THE VET

JOE WILSON- VIETNAM VET
By Ike Griffin
Note: Names of individuals and institutions have been changed. Circumstances are real, and are encountered frequently enough to believe they are representative of any number of the incarcerated.

“Fifteen or twenty minutes of fuzzy thinking can ruin your entire life.” (Joe Wilson, Union Correctional Institution, Florida, 1990)

I have now known Joe for eighteen years. Our first meeting was at Union, where he was playing a guitar on a Kairos weekend. His rendition of “Lights of The City” first grabbed my attention. He was transferred from Union C.I. to Tomoka C.I., where he volunteered for the first Horizon class, initiated in 1999. Joe became a Peer Facilitator for a family pod of eight men.

Born in central Pennsylvania to a middle class family mid-way through the twentieth century, Joe’s childhood was unremarkable in the way that “normal” is unremarkable. Life did not present much of a challenge for Joe. “Normal” in America during the ‘50s could be pretty spectacular. However, Joe thought of himself as ordinary.

Possessed of a loveable personality, he put great store in quality of friendship and loyalty. He was reliable, responsible, and willing to sacrifice if called upon to fulfill his cultural vision of male virtue, that of protector of those who came into his sphere of caring. Unassuming as he was, he saw himself as good, not heroic.

After graduation from High School in 1968, Joe enrolled at Penn State intending to prepare for life as an electrical engineer. Difficulty in a required class convinced him that he had set his sights on the wrong career path. He dropped out of school to re-think his future. Responsibility and failure weighed on him intensely, and he enlisted in the armed services. Joe joined the U.S. Army hoping to regain his confidence after a poor start in school. The tide of popularity against the Viet Nam war did nothing for his self image. If you asked him, he would say that he was proud to wear the uniform and to serve, but the pride did not manifest itself in his feeling of acceptance, and he wore the uniform as little as possible when off duty.

Upon release from duty in 1975, Joe returned to Penn State. Student routine was familiar but things were different now. Students and faculty had nothing but contempt for the Viet Nam experience. Far from welcoming the returning warrior with grateful arms, student discussion would lead him to believe he was foolish for having not burned his registration card to pass the war in Canada.

Compared to Joe’s recent experience in Vietnam, current causes igniting student emotions seemed trivial and insignificant. Football games, pep rallies and college pranks left him cold. Joe felt disconnected. He was at a different place. Six or seven years older than his classmates, he was light-years ahead of them in experience. He longed for acceptance and belonging, but he felt isolated. Whereas he had the advantage of experience, it was he who felt he had missed out on something, though he could not imagine what that something might be. He longed for mutual experience with his peers upon which to build a relationship.

When spring break rolled around, Joe joined two girls, one particularly attractive coed named Elaine, and two boys, carpooling to Daytona Beach, Florida. During the ride down, Joe explained to the others that he had been in the military, which explained his advanced age. Pressed for stories of military service, Joe spoke of danger, his comfort with firearms. He revealed that, in fact he had a pistol in his duffel bag.

Accommodations were typically scarce and pricey in Florida during Spring Break. All five shared a two bedroom condo on the beach for the week. Tens of thousands of other students from across the country had crowded into Daytona Beach. The plan was to party on the beach day and night, sleeping only when exhausted. Any of their little group might or might not sleep in their condo on any given night. Beds were not assigned.

After a day of beach volleyball, beer, and sand-sprinkled sandwiches, sunbathing, and swapped stories, they built bonfires on the beach to continue the same routine into the night. Joe excused himself, already sporting more sunburn than he really wanted. He retired early to the condo, washed off the sand and flopped onto a bed.

Elaine woke Joe at two o’clock in the morning, shaking him urgently. “Wake up, Joe! Give me your gun! Damn it Joe, two creeps raped and beat me and I’m going to kill them! They just beat the shit out of me and then raped me. They took turns, beating me and raping me! I’m gonna kill them, Joe.”

Elaine’s bloody and bruised face told the story. She had puffy eyes, blood in her hair and a crescent shaped cut in front of her left ear that was still oozing blood. As Joe focused his own blurred vision on her, he thought, “No! I can’t let her have my gun. She’ll just hurt herself more.”

“I’ll go with you. You can’t do this alone. You’ll just get hurt.”

Elaine led him back up the beach about a half-mile, passing revelers in the dunes between the condos. Small groups of students were still around bonfires, though the night had finally turned quiet. Occasional laughter pierced the humid air, but most of the energy was spent for this night. At a dying fire near the dunes with salt grass growing in tufts, two male students were packing their tent into a Volkswagen van, apparently preparing to depart.

“There they are,” said Elaine. “They are the ones.”

Joe walked up to the two, who were not looking particularly confident by this time. He pulled his gun from the waistband of his jeans and said, “That girl you beat and raped had a friend.” He shot them both, picked up the spent cartridges from the sand, took Elaine’s hand cut through the sand dunes to the road.

“There they aren’t. Not any more, Elaine. Let’s get you to a hospital.”
The emergency room staff of the hospital began work on Elaine. Joe sat in a waiting room with a Methodist minister who had brought his wife in to be treated for what seemed to be food poisoning. Killing time, anxious and bored, they explained to one another why they were at the emergency room in the middle of the night. Joe, knowing full well the enormity of his actions, confessed to the minister all that had happened. “I think you need to pray about this,” commented the minister. So, Joe went into the chapel at the hospital and prayed about it. God seemed to say, “Tell the truth.”

Later that day, after taking Elaine back to the condo, Joe was stopped for driving erratically, like dozens of other students, on suspicion of DWI. Joe explained to the officer that the steering on his car was loose and needed to be fixed. They took him into the police station for breath analysis. As they were booking his data, Joe pulled the spent cartridges from his pocket and handed them to the arresting officer, and told them the truth.

Double Life… a few minutes of fuzzy thinking, acting on loyalty and compassion, can ruin your entire life.

Jack (Murph the Surf) Murphy had done time with Joe at Union. Jack told me that Joe was one of the most gentle men in the system. Jack claimed that if Joe had done his crime on Padre Island in Texas rather than on the beach in Florida, he might have been given a public reprimand and a private thank you for rendering swift justice.