by Jordan Adair —
Durham Academy
(A version of this article originally appeared in the Durham Academy Record in 2004.)
It began fortuitously enough in the summer of 2002 in Connecticut. I was riding down the road in the backseat of a car with my wife’s cousin, heading for a relaxing day at the beach. We were talking about the frenetic pace of our lives, about what we were doing that was new, and about her job with the Library of Congress. Well-connected in Washington, D.C., Ellen Lovell had spent many of the previous 15 years in and around Capitol Hill. Her new job, however, was with the Library of Congress and well out of the political maelstrom she’d endured for so long. It all seemed innocent enough.
But when I mentioned to her that I was in the process of designing an English course on literary and artistic responses to the Vietnam War and that I wanted to do something with oral histories of veterans who’d fought in that conflict, she sat up. “You know that my new job is directing the Veterans History Project, don’t you?” I didn’t. “Did you know that we’re looking for partner schools to participate in the project?” I didn’t know that either. After she filled me on the nuts and bolts of this extraordinary project, I knew that she’d presented me with an opportunity I couldn’t even think about ignoring. And that brings me to the fall of 2003.
Public Law 106-380 states: “It is in the nation’s best interest to collect . . . oral histories of American war veterans so that . . . Americans will always remember those who served in war and may learn first-hand of the heroics, tediousness, horrors, and triumphs of war.” The Veterans History Project (which collects oral histories of veterans of all wars in which America has been a part) is the outgrowth of this law and forms the culminating experience for students in the senior elective I teach Durham Academy, “Literary and Artistic Response to War.”
Nothing resonates more with high school students—or with anyone, for that matter—than a taste of the real thing. So many exceptional experiences lie outside of our reach that most of us depend on those who know them intimately to bring the reality home.
It could be an artist describing her creative process or a musician discussing preparations for playing a particular piece. Or, as is the case in the English class I teach, it could be a WW II or Vietnam veteran recalling experiences from long ago. Or, it could be a more recent veteran detailing what his or her deployment in Iraq was like on the ground. Applying first-hand experience to telling a story connects us to others most profoundly, and it is this desire for immediacy that has been the driving force behind the 17-year odyssey of this class.
When I first taught this course, it focused exclusively on the literary and artistic responses to the Vietnam War, but over the years that focus has shifted steadily so that today the course is split evenly between examining responses to the war in Vietnam and those about the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. We begin this journey with books that set the stage and introduce the themes that the veterans bring to life. As the veterans share their stories with my students, they make it tangible—no longer is it distant prose enclosed between the covers of a book.
In its earliest incarnation, this course examined exclusively the American response to the war in Vietnam, the violent crucible that brought forth some of our country’s greatest literature, music, art, and film. Students looked at several key literary responses to the war, Michael Herr’s Dispatches, Lewis Puller, Jr’s Fortunate Son, The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, Bloods, a collection of oral histories by African American soldiers edited by Wallace Terry, as well as selected poetry and letters of Vietnam veterans. Photographs documenting the war figured prominently as well. In addition, students examined the musical response to the war through the protest songs of Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Joni Mitchell, Bruce Springsteen, John Prine and others.
The film responses included Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam (documentary), Platoon, Apocalypse Now, and Born on the Fourth of July. In recent years, I’ve since added the novel Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes, a Marine veteran with whom we have had remote visits, and Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War, which examines the experiences of a North Vietnamese Army veteran. Students write response papers throughout the semester to document their progress in understanding and synthesizing these varied materials and create more involved projects that examine war photography, among other subjects.
The crucial knowledge I want my students to have, and most importantly to appreciate, is what it is like to serve in the military, in both combat and support roles, and how those years of service have shaped the lives of those who have served. I can give my students the readings and the writing exercises, show them the films and photographs, but none of that truly brings home to them the true nature of war and service until the veterans visited. Spread out over the course of the entire semester, I bring in anywhere from 10-15 veterans each year. I try to balance the branches of the service, gender, and racial makeup of those I invite in hopes of giving my students as varied an experience as possible.
Among the Vietnam veterans who have visited is John Atkins of the 11th Armored Cavalry Division (the “Blackhorse Regiment”), who got the class up on their collective feet at attention, ready to get the news that they had just a short time to get their affairs in order before shipping out to ’Nam. Wayne Poole told them about walking the DMZ in jungle so thick you couldn’t see the guy in front of you. Dr. John Harmon visited early on a Monday morning and shook the sleep from their eyes with his stories of standing in the troughs of blood in the operating room at the 93rd Evac Hospital outside of Saigon. They understood the difficulty of his job when he told them of handling triage on the landing pad outside of the hospital. In an instant, he’d had to decide which soldier would get top priority for surgery, and which one would die because several others might be saved in the valuable time (sometimes 10-12 hours) that would be devoted to trying to save his life. Moral decisions don’t get much tougher than that.
Norm Gaddis carried his 80 years well on a fit and trim physique, one that still allows him to wear his flight suit from his days in Vietnam. He stood erect and solid on the day he told his story to a mesmerized class in a soft but firm voice. Brig. Gen. Gaddis, USAF (Retired), began his military service in the aviation cadet program in 1942 and received his pilot wings in November 1944. He served in Germany and Korea during the late 1940s and into the 1950s, and after various other assignments was transferred to Vietnam in November of 1966. Attached to the 12th Tactical Fighter Wing at Cam Ranh Bay Air Base, General Gaddis flew 72 combat missions over South Vietnam, North Vietnam, and Laos. His last flight, on May 12, 1967, would be one of his more memorable, and his most harrowing, for he was shot down and taken to the infamous Hanoi Hilton where he was held prisoner for six years.
What was to come next for Gaddis would make his bailout seem minor in comparison. He spent the first three weeks under intense interrogation and torture, “in a room that had seen a lot of terror,” going one stretch of 65 hours without sleep. He spent the first thousand days of his captivity in solitary confinement in a 7-foot-by-7-foot cell, unable to see or speak to his fellow prisoners.
When one student asked him how he was able to maintain his mental strength during his long imprisonment, Gaddis said, “I tried to remember the pleasant things from my life, trips I’d taken to places that I loved.” He also designed and “constructed” a house, imagining in minute detail all of the specifications. But what saved him, he believes, was his abiding faith, the love of his wife, and that he never doubted his country would come rescue him.
After his 30 years of service, Gaddis retired from the Air Force and today lives in Durham. He has a healthy respect for war—it is a “horrible thing,” he says, “but sometimes it’s unavoidable as a last resort.” Books simply cannot convey this sort of truth in the same way a veteran can.
In the years since I started teaching this course, the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan raged on. It occurred to me that limiting this course to the war in Vietnam seemed decidedly out of tune with what was happening in our country and a missed opportunity to engage with the newest military veterans. So, in 2010, I broadened the scope of this semester course to include these two conflicts, and as a result, expanded the materials to include some of the most important artistic responses to them. These include David Finkel’s The Good Soldiers (a Washington Post journalist with whom we’ve had several remote visits), Dexter Filkins’ The Forever War, Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds (an Iraq War Army veteran who visited our class last year), C.J. Chivers’ The Fighters (another Marine veteran with whom we’ve had remote visits), and the documentary Restrepo, a film shot mainly in Afghanistan by Sebastian Junger and the late Tim Hetherington. In addition, I now had an entire generation of veterans I could access as visitors to my class. The timeliness of this decision brought a new sense of urgency to the discussions in class and to the impact the stories of this new generation of veterans would have on my students.
Al Bonifacio, a Filipino immigrant to the States with a strong commitment to serving his adopted country, entered the U. S. Army a mere five days after graduating high school and he has served ever since, the last 19 as a reservist and medic. From 2003-04, Al was in mission support in both Kuwait and Iraq. His story of service, from the perspective of an immigrant and reservist, drove home powerfully to my students and to me a seemingly under-reported side of the war—what it means to serve in the Reserves. Al was working fulltime as a nurse when he was called up, and despite taking a significant pay cut and suffering through the disconnection that comes with leaving an established life and saying good-bye to family and friends, he willingly answered the call. When asked how his service has changed him Al wrote in an email, “In the quiet times, beauty can be found even in war. Cherish every day. Never take our freedom, way of life, and luxuries for granted.” Only someone with first-hand experience in war can convey this sort of truth. It can’t be found in books or movies or a painting.
Mike Dolan (Class of ’99) was the starting point guard on two varsity basketball teams I coached at DA and even then he had leadership skills. But it took four years at West Point and a 15-month tour in Baghdad (where he conducted escort missions in up-armored Humvees) to shape him into the man he is today. By his own admission, Mike says the most important lesson he learned during his time in the military was accountability (he left the Army in July of 2010). He believes that a person must have integrity and accept responsibility for his actions. There are, he believes, no excuses. Mike also possesses a keen awareness of what’s important in life, and chief among them is his health, both mental and physical.
When I taught Patrick Nevins (Class of ’03) as an 11th grader, he was a typical teenager with typical teenage concerns. Aside from the deep and abiding compassion he’d always possessed, the young man who spoke to my class bore little resemblance to the teenager I taught. In his place sat a Marine officer whose articulate voice enthralled my students and me. Reading from a journal he kept during his first tour (in Afghanistan in 2008-09), Patrick described the education he got in country. As a platoon leader, he soon realized that it was his moral responsibility to take care of the men in his unit, some of them barely out of high school and others with many years of experience in the Marines. He learned quickly the difference between the sound a bullet makes that lands meters away and one that whizzes right by your head. That’s not something you’re taught in high school, not even something infantry training can prepare you for. And it was in witnessing the death and destruction that is warfare that Patrick was given his most enduring and life-altering lessons. Family, health, and the importance of quiet time stand front and center for him today.
Dave and Haley Utlaut both attended West Point, but they got to know each other while serving in Iraq. In 2007, Dave was stationed in Baghdad, during one of his five combat tours, as a rifle company commander, and Haley was on the staff of General David Petraeus. During some of Dave’s missions in Sadr City, one of the most dangerous places in Baghdad at that time, Haley was part of the team that kept in communication with his unit. As both of them described it, these were the most intense of times, and because of the direct and honest way in which Dave and Haley told their stories my students surely got the message—these were life and death experiences.
These stories deserve to be told. And to that end, I chose participation in the Veterans History Project as the culminating exercise for this class, one that would stand in for a final exam and have a practical value at one and the same time. I pair my students with a partner and then matched each group with one veteran. The groups were responsible for preparing interview questions, conducting mock interviews on one another as a rehearsal for the real one, and then contacting their veterans and setting up a time for the interview. Each interview runs no longer than ninety minutes and covers before, during, and after the veteran’s service. Initially, once the interviews were completed, the students typed up a transcript of the videotaped session. Today, the VHP creates the transcripts. Students collect any artifacts the veteran might want to contribute to the project, and assemble the entire package for transport to the Library of Congress. Eventually, once the interviews have been catalogued, they are made available on the VHP website. Additionally, I have copies made of each interview so that the veterans and their families can have a record of their story.
Thousands of stories just like these are out there waiting to be told, waiting to be collected. In offering this course and in registering Durham Academy as a partner school in the project, I hope to build upon the legacy of service of these men and women and to preserve their stories for posterity. That my students have been deeply affected by their experiences with the veterans is without doubt. Anyone who wishes to know more about the Veterans History Project can access the web site at www.loc.gov/vets.
