Maybe solved my own problem:
referencing
https://medium.com/@Dylan.Wang/enable-openvpn-log-and-add-timestamp-in-log-dfdd7bb186b8 I found my systemd script
find /etc/systemd | grep vpn
exited the Exec line to add "--suppress-timestamps" as the first arg
then ran
# systemctl daemon-reload
# systemctl restart <servicname>
(servicename was the basename of file that I edited)
I'm a little disappointed that I couldn't make this change in a conf file, but oh well. And suppressing it made the us= statements go away, implying they were a decimal after the second place.