WATERLOO - "I don't watch war movies," Lloyd Faulkner said.

He has plenty of war memories of his own.

Faulkner was wounded while serving with the U.S. Marine Corps in Vietnam in 1968. "I was hit in April, July, and November," he said. "I got three Purple Hearts."

In 1990, the thrice-wounded Faulkner, then 42, volunteered for duty in Operation Desert Shield and served in Saudi Arabia during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

In 1996, he helped organize a local chapter of an organization for combat-wounded military veterans - the Military Order of the Purple Heart. He was the chapter's first president.

Today the organization has members whose combined military service spans more than 60 years - from World War II through Afghanistan.

At the elder end of the spectrum are veterans like Oscar Gingrich, who served with the Army's 186th Tank Destroyer Battalion in World War II. He survived the D-Day invasion at Omaha Beach, but was wounded on March 7, 1945, roughly two months before the war's end. He walked out of a concrete building in Germany to help two buddies change a tire on a Jeep when he was hit in the face by debris from a Nazi artillery shell blast.

"If I'd have probably been 10 steps farther out. It probably would have killed me. But I was just lucky," Gingrich said.

Many are Vietnam veterans, like Mike Clancy of Waterloo, who served with the U.S. Army 101st Airborne and was shot Aug. 15, 1967, in an ambush in a rice paddy area near Chu Lai as his platoon was dropped into an area surrounded by the enemy.

"We walked out of the jungle into a huge rice paddy complex and soon discovered we were surrounded. We started taking fire from all four sides. It sounded like a bullwhip convention," from the crack of passing fire, Clancy said. "All of a sudden it felt like somebody took a baseball bat and gave me a charley horse. It snapped my (right) femur like a toothpick."

Hours later, as his unit slipped out of the area under cover of darkness, Clancy was carried to safety through "undulating jungle," with bone from his shattered femur protruding into his behind throughout the three-hour trek.

The memories don't go away. Some of the members have. Numbers have dropped off as older, World War II-era veterans have passed on. There are a little more than 40 members.

But they know their numbers may be on the rise soon.

Some members, like new local chapter president Steve Hyde of Marshalltown, who grew up in Cedar Falls, have already spoken with wounded Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. Many of those soldiers are with the Iowa Army National Guard's 224th Engineer Battalion, which earned military distinction and sustained substantial casualties in Iraq in 2005.

"We went face-to-face and met with the 36 Purple Heart recipients that just came home from Iraq, and we told them we want to start a new chapter," said Hyde, a recently retired command sergeant major who was wounded serving with a helicopter crew in Vietnam. He also served in Afghanistan in a 35-year career with the Army and National Guard. "Before we could really get our boots on the ground beyond this face-to-face with them, they got the call and they were back in Iraq again.

"They had four KIA (killed in action) and 36 Purple Hearts" for their service to that point, Hyde said. Two Northeast Iowans were among those killed - Lt. Brian Gienau of Tripoli and Sgt. Seth Garceau of Oelwein.

Hyde said he also knew Staff Sgt. Scott Nisely, 48, of Marshalltown, who was killed with Spc. Kampha B. Sourivong, 20, of Iowa City, in a Sept. 30 attack while serving with the Waterloo-headquartered Iowa Army National Guard 1st Battalion, 133rd Infantry.

Purple Heart chapter members know soldiers and their families have suffered and will continue to suffer stress regardless of whether a soldier was wounded in combat. They want to help those soldiers and their families, too - particularly those in the National Guard and Reserve who have been uprooted from jobs and family life for military deployments, some on multiple occasions.

"This quick redeployment is really stressful on families and the soldiers, and we go through PTSD," or post-traumatic stress disorder, said Anthony Tisdale of Waterloo. The decorated Vietnam veteran is former local chapter and past state commander of the Purple Heart organization. He said he was wounded in Cambodia in 1969, served 20 months in Vietnam with the Army over two deployments, won several Bronze Stars for valor and left service as a captain.

Local Purple Heart chapter members want to help returning soldiers and their families work through the appropriate agencies to obtain whatever benefits they are due.

Tisdale said there are a number of emotional and other benefits for those who join the group. "Camaraderie, from the aspect that we're distinct and distinguished because we all have Purple Hearts or were wounded in combat in our military service," he said. "We can identify a lot of things, as far as the trauma, the anxiety - and the sense of duty, too."

Like today's soldiers serving multiple deployments, Tisdale returned to Vietnam after being wounded. He wanted to finish his deployment.

"Yes we have a lot of wounded" from the current conflicts, Hyde said. "And we're having some very severe head injuries - more head injuries than from any other conflict in the past. And a lot of it comes from the IEDs, the mines in the road, the improvised explosive devices.

"But the other piece," Hyde added, "and you're going to find this hard to believe - there are more cases of PTSD coming out of Iraq."

"PTSD, right now, no one's paying attention to it. But it's going to springboard - veterans treated for psychological injuries." Tisdale said.

It has been a long time between conflicts, and the tactics have changed.

"We went so long from Desert Storm, which was very short - 100 days - we went 10 years before we got involved in Iraq and Afghanistan," Hyde said. "The tactics the enemy are using are so extreme - beheadings and suicide bombings and kidnappings. At least when we were fighting our enemy, we knew we were going to go nose to nose and try to blow each other up."

"It's not comparable to what these kids are going through," Tisdale said. Casualties to an increasing number of women serving is especially traumatic for their comrades and families, Hyde said.

"I still say - this is my opinion - the National Guard and Reserves are serving too much front-line duty," Tisdale said.

But Hyde said National Guard and Reserves make up a major portion of the combat service support for active-duty forces. And, because the Iowa units perform so well in the field, he said, they are in high demand - even if they are retrained to perform duties outside their original area of specialty. It is a reputation soldiers from this state have held dating back to the Civil War, he said.

For Hyde, the Purple Heart organization's continuing service, beyond military service, is important.

"The sole purpose of this group is to find a veteran that needs help," Hyde said. "We've got veterans out there that don't know that they can get disability claims, that you can get education assistance." The organization helps fill in the gaps, keeping veterans informed when government agencies' efforts may fall short.

Hyde, for example, volunteers at the Iowa Veterans Home in Marshalltown. Whatever money group members raise, they give away.

"My biggest thing now - early on it was the camaraderie with other veterans - but today … it's serving veterans," Hyde said.

More information about the local Chapter 861 of the Military Order of the Purple Heart may be obtained by calling Tisdale at (319) 234-5875; Don Delamore at (319) 268-1279; or Hyde at (641) 351-9686. Membership is open to Purple Heart recipients in Waterloo, Cedar Rapids and Northeast Iowa. The group meets at 6:30 p.m. on the second Monday of each month at Veterans Memorial Hall in Waterloo at West Fifth Street and the Cedar River. An auxiliary chapter also is being organized.

Contact Pat Kinney at (319) 291-1484 or Pat.Kinney@wcfcourier.com.