knew who they were. It was a new kind of war, not at all like World War II and previous wars, where enemies wore uniforms and where you knew who was your friend and who was your foe. “There was a common, every-minute dread that I never forgot,” he says. He notes wryly that, although Vietnam was and is an underdeveloped nation, what used to be the famed Ho Chi Minh trail that supplied the North Vietnam troops is now a paved, threelane highway. He left Saigon to return to the U.S. by air in July 1964, just as the build-up of
American troops began in earnest. He was discharged in Oakland, Calif., and returned to Millersville University to earn a B.S. in arts education. He remembers being called a “baby killer” there because of his service in Vietnam. He taught art and industrial arts in high school in Haddonfield, N.J., for a year, and then used the G.I. Bill to earn an M.S. in art education at Glassboro State Teachers College. After that, he taught at the State Hospital for Crippled Children in Elizabethtown, Pa. And that was followed by a job with a company called Emtol, where he did
computer design work and was involved in equipment and assembly line design for large companies like Kellogg, the cereal company. Suffering from the physical handicap of epilepsy (and, more recently, the effects of Agent Orange, from his days in Vietnam) he says that “art became a major therapy and a career choice” for him. He has become an internationally honored artist, craftsman, and author, exhibiting paintings, silkscreen prints, and weavings in many local and national shows. His work has been exhibited, for
example, in the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York, and the Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, Pa. He says, “I now use art to enrich my life and help others find ways to overcome their handicaps. With this as background, I helped create a local art group of veterans doing artwork.” So, despite his physical handicaps, he continues to fill his life with the art that means so much to him. Colonel Wilcox flew a B-17 bomber in Europe in World War II.
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