Shedding My Shame

My discharge date approached with the inevitability of calendars, that slow countdown from two years to one year to months to weeks to days. I had served my time, typed my forms, maintained my desk, participated in the great institutional machinery of the Army without particularly distinguishing myself or causing any notable problems.

On the day of discharge, I went to a building and waited. Names were called alphabetically, and eventually they called mine. I went into a small room where stood a sergeant all resplendent in dress uniform—the kind of uniform you wear for ceremonies and official occasions, pressed and starched and decorated with ribbons that announce service and achievement.

He looked at me and asked: "You're Mister Thompson?"

Not Specialist Thompson. Not Specialist-Four Thompson. Not any military rank or designation.

Mister Thompson.

I was a civilian again, or about to be, and he was acknowledging this with a formality that military culture reserves for people who are not subject to military authority.

I said yes.

He extended his hand and took mine—another formality, another acknowledgment that we were now meeting as equals rather than as superior and subordinate.

And then he said, while still holding my hand: "On behalf of the President of the United States, the people of the United States, and myself, I want to thank you for your service to our country."

I could hardly believe it. I had come full circle. From Greeting to goodbye.

I was being given recognition for being there. Validation for the time I didn't want to spend in the Army, for the service I had been drafted into against my will, for the two years that had been taken from my life and used for purposes I hadn't chosen.

The sergeant released my hand. He handed me my discharge papers—DD-214, the official proof that I had served and was now free. I took them, thanked him, and walked out of that building into sunshine.

I was elated. Free. The two years were done. The draft had taken its time from me and now I was being released back into civilian life, back into my own choices, back into a future I could control again.

The 650 Yamaha was parked where I'd left it that morning. The same bike I'd ridden through Missouri snow and Ozark curves, the bike that had carried me through two years of Army service, now waiting to carry me out of it. I walked toward it, discharge papers in hand, feeling the weight lift with every step.

I swung my leg over, settled onto the seat, reached for the key.

And that's when it hit me.

I hadn't done what the Army had trained me to do. I hadn't gone to Vietnam even though I had asked. I hadn't tested myself in combat. I hadn't faced the thing that all the training, all the preparation, all the institutional machinery was supposedly designed to prepare me for.

The elation was still there, but now something else mixed with it—something uncomfortable, something that didn't fit with the freedom I was supposed to be feeling. I sat on the bike, key in the ignition, not starting it yet.

I felt... incomplete. Inadequate. Like I had been given credit for something I hadn't earned, thanked for a service I hadn't fully performed. The sergeant's words—"thank you for your service"—echoed differently now. What service? I had typed forms. I had maintained a desk. I had ridden motorcycles on weekends while other men went to the place I'd been trained to go.

I started the bike. The engine came to life, that familiar rumble. Freedom. Escape. The road waiting. Everything I'd wanted for two years.

But something nagged at me as I rode away from that building and out the front gate for the last time; some small voice that said I had gotten away with something, that I had been let off easy, that I didn't deserve the recognition I had received.

I didn't fully understand the emotion I was experiencing. I didn't have words for it yet, didn't know why discharge—which should have been pure relief—carried this small shadow of guilt.

I wouldn't fully understand for another twenty years.

I was attending a four-week in-house drug and alcohol rehab at the VA clinic in Vancouver, Washington. This is another story entirely, one that involves the long aftermath of choices and consequences, but it's relevant here because of what happened one day when a bunch of us were sitting in a room just talking.

There were maybe eight of us that afternoon—guys from different wars, different branches, different decades of service. The counselor had left us alone for a while, and the conversation had drifted the way it does when veterans get comfortable with each other. Someone told a story about a patrol. Someone else told a story about coming home. Small stories, specific stories, the kind that don't make sense to anyone who wasn't there.

Then Jerry spoke up. Jerry was maybe forty, thin, with the kind of nervousness that came from trying to hold too much inside for too long. He'd been in Germany in the early seventies, drafted same as me.

"I feel like shit about it," he said, interrupting the natural pause in conversation. "I really do."

"About what?" someone asked.

"I played trombone in an Army band. In Germany. While guys were dying in Vietnam." He said it like a confession, like he'd been carrying it around and couldn't hold it anymore. "I got lucky with my assignment, and I feel like... like I didn't do what I was supposed to do. Like I got out of something."

The room got quiet.

I felt something shift in my chest. That familiar weight I'd been carrying since my discharge day, the one I'd never been able to name.

One of the combat vets—a guy named Martinez who'd done two tours in the shit and had shrapnel scars on his neck—leaned forward.

"Jerry," he said, his voice gentle but firm. "Let me tell you something. I'm glad you didn't go."

Jerry looked up, surprised.

"I mean it," Martinez continued. "That place was a fucking nightmare. People died for no good reason. Good men. Better men than me. And you know what? I'm glad you weren't one of them. I'm glad you're sitting here. I'm glad you got to play your goddamn trombone."

Another vet, older guy who'd been in country in '68, nodded. "You went where they sent you. That's what soldiers do. You don't get to pick. They needed a trombone player, they got one. They needed an infantryman, they got one. Neither of us had a choice."

"But—" Jerry started.

"No buts," Martinez said. "You served. You put on the uniform, you did what they told you, you got out honorably. That's your service. Don't let anybody—including yourself—tell you it doesn't count."

I realized I had tears running down my face. I hadn't made a sound, hadn't moved, but they were there.

Martinez looked at me. "You too?"

I nodded. Couldn't speak yet.

"What'd you do?"

"Clerk," I managed. "Fort Leonard Wood. Typed forms. Never left Missouri."

"And you've been carrying this shit around thinking you didn't do enough."

It wasn't a question.

"Yeah."

He stood up, walked over to me, put his hand on my shoulder. "Brother, I wish every man I served with had gotten what you got—to type forms and go home in one piece. I wish every single one of them had been that lucky. You got nothing to feel guilty about."

The older vet spoke up again. "We served. All of us. Some of us got sent to hell, some didn't. That wasn't up to us. That was just... that was just how it went."

Jerry was crying now too. So was another guy across the room who hadn't said anything but whose face showed he understood exactly what we were talking about.

Martinez pulled me up and hugged me. Actually hugged me, hard, the way men hug when words aren't enough. Then he went to Jerry and did the same.

"You served," he said to both of us. "Don't ever forget that. And don't you dare feel guilty for surviving."

We all sat there for a while after that, not saying much. The counselor came back eventually and asked if we were okay. We said we were. And for the first time in twenty years, I actually was.

That weight I'd been carrying since my discharge day? It didn't disappear. But it got lighter. Light enough to carry without it crushing me.

Light enough to finally understand: I wore the uniform and went where the Army told me to go and did what the Army told me to do. I hadn't failed. I'd just survived.

And that was allowed.

But that was decades away. On that beautiful spring morning in 1972, all I knew was freedom.