A Vietnamese landmine destroyed 25-year-old David Wenzel’s legs, half his left arm and an eye, but missed his big heart.
Wenzel, an Army first lieutenant leading a patrol the day he was wounded, forgave whoever tried to kill him on Jan. 25, 1971, in the middle of the Vietnam War.
Wenzel, who died Wednesday in a Scranton veterans nursing home at age 80 while a local university honored him a few blocks away, never felt bitterness against the Vietnamese that might have consumed him.
A VETERANS DAY PROFILE
Former Scranton Mayor David Wenzel, 80, who died last week, was a disabled Vietnam War combat veteran who became a nationally recognized advocate for disability rights. Today we look back on Wenzel's life — in particular how his war injuries shaped his career.
Wenzel, who loved a good movie, never shied away from even Vietnam war films that questioned the war like “Platoon,” “Full Metal Jacket” and “Apocalypse Now.”
“I'd always say, ‘You're okay with this?’ especially if they dealt with Vietnam,” longtime close friend Joe Riccardo said the day after Wenzel died. “And he would always be okay with it. He said it never really bothered him ... He was proud of his service. He was proud of the men and women who served in Vietnam but ... there was no sense of vengeance or hatred towards the Vietnamese. He never blamed them at all.”
Instead, Wenzel moved on. He served as Scranton’s mayor, became a role model and advocate for people with disabilities, pursued peace in the outside world and found it within.
“He was so patriotic,” Riccardo said. “He never said to me, ‘I regret going to Vietnam.’ He would say to me, ‘Joe, every day when I get up and get out of bed, I'm reminded of Vietnam. I still feel sometimes I'm fighting the Vietnam War’ because of his injuries and negotiating all the challenges. But he never once said to me, ‘I regret my military service.’”
Fighting a war, even for a short time like he did, can place things in perspective later in life.
Amid the pressures of serving as Scranton’s 27th mayor, Wenzel sloughed off the public criticism of his tenure that often bothered his wife Janet a whole lot more, Riccardo said.
“You know, there were a lot of controversies when he served, like with any mayor, but the one thing about him is ... he never held any grudges” against critics, Riccardo, 59, said. “It was politics. It was just, they were doing what they thought was right, he was doing what he thought was right. So, David was very much the happy warrior, and that's the truth.”
Born amid war
Born three months after World War II ended in Europe in 1945, Wenzel graduated from Scranton Central High School in 1963, and the University of Scranton in 1969 with a bachelor’s degree in business management. Because he went through officer training while in college, he was commissioned as an Army second lieutenant, married his wife on July 4, 1970, and arrived in Vietnam almost three months later.
Three months after that, while on patrol in Quang Ngai province in what was then South Vietnam, he stepped on the mine.
Coming home
Three months after that, he was with his wife in their Wheeler Avenue apartment talking to a newspaper reporter, who described him as “a happy man” who “smiles a lot and is optimistic about the future.”
“It doesn’t bother me at all,” he told Scrantonian reporter Frank Rossi. “I know it sounds funny, but I didn’t even cry because of the loss.”
But that was a difficult time. Despite the visit at home with the reporter, he spent a difficult 11 months rehabilitating in a Valley Forge hospital.
When he arrived home, his hometown welcomed him like a hero, but heroism only goes so far. He had a life to live.
“I was surprised how nonchalant I was,” Wenzel told The Scranton Times-Tribune in 2012. “I thought, 'I’m just going to get on with my life, and I’m not going to worry about anything.'”
Moving on with life
The recipient of a Bronze Star and Purple Heart, Wenzel threw himself into advocating for veterans and the disabled. He earned a master’s degree in accounting from the University of Scranton in 1974. Scranton Mayor Gene Peters appointed him the city’s coordinator for the nation’s bicentennial celebration and later named him his executive assistant.
By 1977, his first solo political opportunity arrived. A Republican like Peters, Wenzel ran for Scranton tax collector.
“He wants to do more,” a pre-election newspaper campaign ad said.
The tax-collecting veteran
Wenzel won. He did the job, but outside interests beckoned, too. Months into his first term, the Disabled American Veterans honored him as National Disabled Veteran of the Year. He joined the Deutsch Institute, a local organization dedicated to programming for disabled people.
In 1981, he took on the presidency of the United Nations Association of Greater Scranton — an organization, like its namesake, devoted to promoting understanding among different peoples.
The same year, Gov. Dick Thornburgh named him director of the Selective Service across Pennsylvania, maintaining lists in case the nation ever had to draft soldiers for war again.
Later that year, he also won re-election as tax collector.
A higher calling
As he tax collector, he sought more efficient tax collection. Then he sought higher office.
In 1985, he ran for mayor against Democratic incumbent James Barrett McNulty, whose flamboyant and sometimes forceful style alienated many Democrats and neighborhood leaders, who openly endorsed Wenzel.
Senior Lackawanna County Judge Tom Munley watched in amazement as his close friend campaigned.
“He worked in City Hall, but he'd have a hard time getting around,” Munley said. “But he had two artificial legs, and he had an artificial arm, and he used to go up to the podium. It was so hard for him to get around — I don't know how he did it — and (he’d) go up there and he'd speak.”
A victory
In an unexpected upset, aided partly by the neighborhood ties of his community development director and eventual successor, Jim Connors, Wenzel won — by only 120 votes.
Suddenly, a disabled veteran, who used a wheelchair, but could walk with the help of prosthetics and crutches, was Scranton’s leader.
His first year included inheriting and overcoming a police civil service exam cheating scandal that unfolded in the last days of McNulty’s administration and department store owner Al Boscov's announcement of plans for a mall in downtown Scranton. The mall, which eventually kickstarted the city’s downtown revitalization, didn't open until 1993, but many of the property acquisitions for it happened under Wenzel, Riccardo said.
A scathing report titled “Partnership ’87,” organized by local civic leaders, criticized the structure of city government and called for a major overhaul.
The plan was largely ignored, and Wenzel later said the plan didn’t call for concrete solutions and only contained criticisms.
The loss of federal funding for cities and contract arbitration losses to unions hurt the city’s finances during Wenzel’s administration.
Five years later, after he was gone, the city, mired in deficits and operating with staffing levels from a more prosperous era, entered state financially distressed status and didn’t emerge until 2022.
'Honesty and integrity'
Nonetheless, Riccardo said, Wenzel felt he had a successful tenure as mayor.
“He brought honesty and integrity to City Hall,” he said. “If you ask him, what his greatest achievement — and I don't think it, I know it — it was the fact that while he was mayor, there weren't any scandals. And he really represented the city in a very, very positive way, with integrity.”
McNulty ran for mayor again in 1989 but lost in the primary election. Connors won in the fall.
One phase ends, another begins
Wenzel didn’t run.
Riccardo said Wenzel felt the personal attacks were hard on his wife and decided he didn’t want to put her through that anymore.
“And I think at that point he really had his interests were in writing and teaching,” Riccardo said.
Munley said Janet Wenzel worried more about the physical toll on her husband.
“She was worried about his health. She didn't want him to run. She didn't even want him to run the first time,” Munley said.
So, Wenzel stepped away from elected life and began teaching at the University of Scranton. He taught a course on the Vietnam War and invited Munley, who survived Vietnam as a soldier unscathed, to share his stories.
If he wasn’t an opponent of the war, Riccardo thinks Wenzel came to believe the United States didn’t prepare for the war properly or understand the implications of waging it.
“He felt after that, it was the wrong war,” Riccardo said. “He felt that the United States, you know, didn't really have the will and the commitment to win the war that our mission and objectives were unclear.”
Munley said he came to think the Vietnam War was a wrong but said he never heard Wenzel say that.
Wenzel did show disappointment at the lack of respect for many of the war’s returning veterans.
“The treatment of Vietnam veterans when they came home profoundly impacted him,” Riccardo said. “And of course, he hated war. He felt war itself was irrational, while there may be a just war like World War II. Of course, he was a big proponent of peace.”
Forgiveness
Annually, he took part in the United Nations’ group’s anniversary celebrations. (The group named a peace fund after him.) He advocated for dropping the U.S. trade embargo against Vietnam.
“I feel we should start a whole new era with them,” Wenzel told The Scranton Times in 1994. “The more exchanges we can have on a personal basis, the better the chances we won’t be going to war with them in the foreseeable future.”
When Connors became mayor, he appointed Wenzel to the city’s Redevelopment Authority.
Politics again
In 2000, he ran for delegate to the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia that nominated Texas Gov. George W. Bush as president. He was chosen to address the convention, too.
In his speech, he praised Bush’s father, President George H.W. Bush, for successfully pursuing passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act that open up many buildings and other public venues to the disabled. He said the son would do that, too.
The day after Bush was inaugurated, Wenzel toured the White House, and the new president pushed his wheelchair along. Bush later appointed Wenzel to the National Council on Disability.
In 2003, Wenzel testified before a House committee on the need to improve public transportation for the disabled. In July 2005, he celebrated the 15th anniversary of the passage of disabilities law with the first President Bush at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. He introduced champions for the disabled who were honored that day.
“You’ll have to excuse me,” he said, seated in a wheelchair, as he put on glasses to read the introductions. “My disability is that I need these to be able to read.”
Writing history
A history buff, Wenzel joined Munley and Riccardo in organizing interviews and documenting the lives of local veterans. In 2006, he published a book, “Scranton’s Mayors,” a review of the tenures of the city’s mayors, including his.
In 2007, Mayor Chris Doherty named the Nay Aug Park treehouse after Wenzel, who was skeptical about it at first, preferring maybe a street instead.
“And Chris said, ‘I think you're going to like my idea, mayor,’” Riccardo said. “It was funny, because he loved it ... And we would go up there quite often.”
He joined a panel that helped U.S. Rep. Matt Cartwright screen prospective candidates for the nation’s military academies. He was part of a drive to plant 150 trees across the city to celebrate Scranton’s 150th birthday in 2016. For almost a decade, he served on the city’s Shade Tree Commission, which bestowed on him the title “Commissioner Emeritus for Life” in 2023.
A model for others
Watching Wenzel, sometimes up close as a colleague and sometimes from afar was Keith Williams, confined to a wheelchair by a neuromuscular disease. They met in 1987, when Wenzel was mayor and Williams was still in his 20s and beginning his own advocacy for the disabled.
In Williams, Wenzel had an admirer who saw him as a model.
“He sure was,” Williams said. “Look at the heights that he had reached ... I look(ed) at him and ... and saw somebody with a significant disability as the mayor of Scranton, and it was inspiring.”
One lasting award
On Wednesday, the 40th anniversary of the day Wenzel was elected mayor, the University of Scranton’s University’s Center for Ethics and Excellence in Public Service presented his wife with its inaugural Public Service Award.
From now on, the award will bear his name, a university spokesman said.
Janet Wenzel accepted the award on his behalf. As the event wrapped up, she got word her husband died, Riccardo said.
She and her husband talked about death more than 55 years earlier before he headed off to war.
Before boarding the plane for Vietnam, he reassured her, according to a November 2012 Scranton Times-Tribune story.
“Don’t worry, I’m a lucky guy,” he said.
