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I Was a Hero OnceBy Jan Barry (reviewer)
I Was a Hero Once Peter Mahoney was a real-life Forrest Gump. As related in his delightful memoir, I Was a Hero Once, the Catholic high school grad who joined the Army to prove himself came home from a combat tour in Vietnam searching for some meaning in life. An adrenaline junkie who got hooked in parachute jump school and firefights in Vietnam, he found adventures that repeatedly popped him into the midst of historic events. Signing up for a compatible veterans' group as a college student in New Orleans, he traveled to a gathering of Vietnam Veterans Against the War in Florida and ended up in the famous Gainesville 8 trial, charged with planning to attack the 1972 Republican Convention in Miami with slingshots and fried marbles. "Different people who participated in this discussion had very different impressions of it. My own take was that it was just an after-hours bullshit session," he wrote of the alleged conspiracy meeting. It had been called to discuss what peace actions VVAW should participate in at the Democratic and Republican conventions. Amid copious imbibing, provocative ideas were spun by guys who turned out to be FBI informants. Startling connections emerged between this case and the Watergate scandal that brought down the Nixon Administration. The VVAW arrestees were used as the excuse for the infamous break-in of the Democratic Party headquarters by members of Nixon's presidential reelection campaign staff. The jury acquitted the veterans in Florida of all charges brought by a federal prosecutor who targeted peace activists. "In spite of all this joy and elation, I can't forget that the government put me through fourteen months of hell," Peter Mahoney told the news media after the jury rejected the government's trumped-up charges. Disgusted, he moved on to try a quiet life with VVAW comrades in Brooklyn, NY, working with a vets' theater group, editing a community newspaper, and doing odd jobs. He took up writing poetry for a veterans' poetry anthology, Demilitarized Zones, that I was compiling with W.D. Ehrhart. The book included seminal work by Bruce Weigl, Horace Coleman, and Gerald McCarthy, among others. Peter Mahoney helped me with the tedious work of laying out the book—in those days, gluing printed pages on paste-up boards—for an independent small press print run. We had great discussions about poetry, veteran issues, and life in Brooklyn. And then he restlessly moved on, bouncing from New York to New Orleans and back, looking for something meaningful to do. Through veterans' networking, he got hired as the deputy director of the New York Vietnam Veterans Commission, hobnobbing with financial patrons, Donald Trump, and other top hat society types. His job entailed collecting astounding letters by veterans about the war, which were engraved on the New York Vietnam Veterans Memorial and showcased in a book called Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam, which spawned an HBO documentary seen by millions of viewers. Years later, Peter Mahoney wrote a poem, "I Was a Hero Once," that would have been a good fit for the Dear America collection. It's the frontispiece and title of his memoir. In an Author's Note, he wrote, "If I were to be called a hero, then it should be for the things I did after Vietnam." Moving on from the literary world, he became an investment banker who had a front-row seat for the Wall Street market crash of 1987. Packing up and moving on, he joined a delegation of Vietnam vets who met up in Russia with Soviet vets of their Afghanistan War to talk about common concerns of fitting back into society and working for international peace. He met a Russian woman, married, and moved there for several years during the tumultuous aftermath of the Soviet Union's breakup. Traveling between a home base he established for his family in Vermont and numerous airports, he nurtured an improbable career as an international development consultant—despite never having completed a college degree—working with NGOs seeking to improve social conditions in Russia, Ukraine, Haiti, Philippines, Nigeria, South Africa and elsewhere. This work put him in Russia when the government collapsed economically in 1998, and an unknown apparatchik named Vladimir Putin ended up in charge. Ever restless, in the fall of 2016, at age 68, Peter Mahoney packed a backpack. He flew to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota to join hundreds of veterans who went to help a local protest against an oil pipeline being jammed through the reservation's water supply area. The protestors were confronted by a small army of law enforcement officers using armored personnel carriers, water cannons, rubber bullets, teargas, and concussion grenades. A blizzard scattered the battered survivors. "I wanted, for one more time in my life, to stand shoulder to shoulder with other veterans, to feel the passion and commitment of my youth, to try to make a difference even in the face of overwhelming odds," he wrote. "Sometimes in life, you have to stand up and be counted. Sometimes you have to do what is right, even if it is not successful." Peter Mahoney alternates throughout his memoir between spinning fascinating accounts of his incredible life story and seeking lessons to share. "I tried and failed to change the world, but I tried," he writes in a concluding chapter addressed to his children. "I hope that reading about my life can help you understand what you must do in the world I have left you." A major thing yet to be done, he writes, is curing America's addiction to war. "Sure, we want to take credit for forcing an end to the Vietnam War," he writes of his generation of activists, "but we never changed the rampant militarism of post-WWII America." Jan Barry is a long-time VVAW member, poet, and author.
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