THORNDIKE – In 1967, at age 19, Vincent Gabriel had gone from his home in New Jersey to visit a cousin in California.

“I was playing in a rock ‘n’ roll band,” he told a senior English class Friday at Mount View High School. “Life was sweet. Life was good.”

He had been in California for a week when he got a letter from the draft board ordering him to report for induction into the U.S. Army.

“I flew right home,” Gabriel said. A day later he left for the Army and Vietnam.

“When we left home, we had no idea our tour would last a lifetime,” he said Friday.

While he spoke, video on a movie screen flashed to a scene of young men standing at an Army induction center. Then the scene shifted to Vietnam, where soldiers languished in the heat, stripped to the waist.

“We were all scared to our souls,” a voice in the background said.

Gabriel of Warren travels the countryside telling “A Soldier’s Story” in video and in original songs about his life in Vietnam in 1968 and 1969, some of which he has recorded on a compact disc, “11 Bravo … Vietnam.”

Students in teacher Tanya Hubbard’s senior English classes Friday paid close attention for two hours to Gabriel’s presentation, the third in three years made to her classes. Each year, the class undertakes a major research project on the Vietnam War.

“I didn’t smoke marijuana, because I wanted to stay aware of things around me, but I did drink a lot of warm beer there,” he said. “Our New Jersey-style humor kept us from going off the deep end.

“We were young boys asked to do a big job,” he said.

When the new soldiers arrived, they were greeted with oppressive heat, dank smells, and death, he said.

“I was even more convinced than ever that somebody had made a mistake in sending me here. We were the new meat, scared … like sheep going to the slaughter,” he said.

Meanwhile, scenes in the film flashed to the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C.

“There was a rule of thumb that you didn’t make close friends because you would lose them,” Gabriel said.

He described his feelings of guilt when a man named Howard R. Spitzer, who had taken Gabriel’s place in the ranks because he carried an M-79 rather than an M-16 rifle, was killed by a land mine.

“Why not me?” Gabriel said he asked himself over and over.

For the Vietnam research projects, which Hubbard has assigned to her senior classes for 12 consecutive years, each student selects a different war-related topic, such as Agent Orange, post-traumatic stress disorder, women in Vietnam, or the Wall, among many others. The research culminates in hour-long presentations that the students, some individually, some in teams, give to their classes, taught by English teachers Hubbard and Bonnie Woellner.

“In the fourth semester of their senior year, they know they have what is known as the ‘Vietnam Project,'” she said.

“I tell them the presentation is their one shot to give me the best class anyone has ever seen,” she quipped.

“And they do,” she said. “It’s just unbelievable what young minds can do when they’re interested and motivated.

“This is part of their senior English class, and it really encompasses their senior exhibition,” she said.

Hubbard said Gabriel’s strengths are in his multimedia message and his ability to talk with the students.

“He can use the same language they use without talking over their heads,” she said.

“He just tells his stories, good and bad, then he entertains questions and makes comments,” she added. “He’s a real-life experience and not a stereotype.”

Edwin Santana, a MVHS senior from Thorndike, said he hadn’t expected all the music.

“It’s a cool way to learn the information from stories and songs,” he said.

For information on Gabriel’s CD and Vietnam documentary, e-mail blindalbert@yahoo.com. His MySpace page is at www.myspace.com/blindalbert.

gchappell@bangordailynews.net

236-4598