When someone hails Vietnam War veteran Phil Chapman as a hero, he is likely to pull them up short.

“I’m not a hero, I got to come home. The real heroes are the ones who didn’t,”  he said.

Boothbay Harbor’s Phil Chapman is one of the more than 2.7 million service members who served in Vietnam. More than 58,000 were slain, more than 300 of them were from Maine.

Last Thursday, when the nation celebrated the second National Vietnam Vets Day, Phil became the TV face of the state’s Viet vets.

For public officials, it was a chance for them to say “Welcome home” to a group that stood quietly, (and some not so quietly) in the shadows for 50 years as the nation argued the pros and cons of the war itself.

For Phil, it was the 51st anniversary of a day when he stepped on the mine that ripped off one of his legs. For other Viet vets, the official “Welcome Home” greetings were nice, but about a half century late.

When vets like Phil came home, there were no “troop greeters” at the airport, In fact, there were reports that some returning servicemen were met with disdain, derision and worse. There were no lavish parades. Other than immediate family and friends, no one seemed to notice.  Even organized veterans groups, filled with older men from World War II and Korea, frequently turned a cold shoulder to the Viet vets.

Some younger vets liked rock and roll, long hair, questioned the war and smoked funny cigarettes. They didn’t seem to fit in with the older vets who preferred Glen Miller, crew cuts, and bourbon.

In the half century that has passed, our nation still has not come to terms with the longest war in our history. Why were we there in the first place? Were our leaders telling us and themselves the truth? Why did military leaders think we could win over the hearts and minds of a mostly rural population by burning their villages and poisoning their crops and forests? Were we fighting communism or nationalism or both? We still are not sure of the answers to these and a hundred other questions.

None of that mattered to the young men, like Phil, who served their country and came home with grave physical and mental injuries. They just wanted to get on with their lives.

Phil came back to Boothbay and got a job running a press at my favorite newspapers, the Boothbay Register and Wiscasset Newspaper. After a while, he found he could earn more money roofing in the daytime and bartending at night, so he got out of the newspaper business and gave his job to another vet. Phil tells it this way. “I saw Dave McKown coming home. He still had his Army uniform on. I called him over and offered him my job. He kept it for the rest of his life.”

He was right about Dave McKown, a fixture at the Register for most of his life, except for the time he went home to East Boothbay for lunch, signed on as a deckhand on the schooner yacht America and sailed around the world. Then he quit, walked back into the newspaper office and asked for and got his old job back.

Besides roofing and tending bar, Phil Chapman went to college and earned a degree in industrial arts. For the next 26 years, he taught school for the Defense Department in England and South Korea. He retired in 2002, came back to Boothbay Harbor, listened to his wife, Laura, went into the hospitality business and became a smiling host. The hardworking couple rebuilt Boothbay’s Blue Heron Inn into a charming and popular New England seaside B&B.

But day after day, like thousands of his fellow Viet vets, Phil just smiled and coped with the prosthesis, pain and other ailments that remained after he took off the nation’s uniform.

Last March, America finally got around to honoring the men and women who served in a conflict that began in May 1961, when President John F. Kennedy ordered helicopters and Army Special Forces troops into combat. The nation chose to honor them on March 29, the day in 1973 when the last American combat and support troops left that southeast Asian nation.

Last Thursday, at Togus and Augusta, Maine state officials, some in person, like Gov. Paul LePage and Sen. Angus King, and others by proxy, said: “Welcome home” to Phil and a couple of small gatherings of Viet vets.

As usual, the Viet vets just smiled, politely applauded, and posed for “grip and grin” photos with elected officials. Then they quietly went back home.