Veterans Day Reflections
VJ Rawson
The following post may seem a bit personal and off-topic after an important week for our democracy. But I am feeling gratitude for the veterans in my life and the examples of their citizenship. If you’ll indulge me, I'd like to share some reflections about them.
My wife Martha and I are looking forward to having dinner tonight with our old friend John Tien, an Army veteran who led troops in the first Gulf War and the subsequent war in Iraq. In a Veterans Day post two years ago, I shared an interview with John on how “Post 9/11 Veterans Are Helping to Mend our Social Fabric.” John remains an active supporter of these next-generation veterans groups. He has also returned to the service of his country as Deputy Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, a job that is as tough as it is thankless. I am grateful we have someone of John’s caliber at the operational helm of this sprawling agency.
Earlier this week, we caught up with other longtime friends, Kathy and Mike Gaffney. Mike has enjoyed a successful career as a consultant, investor, and business leader. He has a calm steadfastness and good humor about him that I have always found appealing and reassuring. Mike served in the Navy as a submarine officer before he started his business career. I am likewise grateful for Mike’s service and the outlook and demeanor he brought to it.
As Martha and I talked with Mike and Kathy about their time in the Navy, I was reminded of something we have also come to recognize in conversations over the years with John and his wife Tracy. It is not just our veterans who have served their country. Through all the disruptive moves, new schools, long deployments, endless worries, and empty seats at the dinner table, their spouses and children have also.
In the field in which I now work, I have had the privilege of getting to know a number of veterans who have, in subsequent chapters of their lives, dedicated themselves to shoring up our democracy through their work in civil society. They include David French of the Dispatch, Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution, Jake Harriman of More Perfect Union, Ted Johnson of New America (whose compelling patriotism you may have already encountered here), Liz McNally of Schmidt Futures, and Dan Vallone of More in Common. While their contributions now do not rest primarily on their prior military service, it certainly enriches the power and effectiveness of their voices, and it underscores their dedication to our democracy.
I have also appreciated how two friends and former colleagues, Kat Kaufmann, a Partner at The Bridgespan Group, and Kathy Grant, Chief Information Officer at the Hewlett Foundation, veterans of the Navy and Air Force, respectively, bring their unique knacks for leadership to bear in their work. Bridgespan and Hewlett are influential institutions in civil society; they are better institutions for having the leavening perspectives of these veterans in their midst.
In my own family, I respect how my brother Mark and sister-in-law Karen began their careers as family practice physicians by tending to sailors, marines and their families as Navy doctors in Okinawa, Japan.
Then there is our dad, Pete, who enlisted in the Marines in 1958. He did so not because he was especially enthusiastic, but because he knew if he did not enlist he would be drafted at some point. He had just started up the farm he would end up working for the next 55 years, and he couldn’t afford to be away at basic training during planting or harvesting. The Marine Corps was the one branch of service that allowed enlistees to choose the time of their induction, so in October, after all the corn was picked, he went to Parris Island, South Carolina for boot camp. He was back home in time for planting the next spring, and was then able to finish up his remaining commitment part-time in the reserves.
Private Peter D. Stid had an uneventful experience as a Marine, and he rarely talked about it as we were growing up. But I was struck in doing an oral history with him last year how many details about his service had stayed with him more than six decades later. He acknowledged he wasn’t the most “squared away” Marine. At one point he got into all sorts of trouble with his drill instructor for calling his rifle a gun. But redeemed himself in his instructor’s eyes with his superior marksmanship. And he recalled a fun fact: one of his fellow enlistees in boot camp was Roberto Clemente, the great Pittsburgh Pirate and humanitarian, whom my dad remembered as friendly and unassuming–“you’d never have known he was a big league ball player!”
In recent years on Veterans Day, my thoughts have come to rest on my friend VJ Rawson (pictured at the top of this post). He commanded a platoon in the 101st Airborne engaged in some of the fiercest combat of the Vietnam War. VJ had planned a career in the Army, but he suffered wounds that forced him into medical retirement.
Over the next several decades, VJ worked instead as a civil servant for the state of Michigan and then as a masterful carver of holiday ornaments and decorations. Stephanie, VJ’s wife and business partner, painted his carvings with equal artistry. Their folk art, which they marketed under the name of The Whimsical Whittler, was a good business. And they had such fun, laughing and working side-by-side and entertaining friends who would stop by for a visit in their workshop, which was always redolent with smoke from VJ’s pipe.
On top of these day jobs, VJ volunteered for years as a statistician for the Mason High School football team (Go Bulldogs!). In that capacity, he also came to serve as a mentor and tireless booster for players on the team, helping dozens of callow boys (including yours truly) figure out how to become young men. He consistently and benevolently overestimated our potential, but in ways that helped us believe in ourselves in the right way.
VJ would have little truck with the superficial, “thank-you-for-your-service,” valorization of “the troops” and veterans that has paradoxically become prevalent in a society in which an increasingly smaller fraction of people have actually been in the military.
Or maybe it is not a paradox. I came of age in an era when roughly one of every two adult males was a veteran, and a healthy share of them combat veterans. People were thus inclined to look at the military realistically. It was a shared experience and set of institutions that, like most human endeavors, encompassed good, bad, and ugly elements.
However, the proportion of Americans who have experience in our now all-volunteer military has plummeted for five decades. The Census Bureau reckons that by 2030, only 10% of men and 1% of women will be veterans. The rest of us will thus need to get better at respecting veterans and their service without putting them or our armed forces on an undemocratic pedestal.
When it comes to holding the office of citizen, which we do in common, it is important to look each other squarely in the eye, as equals, and to find ways to contribute to the health of our communities, states, and country together. That is something we all can do, whether we are veterans or not, whether we are civil servants, doctors, farmers, consultants, nurses, CEOs, folk artists, think tankers, small business owners, big league ball players, etc.
VJ Rawson remains a model for me in this regard. This disposition was woven into how he conducted himself as a soldier, but also, and I bet he would say more importantly, as a friend and neighbor, and – though he would harrumph into his pipe at these fancy words – as a mentor and civic leader.
VJ has been on my mind each November 11 in recent years because of his untimely death in January 2015 due to prostate cancer. The presumptive cause was the Agent Orange that the U.S. military used to defoliate the mountains and valleys of Vietnam in which VJ and the soldiers he led had fought all those years ago. Thus forty-five years after VJ came home from war, its long arm caught up with him.
VJ continues to be missed, most of all by his widow Stephanie, our brave friend, who we will plan to drop by and see when we return to the farm in Michigan for Thanksgiving later this month. But he is also missed by the young (now older) men whose lives he illuminated and helped put on a better path. It is up to us to remember VJ, and to live up to the legacy of his citizenship.
