Daily Smile

When you have dinner reservations but you can't get your lab out of the pool....

Smile 3 16 24

Cowboy State Daily is Wyoming’s largest newspaper with Wyoming’s most experienced journalists. 

<title>Daily Smile: Saturday, March 16, 2024 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Daily Smile: Saturday, March 16, 2024

 When you have dinner reservations but you can't get your lab out of the pool....

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily's business and tourism reporter, Renée Jean

Renée Jean

Business

Kelli Tracy feels like she’s “living in a Hallmark movie.” She and her husband just closed on their own brick-and-mortar store in downtown Sheridan, and she’s now celebrating her 10th year in business. 

These days, her Lil Bee’s Bohemian clothing line ships all over the world, and the business brings in a comfortable $600,000 to $700,000 a year in sales. 

But, like any Hallmark movie, getting to “happily ever after” wasn’t an easy task. 

The journey started when she was unexpectedly laid off from a big corporate job in Florida as a quality assurance compliance manager. It was scary.

“I had just moved in with my now husband but, at the time, my boyfriend,” Tracy recalled. “And he was like, ‘Well you need to get a job. You need to maybe go back to bartending or go back to doing something so you have money coming in.’” 

Tracy had done plenty of bartending in college and had no intention of going back to it. She had a completely different idea, one people told her was crazy at the time.  

“The next day I started my own boutique with clothing out of my closet,” she told Cowboy State Daily. “That’s when Instagram first started. Like it was just coming out and the algorithms were great. Everything was great.”

She propped a mannequin she bought from California — a model she named Lola — in front of her phone, dressed it in her own clothes, and opened a Shopify account. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Lil Bee’s Bohemian was born."}]

Starting out, her biggest problem wasn’t finding customers. She had plenty of people clamoring for the outfits she was styling. 

Her trouble was finding inventory priced low enough that she could resell it with a healthy profit margin. 

“I didn’t know there were places like Fashion Go or like Marketplaces and all the things,” she said. “You can go to Dallas Market and like find all your vendors.”

Initially, to get inventory, she’d go to places like Ross and Marshalls to buy items for the outfits she was promoting on Instagram. It was rare, but if the outfits didn’t sell, she’d just return them.

That strategy wasn’t going to work long-term, she realized. She had to figure out something else.

“Then I met a lady named Holly who owns Baja Ranch and she’s the one who helped me,” Tracy said. “I was buying a bunch of her stuff off eBay, because it was really cheap, to resell. And so she asked me like, ‘What are you buying all this stuff for?’”

When Tracy explained she was starting a boutique and needed inventory, Holly explained where she could go to find wholesale items to resell. 

“I mean, you can buy from me,” she said. “But you can get all of this stuff here.”

And the prices would be much less expensive. Wholesale pricing, Holly explained, would let Tracy keep her margins, without relying on returns.

Tracy, meanwhile, helped Holly figure out how to start Instagram and Shopify accounts so she could improve her business model.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"A $12,000 Surprise"}]

Once she had reliable wholesale sources, sales were booming. But there was a big problem. Somehow, despite making many, many sales, the money wasn’t adding up. 

“I was like, ‘Man, where is all the money?’ Like I know I didn’t spend all this money,” she said. 

Eventually she figured out that many of the purchases were landing in her business’ PayPal account. She thought that money would transfer to her bank account automatically, but it was sitting there, quietly waiting for her to go in and authorize its transfer.

“I was almost to the point of bagging it,” Tracy said. “I was like, ‘I don’t think I can do this. I can’t really afford more stuff.’ And then I wound up with all this extra money.”

The business was saved, and Tracy realized she had to get more organized. The scare pushed her to tighten up her books and treat Lil Bee’s less like an experiment and more like the real business it was becoming.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"One Closet Wasn’t Enough"}]

As the business grew, so did its footprint inside the couple’s home. 

It was no longer just her own closet. It was every closet in the house. She put racks in the spare bedroom, the living room, and even one hallway.

“It was just taking over the house,” Tracy said. “It was bad. I remember looking over at my husband and his two kids and the dog and they all looked at me like I was crazy.”

Finally, one day her husband said, “Hey, if you go get a place like a studio or like an office, this whole entire closet here could be your personal closet.”

Tracy heard what he was really saying. It was time for Lil Bee’s to grow wings and fly. 

“I had the keys to a showroom the next day,” she said. “Within 24 hours.”

The business doubled in size and quickly outgrew the showroom. She moved it next to a big warehouse, and just kept upgrading from there. 

“At one point, I think I had two, maybe three warehouses,” she said. “It just kept getting bigger and bigger.”

The growth looked impressive on paper. At peak, Lil Bee’s was doing more than $1.4 million a year in sales.

But the pace was grueling, the overhead relentless, and she was working all the time. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Right-Sizing Her Business"}]

By year eight, she made some decisions that shape the business as it is today. 

First, she decided to start making her own clothing designs instead of just buying and reselling other people’s ideas.

That would also allow her to boost the quality. No more thin, disposable stuff. She wanted pieces that people could keep and love forever.

She also decided just how big she wanted Lil Bee’s to be. 

“It just got to bee too much,” Tracy said. “It was just more, more, more.”

She realized that if she downsized her business, she’d still remain profitable and she would have more time to focus on her own designs.

That turned out to be a fortuitous move. Her ‘70s-inspired clothes caught the eye of a rising country star — Lainey Wilson.

Wilson, then an artist in Nashville, was a regular customer. 

“She bought bell bottoms from me and she called it ‘Balling on a budget,’” Tracy said with a chuckle. “She even spoke about Lil Bee’s on the Bobby Bones podcast.”

Eventually, Wilson and Tracy teamed up on a collaborative clothing line built around flared jeans and boho blouses. 

“We created four items together,” Tracy said. “It was a really cool, button-down top, a pair of jeans, like acid-washed black jeans, a bandana, and striped bell bottoms.”

As Wilson’s career took off, however, the partnership became more complicated. New managers stepped in, and access to the star tightened. 

“I couldn’t just call her up anymore,” Tracy said. “I didn’t take it personally though. She’s a wonderful person, and she’s the same way in person as she is on stage.”

The Lainey Wilson chapter was a fun, unexpected part of her business journey, but it’s not the one Tracy likes best. 

That's the one she’s in right now, designing her own clothes and selling wholesale to 146 stores across America as well as stores in Canada. She also ships orders direct around the world and has a loyal following in Australia. 

The boutique shop she just closed on in Sheridan exactly 10 years after starting her business is a full-circle moment. 

The store is just 800 square feet. But it feels just right for now.

“It’s packed so full of just amazing beautiful stuff,” she said. “I’ve got my entire line in there — all my blouses, and jewelry.”

There are sweaters, jackets, dresses, tallow makeup, bags and a hat bar, too. 

“When you get in there, it’s like a time capsule back into the '70s,” she said. “It’s groovy, and there’s not one thing that’s plain. It’s like a maximalist dream.”

It’s a dream that’s also planted in the one place in the world she’s decided she likes the best of every place she’s ever roamed — Sheridan. She got to know the town after visiting some friends, and just decided it’s where she’s always belonged.

“It’s just marvelous,” she said. “This last Christmas we had the Holiday Stroll and it snowed. I mean, it snowed so much that night, it was just marvelous. Everyone was out there with hot chocolate and their scarves and I was like this is nuts. Like I’m living in a Hallmark movie.”

Lil Bees and Kelly Tracy 8 16 26

<title>How A Sheridan Woman Turned Her Closet Into A Funky Worldwide Fashion Business | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Laid off from a corporate job, Kelli Tracy started selling clothes out of her closet on Instagram. Ten years later, she owns Sheridan’s Lil Bee’s Bohemian and ships her '70s-inspired designs to people all over the world from her Wyoming storefront.

How A Sheridan Woman Turned Her Closet Into A Funky Worldwide Fashion Business

Wyoming Life

ELK MOUNTAIN — Margaret Karstoft’s grandfather came to America from Sweden in 1870. He spent three years earning the money needed to bring his family to Elk Mountain, where he worked as a tie hack.

Karstoft is among longtime Elk Mountain residents whose memories are now preserved in a new 30-minute legacy film commissioned by the Elk Mountain Museum. 

Created as an America250 project, the film distills hours of interviews into an oral history of the Carbon County town — from its tie hacks and sheep camps to its blizzards, dances, and stubborn will to survive. 

The museum has also retained the raw interviews as part of its archive, and given copies of the tapes to their families. 

Karstoft’s grandfather had a backbreaking, seasonal job. The men lived in tents, working through the winter on Elk Mountain, a place where the brutality of wind and cold are legendary among locals.

The men hewed their ties by hand, one timber at a time, then hauled them to the river, where they were floated downstream in the spring, after it had warmed up enough to melt the ice. 

“My grandmother wanted to come to this country because she heard that the streets were paved with gold,” Karstoft said in a soft voice. “She wanted to come here because it was hard times in Sweden at that time, too.”

In the film, old-timers tell of wind sometimes so harsh men had to crawl rather than walk, and blizzards where they had to trust their horse to get them home. But they also remember neighbors who banded together to help each other not only survive but thrive.

Tie hack camps in Carbon County shut down as large corporate ventures in 1912, but many people in Elk Mountain were still cutting railroad ties by hand into the 1950s. 

[{"type":"text","text":"Bob Johnson was one of them."}]

“It was before chainsaws or anything like that,” Johnson said. “We used a handsaw and an ax. I had a measuring stick and it was 102 inches long. That’s how long a railroad tie was back then. They had to be 102 inches. I cut a lot of those.”

[{"type":"text","text":"Bill Jones remembers peeling the bark off railroad ties."}]

“It froze on there in the wintertime,” he said with a chuckle. “That was a ‘good’ job.”

[{"type":"text","text":"Before Elk Mountain Was The Crossing"}]

Elk Mountain today has 144 people, according to the most recent census. It has always been a tiny town, however, even from inception. When it was incorporated in 1909, it recorded 98 residents in the 1910 census. 

Its peak population was recorded in 1980 at 338, on the coattails of a regional energy development boom in Carbon County that started in the late 1970s and continued into the early 1980s. 

Before it was incorporated, people had a different name for the area. It was just called “The Crossing.” It had been a convenient stop along the Overland Trail in the 1860s, with the nearby river offering reliable, year-round water. 

Fort Halleck was built just west of The Crossing in 1862 to protect emigrants, mail carriers and telegraph lines In the developing area.

Nearby Carbon, which incorporated in 1868, was much larger with a peak population of 1,140 in 1890. But its coal mines closed in 1902 — the same year a mercantile store opened at The Crossing, followed by the Mountain View Hotel in 1905. Both the hotel and the store remain standing. 

[{"type":"text","text":"Life In A Wind Tunnel"}]

Elk Mountain has always been a place where weather sets the rules — especially true in winter. 

“Up on that mountain, the wind can blow,” Shorty Richardson said. “Me and Pete Johnson, we went up on one ridge and we had to cross the top of that. I ain’t saying I was tough, but Pete Johnson, he was a horse, and we was on our hands and knees crossing that ridge, because we couldn’t stand up, the wind was blowing so hard.”

Powd Boles remembers his dad chaining a large sled to a telephone pole so it couldn’t blow away at night. 

“That’s how hard the wind blows down through there all the time,” he said.

One day Pete’s brother, Bill Johnson, noticed a fellow walking what locals refer to as the UL flats, looking for something. 

“He asked the guy, he says, ‘What’s the trouble?’ He says, ‘Well, I’m looking for the wheel for my anemometer. It blew off last night and I’m looking for it,’" Richardson said. "And Bill says, ‘Well, how hard was the wind blowing?’ He says, ‘Well, it registered 200 and then it died.’ So he said, ‘I don’t know how much harder it blew, but it did register 200.”

Richardson believes the wind blows so fast because it’s coming in down between mountains, forming a wind funnel. 

It’s not unlike pinching a garden hose, causing the water to flow out with more force, but in this case the “water” is the wind.

[{"type":"text","text":"Getting To The Dance On Time"}]

Neither wind nor cold stopped people from getting to town for dances, though, Powd Boles added. He remembers the time a fiddle player was snowed in upriver and couldn’t get to town for a dance.

“So Henry Cheesbrough, he had a Jeep, and he says, by God, he’d run up and get the fiddle player,” he said. “So he ground up there and got the fiddle player, and they were having a dance here in the Odd Fellows Hall. 

"Old Cheesbrough, he just drove through the front doors, drove right up to the bandstand, and dumped the fiddle player off.”

[{"type":"text","text":"Then he drove right back out the same doors he’d come in. "}]

“The next day he had to, by God, go to town and find new doors for the Odd Fellows Hall,” Boles said with a laugh.

Another time, Boles remembers that a couple who wanted to get to a dance couldn’t get anything to start but an old tractor.

“So they drove it all the way down from the UL down here to the dance,” he said. “That was in the middle of wintertime, and of course that tractor didn’t have no cab on it or nothing.”

[{"type":"text","text":"Winter Fun, Winter Peril"}]

Winter was a time for fun. There was ice-skating on the frozen pond and there was skiing behind neighborhood vehicles. It was safe enough then because there were no major highways. 

“You’d go up over where the roads are going into people’s ranches or meadows,” Bill Jones recalled. “You had to bounce over them a little bit when you ski. And then we’d have a whole line of sleds hooked together and somebody pulling us with their pickup around the streets. If you were the last one, sometimes you’d get snapped around.”

[{"type":"text","text":"Winter wasn’t all fun and games, though. "}]

“We used to follow the telephone line across this one spot we called UL Flat,” Bob Johnson said. “The horse knew the way, and I knew the way kind of, if you could see.”

In a blizzard, though, Johnson learned to listen for telephone wires overhead. 

“You could follow them to get home,” he said. “It used to take me 45 minutes to come down this direction and nearly two hours going back against the wind and the crosswind.”

Cheryl Bowen remembers her dad making her stand with her back toward the wind to avoid her face becoming frostbitten.

[{"type":"text","text":"She, like many children in that day, rode horseback to school."}]

“You couldn’t wear jeans to school, so I had to pack my dress,” she said. “And then I put my dress on to attend school.”

[{"type":"text","text":"When Sheep Ruled The Range"}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Elk Mountain was sheep country when he was growing up, Boles said. "}]

“Everybody had sheep back in the old days,” he said. “Predators got too thick and they couldn’t find any help to herd them, so that was the end of sheep. But Carbon County was like the largest sheep-producing county in the United States at one time.”

[{"type":"text","text":"Johnson remembers living in a sheep wagon with his brother. "}]

“My mother would live down on the ranch a mile and a half away,” he said. “We’d have lanterns, and we’d have a stake in the ground. We’d light a lantern to keep the coyotes away.”

His mother would climb up on the cellar to see if the light was burning at their sheep camp. 

“If we had a light in our sheep wagon, it meant we were done flagging sheep and we were cooking supper,” Johnson said. 

[{"type":"text","text":"Boles’ family was among the first to bring Angus cattle to the area. "}]

“Everybody else had Hereford cattle,” he said. “And everybody thought they were stupid for raising black cattle. But when they’d ship in the fall, their calves always weighed over 400 pounds and everybody else’s weighed like 310 or something. So they were a step ahead of everybody else.”

[{"type":"text","text":"Making Do On The Ranch"}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Families worked hard and knew how to stretch a dollar, Karstoft said. "}]

“We’d get flour in feed sacks,” she said. “My mom always tried to get a couple of them that would match, so she’d have enough material to make us clothes. That’s all we had were clothes made out of flour sacks. She did everything. She milked cows, fed chickens ...”

And she also cut the heads off those chickens herself whenever it was time to make dinner.

During times of war, women were also out in the field helping hay, Richardson added.

“There were no guys, they were all at war,” he said. “And you had to feed your livestock. It was a chore putting it up back then. Not like now. We’ll probably put up more hay in 15 minutes now than they used to put up in a day back then.”

[{"type":"text","text":"There also used to be many more little ranches, Boles added. "}]

“It’s 50, 60 head of cows,” he said. “Now all them little places are gone. The big outfits have bought them out, so all of them little places are history … when I was a kid, I suppose they delivered mail to probably 40 people out there. Now my wife runs the mail and she delivers mail to seven people.”

[{"type":"text","text":"Why They Stayed"}]

Many of the people who live in Elk Mountain today can trace their ancestry to the original homesteaders, and say they’ve never thought about leaving.

“I had chances to go elsewhere, and I always came back,” Jones said. 

“It’d be hard to leave, I guess, now,” Boles said. “I wouldn’t know how to act anyplace else.“

What Karstoft has always liked about Elk Mountain is the “small town” living. 

“Everybody knew each other, everybody helped each other,” she said. “Of course there was disagreements, too. There always are. But it was a beautiful place to settle.”

Richardson knows he could retire somewhere else — Florida, California, Arizona.

“I’m going to stay here,” he said. “I don’t know how much longer I’ll be here, but anyway, I’ll be here till it’s done.”

Through the years, what Richardson has seen is there’s always just enough to keep the town going. 

“There will always be an Elk Mountain,” he said. “I’m sure of that.”

Thanks to the legacy film project, there will always be stories of the people who made it so, from the tie hacks and ranch families to the children on horseback and the neighbors who helped each other not only survive, but thrive.

Contact Renee Jean at renee@cowboystatedaily.com

Elk Mountain history Powd Boles 8 16 26

<title>Elk Mountain Old-Timers Keep Remote Town’s Wild History Alive One Story At A Time | Cowboy State Daily</title>

To preserve the town's legacy, old-timers in remote Elk Mountain, Wyoming, are sharing their tales for a film project. The blizzards were so bad, they say, you had to trust your horse to get home.

Elk Mountain Old-Timers Keep Remote Town’s Wild History Alive One Story At A Time

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily reporter, Dale Killingbeck

Dale Killingbeck

Around Wyoming

He rescued two wounded men under heavy enemy fire, took a bullet to his leg, and the next day was blown into the air as a rocket-propelled grenade hit a half-track vehicle he was standing beside, sending shrapnel into his legs and back.

Capt. Barry Gasdek kept leading his men in September 1968 while countering a heavy North Vietnamese Army attack. During other action in Vietnam, he was shot out of the air twice while riding in helicopters.

Gasdek's philosophy then and now as a retired lieutenant colonel who closed his career at the University of Wyoming teaching ROTC students is that officers “lead from the front.”

“If you’re closer to the front, then you’re in whatever’s going on,” Gasdek said. “I never asked my men to do anything that I would not personally do, including being a tunnel rat or point, whatever.”

He left Vietnam after two consecutive tours with the Distinguished Service Cross, Legion of Merit, Soldiers Medal as well as a Silver Star, Bronze Star with a “V” for valor and four oak leaf clusters, and the Purple Heart with an oak leaf cluster for wounds received on the battlefield.

Growing up, Gasdek said he never considered the military as a career. He was born the day before Memorial Day on May 29, 1942, as the nation tried to respond on two fronts in the early days of World War II.

Born and raised in Loyalhanna, Pennsylvania, southeast of Pittsburgh, in a Czechoslovakian neighborhood, Gasdek’s grandparents had left the old country and moved to the U.S. to find a better life. His grandfather was a coal miner and his father also worked in the coal mines and steel mills around Pittsburgh.

An Eagle Scout and multi-sport athlete in high school, Gasdek was a three-sport college athlete at Indiana State College in Indiana, Pennsylvania. He played guard on the football team, wrestled in the heavyweight class and ran the two-mile on the track team.

Entering college, he chose to join the Army ROTC rather than do two years of required physical education because his sports commitments already meant he would have a lot of gym time. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"He found he enjoyed the military order. "}]

During his junior year, he committed to advanced ROTC training and graduated in 1964 with a degree in art education and due to his superior academic performance received a commission as a second lieutenant in the regular U.S. Army instead of a reserve commission.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Germany To Vietnam"}]

Gasdek said initial assignments took him to Fort Benning, Georgia, and then three years in Germany during the Cold War with the 4th Armored Division, where he had roles as a platoon leader, company executive officer and then company commander with the 1st Battalion, 54th Infantry Mechanized in the 3rd Brigade of the 4th Armored Division.

In 1967, he received orders to join the 1st Infantry Division, the Big Red One, in Vietnam. Gasdek said he convinced the army to send him to Ranger school before he went into combat. The Army gave him a slot in the school, but a month through the training he injured his knee and spent three months recuperating.

After the knee was good to go, he was reassigned to Hawaii and a new battalion being formed for Vietnam, the “Jungle Warriors.” They were deployed to Vietnam in February and March of 1968.

A short time after entering the country and being sent to 11th Light Infantry Brigade headquarters, Gasdek was promoted to a company commander role.

During his first six months in Vietnam, Gasdek was involved in directing search and destroy missions in the northern part of South Vietnam. He said they mostly were dealing with Viet Cong fighters. However, in September 1968, his unit, Company D, 4th Battalion, 21st Infantry, 11th Brigade Americal Division, was sent farther north, where North Vietnamese Army troops were active.

On Sept. 22, his unit was conducting a combat assault into the new area and one of the 40-soldier platoons became engaged with North Vietnamese forces.

Gasdek recalls sending in another platoon to reinforce them and both were pinned down.

With two radio operators, Gasdek moved to where the action was occurring. He called for help from an armored cavalry unit but the M-113 track with a .50-caliber machine gun and two M-60 machine guns could not make it through a narrow pass.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"AK-47 Fire"}]

As Gasdek spoke via radio with a platoon leader, his two radio operators were on either side of him. A North Vietnamese soldier sprayed AK-47 fire on their position. Both radio men were hit in the head, Gasdek was untouched. One of the operators was dead and the other wounded.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Gasdek applied first-aid to the fallen."}]

“The one that was wounded, he calls me once in a while,” Gasdek said. “He was a police captain, I think in the New York Police Department. He said after Vietnam he healed and all that and went from one war to another in New York.”

Gasdek’s Distinguished Service Cross citation states he was wounded in the leg during the firefight. After learning two other men in one of his company’s platoons were wounded and laying in front of a defensive position, Gasdek crawled out and pulled them back into the defensive perimeter.

Other soldiers had hesitated due to the withering enemy fire.

The next morning, despite the leg wound, he led an attack through hedgerows and little villages and carried the radio himself due to the loss of his radio operators. As he crossed a rice paddy into a village, the enemy opened up with AK-47s, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades.

Armored tracked vehicles accompanying Gasdek’s troops were hit and he was blown off his feet, taking shrapnel in his legs and back. He led the counterattack and “ended up just going bunker to bunker” killing the enemy. 

Gasdek said headquarters informed him they wanted prisoners to interrogate, so he had a tank drive on top of an enemy bunker until it collapsed. They then dug North Vietnamese troops out and sent them to headquarters for questioning.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"The Casualties"}]

“I ended up with six soldiers killed and 15 wounded,” he said. “I was wounded myself a couple of times.”

The North Vietnamese suffered 67 killed as well as the loss of rocket-propelled grenade launchers, ammunition, AK-47s, and other weapons.

During the battle, Gasdek continued to communicate via the radio and help get air support for his troops as well as engage the enemy. The chaos of war from helicopter gunships, rocket-propelled grenades, machine guns and other small-arms fire somehow brought him to a place where “in your mind it goes quiet.”

“I thought that if this is the day I die, at least I’m where I should be up front with my men,” he said.

His actions that day resulted in his being awarded the Distinguished Service Cross by Gen. Creighton Abrams, for whom the Abrams Tank is named. Gasdek said he had no clue who Abrams was until after the presentation. 

Abrams later become the Army Chief of Staff.

Gasdek remained in Vietnam for two tours and served for six months flying Visual Reconnaissance Missions as a base defense commander with a pilot on a light observation helicopter. He had at his disposal a mini-gun with 2,000rounds of ammunition and a case of grenades at his feet.

His responsibility was to protect a brigade-size firebase at night.

“We got attacked a couple of times. One night we killed 19 at the wire, and another time 21,” he said.

On other missions, Gasdek was shot down twice while flying as a passenger in Huey helicopters. In one instance they were flying over a village and took 21 bullets and fortunately were able to radio for support.

“It was about 5 or 10 minutes before we had gunships come out,” he said. The pilot found an old French airstrip to make a skid landing and a large Chinook helicopter was sent to lift what was left of the helicopter and take it back to base.

After Vietnam, Gasdek returned to the states through Hawaii, where he spent a week scuba diving, and then San Francisco and back to Pennsylvania. He said he never experienced personally the anti-war sentiment that many Vietnam veterans received. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"His Welcome Home"}]

In Pennsylvania, he said the miners and steelworkers made sure he did not have to pay for anything.

However, his own payment for the many battles he experienced involved post-traumatic stress and a traumatic brain injury. He said he believes staying in the service and talking with other Vietnam vets helped him cope and kept him from becoming socially isolated like other buddies from Vietnam who wanted to be a hermit and “wind up in the hills.”

Retired Vietnam Veteran Lt. Col. Barry Gasdek had a leadership philosophy that kept him in front of his men. He has the scars and medals, including a Distinguished Service Cross, to prove he lived out that ideal during two tours of combat at the height of the war.

Daily Smile: Saturday, March 16, 2024

In case you missed it

More in Daily Smile

Daily Smile: Monday, August 17, 2026

Daily Smile: Sunday, August 16, 2026

Daily Smile: Saturday, August 15, 2026

Daily Smile: Friday, August 14, 2026

Most read