In December 1972 word came to the Johnsons that that the Army Board for the Correction of Military Records had granted Doug a General Discharge Under Honorable Circumstances. It was not the unambiguous Honorable my father had fought for, but at least Doug would have benefits, and he would not be barred from professions. And so, the Johnsons rejoiced. To his allies in this struggle, my father wrote effusive letters of thanks to those who had supported his efforts. “If only you could have been here to share Doug’s elated reaction, as well as ours, I’m certain you would have considered your efforts well worthwhile.” He added that now, free of the disgrace from the Undesirable, Doug would be “teaching and helping others,” and his “successes on the highway of life may be due in part to your persistence in trying to right a wrong.”

Not content with thank you notes, my father gifted some of his allies with marble-based pen sets. He would have sent one to each his core of powerful supporters: Congressman Jerry Pettis, Senator Mike Mansfield of Montana, Kenneth BeLieu, Undersecretary of the Army and Robert Mardian, Assistant Attorney General of the United States during Richard Nixon’s first term.

In May, 1972 Robert Mardian had left that post to become counsel to the Committee to Re-Elect the President, also known as CREEP. In June, 1972—just days after the Watergate break-in—Bill Johnson cold-called Robert Mardian seeking help for Doug. He approached Mardian on the basis of Doug’s shared Armenian heritage with my mother. How Bill found Mardian’s number I do not know. Why Mardian didn’t tell him to get off the phone and go to hell, I do not know. These weeks following the Watergate break-in were the most fraught of Mardian’s entire life. Late-June 1972, Robert Mardian might have had many fears, but he did not know he would later be indicted and convicted in the Watergate cover-up, his conviction eventually successfully appealed. That evening he heard Bill Johnson out and requested my father’s “precis” of Doug’s case, thirty-four single-spaced pages. In mid-July Mardian replied, “I was most impressed by your presentation of the facts.” He sent my father’s documents on to Kenneth BeLieu, Undersecretary of the Army.

On July 28 1972 Mr. BeLieu wrote to Mr. Mardian regarding Doug’s case, “A preliminary review of the file has been made and the application and the records which accompanied the letter are now in the hands of the Army Board for the Correction of Military Records. You may want to inform Mr. Johnson that my Special Assistant, Mr. Francis X. Plant (telephone Laurnber AC 202 OX 79641, Room IE 520, Pentagon, Washington D.C., 20310), is available to provide information and assistance relative to the presentation of the case to the Board.”

My family always believed this was the crucial moment: without Robert Mardian’s intervention, the Undesirable would never have been lifted.

Though my father continued to cc him on correspondence, Mardian did not take any further active role. The active role went to Francis Plant who served as Bill Johnson’s liaison, creating the case for reversing the Undesirable. I feel certain my dad pestered Francis Plant mercilessly with phone calls and I have proof that he barraged him with documents. Another person in the Pentagon had the opposite role in this drama. Mr. George Sowa collected materials against reversing the Undesirable. On Oct. 5 1972 Mr. Sowa sent his consolidated findings to my dad. My dad wrote him a thank you note. “I was impressed at the fairness of the summary in which you extracted pertinent data from the voluminous material we submitted.” This was a polite understatement. Sowa’s presentation is eye-popping, astonishing for what it excluded as well as what it included. In my book, Undesirable, the document he sent to my dad gets its own entire chapter, Chapter 23, “The Fifteen Point Silver Bullet.”

On Wednesday, November 8, Doug’s case went before the Army Board for the Correction of Military Records. The Presidential election on Tuesday November 7, 1972 resulted in a Nixon landslide. Did Nixon’s smashing victory (he won all but two states) color the Board’s deliberations? Did they know that Doug Johnson’s case had originated with Robert Mardian who had a lofty role in CREEP? In any event Doug’s discharge was changed to a General under Honorable Circumstances and he was so notified on December 18^th. In January 1973 my dad sent out the marble pen sets.

A rectangular slab of amber marble for a base, each had a notch on either side for pens. In the files I brought up from the basement I found an invoice for one of them from January 1973 for about seventy-five dollars. Quite a lot in that era. How many he bought and sent, I do not know. My guess is six. Figuring in postage, and the fact that my dad had each one insured, I would tally the total cost around $600, which, given my family’s circumstances was pretty nearly unthinkable. My mother would have objected to this grand, expensive gesture. She might have agreed to his sending them to men like Robert Mardian or Congressman Pettis, Senator Mansfield, even Mr. BeLieu, but my dad also gifted one each to Francis Plant and George Sowa. She might have asked: Why these two mere functionaries?

If my father had learned one brutal lesson in his battles with the Army, it was that documents disappeared. Poof! Gone. No one knew where. No one knew how. No one to ask. The nameless soldier who guarded my brother on the flight from Vietnam back to the US lost all his records. Gone. And before that: the note the Army doctor in Vietnam wrote saying my brother was unfit for combat, that he should not be sent into Cambodia. That note vanished. No one knew where. No one knew how. No one to ask. Doug was ordered into Cambodia; he went AWOL; he was caught, arrested and threatened with another court-martial, accepting the Undesirable instead. Thereby, literally, hangs this entire tale.

I think my father recognized that these two functionaries had in fact guided Doug’s case through the various portals or bowels or fluorescent-lit arteries of the Pentagon. Though they did not have prestigious titles, Francis Plant and George Sowa were competent, caring men. And whatever my mom thought of the expense, my father prevailed.

Among the documents exhumed from the safe, I found a rather odd, embarrassed letter from Francis Plant, but in its own way, heartfelt.

That Mr. Sowa’s marble set was broken in half seems to me, retrospectively, metaphorically correct. Doug had very few “successes on the highway of life;” he spent decades tormented by the drugs and devils he first met in Vietnam. What happened to that broken marble pen set once it came back to the Johnsons, I do not know.

But the marble pen set that Francis Plant returned, that sat on every desk my mother ever worked at for the rest of her life. Now it sits on my desk. I had no idea where it had come from until I read Francis Plant’s letter.

Chronologically the very last letter I found in the basement files is addressed to Francis Plant.

Who knows if the letter ever reached him? Where was Francis Plant in 1974? Kenneth E. BeLieu had left his post as Undersecretary of the Army in 1973. In any event, Francis Plant did not reply. At some point my dad opened the safe and tossed in the carbon. The door closed. The lock spun. Half a century would pass before it once again saw light.