Respect Your Elders

After Vietnam and grad school, I arrived in Madison, Wisconsin in June 1974, trying to find my way home. Luckily, I saw an article in the local paper about a fledgling operation called Vets House. Created by Vietnam era vets for Vietnam era vets, this grass roots non-profit was trying to make a difference in the lives of my fellow vets who’d been ignored, ostracized, or vilified by their country. With a shoestring budget but an abundance of committed volunteers, Vets House intended to help former GIs find jobs, upgrade their less-than-honorable discharges, and access their VA benefits—even if they were incarcerated. While helping these guys deal with their shame and guilt wasn’t in anyone’s job description, it was also a big part of the Vets House mission.

Or so I learned the first day I set foot in their storefront operation on South Park Street. They’d rented two run-down houses next to a car wash and filled them with old sofas, chairs, desks, lamps, filing cabinets, and even a couple of beds. Both places looked like evacuees from a Goodwill fire sale, but I sensed a palpable energy. Was it hope? Among Vietnam vets for Christ’s sake?

Yes, to hope, and, yes, to Jesus. Because while I looked around, I read a plea for help to the local religious community. Written by a UW-Madison professor, Quaker, and internationally respected peacemaker named Joseph Elder, the letter indicated that “Vets House is an inspiration to care for Vietnam vets bearing the traumas of war, including post-traumatic stress.” He asked for prayers, but also for financial support.

And before you could say “welcome home,” Vets House had enough funding to hire vets like me to find jobs for veterans. With my writing chops, I was soon cranking out Vets House press releases and giving interviews, including on a local radio show hosted by George Vukelich, a big-hearted guy who called himself Papa Hambone. The topic for this particular evening was amnesty for Vietnam veterans and, you guessed it, one of the other guests was Joe Elder.

During that hour, I learned a lot about Joe. Not because he was talking about himself, but because he was speaking quietly, yet passionately, about nonviolence, justice, and compassion. But Joe Elder didn’t just speak it, he lived it.

And from that night on, he became one of my heroes.

He still is, although we lost Joe Elder last week at the age of 94. The son of Presbyterian missionaries in the Kurdish region of Iran, he was raised in Tehran. Later, his opposition to the Korean War steered him to become a Quaker. On behalf of the American Friends Service Committee, Joe and his wife Joann traveled twice to Hanoi during the darkest days of the Vietnam War to assess the needs of North Vietnamese civilians for medical supplies.

Eventually, he, Joann, and a group of committed Quakers co-founded the nonprofit Madison Quakers, Inc., in the early 1990s. Over the past three decades the organization has lifted more than 10,000 Vietnamese people out of poverty, provided children with an education, school supplies, water filtration systems for their schools and equipped communities with reliable water within their villages.

And yet within this context of international diplomacy, peace, and nonviolence, Joe Elder found time for us Vietnam veterans. He wanted to do what he could to help us to get back home.

Joe was instrumental in helping me launch my first book, DEROS Vietnam: Dispatches from the Air-Conditioned Jungle at the Wisconsin Book Festival in 2012. And he and Joann attended my and Craig Werner’s first Madison presentation for We Gotta Get out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War, in early 2016. When they placed a book in front of me for singing, I asked what their favorite Vietnam era song was, expecting to have them say “Universal Soldier,” “Draft Dodger Rag,” or “Where Have All the Flowers Gone.”

“We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” Joe smiled, adding, “and we did.”

RIP to one of our supreme elders.

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Vietnam veteran Doug Bradley is the author of Who’ll Stop the Rain: Respect, Remembrance, and Reconciliation in Post-Vietnam America, co-author with Craig Werner of We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War, which was named best music book of 2015 by Rolling Stone magazine, and DEROS Vietnam: Dispatches from the Air-Conditioned Jungle, now available as an audiobook. His music-based memoir, The Tracks of My Years, will be released by Legacy Book Press in 2025.