Finding My Voice

by Faith Ramos, Voices in Wartime staff

I was raised to be “seen and not heard.” This not only applied to my childhood, it was intended to blanket my life as a woman. While this continues to make me reticent to share my views, it did bring with it a great capacity to receive stories; to be a good listener.

My parents separated when I was 18. The following year, my mother began dating a high school sweetheart. The two had recently encountered one another at a twenty year, Class of ’67 high school reunion. Both were separated from spouses whom they married as teenagers. I eventually met Johnnie Michael Adams, my mother’s “first love.” He seemed affable enough. He and my mother could wax nostalgic about the shared stories of the Atlanta of their youth. (This strikes me as funny now because at the time, they were both years younger than I am today.)

As Johnnie integrated into our lives, there was occasion for me to observe him. One afternoon as he walked my mother’s dog in the sweltering Atlanta summer heat, I watched from inside the parked car. My mother and I were absent-mindedly conversing about some trivial thing when she casually mentioned that Johnnie had been in Vietnam and had contracted malaria while there. She went on to say that he became a bit anxious on hot days. That was all that was said. I didn’t ask any questions. I hadn’t really known any veterans so I had no point of reference. I mean, yes, both of my grandfathers were WWII veterans, Navy and frontline Army, and my grandmother’s brother had been a military chaplain during WWII, but I knew them from a child’s perspective. It didn’t register.

My mother and Johnnie eventually wed. He has been in my life for twenty years now. On very few occasions over the years, my mother said matter-of-fact things like, “Well, he had a hard time coming back from Nam” but there was never any explanation and I never asked. It didn’t connect.

On October 1, 2007 I joined the staff of the Voices in Wartime Education Project. One month later, I travelled to Atlanta for a pre-planned trip home. My mother and stepfather have a cabin in the north Georgia mountains. Due to commute logistics, my stepfather and I shared the 2.5 hour ride back to their home in Atlanta. In twenty years, the two of us had never spent this much time together without other members of the family to buffer communications. After reading the Voices in Wartime anthology my perception had shifted. Now, I connected with this man as an individual who had experiences I could barely imagine; not simply as my mother’s high school boyfriend whom she married in my young adulthood. I began telling him about the people I was meeting through my new job, in particular the story of a young returned Iraq veteran. It struck a chord. He spent the next two hours recounting pieces of his tour of Vietnam.

In January of 1968, one month after turning 18 years old and joining the Marines, Johnnie Adams boarded a plane headed to war. He joined thinking he would “be like John Wayne.” When he landed in Vietnam and prepared to board a bus that would take him to his quarters, young men ending their tours of Vietnam were getting off of that same bus. His heart dropped. “Every single one of these guys had hollow eyes. If you’ve ever seen a person with hollow eyes, you don’t ever forget it.” Johnnie spent eight months in Khe Sahn where the battles are now reported to have been the worst of the war. He was there long enough to see his best friend’s body thrown, along with hundreds of others, onto the back of a truck that carried both the dead and wounded “like firewood”; long enough to see white phosphorus and napalm dropped following an ambush that lasted twelve hours; long enough to see young men succumb to drug addiction; long enough to hear battlefield cries of “Corpsman!” deteriorate into hysterical cries for mothers, brothers, girlfriends and wives. While in the infirmary recovering from a second bout of malaria, Johnnie’s entire platoon was killed. To this day, he asks the question, “Why not me, and why them?”

I listen.