Remembering My Friend the Veteran

To commemorate Veterans Day, I want to take the opportunity to remember my friend LCpl. John Alan Wikel, better known as Johnny Y, who died this year. A thrice-wounded combat Marine, Johnny Y was one of the most charismatic, funny, and genuine friends of my life.

Born in 1947, Johnny Y was arrested as a teenager for pulling a warehouse heist in Miami. During the arrest, he was shot in the face by a cop’s .357 bullet fragment ricochet. The judge gave Johnny Y the choice of state prison or the Marines. 

At 20, he was shot three more times on a hilltop outside Phu Bai during the 1968 Tet Offensive. Johnny Y was a Marine Force Reconnaissance M60 machine-gunner and helped hold off hundreds of North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong fighters. All the members of Johnny Y’s squad were killed except for him and another guy named Frenchy. 

I first met Johnny Y in California in August of 1972. I was a farm laborer in the San Joaquin Valley, and he was a truck driver.

Four years later, Johnny Y and I were salesmen in a showbiz clothing store in Nashville. The Alamo of Nashville was open 9 a.m. to 2 a.m. six days a week. After midnight, when Black Sabbath had finished their show, we sold cowboy boots and rhinestone belt buckles with the band’s insignia. Ozzy Osbourne was the only one flying high, as I remember. Guitarist Tony Iommi told Johnny Y that Black Sabbath weren’t devil worshippers: “The satanic stuff is just part of the act.”

In 1978, we were at the unemployment office in Fort Smith, Arkansas. Our interviewer was a Vietnamese guy who fled Saigon in 1975. Johnny Y asked if he was from the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN)—the South Vietnamese force aligned with the US. “Yes, I was a colonel. And I see you are a veteran,” the interviewer said. 

The ex-ARVN colonel got us a job unloading 100-pound sacks from railroad boxcars at the Planters peanut company. He stamped a document and handed it to Johnny Y. Another Marine named Mike Elmore was waiting for us outside in his pickup truck.

“So what did he stamp on it?” Elmore asked. 

He handed me the paper, which read, “Don’t forget. Hire the vet.”

Johnny Y banged his fist on the dashboard and screamed, “My brothers died in this stinking coward’s country! And now I come back home and he’s giving me a stinking job!” He wept and punched more dents into Elmore’s dashboard.

In 1979, Johnny Y was my roommate in New York City on West 55th. I got him a job working at a boutique next door to Studio 54. Johnny got tight with the bouncers, and he was hired. He got props his first night for cooling out a fistfight and was placed in front: the chosen bouncer holding the velvet rope.

During that time, he took drumming lessons from a legendary jazz musician. I forget the guy’s name. He auditioned for acting and voice-over jobs too. Moved to Nashville and then on to Hollywood. Appeared in national commercials and music videos.

Johnny Y. lived his last days in Florida with other combat veterans from the Vietnam War, Desert Storm, Mogadishu, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

Semper fi.