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A Rocky Road to Peace

By Jan Barry (Reviewer)

A Patriot After All: The Story of a Chicano Vietnam Vet, by Juan Ramirez (University of New Mexico Press, 1999)

The path to peace, and peace work, is often long, twisting, and hard.

Surviving Vietnam battlefields, he struggled to find peace of mind. By his own account, he drank too much, took drugs, went AWOL. Drummed out of the Marines with an undesirable discharge, he robbed fast-food joints with a toy gun, high on the addictive rush of living dangerously. Realizing someone could get hurt, he gave up the bizarre sprees, enrolled in college and volunteered with the United Farm Workers grape boycott campaign.

"I was looking for something far removed from the war and the violence that I had committed on my heart and soul," Ramirez writes in a frank, unflinching memoir telling a redemptive tale of how a macho Chicano GI became a peace advocate. His searing account offers insightful lessons for peace organizers looking to encourage such transformations in hot-tempered youngsters and adults.

Ramirez tells a classic story of how hard it is to be raised in a violent society and become a peaceful person. His career as a boycott activist, for instance, was cut short when he punched a cop who stopped him for drunk driving. He spent time in jail, raging until beaten senseless by guards. He asked a friend to lie in court about his less-than-sober condition. "I was ashamed of myself," Ramirez recalled of his botched sally into civic activism. "Besides my drinking, my temper started to interfere with my UFW work, an obvious problem given the organization's commitment to nonviolence."

Intent on self-improvement, he worked to gain a college degree. In a politics course on Southeast Asia, a fellow student challenged his brooding silence on the war. Ramirez stormed out of the room and dropped out of college. "The blasting I had gotten from that woman brought all my guilt and shame about the war to the fore of my consciousness. I could not bear the thought of being confronted again," he writes, describing an all-too-typical reaction by war veterans when pressed to talk about themselves.

That incident happened in 1975, the year the war ended. By that time, he says, "I had been convicted of drunk driving twice, assault on police officers, and resisting arrest during barroom brawls twice." In subsequent years, he held and lost various jobs and underwent treatment for alcoholism and group therapy for veterans. "When confronted by the rest of the group," he admitted, "I lashed out: 'I don't have the same problems as the rest of you guys in here.'" He felt his problems stemmed more from discriminatory treatment as a Mexican-American, as well as from drinking and drugs, than from engaging in combat.

Eventually, aided by a number of friends, acquaintances and lovers, Ramirez confronted his nightmarish war memories and worked on healing long-festering emotional wounds he had been self-medicating with booze, the buzz of street drugs, and bluster. He won an appeal for an honorable discharge, returned to college, and began speaking to high school classes on his views on war. At last, he writes, "I found a way to use a terrible life experience constructively." He had found his voice, rough-and-tumble but articulate, to describe the battle many ex-soldiers wage to become productive citizens.

"What I have to say, and I'll say it the day I die, is that we were wrong, and it is wrong to kill other people in the name of religion and ideologies," writes Ramirez, who now runs a landscaping business in California. "As a veteran, I feel that what I can contribute, is to help heal the country, not just for my own sake but for all the lives that were sacrificed - Vietnamese and American."