Vinny “The Weasel” Capello – Vietnam, 1968–1970
Vinnie never talked about Vietnam unless the whiskey was deep and the bar was almost empty. Even then, he told it like a joke that wasn’t funny anymore.
He was nineteen when the draft notice came. North End kid, skinny as a rail, with quick hands and quicker eyes. The Army looked at him and saw exactly what they needed: someone small enough to fit in tight spaces and smart enough not to ask too many questions.
They sent him to the 1st Infantry Division, Big Red One. By the time he stepped off the plane at Bien Hoa in late ’68, the war had already turned into a meat grinder wearing a smile. Vinnie learned fast that survival wasn’t about being brave. It was about being useful.
They put him on supply runs. That’s where he earned the name.
While other grunts were humping eighty-pound rucks through the Iron Triangle, Vinnie was the guy who could slip through the wire at night, trade cigarettes and C-rations with the villagers, and come back with fresh intel, cold beer, or a case of stolen penicillin. He could find things. He could move things. He could make problems disappear without leaving bodies on the trail.
The officers started calling him “The Weasel” behind his back. At first it stung. Then he realized it was the best compliment they knew how to give. A weasel gets into places other animals can’t. A weasel always finds a way out.
One night in ’69, his squad got pinned down near the Cambodian border. Mortars, tracers, the whole horror show. The lieutenant was bleeding out, screaming for a medic who wasn’t coming. Vinnie crawled through the elephant grass on his belly, dragging a wounded man behind him, and somehow made it back to the perimeter with the radio and a satchel charge that bought them twenty minutes of breathing room.
The next morning the captain pinned a Bronze Star on him and said, “You’re a slippery little bastard, Capello. Keep it that way.”
Vinnie smiled the thin smile he still uses today. Inside, something had already started to calcify.
He saw too much. Kids no older than him turned into ghosts. Villages burned for no reason that made sense in the daylight. Black-market deals in the rear where officers traded body bags for stereo equipment. By the time he rotated home in ’70, the war had taught him one lesson he never forgot: everybody’s got a price, and most people are cheaper than they think.
Back in Boston he tried to go straight. Got a job on the docks, same ones his old man had worked. But the crews that ran the waterfront were the same ones who’d been skimming during the war. They remembered the little weasel who could move product without asking questions. They made him an offer he was too tired to refuse.
The rest, as they say, is history written in brown paper bags and late-night phone calls.
But every once in a while, when the whiskey hits just right, Vinnie will stare into his glass and mutter the same line:
“I went to Vietnam to fight for my country. Came home and realized the real war was right here in the North End… and the enemy wore better suits than the VC ever did.”
He never says it loud enough for anyone to hear the regret underneath.
But it’s there.
That’s Vinny’s full Vietnam chapter — raw, cynical, and shaped by the same survival instincts that made him “The Weasel.” It explains why he became the man he is in 1988: slippery, resourceful, and quietly aware that the system is always rigged.
