The author has collected and shaped interviews into a book of true stories of the stunning journeys that ordinary people have made from pain to redemption. Unwasted Pain, the subtitle of the book, refers to the process of facing and distilling pain from such difficulties as abuse, hatred, crime, war and evil-and finding more peace and equilibrium (sometimes more than there was before). Besides the twenty-one stories that comprise the chapters of this book, Mary Ciofalo has also written four essays and an introduction that include more vignettes of redemption stories along with her observations about the nature and activation of redemption. She tells us what she has gleaned while compiling this book. She also includes the view of an Advaitan Swami and an Episcopalian minister, as well as those of a former warden of San Quentin Prison. This book is inspirational; and it has the potential to expand one's thinking to include the possibility of redemption to both the harmed and the harmer-in situations where one might not even conceive of mercy or forgiveness or the possibility of redemtption.

Redemption Stories

Unwasted PainBy Mary Ciofalo

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2009 Mary Ciofalo
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4490-5152-5

Contents

INTRODUCTION................................................................ixChapter 1: LEE THORN........................................................1Chapter 2: JACK MCCLOSKEY...................................................21Chapter 3: JACKIE...........................................................29Chapter 4: SI LEWEN.........................................................39Chapter 5: MARIETTA JAEGER..................................................44Chapter 6: ESSAY ON UNWASTED PAIN...........................................60Chapter 7: ZAHER............................................................65Chapter 8: GEORGE WHITE.....................................................75Chapter 9: DAVID MAGRIS and DENNIS TAPP.....................................84Chapter 10: ARCHIE..........................................................104Chapter 11: CECILIA.........................................................109Chapter 12: ESSAY ON CRIME AND REDEMPTION...................................115Chapter 13: JOHN McNEILL....................................................122Chapter 14: MARIANNE DUDDY..................................................130Chapter 15: SHARON..........................................................138Chapter 16: RUTH, HANNAH AND OLIVER.........................................147Chapter 17: GUNTHER WIELAND.................................................155Chapter 18: ESSAY ON JUDGMENT, PERFECTION AND EXCLUSION.....................165Chapter 19: SAHRA AND SCOTT.................................................169Chapter 20: TONII...........................................................182Chapter 21: CHRISTINA.......................................................194Chapter 22:RIVKA AND ANNA ROSE..............................................200Chapter 23: ANNIE...........................................................208Chapter 24 THE REDEMPTION OF THE TOWN OF BURLEY, IDAHO......................216Chapter 25: ESSAY ON SPIRITUALITY AND GRACE.................................224

Chapter One

"A vision without a task is but a dream. A task without a vision is drudgery. A vision and a task is the hope of the world. (Inscription in a church in Essex, England)

LEE THORN 1995

I met Lee Thorn in a serendipitous way. I saw a piece of torn paper on the sidewalk and for some unknown reason I picked it up. The paper advertised classes given by Mr. Lee Thorn on the spiritual aspects of finance. What hooked me was a two-sentence write up about Lee that mentioned redemption from his involvement in the Vietnam War. I looked him up; he agreed to be interviewed. We became friends and I joined him in producing and participating in Reconciliation is the Opposite of War, a presentation of improbable pairs (people on opposing sides of wars who had reconciled). I've stayed in touch with Lee and his work and followed the developments that have moved outward from his first redemptive actions. I've presented his story in three parts showing the global effects of Lee's changes over time.

Lee spent the first twelve years of his life in Kansas City, Missouri. As a white kid he lived in a segregated community and went to a segregated school. By the time he was six he learned about racism in a way that affected how he felt about injustice for the rest of his life. His mother had a black maid. This woman brought her six-year-old niece, whom she was raising, to work. The girl and Lee would play together. As long as they played in the house, his mother didn't seem to mind. One day Lee took the girl across the street to the schoolyard to teach her how to ride his bike. That night his parents berated him. They said he had done a terrible thing by playing with this black girl in public. They took him for a drive through what they called nigger town. "See all those yards? See how these people live?" Lee said this lesson broke his heart. "I just bawled. I couldn't believe that they talked that way about people, especially since it didn't fit with the values I was being taught in church every Sunday. From then on I fixated on justice, particularly racial justice. When I came back from Vietnam I focused on the same thing-justice. I dealt with the losses resulting from the war the same way I had with my childhood ones."

Lee was an unhappy child. He didn't feel he fit in with his family, and by the time he was twelve he barely spoke to them. After he finished high school he enrolled at UC Berkeley and majored in premed. Then he began abusing alcohol. When he stopped showing up for classes and received straight F's that semester, he left school. Since he'd lost his college deferment by flunking out, he was automatically slated to be drafted into the army. He pre-empted the draft by enlisting in a two-year program in the navy reserves.

Lee's bad attitude kept getting him into trouble. He finally got into enough of it to be pulled out of training school and reassigned to an aircraft carrier operating off the coast of Vietnam. Lee said, "At the time I wasn't anti-war; I was just being a jerk. It was 1966 and I wasn't saying the war was bad, I was just saying I didn't like the navy." Lee was assigned as a clerk in the ship's ready room. He was the communications person between the pilots and the rest of the ship, so he was the one who broke the news whenever one of the pilots in his squadron was killed.

His punishment for continual bad behavior was an assignment, without training, to the emergency bomb-loading crew. The flight deck of an aircraft carrier is the most dangerous place per square yard of any location in most wars. Soldiers can be blown off, badly burned, or seriously injured in other ways. Lee saw plenty of horror on that carrier deck. He was loading bombs when an incoming plane missed the landing deck and crashed into the water. He watched the pilots drown when their canopy wouldn't open. He saw a man he knew get encircled in a ship line that suddenly tightened and cut him in half. During the time he worked the ready room, the ship's crew lost three people and a full complement of bombers. One of Lee's friends was a pilot who was forced to eject in the Gulf of Tonkin, and Lee was on the radio when it happened. His friend got caught in his parachute cords-"shroud lines" in Navy lingo-and drowned. After that Lee didn't want to get close to anyone anymore.

The turning point for him, however, was the bombing of Haiphong. Every available American plane in Thailand, South Vietnam, Guam, and on the ocean carriers was used to destroy the oil depot and refinery in the large port city of Haiphong in North Vietnam. It was the first time the U.S. military had targeted a city for such a large operation. Lee loaded bombs for the mission. Afterwards he ran the projector that showed the pilots the top-secret films of the bombing runs.

"I remember feeling utterly shocked. I feel my body numbing now as I try to talk about it. Two things struck me at once. One was the fact that only one out of ten bombs was hitting the refinery; the rest were hitting homes and other businesses. The second was the firestorms. The refinery was full of huge storage tanks of gasoline and fuel oil. The first explosion shaped itself like the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb. The other bombs being dropped all around that first explosion created a wave of fire that whooshed away from the refinery and outward through the city." In the resultant firestorm, the air caught on fire. Any civilians near the epicenter burned to death. Those further away suffocated when the oxygen was instantaneously sucked out of their lungs.

Before Lee saw the film of the bombing of Haiphong he had been able to feel that the U.S. government's role in the war in Vietnam was necessary. He could believe that our forces were protecting lives, and that the bombings would help to shorten the war. Watching the firestorming of Haiphong changed Lee's mind. "What we were doing was on a scale and with an intensity that had never been seen before in the history of mankind. Even if we were right to do it, it was still an evil. Evil is any abstraction that enables you to look at someone and not see the person, not see his or her essence. In the military you're trained to do that. When you do it on the scale that we did it in Vietnam, and if you're able to see it ... it's just too much. When you see what you are doing, then you cannot deny your participation in evil. To be evil you don't have to kill, you just have to not see. It's about not being present, not being able to form relationships to what exists. The people who dropped those bombs were not necessarily evil people; they were just doing evil things at that moment. That's where people got very confused about Vietnam veterans. They knew that evil things were going on in Vietnam. They could not believe that people like themselves could do evil things. They had never found themselves in that position. When I was participating with the dropping of those bombs, I felt like another Hitler. I understood that. It was very difficult for me to realize that I had gotten to that place because I had spent my time in the military denying it. Most people that I was with seemed to be able to do what they were told and separate themselves from what they were doing. I couldn't do that."

Lee named two evils that he saw. One was killing the people and the other was killing the land. He watched post-bomb-run movies of some areas, particularly the Plain of Jars in Laos, so pockmarked with bomb craters that the once-fertile land, now denuded, looked as barren as the surface of the moon.

Now Lee was changed; he was actively against the war. He found other people on his ship who felt the same way. Two months after the Haiphong fire bombing, Lee's ship returned to the U.S. and his tour was over. He had yet to discover the full extent of the damage he had sustained, but he did know that he was extremely angry and he felt used.

Two weeks after he was discharged in September of 1966, Lee was back on the Berkeley campus. Within six months he was organizing, along with other disillusioned and angry vets. The first major meeting of Vietnam Veterans Against the War on the West Coast was at Lee's house. By the time Lee left the VVAW in 1974, the West Coast membership had grown from five individuals to thirty thousand members. The VVAW organized thousands of people, and produced numerous events, protests, and marches. Lee worked with active duty personnel in every branch of the military. He assisted the man who organized graduates of one of the U.S. military academies. Lee and his friends also publicized some of the covert government operations that they got wind of. For example, they arranged the press conference that broke the news of the CIA's involvement in the heroin market in Laos and Vietnam.

By 1972 every military unit of any size in Vietnam had an insurrection-people with anti-war beliefs working together to sabotage the war effort from the inside. At one point 65,000 people belonged to the VVAW. That's veterans against the war!-a remarkable figure considering that the organization had been started by an extremely loose, almost anarchic network of angry and frustrated individuals whose initial intention was to try to support each other in the hostile homeland environment.

The anti-war resistance was a heart-felt movement that actually succeeded. Lee said that those in the movement didn't realize how successful their efforts were partly because of the drug and alcohol abuse by many participants, and partly because they didn't feel fully effective because their definition of success was to get all U.S. soldiers out of Vietnam. Lee said, "In order to do that work with that intensity, with that amount of energy and emotion and strength and community and brains, we worked with a crazy kind of fervor. There were a lot of people just like me doing it, and all of us were pretty nuts. You simply can't maintain that energy for a long time. You can do it for a couple of years when you are young."

For Lee redemption was partly about guilt for what he'd done, but it was also more than that. "I wanted that war to bloody end, because it hurt too much. It was like the racism in my childhood; the organizing gave me a place to put all my rage and use it constructively instead of just destroying myself or somebody else."

In the summer of 1972 during the Republican Convention in Florida where Nixon was renominated, the VVAW staged "The Last Patrol". Convoys of Vietnam veterans from all parts of the country converged in Miami. They were trained in military maneuvers, and most of the local police along the convoy routes left them alone. Every time a convoy traveled to a military base on the East Coast, the guards would open the gates and the convoy would be applauded from the barracks as they drove through. The presence of "The Last Patrol" was felt at the Republican Convention.

The VVAW was one of the most revolutionary groups in the country. They instigated mutiny in Vietnam and in virtually every military base located in the United States. The government was threatened by them. They were mentioned in the Watergate tapes, and Nixon himself participated in the repressive measures the government took against their organization.

The VVAW held "Winter Soldier Investigations" throughout the country. At these investigations, vets spoke out about what they had witnessed or participated in or initiated in Vietnam. "I dropped this person out of this airplane." "I did this kind of torture." "We bombed this place." "We shot these women." ... "these children." Lee said that a lot of the men who testified would have welcomed being prosecuted as war criminals because it would have publicized a lot of suppressed information. The VVAW got some publicity for the first Winter Soldier Investigation in Detroit, but they had a hard time getting more because most people simply couldn't believe what these ex-soldiers were saying.

VVAW members knew too much, way too much, not just about the war but about other reprehensible government operations as well. The VVAW was active in Wounded Knee when federal Marshals got involved in a standoff with Native Americans; they were active in Cairo, Illinois when poor people in public housing projects barricaded themselves to protest the poor conditions the city government subjected them to. Because their reputation, well deserved, was that VVAW members were crazy, policemen in many cities wouldn't tangle with them. Most of the Native American protestors at Wounded Knee were vets, and a lot of white and black vets backed them up. Lee said, "The stories have not come out yet. Sooner or later they are going to. Nixon was masterful in somehow managing to keep the country together in those days, because we were very close to civil war."

Six months after he started organizing through the VVAW, in November of 1970, Lee met Van-just out of the service and very troubled. Six months later, Van suicided. It was one thing to be anxious about the soldiers who were still fighting overseas, but it was a shock to have someone who had made it back home kill himself. It taught Lee and his friends that the war was going on here, as well as in Vietnam. They knew that many vets had problems. Virtually every week they were bailing somebody who had done something stupid out of jail, talking somebody down off a drug overdose, or getting involved in other life-threatening situations. Lee said that this period was incredibly intense because at the same time they were doing very effective political work, they were also taking tremendous heat from the government-and they were all emotional wrecks.

In 1974 Lee helped write the legislation establishing treatment centers for Vietnam veterans as alternatives to VA hospital-based programs that many vets avoided because they felt they did more harm than good. The basic idea of the Vet Centers was to provide peer support and peer counseling. At the same time, Lee and Jack McCloskey and others fought successfully to get the psychological establishment to recognize PTSD so vets could get treatment for it.

Eventually the VVAW got taken over, as much by exhaustion as by the government's attempts to suppress the organization's work. The leadership of the national office was seized by members of the Revolutionary Communist Party. As soon as that happened, the VVAW membership dropped 90% in a single year, and never recovered.

Lee dropped in and out of the VVAW work for most of the 70's and 80's. He worked a lot of different jobs and drank too much alcohol. He married and divorced twice. Finally, in December of 1985, he stopped drinking for good. When Lee had been sober for about two years he went into therapy. He worked on childhood issues for four years and found the work helpful. His therapist didn't feel confident in working with Lee with his Vietnam experiences, so he went to group therapy at Swords to Ploughshares, the nonprofit, self-help group for vets that Jack McCloskey had helped to start. Lee was usually the only group member there who wasn't homeless.

In 1990 one of Lee's mentors died, and he started thinking about rituals as a way to handle grief. He wanted to do a mourning ritual for the victims of the Vietnam War. He sensed that some sort of public ceremony might crack open something inside of him that needed to be released and he also wanted to offer the ritual to other vets. Two years later, with the help of theologian Matthew Fox, poet Robert Bly, African shaman Malodome Some, mythologist Michael Meade, and a cast of hundreds, a ritual was performed at Fort Mason in San Francisco in which thirteen hundred people participated. The event was in three parts, addressing anger, then sorrow and finally reconciliation so that attendees could relate to one or more of these stages of grief. Lee said that when Michael Meade talked about his own experiences as a Vietnam-era vet and had everybody hold each other's shoulders and sing, "Johnny We Hardly Knew Ya," that "that's when I started feeling what I was looking forward to-a sense of the connectedness of people. The height of our connectedness in the event came to us in our shared sorrow. There were a lot of tears."

Shortly after the ritual, Lee quit his job and went on disability. He started working very intensively on mourning the losses in his life that were not related to the war. He said, "I got help. I didn't stop eating, I didn't drink, I didn't drug ... I kept in touch with people and I spent full time for about a year dealing with myself. At the end of that time I went back to school. I also started working out and taking care of my body for the first time ever." Since then, Lee has had two very close friends die. He was able to deal with those deaths in a way that served him, that was respectful of his family, and that honored the people that he mourned.

(Continues...)

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