Remembering sacrifice through scholarships

Last updated Jun 10, 2008 12:0pm0

Eric Dolson count

Lynn Johnston has made a big impact on students’ futures.

Lynn Johnston is a contractor. He calls himself a simple man, a carpenter. He would rather talk about his heroes than himself.

His shop, with polished concrete floors, is cleaner than a hospital. The building does not have his name on it, neither does his pickup truck.

At their June meeting, the Sisters School Board thanked Johnston for $40,000 he raised in scholarships for kids graduating from Sisters High School this year. Of that, about $20,000 came from Lynn and his wife Vicki.

When you ask Johnston why, it doesn't take long to know that it is because there are things he believes in, and he believes in those things passionately.

"I feel an obligation to help our kids," he said. "These are good kids that go to our schools."

But it goes deeper than that. Johnston is a Vietnam veteran; it says so on the license plate of his truck. While he downplays his own sacrifices, he talks of the sacrifices made by others, by soldiers who served in Vietnam and in other wars. It doesn't take long to know this great passion motivates him in many ways.

It was a visit in the year 2000 to the cemetery in France, where U.S. soldiers are buried by the thousands, that motivated the "Veterans Appreciation Scholarship" in Sisters.

"I felt compelled that I needed to have the kids learn something (of this sacrifice). To earn the scholarship, kids have to interview any soldier, and read some kind of book. I want them to appreciate the freedoms they have and how we have these freedoms," Johnston said.

Why did he give so much of his own money? Because it is important to him, though he admits a personal satisfaction. One day Lynn was invited to the high school for lunch. During that visit, kids applying for the scholarship individually told Lynn what they had learned. That moved him, he was humbled.

"What is that worth? Five million? Ten million? Twenty? It does not get any better than that," he said.

The first year he gave $1,500; $2,000 the second year; $3,500 the third. Then a client who learned of the scholarship pitched in $2,500. Then Lynn sent out a letter to subcontractors who worked with him, who kicked in from $100 to $2,500 each.

This year $40,000 went to support the education of Sisters students. Next year, he told the Sisters School Board, he hopes it will be $50,000.

Don't doubt him.

Lynn Johnston: To listen with a heart

The experience of war shaped Lynn Johnston. Committed to remembrance of the sacrifice of thousands of young people, he is helping young people in Sisters through a total of $40,000 in scholarships (see story, page 1).

Johnston grew up as a "middle-class kid." His father was a builder. In 1965, Lynn went to Vietnam, officially as a court stenographer, but acting, he says, as a "Radar," the character from the show M.A.S.H., the one who gets it all done.

He was posted for eight months to the 8th Field Hospital. He saw things there that changed the middle class kid from Eugene, Oregon.

"I had never seen anything like that: People who were severely malnourished; kids eating bugs off the street; every day people who were severely injured and dying; helicopters coming in with body bags, hovering, and pushing bodies off from six feet in the air."

He often wondered if any of those bags hitting the ground had the body of his friend, Steve.

"I was around doctors treating the enemy chained to the beds, going out into the jungle and treating people from the other side," he recalled. "Red Cross girls sitting up hour after hour after hour writing letters for boys who had lost limbs."

On leave, he went to see the sacrifice made by the prisoners who built the Bridge over the River Quai (Kwai) in World War II. At the hospital he led commanders to the bedside of injured soldiers, often boys of 18, the age of boys and girls now graduating from Sisters High School, the age of American boys and girls now losing arms or legs or eyes or lives in Iraq.

"I had a two-star general come to see a boy who had both of his legs blown off. The general stood at the foot of his bed, and the boy started to cry. Then the general started to cry. This grizzled old guy who could eat this chair" - Johnston points to the chair beside him in Sisters, more than forty years later his own eyes start to fill with tears - "This general ... I don't know. That was a big impact."

Another story from Vietnam, a happier one but one that closes as if with a button what his generosity in Sisters is about: "A man from Texas that contacted our commander to ask if there was anything they needed. Anything at all, it did not matter. The commanders got together and said, I suppose there is one thing, an ice cream machine. It was coming close on Christmas. So the commander also said, he might send a real Christmas tree. Christmas means so much to a soldier overseas. Soldiers think about home at Christmas time.

"This guy in Texas had a (Boeing) 707 or something like that filled with Christmas trees, there were a thousand of them, from the state of Washington, so these boys would have a real Christmas. Soldiers are lonely in a godforsaken place. These places are not Sisters, Oregon."

••••

Things had changed by early 1967 in the U.S., when Johnston returned from Vietnam, where he thought he was fighting for God, country and freedom. People would call the returning soldiers names. Some soldiers were spit upon. Johnston is careful to say no one spit on him.

Johnston went to Lane Community College. There was another returning vet from Vietnam in the classroom. The first day in English Comp, the professor asked each student for his background, a "get-to-know-you-better." After the two vets said where they had been, the professor said, "Well, class, we have two baby killers here." All term long, the two were vilified.

"Like we just went over to kill people. He just loved to ridicule us. And kids I went to school with at North Eugene, they would come up and say, 'Hope you didn't kill too many people.'"

That was bad enough, but it didn't stop there. For years after the war, Vietnam vets were so often portrayed as losers, "as deadbeats, low-lifes. It just wasn't true.

"I went over for God and country and to help an oppressed people, people who had seen their parent's throats cut, people who were thankful we were there. I didn't ever kill anybody. If I had, would I have come back and been the success I am today? I don't know."

But what the vets were faced with when they returned home burned deeply.

Johnston admits to the bitterness that he carried for years. It began to lessen about five years ago, he says, when the view of Vietnam vets began to change, when it was recognized that the soldiers in the field were not the ones who started the war, that sacrifices are made, that those began to be recognized.

Today, to a solider coming home from Iraq or Afghanistan, Johnston would simply say "Thank you." Before he makes a final judgment on the war, whether it was worth it, he would want to talk to those risking their lives, losing buddies to bombs or bullets.

"What do the soldiers tell me? What have they learned from being around the Iraqi people?" he asks. He would talk to the soldiers willing to give their lives: "Why they do what they do, why it is worth it or not.

"I am a carpenter. I am not an intellectual guy. But I know they are not there because they want to be. They are there for each and everyone of us, whether we are for or against Iraq or Afghanistan."

Johnston is not trying to convince. He has opinions on the current wars, but he does not insist he is right. He believes in honesty and integrity. He has a plaque that speaks the philosophy that he credits for much of his success. It reads, "If a person has integrity, nothing else matters. If a person does not have integrity, nothing else matters."

Johnston feels it is vital that young people understand the sacrifices made by soldiers to protect freedom, and it doesn't take long to understand that for Johnston, that freedom is something that all people deserve.

He wants to make sure that others understand that. But there is another lesson.

Christina Holler, who won the largest scholarship with her essay, stressed the importance of listening, which she says is a skill and an art that we all must develop.

"We often want to interrupt others with our own comments and try to fix their problems when they just need someone to listen. Not everyone needs to hear that it will be OK. Some just want to tell their story without people trying to make it better," Holler wrote. "The art and skill of truly listening may be one of the most powerful to learn and yet most difficult to practice... The Chinese symbol for listening consists of an ear and a heart ... to listen, we must not only use our ears, but we must ... open and listen with our hearts."

As Lynn Johnston would say, what is that lesson worth?