When my brother, Doug Johnson, staggered off the plane, returning to the US after fourteen months in Vietnam, he was clutching the sandal of a Viet Cong he had killed. The soldier assigned to guard him from Vietnam to McChord AFB lost his medical and financial records, thus complicating his out-processing. To be released from the Army Doug signed the Undesirable Discharge “for the good of the service” (the Army’s official lingo). It meant Doug avoided a second court martial for being AWOL and sleeping on guard duty. It meant veteran’s benefits were denied him forever.

Doug was twenty years old.  He weighed fifty pounds less than when he’d enlisted; malnutrition and repeated bouts of malaria and hepatitis had undermined his health, along with extensive drug use. He’d been shooting up speed and heroin “seven or eight times a day” for a year, as he later testified.  Immediately after bringing him back to Southern California (and at their own expense) his parents admitted him to Loma Linda Medical Center. After ten days as an in-patient, the presiding doctor stated that Doug’s health was so shattered, he could not have lived another six months in those conditions. The psychiatrist’s description reads in part, “psychotic depressive reaction chronic, very severe.”

His father, Bill Johnson, went to see Doug every day. They sat on the hospital lawn where Doug sobbed to speak of what he had done and what had been done to him in Nam. Following hospitalization Doug returned to the family home where in addition to his parents, he had two younger siblings there, a sister, eighteen, a brother thirteen. Despite the stresses of integrating a traumatized veteran and drug addict into the family, within weeks my father leapt into action to reverse the Undesirable.  In those hospital conversations with Doug Bill had learned of circumstances that convinced him that the Undesirable was utterly undeserved. Unjust.

On October 16^th 1970 Bill sent out copies of an excoriating 1700-word letter to multiple individuals, including Army brass, senators and congressmen, citing the reasons why Doug absolutely did not deserve the Undesirable, insisting that he should be given an Honorable, or at the very least, given his shattered health, a Medical discharge. This letter rang with the repeated phrase, “the general was not aware.” The general in question was Doug’s Commanding officer, General Burke who had signed the order for Undesirable.

Acting on my father’s letter, Congressman Jerry Pettis, arranged for the Inspector General’s office to conduct a hearing. This took place on  December 4 1970 at Fort MacArthur  (greater Los Angeles).  It lasted all day, beginning with Doug’s long description of his drug use and combat experience. Colonel Duddy, who conducted the hearing, asked Doug ninety-six questions. The typed transcript came to twenty-one single spaced pages.

At the Inspector General’s hearing Doug recounted how, after Nixon had publicly announced the invasion of Cambodia (that had already been going on for about a year), Doug had turned himself into a Dr. Cantrell for being strung out on drugs. Dr. Cantrell gave Doug a handwritten note exempting him from combat duty on health grounds. In May, 1970, ordered to  give this note to a sergeant, Doug complied. It was never seen again. On May 10, his unit was ordered into Cambodia; Doug protested he had a health exemption, but the note had vanished and Cantrell had been posted elsewhere.  Doug was put on the helicopter, but he did not fight in Cambodia; he went AWOL. Caught, arrested six days later, an additional charge of sleeping on guard duty was added. Crazed, fearful, shooting up nonstop speed and heroin, he went AWOL again. this time till June 8. Following this arrest he was sent to Long Binh jail, a hell he had already visited. He remained there till around July 1.

 My father contended  that if Dr. Cantrell’s note had not vanished, Doug would not have been sent into Cambodia. He would not have gone AWOL. He would have been spared the Undesirable in lieu of a court-martial. The Army lost the note (just like the Army lost Doug’s records). The fault was theirs. Moreover, my dad had found Dr. Cantrell, now in private practice. Cantrell remembered Doug and signed an affidavit attesting to this truth. My parents felt confident of victory.

But this was not to be. My book Undesirable chronicles Bill Johnson’s four major battles with the Army, three of which resulted in failure, one in a compromise.

One month after the Inspector General’s hearing, in January 1971 that office wrote a detailed Interim report and in March 1971 a Final. Both shredded my father’s assertions. General Enemark’s Final culminated with, “Mr. Johnson’s statement that his son did not deserve an undesirable discharge was not substantiated.”

After the IG denied Doug, my father approached the Army Discharge Review Board in April 1971. A full year later, April 1972, they replied with a rote decline.

In the fall of 1971, my dad sought a Medical discharge for Doug. The Army scheduled a physical at Letterman hospital in San Francisco in November. Doug and Dad went together and took with them the statements of the Loma Linda doctors. When the Johnsons left Letterman Hospital, they were under impression that the Medical would be granted. But in February, Jerry Pettis informed my dad that the “Central Physical Evaluation Board, which is a part of Walter Reed Army Hospital, found Douglas physically fit.” No word on how/why these Army medical men in DC came to this conclusion. They did not examine Doug and his records remained lost.

I wish I could answer this question: How many great military minds came together time and again to defeat my father?  In the files I retrieved from the basement I found correspondence from seven generals and seven colonels. I quote these men. But I do not include the names of the officers on the Army Discharge Review Board because when my father asked to know their names and for the minutes of their meeting, he was told no minutes were kept and no names were forthcoming.

My book does not include the names of the anonymous officers at Letterman hospital in San Francisco who examined Doug and sent their findings to also-nameless officers at Walter Reed in DC, who denied the Medical Discharge, despite the written testimony of the Loma Linda doctors, and (my father believed) the assurances of the military doctors at Letterman,

My book does not include the names of officers on the Army Board for Correction of Military Records who convened to consider the case of Douglas Scott Johnson. This appeal took place inside the Pentagon and with the oversight of the Undersecretary of the Army, Kenneth BeLieu. The Army Board for Correction of Military Records met at the Pentagon, room  1E-517 on November 8^th 1972 where an unknown number of anonymous officers altered Doug’s status from Undesirable to a General Discharge Under Honorable Circumstances. Not the unambiguous Honorable my father petitioned for, but sufficient to allow my brother access to veterans’ benefits.

The Johnson rejoiced, but my dad was not done.  April 1973 he again appealed for an Honorable. He was denied by Army Discharge Review Board. This time they did not take a year to ponder; their denial (verbatim the earlier one) is dated April 18^th 1973. They added no further information as to why or how—or who—came to this decision.

How many men were part of these deliberations and denials?  I will never know. But I imagine a line-up of all the high-ranking officers who participated, the men who in addition to the seven generals and seven colonels, remained anonymous. I picture them all standing at attention, broad shoulders and crew-cuts, shined shoes, pressed dress uniforms, medals glowing across their chests, men collecting respect and pensions and honors and accolades.

I only have only fourteen names, but I have perhaps a thousand pages testifying to the time, weeks, months, the years, the Army lavished on denying Doug Johnson an Honorable or a Medical discharge. When finally, presented with all the evidence, the Army Board for Correction of Military Records offered only the tepid General Discharge Under Honorable Circumstances. At least Doug had some recognition of his twenty months of military service, and it was said, a Bronze Star that to my knowledge was never received.

Why this compromise? My book, Undesirable makes the case for intentional, institutional choices on the part of the Army to shield a general who had inflicted a vindictive wrong on a vulnerable enlisted man. In short, a cover-up.

Doug Johnson was no model solider—repeatedly AWOL, constantly high, persistently substandard evaluations, frequently stricken with malaria, hepatitis, dysentery, jungle rot, malnourishment—but his crimes were not murderous mayhem, thievery, treachery, or rape. In the Inspector General’s Final denial, General Enemark opined (with unrivaled brilliant insight!) that at nineteen Doug was “an immature personality influenced by drug abuse.”  Doug became a drug addict in Vietnam, and he was not alone in this. The Army’s own estimate, laid out at length in their book (available online), U.S. Army Psychiatry in the Vietnam War,  “Chapter 9 Substance Abuse in the Theater,” admits that by 1970 heroin use among troops constituted a “medical epidemic.”

The official wording—that Doug Johnson accepted the Undesirable for “the good of the service”—strikes me humbug. Was “the good of the service” fulfilled by tarring Doug Johnson with Undesirable for the rest of his life? For choices he made when he was not old enough to buy beer in California?  When he was not old enough to vote.

He was not alone in this either. The average age of soldiers in Vietnam was nineteen. Doug Johnson was one of those drugged-up, ineffective infantrymen, on point, leading a bunch of others (equally drugged-up) through the jungles. He testified, “late at night you have to hang on to the guy in front of you because you can’t see. If you let go, you have to stop because of the intensity of the dark.” How deep was that darkness? And yet they kept walking, these young men as they were engulfed in events, endured ordeals and made choices that changed their lives forever.