“In my eyes, Vietnam was not a war,” the Fort Dodge man said. “It was a crisis.”

“It was just a mess and we were caught in it,” he added.

It was a mess he feels blessed to have survived after months and months of combat in the jungle.

“There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t tell the man upstairs thank you because that’s why I’m here,” he said. “I was brought back for a reason.”

Rosalez enlisted in the Marine Corps in September 1968 and was sent to boot camp at Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego in California.

After about 10 weeks of boot camp, he was sent to Camp Pendleton, also in California, for additional training as an infantryman.

He recalled that base as being very hilly. The Marines, he said, spent a lot of time running up those hills. They lived in a tent city.

“When it got cold, there was frost on the tent,” he said.

His training completed, Rosalez was sent to Okinawa, where he waited to be assigned to a Marine unit in need of men to replace those who were killed, wounded or rotated back to the United States. The next stop was Da Nang in South Vietnam, where he was assigned to a unit and sent to An Hoa Fire Base. But he didn’t stay there very long before being sent out into the jungle, which the Marines called the bush. That is where he would stay for months.

“I lived in the bush for almost a year,” he said. “That’s why I don’t like camping today. A little bit goes a long way.”

Out in the jungle, his unit had two main tasks: guarding a bridge and going out on patrols in search of the enemy.

Rosalez said he weighed about 115 pounds at the time and carried almost that much weight in equipment when he went out on patrol. He said he had two bandoliers of ammunition clips for his M-16 rifle slung across his shoulders. He carried another 2,800 rounds of rifle ammunition in his pack, along with a small rocket launcher called a Light Anti-tank Weapon, plus food.

He said he carried one canteen of water. He added that he had to be careful when drinking from the canteen because any splashing sound could be enough to let the enemy know where he was.

He also wore a flak jacket that had fiberglass plates in it. Those plates, he said, wouldn’t stop a bullet, but would reduce the severity of a gunshot wound.

“We went traipsing through knee deep water and mud,” he said. “Needless to say, you got a workout.”

He felt sympathy for the South Vietnamese civilians the Marines encountered.

“The people there — I felt sorry for them,” he said. “They were caught in the crossfire.”

Vietnam, he added, is a very scenic place.

“Vietnam is beautiful,” he said. “It’s unbelievable the beauty of Vietnam.”

Hidden in that beautiful countryside was the enemy.

One of the battles that sticks out in his memory occurred when the Marines were going up into the mountains. The captain who was leading the patrol ordered the men to stop.

At that moment, Rosalez said, “a machine gun cut loose on us.” One Marine was shot in the head and killed. When all the shooting was over, Rosalez had to help carry his body, wrapped in a poncho, to a helicopter. He recalled that there was no flat place for the chopper to land, so it hovered very close to the hillside while the Marines loaded their fallen brother into it.

According to Rosalez, that captain had never been very popular with the Marines and the death of that man didn’t help.

“They would never had a chance to open up with the machine gun if he hadn’t stopped everybody,” he said.

After months in the bush, Rosalez was moved back to a base and became what the Marine Corps called a forward supply non-commissioned officer. In that role he loaded supplies into big cargo nets that were picked up by helicopters and carried out to Marine units in the jungle.

Being at the supply base was safer than being out in the jungle, but it wasn’t entirely without risk. The enemy was regularly firing mortars and rockets into the base.

There was a particularly heavy barrage on his last night in South Vietnam.

“That night, they were hammering us,” he said. “I thought, I’m not getting out of this hole for anything.”

He left South Vietnam in 1970, traveling first to Da Nang, then to Okinawa and finally to California. There, he was assigned to El Toro Marine Corps Air Station. He finished his active duty service there. He returned to Fort Dodge in 1974.

Rosalez was not done with military service, however.

After being out of the service for a year, he enlisted in the Iowa Army National Guard field artillery unit in Fort Dodge.

He would later transfer to the 185th Fighter Wing of the Iowa Air National Guard, based in Sioux City. There, he became a heavy equipment operator doing things like plowing snow on the air field.

“That was playing with Tonka toys,” he said.

Rosalez retired from the military with 28 years of service and the rank of master sergeant in the Iowa Air National Guard.