On April 30, 1975, one month after Gary and Lolly were married, South Vietnam fell to the Communists. The war was over, although its conclusion hadn’t gone exactly as planned by the allies.
The news of the fall brought back memories of war for Gary—desperate feelings, ghosts of death and darkness. He thought of all the lives given to provide freedom for the people of South Vietnam. He thought of the Montagnards, the people he’d grown to love so dearly. The NVA had vowed to wipe them out. What would happen to the Montagnards now?
Gary had considered returning to the Montagnard tribes someday, perhaps as a medical missionary, but there was no way now he would be allowed back in the country. He knew he needed more schooling and began a program at the University of New Hampshire, majoring in sociology and psychology. It seemed the logical conclusion to his seminary studies. He was interested in what made people tick.
The president of the Medal of Honor Society, Charles “Mac” MacGillivary, asked Gary to become chaplain of the society. Gary’s task would be to visit VA hospitals around New England to encourage the veterans and help with any spiritual needs. Gary took a deep breath. In many ways his life was still a mess, but he sensed that saying yes was part of God’s larger plan.
To help with credentialing as a chaplain and at President White’s urging, Gary became ordained through the United Baptist Fellowship of New England. In addition to his duties as chaplain of the society, Gary began another job of caring for the spiritual needs of prisoners throughout Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont.
Life seemed to be falling into place. Only a few months earlier, Gary had been living in a cave. Now he was married with a two-year-old daughter. He was a full-time college student again, an ordained minister, and a chaplain working in VA hospitals and prisons.
His days were full. Evenings were spent with Lolly and Stephanie. They rode bikes around Durham. They took car trips to the coast of southern Maine to tour lighthouses, explore beaches, and sit by the ocean. Gary loved taking little Stephanie by the hand and helping her look for starfish, crabs, and other marine life that inhabited the tide pools.
A son, Stephen, was soon born to Gary and Lolly. As the mountains had been, home life became Gary’s new sanctuary.
But the way forward would not be easy.
Gary graduated magna cum laude from the University of New Hampshire and began looking into master’s degree programs. He and Lolly and the children soon moved to Norway, Maine, to help with a pastoral ministry that Buck was beginning there. Money was tight, so Gary bought a twenty-acre hunting camp for $10,000 flat. A tumbledown shack stood on the property, but to reach it, you needed to ford a creek. Springtime runoff could sometimes make the creek impassible. The shack had no electricity, running water, or indoor plumbing. Heat came from a dilapidated woodburning stove.
“We’re living here?” Lolly asked when Gary showed her the land, his chin held high. A slew of questions followed: “How do we get water? How will I do laundry out here? How can we cross the creek during spring runoff?”
Gary scratched behind his ear and thought, Those are good questions. He hadn’t worked out all the details yet but was full of vision. They’d install insulation and dig a well. They’d get power out to the camp and install plumbing. Those were long-term projects. In the meantime they’d live like he’d lived with the Montagnards. Dig a latrine. Carry water from the creek. Boil it on the stove. They’d make things work. After all—they had twenty acres!
Lolly put on a brave face and tried to make the shack a home. She hung their lantern on a beam inside the shack and called it their “chandelier.” She fixed Hamburger Helper on their tiny camping stove because the woodburning stove couldn’t maintain a steady temperature. More than once she stood on the kitchen table with a broom to swing at mice that scampered along the rafters. Stephen dozed in his slatted crib, and Stephanie slept in a loft over the kitchen.
The Maine winter hit hard. During the day, water dripped through cracks in the roof, and when darkness fell, ice coated the inside of the cabin walls. One frigid January morning Gary watched as Lolly fixed some soup for Stephen and sat him by the stove to eat. He was still in his snowsuit, and his little hands shook so badly from cold he could hardly eat.
Gary realized the shack was no place to raise a family. They needed to move, but money was scarce, and how do you sell a shack in winter?
Complicating matters, the PTSD that had plagued Gary since the war now attacked with a vengeance. Some of Gary’s behaviors could be explained. Others couldn’t.
Once when Gary was repairing the chimney, he cut himself on a sharp edge of stovepipe and lost his temper. He beat the piping with a hammer until it ended up a crumpled mess on the floor.
Another time, Lolly bought Stephanie a Holly Hobbie lunchbox for school. Stephanie loved her lunchbox, but Gary ordered Lolly to take it back to the store. “You can use a paper bag,” Gary told Stephanie. “The Montagnard kids played with empty bullet shells and scraps of metal.” His voice was far too stern.
Without telling Lolly where he was going or why, Gary would often disappear into the woods for hours. One morning in early spring, Gary disappeared and Lolly felt a distinct urging to look for him. She hiked through the woods and spotted Gary in the distance, a glazed look on his face. He held a machete in one hand and a large snake in the other. Lolly knew Gary hated snakes. He was living through some sort of hallucination, and she considered approaching to ask what was wrong, but she felt another distinct urging not to do so but to keep her distance and pray for him.
When Gary came home, he had no memory of the incident.
In time, they moved to Rochester to care for Gary’s mom. A third child, Sarah, was born. Gary enrolled in a master’s program in counseling at nearby SUNY Brockport. A constant question, surprisingly, was how to handle the Medal of Honor—and all the gravitas it entailed. It felt like a blessing but also a burden.
Shortly after moving, Lolly was arranging furniture and hanging pictures. Gary scanned the room and saw she’d taken his framed medal citation and hung it on the wall. “No” was all he said. He took it down and placed it back in storage. He couldn’t even broach the subject yet.
Coursework in the graduate program was designed to help students peer under the surface and find the honest truths of their inner lives. One professor encouraged his students to “discover the bear in your cave,” an expression Gary found particularly ironic, although he wasn’t encouraged by what he found. A whole pack of bears growled around in his cave—Angry Bear. Sullen Bear. Dismayed Bear.
Whenever the going got tough, Gary withdrew, keeping people at arm’s length, deliberately separating himself from anybody around him—including his family, the people who loved him most. He knew he needed to confront his bears.
During class counseling sessions, every interaction, action, and reaction was open to examination. The professor, Dr. Jeremiah “Jerry” Donigian, encouraged the class to challenge simplistic answers, dig for honesty, develop real relationships, and confront if necessary. When it came time for Gary to be counseled by fellow students, he shared a bit about his life with the group, then waited for their responses. There were about fifteen students in the group. A student confronted Gary for not going deep enough. Another agreed, insisting Gary was sharing only safe information. They waited for him to share more.
A sheen of sweat broke on Gary’s forehead. He tried digging deeper, but whatever he said sounded stilted. Phony. Another student charged him with trying to hide something, and still another accused Gary of not being a contributing member of the group.
Gary was agitated now, rubbing the back of his neck. He wanted to jump up and leave. “How can you ever expect to help anyone if you’re not even able to help yourself?” a student asked, his voice demanding. “Come on, Gary. You’ve got to open up. We’re here for you, but you won’t trust us. What do you even want from us?”
“What do I want from you?” Gary asked, then exploded. Words spewed from his mouth, flowing from a place of deep hurt and rage. “I want you to hurt! That’s what I want! I want you to hurt the same way I hurt. I want you to hold a friend in your arms and watch him die and not be able to do anything about it. I want you to hate so bad you chase an enemy through the forest—an enemy who’s just killed your friends—and you hate him so much you wouldn’t think twice about killing him if you caught him. I want you haunted by guilt and fear. I want you to see images so strong and lifelike you’re afraid to close your eyes at night. I want you to have hallucinations of horror during the day. That’s what I want! I want you to hurt like I hurt so I can see how you deal with it. I just want to feel normal so I can go on living. That’s what I want!”
The group fell silent. It felt like hours before anybody moved. A side door opened, and the professor emerged from an adjoining room where he’d been watching the session with the other half of the class.
“Congratulations, Gary,” the professor said. “You just reached the truth.”
With the door to his inner life now unlocked, Gary began private counseling sessions with Dr. Donigian.
“Not long ago I was awarded the Medal of Honor,” Gary said to him one afternoon during a session. He looked into his professor’s eyes for a reaction. Gary had told a few people about the medal, but this telling felt different. Gary added, “It’s a part of me that I don’t know if I can accept. A part of me I don’t understand. Can you help me?”
The professor nodded. “That must be a lot of pressure.”
That one line communicated much. Gary knew he’d found someone who could help him understand why he still hurt, why his emotions were paralyzed. Why he couldn’t forget. “Mostly I’ve just been trying to forget the war,” Gary said. “But it isn’t working too well.”
“That’s because forgetting isn’t the answer,” the professor said. “If you forget a hurt, that doesn’t mean you’ve healed from it. To get better, you need to find a trusted friend to go with you into the depths of your hurt and grieve with you. You need someone who will endure the pain with you, who will stay with you so you don’t have to go through it alone. You need someone to love you through the hurt, because with love you heal and with healing comes the ability to take those hurts and make them a part of you.”
The professor paused. “You will never forget the hurts, Gary,” he continued, “but you can draw strength from where you’ve been. With this strength you can comfort others. And as you comfort others, you will heal more.”
Gary absorbed those words—and the force behind them. Over the next few months, as they continued to meet regularly, the professor became a trusted friend who listened to Gary and entered the world of hurt with him. Gary felt his stress lessening. His chest felt far less tight. His shoulders felt looser. The pain in the small of his back was gone. Lolly noticed Gary was more relaxed at home too.
One evening as Gary drove away from a session, he began thinking about Dak Seang. He wasn’t forgetting the terrible times he’d experienced there, but he was also able to remember the joy he’d encountered in the village. He was able to think again of Deo and his sacrifice, and Gary’s emotions weren’t centered only on grief this time—he felt grateful too. Deo had given so much in order that Gary could live.
Gary felt fresh life welling up within him, a powerful flood, something he had not felt in years. His eyes grew blurry, but this time the blurriness wasn’t from rage or dismay. Overwhelmed, he pulled his car over just in time. His insides erupted and he burst.
It took a moment for Gary to realize what was happening; this hadn’t occurred in years. The last time was when Chom’s daughter died.
He was crying.
In another troubled country—Iran—fifty-two Americans had been taken hostage and held in the US embassy for 444 days. Their release occurred minutes after Ronald Reagan’s inauguration as president on January 20, 1981.
As a Medal of Honor recipient, Gary had been invited to the inauguration. He was seated in the front of the crowd when he heard the news. Gary was happy for the hostages and noted the positive spirit of patriotism the release generated within the crowd.
Yet when he returned to Rochester, he started comparing notes with others at the Veterans Outreach Center (VOC). Some veterans wondered why the hostages were receiving such a hearty “Welcome home” from America when Vietnam veterans hadn’t received anything close to the same. For these veterans, the hostages’ warm welcome only incited painful memories.
Gary and Tom Gray, director of the VOC, decided to do something positive. They planned a welcome home rally for soldiers to be held at the focal point of Rochester, a downtown monument known as the Liberty Pole. Some twenty-seven thousand citizens of Rochester had served in Vietnam between 1965 and 1973, and more than 225 had died in the conflict. The Vietnam veterans and their family members were invited to the rally, along with politicians, community members and leaders, and the press.
Tom asked Gary to speak at the rally—and to wear his medal. Gary balked. He hadn’t worn his medal since President Nixon had presented it to him seven years earlier. But Tom’s eyes became like steel, and he said, “Don’t wear it for you. Wear it for us—for all the veterans who served.” His words carried much weight.
Early on the day of the rally, Gary took his medal out of storage, dusted it off, and hung it around his neck, although it still didn’t feel as if it was fully a part of him. He affixed his Special Forces patch to his lapel; he felt better about that than the medal.
On a cold, windy morning, about three hundred people turned out for the rally. Some veterans came in their uniforms. Some came in wheelchairs. Gary took the microphone and spoke words of welcome, healing, and honor. The crowd cheered. Many veterans in the crowd said afterward that the rally helped. They felt at last as if they’d been welcomed home too.