement plans are pretty vague. Really wish I could be at the reunion but it's a bit far and I've had the annual home leave Reuters allows me. My best wishes to everyone there, especially the man of honor. Not sure how much longer I'll be in Jakarta but at least for now if anyone plans a visit to the neighborhood please let me know.