Robert Janicki honored as Branford Memorial Day Parade Grand Marshal

Robert Janicki, the grand marshal for Monday’s Memorial Day parade in Branford, went to hell and back while fighting for the Marines in Vietnam. When he got home as a decorated veteran in 1968, his uniform and crewcut elicited dirty looks and jeers.

And yet, “being in the military was the best thing I ever did,” said Janicki, the author of “Looking Back,” a riveting account of his experience serving in one of America’s longest and bloodiest wars.

Janicki got a draft notice in October 1965, the year after he graduated from Branford High School. He joined the Marines in March 1966. “For me and many others like me, deferring with college was not an option,” he said. After boot camp at Parris Island, and a year as a member of the military police in Charleston, SC, he volunteered to go to Vietnam. “It was getting more explosive by the day, and my buddy and I decided we wanted to go,” he said.

For 13 months, Janicki, an infantry squad leader with the 3rd Marines, operated with his unit in and around the DMZ, participating in 22 major offensive operations through the Tet Offensive. Every day, he said, “we were in harm’s way.”

He returned home in October 1968 with a Purple Heart and a host of other awards. There were no parades. No one was thanking him for his service. “The treatment was horrific,” he said. “If you ever said anything about being in the military, you got yelled at and screamed at, so you shut up, you started a family, you got jobs, you never told anybody anything.”

Janicki married and settled in the Granite Bay neighborhood of Short Beach. A son and daughter followed. After a stint at First Bank, he rose through the ranks as a software developer at SNET, becoming a project manager.

All the while, “I was a mental mess,” he said. “Very few of my unit came home in one piece, and those of us that did struggled daily with the question of why we were allowed to survive.” He started going to a veterans’ counseling center on Whalley Ave. “Only veterans know veterans,” he said. “Especially combat veterans.” At some point he had a realization. “I knew a lot of veterans at SNET, and if they were anything like me, they needed to talk to other veterans.”

He credited senior vice president for human resources Jean Hanley for her support in starting the company’s first veteran organization in 1983, initially called SNET vets. “She learned very quickly that it wasn’t just the veterans at the company that were affected,” he said. “It was their wives and children.”

The group did outreach at the Errera VA Clinic, helping homeless veterans, among other veteran-related initiatives. Janicki also brought in veteran counselors to train SNET’s own counselors in the employee assistance program on “what to look for and listen for and how to identify if something is going on with the families.”

Janicki’s book grew out of a presentation, “Vietnam: A Chance to Understand,” around that time. Moderated by David Powell, director of human resources, it had SNET veterans telling their stories.

“We had a compressed amount of time and so we wrote our main points on cue cards, and I was able to talk about the war to the public, which was a huge hurdle,” he said. It occurred to him that “this was a chance to share my personal experience and also pay tribute to the Marines that I served with who never made it home.” He took each cue card and started expanding on each thought.

“Looking Back,” published in 2016, was 35 years in the making. A compelling account of the reality of combat in the jungles of Vietnam, Janicki graphically details the daily struggle with intense heat, mosquitos, bugs, and snakes, and a tenacious enemy “intent on killing each and every one of you,” as he recounts in a promotional video, as well as the pain of seeing squad members disappear through injuries and death.

In spite of those travails, “serving in the military changed my life, both the war and Marine Corps training,” he said. It gave me tremendous confidence, the feeling that I could get it done.”

“I wouldn’t change a thing.”

Branford Memorial Day begins with a ceremonial program at 10:00 AM on the Branford Town Green, followed by the parade stepping off at approximately 10:30 AM along Main Street.

"Looking Back" is available at https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebo...