“The Warrior’s Journey Home” lecture started out as a history lesson and ended with tears rolling down the faces of Vietnam War veterans’ and audience members alike as veterans’ shared stories along with some of the pain they suffered almost 40 years ago and still face day to day.

“They changed themselves, they changed our community and they changed our country,” said Kelly Sturgeon, oral historian and SRJC instructor.

The Flower of Dragon veterans came together on April 18 in the Bertolini Student Center to try to heal the pain of war and make sense of it. Flower of the Dragon (FOD) was founded at SRJC in the ‘70s for veterans by veterans after the Vietnam War. The original four FOD founders returned to SRJC to share stories and educate the audience on ways to help vets, simply by listening to them. English instructor Terry Mulcaire said, “They have a story and we should listen, because it’s our story too.”

One of the FOD founders is Peter Cameron, executive director of Vietnam Veterans of California, which serves tens of thousands of veterans in Northern California and throughout the state. Bill White is a former Marine who was wounded in action. He worked for FOD doing outreach, including outreach to vets in jails. Lonny Weissman was a former infantry medic who teaches high school math and robotic engineering. Randy Fowler served four years in the Marines and then returned to serve veterans as a clinician, helping vets with depression and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). He retired after 30 years and was also the coordinator for the first National Symposium for PTSD held at SSU, in 1979.
Vietnam veteran Al Liner also spoke and said since working at FOD and helping other vets, he helped himself. Today, he is an actor and filmmaker.

During the late ‘70s, President Jimmy Carter’s administration saw that FOD was a valuable and important way to organize help for veterans, so Carter funded the organization and others gave grants to build similar organizations. The community-based Veterans helping Veterans service model emerged for veterans in the mid ‘70s and still exists today.
Trying to figure out ‘where do I fit in to this society, given the experience that I have,’ was an obstacle that FOD wanted to help vets overcome when they returned home.
“Although we don’t have control of the past, we do have control over how we understand it,” Sturegon said. “Oral History empowers us to understand the past through the voices of those who live it, giving us multiple perspectives of the past.”

FOD has made a difference for more people in places other than Santa Rosa. “Flower of Dragon isn’t in Kansas anymore. We were now from Santa Rosa all the way to Maine. Everybody knew who we were, and everybody knew what we’re doing and how we we’re doing it,” Fowler said about FOD’s national evolution in helping vets.

The FOD founders wanted the audience to listen to veterans’ stories to try to understand what they have been through and to understand that the transition back into civilian life is not easy and can take years, even decades.

Cameron said on his return from Vietnam, “We rolled our sleeves up, got to work and built a community of veterans.” While attending SRJC after some anti-war and Civil Rights movements, he partnered with other veteran students to organize a current activities club to bring up the issues on war. They published the “Fig Leaf,” a counterpoint to The Oak Leaf, to start discussions.

The Office of Veterans’ Affairs was established and became a focal point for veterans on campus. “The idea was to bring veterans together and start an organization for veterans to come feel recognized, feel safe, secure,” Cameron said.

Forming FOD was done in part for their own healing. At 68, Cameron is still examining the healing journey. “Healing can not take place without you bearing witness,” Cameron said. “Listening, giving them a place [to stay], not judging and just being there, sometimes is enough.”
Bringing people back from the experiences of war is the reason for FOD. FOD became an opportunity to try to heal and re-adapt to civilian life for veterans. FOD started at SRJC because in the ‘70s, this campus “was a major place for veterans to come, use the G.I bill and find time to think about how to re-enter into society,” Wiessman said.

Liner pointed out recent newspaper statistics that show the effects of war on the soldiers. “A U.S. solider dies every day and a half on average in Afghanistan or Iraq. Veterans from those wars kill themselves once every 80 minutes,” he said.

“We have been taught and everybody here believes that the worst thing that can happen to you is that you die in a war,” Liner said. “Well as this is taking place, there’s brothers or sisters out there who felt that there was something worse than dying in a war. That surviving it was so bad. And that’s what we are asking our young people to do every single day.”

Marilyn Milligan offered a current veteran’s quote from “Mach Two,” published in 2010, to stress how long-lasting the Vietnam experience is. “When I came back from Iraq, the biggest thing in the news was Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction at the Super Bowl. And it kind of rattled me. Is this what America is paying attention to?”

Milligan talked about “survivor’s guilt,” how so many vets feel guilty that they survived and others did not. “I believe survivor guilt is one of the sources of self-destructive behavior. Self sabotage, the use of drugs, alcohol and the extreme, suicide,” Milligan said. “Is it possible for a war veteran to come home without these characteristics? I think not. I think not.”

Why is Post Traumatic Stress called a disorder? To receive profession treatment paid for by the Veteran’s Agency (VA) and health insurance companies, it needs to be classified as a disorder. A significant number of returning vets were diagnosed as schizophrenic because they were hearing voices. But hearing voices was a normal reaction to what soldiers have gone through. It was a posttraumatic reaction.

PTS was going to go into the Diagnostic Manual, but in order to go into the book, the diagnosed condition needed to be a disorder so Post Traumatic Stress became PTSD.
“I’m becoming more convinced that brothers and sisters who have been in combat, don’t need to feel anymore stigmatized than they already feel. And I think that the ‘d’, the ‘disorder’ word, has the tendency to make some people feel stigmatized and they may not seek the help they need and so justly deserve,” Liner said.

What has been labeled as another disorder is more of a response to circumstance. “We have been through terrible circumstances and they have become imprinted in our brains. And because it’s imprinted, we respond a certain way when those feelings come up again,” Liner said.

The vets understand for the VA to compensate there has to be a “disorder” diagnosis, “but the reality is, ladies and gentleman, if you have ever been through something like that in your life, whether it was in the middle of a war or some other traumatic experience, your reaction, that stress, that trauma and that reaction to it, is a perfectly normal reaction. And don’t let the press convince you that because a veteran has this reaction, there’s something wrong with them. What’s wrong is that society has not figured out how to get them home yet,” Wiessman said.

How do veterans become the human that they were before they left for war? That’s what Flower of the Dragon helps vets do, try to become the human they were before they were mentally and/or physically affected in war. “Demand of your government, demand of your politicians, demand of the society, that we give them the opportunity to re-enter. That we make them as human as we possibly can, so that they can function in society and not feel that they came from another planet,” Weissman said. Veteran organizations like FOD organized job fairs, softball teams and art shows to help vets assimilate them back into the American community and workforce.

For Fowler, the hardest part was incredible loneliness. “I had nowhere to go,” he said. “When I walked in the building [FOD office], it took away the loneliness. I felt at home. Everybody treated with me with respect, smiles, handshakes, hugs…it gave me a place to be, it gave me a home, it gave me a family.”

Fowler said Americans confused the warrior with the war. “And that was really bad. Because the war sucked. There were horrible things that happened,” he said. “The country was beginning to lose respect for the war and also those who were in theater. Both going and coming.”

An Iraqi Veteran thanked and appreciated the FOD vets for their contributions in paving the way home, especially for his own experiences recently returning from war. The vet said the FOD veterans deserve a lot of gratitude from his generation. The Iraqi vet said people around him worry more about him than he worries about himself.

In an emotional response Wiessman said, “If I felt like there was a failure in my life–excuse me, sorry, it’s hard for me–it is if we would have had done our job, you wouldn’t have had to go through that. Because what we wanted most was to make it impossible for this country to do what they did to us, to any other generation.”

Wiessman said, “Our failure is that we did not awaken this country, an anger and in a storm that would not allow young men to sacrifice like you’ve had to do and like we’ve had to do. No matter what the cause, we all know that war has never once really answered the question of how this world is going to get along. I will say to you, that I am proud you answered the call, but I wish to hell you never had to.”

Audience members applauded, wiped away their tears and blew their noses after Wiessman’s heartbreaking response to a young student, home from Iraq.

Mulcaire said soldiers need to tell their stories and share their experiences so people can try to understand; this helps the vets feel more at home. Many veterans have written books, autobiographies and short stories.

“Don’t just read one book about the war, don’t just hear one story, hear them all because there are multiple views of the experience,” Cameron advised.

The stories of FOD impacted the mindset of students and continue to help the lives of veterans. “Everything that’s been said here, makes it clear that groups like FOD can make a life or death difference in the warriors’ journey home,” Milligan said.