Fort native among heroes featured in nationwide TV special: ‘American Valor’

By Kim McDarison

Growing up in Fort Atkinson, John Wolfram said he was a kid who liked to swim. 

He was a long-haired teenager in the mid-1960s — in fact, he said, his hair was so long his picture was not allowed in the school year book —  and by the time he graduated from Fort Atkinson High School in 1967, he and other young men, especially those who were not married or planning to attend college, were ripe for the draft and deployment to Vietnam. 

Unmarried and without college plans, Wolfram said, “I knew I’d be drafted.”

While watching TV in his youthful years he saw a program about Navy frogmen. After graduation, he made the decision to enlist in the Navy and set his sights on underwater-demolition-team training. 

This month, and now in his 70s, Wolfram was among those invited to the 25th Annual Conference and American Valor program, a three-day event in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the Arlington, Virginia-based American Veterans Center.

The event featured panel discussions and speeches, culminating in a “gala.” Television cameras captured some of the activities, with that footage used to enhance stories slated for presentation in a special TV program titled: “American Valor: A Salute to our Heroes.” 

According to the invitation extended to Wolfram, the event is held in advance of Veterans Day weekend and brings together “several dozen of the most noted and acclaimed veterans of the last 80 years of our history.” 

During the event, the veterans share lessons and experiences with an audience of several hundred students from each of the military service academies and ROTC programs from around the country, the invitation noted. 

The TV special is set to air on major television networks around the country, beginning Friday, with a full schedule developed to reach 100 million households, according to the center’s website. The special’s trailer offers glimpses into the full program, which is narrated by such notables as George Clooney, Morgan Freeman and Clint Eastwood, among others, as they tell the stories of heroic people who stepped up during historic events and times of conflict. 

Wolfram is among participants in the Veterans Day televised event as it highlights the stories of military personnel who served on the U.S. Navy’s Underwater Demolition Team (UDT). In the 1980s, Wolfram explained, the program developed into one which today is used to train Navy SEALs. 

During the Vietnam War, Wolfram noted, he and his platoon members were the equivalent of what we today call Navy SEALs. 

Deployed twice to Vietnam, where, during his second tour, he received a Purple Heart after sustaining a wound caused by shrapnel to his leg, it was his love of swimming and long-hair culture that brought him the most attention: Wolfram explained that in-between his two tours in Vietnam, he was assigned to a UDT that worked with NASA and the Apollo missions. While serving in that capacity, he assisted in the Apollo 10 astronaut and space recovery and was the first frogman in the water to rescue Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins when they landed in the Pacific Ocean after returning to Earth from the moon. 

At the age of 20, Wolfram said, he was a fast swimmer, a skill developed at Fort Atkinson High School, and a requirement when retrieving the astronauts’ capsule and attaching it to an anchor. His speed earned him the honor of being the first person to greet the astronauts as they emerged from their capsule. Also, he said, flower decals brought him some notoriety: During the Apollo 10 rescue, the frogmen placed flower decals on the capsule. They were told to refrain in the future from such activity. Keeping in compliance, Wolfram said, during the Apollo 11 rescue, he placed flower decals on his wetsuit. He and the decals later appeared in photographs published by myriad American newspapers and magazines, he said. 

Wolfram, Capt. Chris Cassidy, a SEAL platoon commander who served in Afghanistan and flew as an astronaut aboard the Space Shuttle “Endeavor,” spending 377 days in space, and Master Chief Edward C. Byers, Jr., a Navy SEAL veteran who was deployed 11 times to Iraq and Afghanistan, counting among his medals two Purple Hearts, assembled at the Omni Shoreham Hotel to discuss the program and their various experiences. 

According to the event schedule, the special operation program through which Wolfram was trained and evolved into the program that today trains Navy SEALs, began in 1942.

A frogman in Vietnam 

Wolfram, a Fort Atkinson native, is the second oldest of six children born to parents Orville and Marion. His father and three uncles served in World War II, he said. During the Vietnam War, two of his brothers — Gary and Paul — were drafted. Several of his high school friends also fought in Vietnam. Among those who did not come home were Gary W. Smith, Larry A. Smith, and Terrence D. Beck. Gary and Larry were not related, Wolfram said.   

In 1967, after completing bootcamp in California, Wolfram was sent home on leave. It was December, he recalled, and he attended Beck’s funeral. He next attended 18 weeks of basic demolition training and was deployed to Vietnam. 

In Vietnam, a 19-year-old Wolfram and his platoon spent their time traveling along the country’s tributaries and waterways blowing up canals, bunkers and dams. If they came across a sunken boat, they would remove the bodies and retrieve guns, Wolfram said.  

They operated in the south, where the Viet Cong were active. Mobile barges docked in a river with hooches on top served as their base, he said. 

The Mekong Delta was filled with small tributaries and streams, Wolfram said. 

Upon completion of his first six-month tour, Wolfram said he returned to a Naval base in California. In 1970, he returned to Vietnam to begin his second tour. 

Wolfram said he hadn’t been in the country for very long when his platoon was ambushed by the Viet Cong. 

“We knew they were there. They had signs saying ‘stay out.’ We knew we were in Viet Cong territory,” he said. 

Eight B40 rockets hit the boat in which Wolfram was traveling, he said. The fighting lasted for three or four minutes, he added. During the attack, he sustained a leg injury caused by shrapnel. 

Following the attack, Wolfram described several weeks in a hospital, but, he said, he didn’t want to stay. Doctors worked to remove the shrapnel, but he was left with what he described as “an 8-inch hole” in his leg that required care to fight infection. He was able to maintain that care with limited results, which caused him to make continued trips to a hospital and kept him out of the water. He helped his platoon as he could from dry land, he said. 

Also, while he was recuperating in the hospital after the attack, he learned that he had lost five of his SEAL teammates. They were killed in a helicopter crash, he said. 

E5 Second Class Petty Officer John Wolfram was discharged from the Navy in November of 1971. He gained a rank after he was wounded, which gave him more privileges and pay, he said, but, he added, he came home with something more: “In Vietnam, everybody has their moment. I found the Lord over there in Vietnam.” 

A man on a mission 

After his return to the states, Wolfram said he joined a Pentecostal Church in California. Making use of the GI Bill, he attended Christian Life College in California where he studied the Bible for four years. Upon graduation, he performed missionary work for four years and then became the pastor of a church in Warsaw, Wis., serving for another four years, he said.  He next returned to missionary work, traveling to such places as Hawaii, Samoa, the Philippines, Guam, and Australia, among others. In 1992, he returned to Vietnam as a missionary and, in time, began a Bible college in honor of his three high school friends and five platoon members who did not survive the Vietnam War. 

While attending college, Wolfram met his wife, Deborah. The couple was married in 1976 and share a daughter. 

Wolfram has written a book about his life, titled: “Splashdown: The Rescue of a Navy Frogman,” which, he said, was a sort of play on words: “while I was rescuing astronauts, God was rescuing me.”  The book was released in 2008. 

In 2010, another 1967 graduate of Fort Atkinson High School, Scott Carmichael, wrote a book about the recovery of the Apollo 11 astronauts, Wolfram said, adding some of his story is included in the book. 

While Wolfram said he no longer serves as a pastor, he continues to oversee operations at the Vietnam Memorial Bible College. He has not visited the country since the development of the COVID-19 pandemic.

He and his family live in Georgia. 

In July of 2019, Wolfram said he visited Fort Atkinson, arriving at the Hoard Historical Museum, where he spoke about his experiences as a Navy frogman serving with the team that assisted the Apollo 11 astronauts. The event was held in commemoration with the passing of 50 years since the moon mission and the capsule’s return to Earth. 

American Valor 

American Valor: A Salute to our Heroes will be televised across 80% of the country, according to its producers, on such major networks as NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX and the CW. It also will be televised to U.S. military personnel in 175 countries. 

The special is hosted by Rob Riggle, who is a retired United States Marine Corps lieutenant colonel. 

According to the website, the American Valor 2022 heroes include airmen from World War II; Korean War pilot and Capt. Royce Williams; Vietnam War pilot Brig. General R. Steve Ritchie; D-Day Paratrooper Henry Langrehr; a 1943 all-women Major League baseball team; Lt. Emily J.T. Perez, the first minority female brigade command sergeant major in the history of the U.S. Military; Vincent Speranza, a quick-acting soldier serving during the Battle of the Bulge; the Doolittle Raiders, and a look at a special operation forces program created as a forerunner to the Navy SEAL program. 

An overview of the American Valor special is here: https://www.americanveteranscenter.org/avc-events/avchonors/.

A full list of stations and times to see the televised special as provided by the producers is here: https://www.americanveteranscenter.org/wp-content/uploads//2022/11/valor-airtimes-2022.pdf. 

A link providing information about the American Veterans Center is here: center.org:https://www.americanveteranscenter.org/about/.

A link to Wolfram’s website, including information about his book, is here: https://www.johnwolfram.com/about.