Out of the Footlocker

Let me be clear.  I am not a veteran.  I am an aging military dependent.

The veteran was my Dad, a career Air Force NCO drafted in July 1948 and finally, after more than 20 years as a ‘lifer’, retired in October 1968.

For almost 16 years, I played my part as a military dependent in a military family.  I followed my Dad from one stateside duty station to another and waited for him to return home from overseas duty stations and various TDYs.

My family moved frequently, and consequently I changed schools regularly.  As a military dependent, it was hard to make or keep friends as I was the “new kid in town.”  It was challenging to maintain a sense of community or continuity even within a military housing complex.  Military families, like mine, moved routinely and suddenly.  Life as a military dependent was unstable and impermanent.

Like my Dad, we were expected to follow orders.  My time as a military dependent was a sustained encounter with social, civic and political underdevelopment.

I attended schools in the civilian sector.  However, many of the rights contained in the language of the American Constitution that I heard about in civilian schools didn’t apply to us. My family’s fear of a blackmark on my Dad’s service record, which might compromise his next pay raise or rank or my military family being labelled as trouble makers or communists, effectively limited our ability to take seriously rights outlined in the Constitution.

In June 1967, my Dad received orders to transfer to a new duty station: Tan Son Knut Air Force Base in Saigon, South Vietnam.  He thought he would be killed in that war, so my military family would need to move to his adopted hometown of Wilmington, North Carolina.  It was the closest city to the farm in Brunswick Country, NC, where my Dad grew up.

When my family arrived in Wilmington in July 1967, finding a place to live and schools to attend were our priorities.  Soon my Dad was on his way to the war in South Vietnam.  In his absence, the family would be headed by a single parent, our Mom.  With her, my three siblings and me, we would wait, as we had done before, for my Dad to come home.

The first event in my life that later I would identify as social justice, was the fact of a Federal mandate ordering all public schools in Wilmington to desegregate.  Integration was set to begin at the start of the school year in August 1967.  I had no idea what the Federal mandate meant or what was social justice or why it was necessary or how integration in the public schools came about.  My sense of local history was missing in action.

Without a clue as to what was going on, I played along as I had done before as a military dependent.  I joined a local Boy Scout troop, participated in student government, found a part time job delivering newspapers, learned to play the clarinet, and of course, played basketball.

During that school year, I learned one pivotal fact:  Racial discrimination against black people was considered normal in Wilmington.

As an ‘outsider’ to Wilmington, I didn’t have the same perspective on white/black race relations.  I was not steeped in racist discourse or with lies about black people.  I had not lived where white and black people were continuing to live within a troubling history that began many years ago.

And so, in time, I found myself listening to black students on the basketball court or in the halls of the school or in student government voice their history of discrimination and injustice.

In October 1968, when my Dad retired from the Air Force, I started a life as a civilian.

Also in 1968, I learned that Wilmington had a long history of racial oppression and white supremacy but those words weren’t used in the white civilian community where I lived.  Moreover, the worst details of that history were kept a secret.  I didn’t know until the early 1990s, long after I had moved away from Wilmington, that in 1898, a white mob of insurrectionists overthrew a democratically elected City government in Wilmington.

The Wilmington insurrection of 1898, also known as the Wilmington massacre of 1898, was a coup d’état and a massacre that was carried out by white supremacists on November 10, 1898. The attack brought to a sudden end a legitimately elected Fusionist biracial government.  Substantial property damage occurred in the black community and a white mob killed an estimated 60 to 300 black people. The white press in Wilmington originally described the event as a race riot perpetrated by a mob of black people – which was a lie.

Between 1969 and 1971, a civil rights reform effort took root in the black community and soon arrived at the high school I was attending.  Ideas about social change, social justice and equality were not shared by all students.  Eventually, armed police roamed the halls of my high school to maintain order. In this turbulent context, I felt an impulse to do something.  I spoke up in student government.  I refused to play ‘Dixie’ in student band class.  I helped start two Boy Scout troops in the black community.  I listened to the complaints of black people while playing basketball.

At some point, a white backlash emerged to discredit and dissolve the civil rights reform effort in the black community.  The routine threat of violence from the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) lurked in the shadows.  A group called the Rights of White People (ROWP) held rallies in town.  And eventually, the white response included producing false charges and the wrongful charges of arson and conspiracy and the conviction of nine men and a women who became known as the Wilmington 10.

Unlawfully convicted in October 1972 of arson, shooting at firefighters and conspiracy, most of The Ten were sentenced to 29 years in prison.  All ten served nearly a decade in jail before an appeal won their release.  In 1980, in the case Chavis v. State of North Carolina, the convictions were overturned by a federal appeals court on the grounds that the prosecutor and the trial judge had both violated the defendants’ constitutional rights.

In early 1971, I was required by law to register with the Selective Service System. I was classified 1-A shortly thereafter.  By that time, most people I knew who were my age, even in conservative Wilmington, had doubts about America’s involvement in the Vietnam war.

When I entered the university in September 1971, voting rights, civil rights, women’s rights, gay and lesbian rights, tenant rights, black liberation, and in particular, the Vietnam War, were front and center.  I encountered those social movements not only as an ex-military dependent but as someone who was willing to struggle to comprehend the issues of the day.

Soldiers returning from Vietnam were more than willing to talk about their experiences than my Dad.  Their stories helped me discern a larger picture of the role of the United States military in the world.

But I owed my start as an activist to the black community in Wilmington for opening my eyes to the serious and unresolved issues in America.

Although my involvement in the struggle for peace and justice continued for the next 50 years, there was a lingering issue that I kept quiet about:  My experience of nearly 16 years as a military dependent.  During those same 50 years, as I learned more about the sordid history of the United States military, the more I remained silent about my experiences in a military family.

Speaking out about my life as a military dependent was difficult for me due to my inability to reconcile that life with my commitment to peace and social justice issues.

For almost 16 years, I was on the US military’s ‘dependent’s payroll’ roster.  I was deeply aware that Uncle Sam had paid for most of my upbringing, my survival and my existence for so many years.  And it wasn’t just me, but my entire family that received a monthly government check for our services.  The contradictions seemed insurmountable.

After I retired in 2016, I started reading media produced by Veterans for Peace (VFP) and the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW).  I learned that these groups were making the connections between peace and social justice and the United States military.  If they could speak out about the issues, as veterans, like my Dad, why couldn’t I?

A light bulb suddenly turned on!

In 2018, I finally came out of the footlocker as a military dependent for peace and justice.

And now that I am out of the footlocker, I use my voice to blow the cover off the propaganda and lies peddled by my Uncle Sam to me and my family.

There was the issue of my Dad’s rank.  For years, my Mom would tell us that my Dad was up for another stripe.  She could have only heard this information from my Dad.  Any change in rank would mean additional income that could help my military family make ends meet.  Instead, he remained at the rank of Technical Sergeant for 12 years (1954-1966).  I have his Air Force military service records which include his performance evaluations, which placed him in the top 10 percent of the enlisted personnel in his unit.  There is even a Performance Evaluation completed during his service in South Vietnam war in March 1968.  But the most profound lie perpetrated by my Uncle Sam were the ‘reasons’ my Dad was sent to the war in Vietnam.  It was the defining moment in my life as a military dependent.  My Dad could have died there.

Thanks to the returning veterans and the publication of the Pentagon Papers, I learned that Uncle Sam and the Pentagon had lied about the role of the United States Armed Forces in the Vietnam war.  The Gulf of Tonkin incident, the basis for US intervention into Vietnam, was a fiction. The government in South Vietnam was not an aspiring democratic government in need of our Nation’s support but a military dictatorship, representing only a small fraction of the citizens of the country. I also learned the United States had secretly supported the French government’s effort to re-established its colonial territory in Vietnam and the later the US obstructed elections in South Vietnam which would have resulted in a victory for Nationalists and Communists.

Since 2018, I have been telling my story of how Uncle Sam shamelessly lied to my family and  violated our trust.

The one thing I have learned is that it feels good to break the silence about personal issues.  I am finally doing that.