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Rob Wilson '71 tells high school students about emotional trauma associated with violence |
The students in general psychology at the High School of Science and Technology in Springfield, Mass., had just heard Vietnam veteran Glenn Santos recount being shot at the controls of his Huey helicopter, escaping death on Hill 425 only because he was thrown from the chopper as it crashed. The other 11 American soldiers on board were killed. Badly injured, Santos spent months in military hospitals. And what did he think then of the war protesters back home, a student asked. "I just figured they were ignorant and didn't know any better," Santos said seriously. On that note Robert Wilson '71 took the floor. "I was one of the protesters he was talking about," Wilson said, his grin telling students there would be no Jerry Springer-esque confrontation. "We're good friends. I went to school with his wife. A lot of people were not supporting the war. I was one of them." Thirty years ago Wilson was one of hundreds of Colby students involved in what was then known as "the peace movement." Wilson voted for the general strike at Colby when the U.S. invaded Cambodia. He joined the march to the Waterville Post Office. Now, as director of the Amherst, Mass.-based Veterans Education Project, Wilson works with veterans who spent those years involved in Vietnamese "pacification," not protest. The purpose isn't to renew debate over the Vietnam war but to deglamorize violence. Teenagers who have learned about war from television and violence from video games, who fight battles as gang members, may listen to someone who has spent months or years living what Wilson calls "the ultimate violence." "They listen to the vets for all the wrong reasons," Wilson said. "They have experienced the ultimate forms of violence that kids fantasize about. And then vets say, ‘It ain't that great.'" What might seem on the surface an unlikely match isn't really. Wilson graduated from Colby and did carpentry and skied. He got his master's degree in education, taught elementary school, worked in public relations and advertising. Then in the the mid-1980s he joined an effort to funnel humanitarian aid to El Salvador and Nicaragua. "I felt I was trying to support people who were caught in the middle like Vietnamese civilians were caught in the middle," Wilson said. He traveled to Central America with a humanitarian aid group from Massachusetts. The experience "reawakened my political consciousness that had been napping since I went to Colby," Wilson said. In Amherst, Wilson started volunteering for the fledgling Veterans Education Project and then took over the program. It has grown steadily since as school administrators, social workers and others hear of the impact that a soldier's story can have on a teenager who has turned a deaf ear to so-called experts. "Who would you rather listen to?" Wilson said. At Science and Technology High School, where a student was murdered in 1998, students listened as Santos, a special-education teacher in the Springfield schools, told of his assignment with the 101st Airborne in South Vietnam. His job was to perform "insertions and extractions" of soldiers, from U.S. Army infantry to Australian commandos, he said. One flight stands out in his mind, Santos said, because he had a single passenger: a dead American soldier who had been horribly disfigured. "I'm thinking, ‘This is somebody's brother. This is somebody's son," Santos said. "It made me sick. After that you shut down." He told students he still wonders how the United States could have lost the war. But other veterans said they questioned why the U.S. was in Vietnam at all. August Carbonella was drafted into the Army in 1968 from a working class neighborhood in New York City. After six months of combat he walked into his company commander's office and declared himself a conscientious objector. His commander said, "You can't quit the Army. Go get some rest." Only a sympathetic Army psychiatrist saved Carbonella from a court martial. Now an anthropologist, Carbonella said he felt Vietnam was a crucible for all of the tensions building back in the U.S. over race and class. "We knew we were the poor who were sent over there to be killed," Carbonella said. "The rich kids didn't go." But the working-class Americans who did go to Vietnam were confronted by poverty. George Williams, a retired New York City firefighter, told of watching Vietnamese orphans eating from Army garbage. Williams, an Army infantryman whose letter to his mother is included in the renowned anthology Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam, said he justified his part in the war by convincing himself he was securing a better future for South Vietnamese children, several of whom he nearly killed. He and another soldier had guard duty at a fire base one night, Williams said. They saw something moving in the darkness and called for flares to be dropped by parachute. As the area was illuminated they fired off a fusillade from their machine guns. When they ventured out to check for dead, they found two children, very much alive. "They were just trying to get the silk," Williams said. "The country was so poor the [parachute] silk they would use to make things they could sell. To get this one-yard piece of silk, they'd risk their lives." These real-life stories are a tough act to follow. But in the classroom that day Wilson talked about "mental armor," the shield we create to protect ourselves emotionally from war, family problems, violence on our city streets. "But we also find this armor screens out emotions like love, happiness, joy because you're filtering out the things around you," Wilson said, putting a GI helmet on a student. It wasn't a firefight, but the students were listening. Only one of 30 was asleep. Later that day, two veterans led a group discussion on domestic violence. The session was a success, as kids who were considered hard cases at the vocational school in Northhampton, Mass., opened up with stories of their home lives. Afterward, the group–four combat veterans and Wilson–gathered for coffee at a Northhampton diner. One veteran talked about being rebuffed by the peace movement after he came home from Vietnam. Another talked about putting his own children through a sort of boot camp, part of his reaction to his combat years. They talked about their conflicting emotions about the war. "A lot of it isn't because of the trauma," said Gordon Fletcher-Howell, a landscaper. "It's because of the quandary." But their own issues aside, the veterans said they think they have found a way to get through to kids. And every time they do that, they stand a chance of breaking the cycle of anger and violence. If it takes stories about a war fought before the teenagers were born, so be it. "The kids who are gang members can really relate to it," Wilson said. "They've been out on patrol in their neighborhoods." |
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