June 25, 2001
Dear Professor Ellis,
I read of your lying about being a Vietnam veteran and an antiwar
activist on a Monday. That night I dreamt I was in Vietnam on just the second
day of another tour. I lay frightened and motionless outside the wire of a
fire base, just after nightfall. If I moved away from the base, the enemy was
there in the darkness waiting to kill me. If I moved toward the base, my
comrades would mistake me for an enemy and set off the death-dealing Claymore
mines. The dream seemed a perfect picture of what it had really felt like for
me to have been a Vietnam veteran and afterward, an antiwar activist: my
country sent me to face a foreign enemy determined to maim or kill me as an
intruder; when I returned home and opposed the war, many of my countrymen
mistook me for an enemy. Looking back, I feel as if I spent years in that
kind of no-man's land.
I love English and history. I taught at a private high school when I got
out of the army in 1970. Most of the other teachers were young. None of them
had been to Vietnam. One day the school sponsored a "hawks and doves" debate
on the war for the senior class. I was the only teacher not asked to
participate. My presence there, and a forthright recounting of my
experiences, would have upset their little academic apple-cart. I was a good
teacher and had an excellent rapport with my students, but at the end of my
first term, the headmaster fired me-not for lying about being a Vietnam
veteran and an antiwar activist, but because I was one.
Even after all these years, I'd like a chance to get back into teaching.
It seems you have an undue predilection for taking to yourself a kind of
glory you imagine attends Vietnam combat and subsequent antiwar activity, so
I'll offer you a deal: I'll trade all my memories and emotions from Vietnam
and the antiwar movement to you in exchange for your job. We're the same age,
57, and I'm qualified to teach many courses especially the one you taught
called "Vietnam and American Culture."
Once our deal is complete, you'll be able to speak honestly and
confidently about your war and antiwar experiences. You'll be able to quote
from Kipling's Gunga Din-"But when it comes to slaughter/You'll do your work
on water" and explain how desperately thirsty you got in the midst of battle.
You can describe evacuating by chopper the wounded "chompin' mad with
thirst," and evacuating the dead by land on the armored tracks because there
was no immediate rush to get their lifeless bodies to Graves Registration at
base camp. You'll be able to describe the dreadful zing of enemy machine gun
bullets flying past your head, the frightful whoosh of enemy 82 mm mortars
dropping from the sky, and the horrifying crack of Russian-made 122s
whistling out of the night.
You'll be able to tell how you hunted down enemy in their "spider holes"
and when they wouldn't come out, killed them with grenades. You'll explain
how, when pulled from their holes, their missing hands and feet told of their
last horrifying seconds trapped with a live grenade in a little space.
I suppose your listeners will be impressed when you tell of your friend
who bled to death after his legs were blown off by a booby-trapped artillery
shell, and of your roommate blown to pieces in the tunnels of Duc Pho, and of
the top officer of your class shot through the heart while courageously
urging on his men. And then you'll think how they were all just boys, really.
You'll explain that certain memories pop up at the worst times-the South
Vietnamese hospital for double and triple amputees, two and three to a bed;
turning over the Viet Cong women you captured to the South Vietnamese police
and learning later they were tortured and raped.
As you look back, you'll be sure you could have done something to keep
that prisoner from being beaten and shot, and found some way to keep the
artillery from shelling that friendly village.
You'll think of that specialist fourth class you were talking to at his
short-timer's party the night before he was supposed to leave Tay Ninh for
home, the one who was killed by shrapnel from a 122 mm rocket because he
wouldn't hit the dirt like the rest of us, insisting that the explosions were
outgoing, not incoming. You can relate that you were the battalion adjutant
at that time, and prepared the letter to his parents, and the letters to the
other parents, and the letters to the wives.
That's a sampling of the war memories you'll be getting from me. It was a
long year. You won't run out of things to talk about. I'll be so happy that
these memories will be all yours and not mine anymore.
And then there's the antiwar activist part of our deal. Once my
experiences become yours, you'll be able to describe the indifference with
which you were met when you returned home, and recount what it felt like to
serve your country honorably in a foreign war, speak and write the truth
about what happened there, and as a result, be called a communist and a
traitor.
You can tell how your children still remember being among the hundreds
tear-gassed in Washington after you spoke at a Vietnam Veterans Against the
War rally. And you'll be able to tell the stories of those other vets,
explaining that you didn't have it half as bad as they.
You'll be able to describe how feelings of terror and grief you
suppressed in Nam, so you could function and survive, came back years later
to ambush you and your family, in incident after ugly incident. You'll still
feel some survivor guilt (it never completely disappears) and you'll be able
to speak about the many problems you experienced in its acute stages when
alcohol and drugs seemed like your best and only friends.
I'll give you all these experiences and more for your teaching job. I
like the $94,000 salary, the prestige, the peaceful setting of Mount Holyoke,
and most of all, the opportunity to teach the truth about the Viet Nam war
and its aftermath.
But I know you're not going to go for this deal. I can handle the
teaching job, but your psyche can't handle my feelings and memories. You're
used to being gently wooed with academic perks, not being sorely beset by the
unpredictable intensity of emotions you wish you never had.
This offer of a trade is simply a device to make a point, and I think
I've made it: you have stepped way out of your depth, professor. What you did
was not a little mistake or one of your "personal shortcomings," as you have
suggested, but a heinous fraud which you perpetrated upon the malleable minds
of your young students with vacuous ease. Your lies are an explicit slur on
all those who actually lived through what was for you nothing but
hypocritical—and now infamous—pretense. Your opportunely contrived
falsehoods also make you a thief—you took some very valuable things for
yourself without ever paying the price. In essence, what is the difference
between what you did and shoplifting from a jewelry store? This is a harsh
letter and you deserve it. I want to make sure you understand this: the
horrors of combat are not something real veterans of it want to talk about,
and if you are not a combat veteran, it's the very last thing you want to lie
about.
While some of your less discerning colleagues may urge upon you a
fatuous, pedantic rationale for some sort of flexible integrity, let me
assure you that lukewarm repentance will not do. Lies like yours permeate
one's entire life and work. What I want is a heartfelt apology. This is the
direction in which I expect the Supreme Spirit is already leading you. I want
an apology to the memory of all those who gave their lives in Viet Nam, an
apology to all who were physically, emotionally, and spiritually wounded
there, an apology to all the aggrieved family members. And I want an apology
to all those, non-veteran and veteran alike, who, unlike you, really did work
hard in the antiwar movement, often sacrificing reputation, position, and
wealth, to help bring that abominable war to an end.
I look forward to hearing from you soon. Don't hesitate. Do the right
thing.
Yours truly,
Robert Bowie Johnson, Jr.
Airborne, Ranger, Infantry, Vietnam
West Point, Class of 1965
727 Montalban Drive
Annapolis, MD 21401
410-757-4630
