SPIRIT OF AMERICA: Gary Atwill

If you ask Home At Last Chairman Gary Atwill his thoughts on his time in the military, he will tell you this: It was the best decision he ever made. “I just know it was the best thing I ever did,” he said. “I found out who I was and what I could do and found out what my capabilities were. It set my course in life.”

The Windermere resident, a U.S. Navy Vietnam War veteran, served eight years in the Navy and was deployed twice. The call to serve ran in the family — his father served in the Army, his first father-in-law was in Korea and his wife Jimmie’s father also served — all during World War II.

But Atwill’s time with the Navy began out of a desire to find his place in the world.

“I wanted to go into the Navy, because I was sick and tired of digging ditches in the winter, and I wasn’t in school,” Atwill said. “I went down to the Army and applied because my dad was in the Army, and I knew a lot of people that were in the Army.”

After he learned the Army wanted to send him to boot camp at Missouri’s Fort Leonard Wood in the heart of winter, Atwill decided to talk with the Navy instead. 

Atwill began his Navy career in January 1964, and for a while, he never looked back.

“The day I went into the Navy, it was the best thing that happened in my life, period,” Atwill said. “They taught me that I was really good at something and found talents I didn’t even know I had. I look back on it and understand where I got the talents — they made me an electronics technician.” 

“It still goes back to the fact that you have the freedom and right to do and achieve the best you can possibly do — there’s no limits on what you can achieve.” - Gary Atwill

After boot camp, he was sent to the Naval Air Technical Training Center in Memphis for 42 weeks of electronics school. There, Atwill learned how to maintain and fix various types of USNI anti-submarine warfare (ASW) systems. Upon his graduation he was sent to another technical school in San Diego, where he was assigned to squadron VS-37. He earned his air-crew wings and was sent back to the squadron, where he worked in fixing electronics.

During Atwill’s first deployment to Vietnam in 1965, he and his squadron were part of a WESTPAC crew. He didn’t know at the time the Vietnam War was bubbling.

“We were doing patrols up and down the coast of Vietnam looking for ships and barges coming down from North Vietnam carrying (weapons) into South Vietnam,” he said. “We’d work with destroyers and find these guys, because we had a very powerful radar. I operated the radar, and we’d find targets, find out what they were and direct the destroyers if they were carrying weapons.”

During his time as part of the WESTPAC crews, he went to Japan, Iwo Jima and the Philippines. After that first deployment, he got married and came back home until his second WESTPAC deployment in 1967.

“The second (deployment) was different, because I was assigned to a helicopter squadron and given the role of door gunner and manned the M60 machine gun,” he said. “Vietnam was really heating up in 1967. The Air Force would come out and go over the land and do strikes on North Vietnam, and the Navy would do strikes coming in from the ocean. Our job was to stand off in various search zones and pick up personnel from downed planes.”

Atwill has three air medals and received two of them for his specific actions. He received the third for the number of missions he flew with his squadron. Additionally, the squadron received a presidential unit citation and meritorious unit citation. Atwill was aboard the USS Hornet CVS-12 for both deployments.

After Atwill’s first four years in the Navy, he went to school at Southwest Missouri State University and earned a degree in industrial relations and personnel management. He also holds an MBA. In 1972, he returned to the Navy to serve as a naval flight officer for another four years but was not deployed.

Today, Atwill and his wife, Jimmie, live in Windermere, and Atwill serves as the chairman of Home At Last. The nonprofit provides mortgage-free homes to disabled veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars.

To him, freedom is precious and something that is fought hard for daily. It means that everyone is free to make his or her own decisions, and that privilege is not something to be taken for granted.

“It’s having the opportunity to be as successful as you can be, and freedom to express yourself,” Atwill said. “It still goes back to the fact that you have the freedom and right to do and achieve the best you can possibly do — there’s no limits on what you can achieve. If you’re willing to work hard, stay the course, willing to work through the problems and live a good life, you can do anything you want to do. The only limits you’ve got is on what you’re willing to try.”

Atwill added that because of the rights Americans have that have been fought for, they can work hard and achieve their goals, as well as express themselves freely. Freedom is not free, he said, and Americans are fortunate to have rights and privileges that those in other countries do not.

“That is what makes us exceptional,” Atwill said.