Video Interview: Janis Nark

The Roaring Fork Veterans History Project

In Association with Aspen Historical Society and the

Library of Congress Presents:

Janis Nark, Lieutenant Colonel

U.S. Army, Vietnam Era, 1968

Interview conducted by: Lieutenant Colonel Dick Merritt

Transcribed by: Western Deposition & Transcription, LLC

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  I’m Lieutenant Colonel Dick Merritt, United States Marine Corp, Retired, conducting today’s interview for the Roaring Fork Veterans History Project.  Today is Thursday, 22 October, 2009, and we are conducting our interview at Grass Roots Community Television in Aspen, Colorado.  We have Casey O’Kane as our cameraman.  Rye Zupancis is our technical director, and our log recorder is Natasha Young.

And today’s interview is sponsored by Marilyn Marks of Aspen in honor of her father, who served in World War II in the Battle of the Bulge and is now living on the East Coast.

Good afternoon, Janis.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  Good afternoon, Dick.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Here we go.  Welcome to our interview for the Library of Congress in association with the library, the Aspen Historical Society.

Janis, tell me briefly about your early life?

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  I will.  When I was thinking about it, it’s briefer than my military life.  I was not quite 20 when I joined the military and then I spent the next 26 years in the military.

I was born in Detroit.  My dad worked for Ford Motor Company.  And when I was 12, we moved to England and I got to go to boarding school there for a few years.  And then my brother, Malcolm, and I got to go to boarding school in Switzerland after that, where I learned to love the mountains and skiing, and then ended up back in Detroit where I went to nursing school.

Graduated from high school and went to nursing school, in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  How did you wind up in the Army?

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  Well, the recruiters came around.  I know you were a recruiter in Michigan, too.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Yeah, I was.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  We talked about that.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Right, in Detroit.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  In fact we have talked about so many things, I was counseling myself before this interview.  It’s like it’s going to be recorded for posterity.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  That’s right.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  Don’t spill your guts all over the place just because you are talking to Dick.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Right.  We go back 30 years, is when we met in 1979 as ski instructors at Highlands.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  That’s right.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Yeah.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  We go way back.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Yeah.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  So anyway the recruiters, and you were one, you know this, they came around to our nursing school and it was 1968.  The war was at its height and they wanted us bad.  They were all in their Class A uniforms, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and they are all good looking and well spoken and intelligent.  And they made us promises like the moon and the stars, more substantial things like good pay, status as an officer, travel.  And travel, boy my little ears perked up.

And I had visions of being the nurse in the dispensary in Garmisch, Germany, skiing the Zugspitze every day, to which they replied “No problem.  You can go anywhere in the world you want to go.”  And I thought, “Well that sounds really good.”  And then I’m thinking, you know, I know that there is a war going on and they’re not talking about it.

And so I said “Excuse me, but I know there is a war going on and you’re not talking about it.”  And they said “Oh no, no.  Don’t worry, don’t worry.”  They could barely bring themselves to say the word “Vietnam”.  Strictly voluntary; even the nurses that want to go can’t get there.  It’s a very choice assignment.

And before we could think about that for too long, they brought out the big hook that had reeled so many of us in before.  They said:  “Ladies, there are 2,000 eligible bachelors for every young woman in the military.”  And I’m going “Well, where do I sign?”  And I raised my hand and I joined on what was called the Army Student Nurse Program.

And I recall going home and telling my family.  And I had already made up my mind, I was a very willful child, and I go home and I call this family meeting and my mother’s there and my father’s there and my brother, Malcolm, who is two years older than I am.  I said “I’ve made a decision.  I’m joining the Army Nurse Corps.  They are going to pay me for my last year of nursing school and then I only owe them two years and I’m going to Germany.”

And my mother, who is this very supportive woman, is sitting there and she looks at me and she said “Janis, I know you have given this a lot of thought, and I know that you can tell me why you are doing this.  I hope that you can tell me why you are doing this.”  My father goes “Is it money?  You want money, I’ll give you money.”  And my brother, two years older goes “Cool, does that mean they’re not going to draft me?”  I remember it like it was yesterday.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Well, so you finished nursing school and then went on active duty?

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  I did.  I finished nursing school, took my boards and went to basic training at Fort Sam Houston, Texas.  And the recruiters hadn’t lied, there were guys everywhere.  You could just literally look across a sea of young officers and go, “You, come here.”  And it was interesting.  It was fun.  It was not like basic training for most of the guys in those days.

We learned military history.  We learned how to set up a field hospital, how to triage, how to read a map, how to land navigate with a compass and a map.  We learned how to march, and I love marching.  It was like everyone moving in unison to the same beat.  And trust me, you haven’t seen funny until you’ve seen an entire platoon of nurses try to do an about-face in high heels.

And then they issued us our uniforms.  I have always stood tall, Mother Nature and Mother Nark made me that way, but I never stood as tall as the first day I put on one of the uniforms for my Country.  It chokes me up just to remember that day, I was so proud.

And towards the end of our basic training, in my little class of nurses, this instructor, one of our instructor walks in and he’s in his little uniform with all his ribbons and decorations, and he stood there for the longest time and just, and looked at us like we were just the most pitiful thing he’d ever seen.  And finally he takes a deep breath and he goes, “How many of you had recruiters that promised you, you wouldn’t have to go to Vietnam?”

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Uh-oh.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  And in my little class of 30 nurses, 29 of us went (raises hand), and he said “Well, they’re recruiters.  They lie.  The truth is six months from now you will be in Vietnam or you will be in Korea or you will be some place so God awful like Fort Huachuca, Arizona, you’ll wish you were in Vietnam or Korea.”  And suddenly, I look around at all of these shocked and stunned faces, and I’m thinking, “Well, he’s obviously talking to them because I’m going to Germany.”  Straight into denial.

So after basic training I went to my first duty station.  It was at Madigan General Hospital in Fort Lewis, Washington.  It was at Madigan that I saw my first young soldier die and that took a piece of my heart that I will miss for as long as live.  It was at Madigan that I learned all the ways that our enemy had come up with to hurt, maim, kill our young soldiers.

Our evacuation system in Vietnam was so good it wasn’t unusual for a soldier to be wounded in the field and lose consciousness, be dusted off by helicopter, taken to the rear, stabilized, sedated, put on a plane, flown over the ocean, put on a bus and brought to my ward, and literally wake up in my hands.

I worked on orthopedics and we would get busloads of air evacs in every day from Vietnam and I would check them over on their litters before I would assign them a bed.  And at least once or twice a week a young soldier would open his eyes and he’d look around and he’d look at me with my little white uniform on with the little sleeves that were pointy and my little white cap and he’d go, “Well, I’m either home or I’m dead because you sure look like an angel to me.”  And talk about your job perks.

I was walking through my ward really late one night and I heard one of my patients crying.  It wasn’t a cry of physical pain, it was the cry of a broken heart.  It was the cry of a shattered spirit.  I walked over to his bed and I put my hand on his arm.  He only had one arm.  He had lost the other one and both of his legs in Vietnam, and I remember he was only 17 years old.

And I don’t remember what I said to him with all of my nursing experience but he looked at me and said, “Why?”  He’d been to war and back and was asking me, the Second Lieutenant, why.  I knew I didn’t know a lot of things but I knew I couldn’t answer that question.  I remember I smoothed the hair back from his forehead and I gave him morphine for the only pain that I knew I could take away.

I was on orthopedics for six months, almost to the day, when I got orders for Vietnam.  I was 21 years old.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Well Janis, what do you want to tell us about Vietnam?

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  That’s a good question.  I remember being extremely stressed when I went over there.  I don’t know if you went through the 90th Replacement Battalion, did you?

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  No.  I —

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  You Marines had your own thing.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  I went up on DMZ off of Iwo Jima.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  Straight into it.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Straight into it.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  Yeah, straight into it.

Well, they were a little different with us nurses.  We went to the 90th Replacement Battalion in Long Bend.  It was a huge installation where they issued us our combat gear, our fatigues, combat boots.  And I know we went through three days of orientation where they told us what kind of patients we were going to be treating, the terrain, the weather, the diseases.  They gave us three days of everything that we needed to know, that they could tell us within that timeframe.  I don’t remember any of that.

I remembered exactly one fact from those three days and that was nine out of ten snakes in Vietnam are poisonous, and the tenth one eats you alive.  I made a mental note not to play with snakes while I was there and I went to Cam Ranh.

I stayed in Cam Ranh for a year.  We worked 12-hour shifts, six or seven days a weeks, unless we got busy and then we just worked until we couldn’t work anymore.  We saw everything and treated everything that you can imagine in war, and frankly a lot of things that would never occur to most people.  It was a very, very strange war.

I remember when I first got in-country, my orientation with my chief nurse, she goes “You will not, under any circumstances get on any helicopter going anywhere your entire year here in-country.”  About three weeks later I get on a helicopter, I even have it recorded here on film.  That’s me.  I flew out to Nha Trang on bogus orders to supposedly check narcotics as a disinterested personnel, and she was right in saying it, because save one who was killed in combat, the other nurses who had been killed in-country were killed in aircraft crashes.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Uh-huh.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  But that was my first experience and getting tar all over my combat boots too.  But I thought, like we all did, “What are they going to do, send me to Vietnam?”

And the next picture is of me on my ward.  One of my patients took that and we actually had a dark room on the compound for patients who were ambulatory, so that they could take pictures and develop them, and he took that picture of me.  And I was having it blown up for this interview at the studio here in town, at Wolfe, and when he said “Well, let’s just enhance that color a little bit,” because this is a black and white picture.  And it went to 3-D.  It just — all of a sudden, man, I was just right back there with my rusty old desk and these old charts.  And I thought, “oh, that’s spooky” where you can just be taken back there like that at an instant.

And then the next one here is me sitting on top of the bunker.  This is my hooch over here.  I’m holding a — some kind of weapon someone — many people have told me what it was, a M1 or M something.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  It looks like an M16 to me.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  It —

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Yeah, it is.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  You think it is?

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Uh-huh.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  But it’s got a wooden stock, that’s why I didn’t think it was.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Yeah.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  So I don’t know.  I know what my .357 Magnum looks like.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Yeah.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  But that’s —

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  It could be a captured AK-47.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  It doesn’t have a clip in it.  They were smart enough not to give me ammo.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Anyway, you’re there with a weapon.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  And I’m sitting on top of this bunker where I’m supposed to go when take incoming, and as you can see it’s filled with sand and it remained that way my entire year that I was there.  And I, like many people, decided “Well, if they are going to get me, they’re going to have to land one right on top of me.”

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Well Janis, did you ever feel like your life was in danger?

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  Yeah, many times.  Because there were no front lines in Vietnam, as you know.  And the compound that I was on had been, and I use this expression, “overrun” nine months before I got there.  I was told by one of my Marine friends, that, “No you weren’t overrun, you were infiltrated.”  There’s a big difference —

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Yeah.  There is.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  — as far as numbers.

So we were infiltrated nine months before I was there and they came through the wires, the sappers with satchel charges strapped to their body, and just ran through the compound blowing up buildings until they were shot.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Uh-huh.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  And we did a lot of things that we probably shouldn’t have been doing, because we were all young and lots of us weren’t that bright, when it came to — it was an adventure and we felt safe.  We had this false sense of security, certainly it was false.

But I would go on missions with the CID guys and anything that would — sounded exciting, off base, I was all over it.  And we would go on MEDCAP missions.  This is a picture of me on the MEDCAP missions.  MEDCAP stood for Medical Assistance to Civilian Population.  And here I am with a water buffalo and I don’t know anything about water buffalos and he’s that near to me, and I’m going “Take the picture, I don’t know what this animal’s going to do.”

And here, this is the head of a little mountain yard boy.  We would go out to the villages and just, and give them medicine or pull teeth or pain pills or antibiotics, whatever we could do in the span of a day.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Yeah.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  And that was the kind of stuff that we did.  We, towards the end of my tour, were infiltrated again.  We’d been getting intelligence reports that we going to be overrun and I knew that only because I was dating the intelligence officer, it was not common knowledge.

But I was working nights on my ward and we had just sedated the last of the patients to sleep, and I’m sitting at my desk with my corpsman, and we hear the strange noise of artillery and things blowing up.  And we both noticed it but neither one of us said anything, and then the next one goes off and he looks at me and I looked at him and he goes, “That was close” and “close” was no sooner out his mouth, the next one goes off, the windows shatter, the fluorescent lights fall to the floor.  And like the good medical people, like non-military that we are, we go running out of the ward outside to go see what’s happening, just to make sure we are under attack.

And just at that moment they blew up the ammo dump that was located across the street from us.  And I’m standing there, it lit up the night sky with every color of the rainbow, and I’m standing there going “Wow, that’s really, you know, beautiful.”  And one of my patients came out and grabbed me and threw me down on the ground, and I’m about ready to say — you know, come up swinging, you know, like what’s going on?  And that’s when the blast wave, of course, hit and everything that wasn’t tied down became airborne.

I would have been dead, (snaps fingers) like that.  Everything went flying overhead, and sticks impaling stuff, and now everything is blowing up around us.

So we go back inside and I get all of my patients into the bunker or under the bed.  And one of my patients comes in and he goes — after all that’s done and all kinds of people running around and things blowing up — and he says “Ma’am, I want you to follow me.”  He takes me into one of the back offices and he says “Please get under that desk.”  It was one of those great big old metal military desks and I said “Okay.”

And I’m thinking, I don’t — and he leaves.  He says “I’ll be right back.”  And he comes back and he brings me a pillow and he says “Now ma’am, when the place goes up,” he says, “I want you to put your face down into his pillow and maybe you can save your pretty face.”  And he said “I’ll be guarding the door” and he salutes me and turns around and walks out.  And I’m going “I don’t want to die.”  And I’m thinking, pillow, face, blown up?  And I just — and I did.  I put my face in the pillow and that’s the last thing I remember.  I think I fell asleep until he woke me up.

And there were other times, but when you’re in a war zone and you’re young, you don’t always think — but yeah, death was never far away.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Exactly.  Janis, can we go back to this MEDCAP?  In the Marines we were fighting the combat but we were also winning the hearts and minds of the countrymen.  We had the civil action groups that were working with the people, and this is an example of the other side of the war, where we are going out to help the locals, and I think that was the —

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  And that’s exactly right.  That’s exactly right.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  I know.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  We —

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  And that was very important.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  We still had it in our minds, that we were winning their hearts and minds, and many of us were there with good intentions.  We were there at different times in the war.  I was there later than you and certainly the attitude had changed, but we were still doing things like that.

I remember going to an orphanage and bathing the babies and dressing them in whatever clothes were available and trying to engage them in games and they were just — had a very flat affect.  There was no crying, it was just crazy.

And I took out my camera, and I was talking picture and I’m looking now through the lens, at these little faces.  Easily 80 percent of them were American babies, the little red-headed ones with freckles, blond, blue eyes, lots of little black babies.  And I’m just thinking, what’s going to happen to these kids?  And I just — and I thought, well, I need to put that out of my mind and go back to work.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Back to work.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  And that’s one of the memories that I buried for years, decades after I came home.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  And in addition, you know, the fact that there is a lot of stress in the war, did you happen to go on leave or on R an Rs during your tour?  Did you get out of country?

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  I did.  I was very fortunate.  They approved a two week leave and one R and R, and so I got — the leave was for guys who were married.  So they could go back and spend two weeks with their wives.  And I so took three R and Rs, and I went to Japan, Hong Kong and Australia.  And for many years after I came home that was the only thing I remembered.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Uh-huh.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  I remembered the fun times and the adventures that we had.  I got to go skiing in Australia and that was the highlight of my year in Vietnam were my R and Rs.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  When you came home what was your homecoming like, from Vietnam to Conus, the Continental United States?

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  Well, I remember the first thing.  I flew into Travis and my boyfriend that I had dated was in law school at Berkley, and I don’t know how I did it but I found my way to Berkley.  I checked into a hotel, and then I was going to the law library to meet him.  And I’ve got my little class — the cords on, the uniform with my ribbons and things from Vietnam.  And the woman behind the desk, I asked her to call me a cab to get to the law library.  And she looks at me and she goes “Oh honey, you’re going to want to change out of that uniform”.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Berkeley.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  Berkeley.  What did I know?  And I said, because I really didn’t have very many clothes, I said, “Really?  Why?”  And she thought about that for a minute and she says, “Well a lot of people are very conflicted about how they feel about Vietnam and the war.”  And I went oh, and then she goes “And I wouldn’t want to see you get hurt.”  And I thought “Hurt?  I just survived a year in the war.  I don’t want to get hurt in Berkeley.”

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Right.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  So I went back to my room and God bless her, she was probably in 20s, maybe early 30s, that woman, God only knows what she spared me from, in that experience in Berkeley.  It all went fine.

And then I went home and people didn’t know what to say.  It’s like when somebody dies, people don’t know what to say.  And they didn’t know what to say to, especially to a woman who had been there.  As unacceptable as it was for the guys to talk about it in 1971, it was really unacceptable for a woman to engage in that conversation.  Because even as the Women’s Movement was making its voice heard, the Feminist Movement was very really strong, the overriding message was very clear:  nice girls did not join the Army.  Nice girls did not go to war.

And I knew that wasn’t true, and I just — it just made me angry and I spent a lot of time being angry.  And I thought, well, you know, this isn’t me.  I’m not an angry person, I’m not.  And so I did what many Vietnam vets did, I took all those memories, all that pain, all that emotion and I stuffed it.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Well, my experience too, coming home was similar, but you know, at that time there were many anti-war types that were protesting “Kill the messenger,” which was us —

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  Sure.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  — and not taking the message to where we received our orders from.

Well, anyway you stuffed those uniforms, and what did you do after that?

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  I stuffed — yeah.  Well, no, actually I was still in uniform.  I stuffed all the feelings, but I was still in uniform.  And I finally got one of my three choices that the recruiters promised me.  And they sent me to Fitzsimons and I was at Fitzsimons Army Medical Hospital in Denver for a very brief period of time.  And I got off active duty there.  I went up to the mountains and I fished and I hiked.  I didn’t do anything for almost a year.  I was — I didn’t know it, but I was like the wounded animal that goes off into the forest to lick its wounds.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Uh-huh.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  And I stayed in the reserves and started working as a nurse again and then I came up to Aspen.  I came up here on vacation with my brother, back when you could get lodging and lift tickets and breakfast and a free drink at the bar, all for $99 a week.  And I went to the Highlands and I fell in with a bunch of really great people, like you know, and I got married.  I had a clothing company.  I had a business.  And it was a good time.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Well —

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  Oh, wait.  We wanted to — we were going to talk about — yeah —

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  The Aspen Highlands.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  — the Aspen Highlands.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Yeah.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  How could I forget about Aspen Highlands?

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Back in the good old days.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  And here is a sign that you made.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Nark’s Nook, most difficult, black diamond.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  That’s right.  And you made that sign and you helped bury it.  We had the whole ski school lined up on top of the little run between this road and Lower Stein.  I can’t even remember the name of that road now.  It’s right at the bottom, but it’s right above Lower Stein.  And then when the ski company bought it — well, Gerald Hines bought it and then — yeah, we knew that was going to happen.  They moved it.  They moved it to the top of the old Cloud Nine lift in the trees, next to the Alps, and this was the first sign but because it moved, then it was like, “Where’s Waldo?” and people kept stealing the sign and moving it around the mountain.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  I know they did.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  They did.  And it was driving Max Smith, the head of the patrol —

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Yeah.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  — just crazy.  So they finally — they have now bolted it to this tree, back there but it’s there, the sign.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  But now it’s a double black.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  Yeah, now it’s a double black.  But at first they made this one a double black too because it’s a little concave bit of terrain right next to the trees, and yeah.  Yeah.  I got more difficult as the years went by, that was a joke too.  But it was a good time and I spent a lot of time on active duty with the reserves.  I did site support.  I continued my education and like I said it was a good time.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  The education you got in the army, how would you rate that as far as the skill levels and everything that you learned?

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  It was interesting.  I took every course that I could and some that I wasn’t even eligible for, I snuck into.  I took survival courses.  I, of course, did the advanced course in Command and General Staff College and MBC school, chemical casualties course.  I took all that I could and I thought they were excellent.  They were people with experience, teaching courses that were relevant, that served me not just in the military but in civilian life as well.  And I was enjoying that, right up until — I stayed in long enough for Saddam Hussein to really screw up my life.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Uh-huh.  So you had a good time.  I remember the day that we were skiing in Thunderbowl and the start of Desert Shield, and I didn’t know it, but you were in the Reserves and you left, and we talked about it here.  And you said “I don’t know what’s going to happen.”  And I skied away and you skied away and I didn’t see you for a while.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  Yeah.  Nobody saw me for a while.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  So tell me about what happen.  I know you got called back on active duty.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  Yeah.  I was actually finishing up Command and General Staff College Andover, Delaware when Iraq invaded Kuwait.  The very next day three of my classmates were gone.

And my husband called me and he said, you know, are you getting a call back to active duty?  And I laughed.  I laughed.  I said “Don’t be silly, they can get two lieutenants and a captain who know what they are doing, for what they’d have to pay me.”  I said “No, no.  Don’t worry, I’m home.  I’ll take care of all those projects that have been waiting for me to do.”  I finished Command and General Staff College.  I go home, three days later I’m called back to active duty.  And I’m just going,  oh, no.  And then I’m thinking, “Well it’s not bad.  If there is a war going on, where else would I want to be?  I want to be there.  I’m a Lieutenant Colonel, I’ve got some rank in this war.”

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Right.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  So we go to our in processing station.  I’m the dolphin that gets caught up in this tuna net.  I’m in this huge general hospital unit.  They just call up the whole unit.  So we go and I end up at Fort Knox, Kentucky because our mission was not to go to the sand.  Our mission was to take over a general hospital when the active duty troops went to war.  So it wasn’t my choice.  I would have much rather been over there.  But that’s not how it worked out.

So I go to in process at Fort Knox and I look around and there’s like 14 lieutenant colonels, one major, one captain and no lieutenants.  And I’m thinking, “Hm, there goes my advantage in this — in that, right?”  And then I went, well, you know, I need to be in training and education because that’s what I do.  And they said get behind the nurses who have their PhDs.  And I’m going, “Damn.”  You know, “this is not going well for me.”

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Yeah.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  So, fortunately they assign me to orthopedics, which I remembered and I could actually do something there.  And thought, you know, we’re seeing all these troops, Fort Knox is a tank post, a — what do they call it?  Armor post.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Armor, yeah.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  And there’s tanks everywhere and there’s soldiers everywhere.  And a week later everything that was green is now sand-colored and a week after that it’s all gone.  And we waited.  We babysat an empty post for a long time.  We did the best we could to maintain our morale around Christmastime, since we’d been since early fall.  We were activated in August, got to Fort Knox the end of September.

So now it’s Christmastime and people are away from their families and we are waiting.  We are glued to CNN and we are just trying to maintain and the holidays came, and everybody was depressed and I began to just spiral into this great depression.

And I have a copy of an email that I got.  And now it’s January, and I get an email on my hospital computer.  It’s a quote from Ecclesiastes, the one, “A time to be born, a time to die, a time to plant, a time to” — that one that the Byrds did a really nice rendition of.  And at the end it said “A time to love and a time to hate, a time of war and a time of peace.”

And I replied to it:

“And it’s a time of war again.  As much as I deny and shake my head in disbelief, I know of course, it’s true again.  And I have this heartache quite literally.  It doesn’t go away.  It’s a heavy sadness that doesn’t leave, because I know the suffering and the death are going to happen again and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.  I speak with the naïve children every day.  I hear how anxious to go to war, to get their combat patch, to have Desert Storm on their record.  There’s no words I can give them to let them know, nor can I know, what their individual prices will be.  I just want it to be over.  I want this feeling to end.”

And my rational mind is going, “Well of course you’re depressed.  We are going to war again.  Young women and young men are going to die again.  There’s nothing you can do about it again.  What about your marriage?  What about your job?  What about your career?”

I had every reason to be depressed and it didn’t have anything to do with any of that.  It had everything to do with all the stuff that I had stuffed from Vietnam, and then poof, it’s over.

It was over.  We won.  I’m back home.  People are giving us parades.  They’re hugging us.  They’re thanking us for our service and I’m thinking, “Wow, this is really strange.  This feels good, but really strange.”  But a process had begun that would have never started for me had, it not been for Desert Storm.  Slowly and painfully I was beginning to deal with PTSD.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  What did you do initially?

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  I think I talked to certain people, very select people.  You and I know that.  We didn’t talk to anybody who wasn’t there and didn’t do that.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  That’s right.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  Hadn’t been there, done that.  I was fortunate to have Sue Lazar, a girlfriend of mine, who was in Tay Ninh during Tet of ’68.  We were in the same reserve unit.  I talked to her.

We went to the Wall in Washington D.C.  We stayed a long way, way away for a long time.  And our first trip down to the Wall was at night.  It was a very slow approach, a very slow maneuver.  And I talked with other friends and even going and being at the Wall, where there were lots of veterans, we never wore anything or said anything that would identify us as veterans.  It was still very easy to be invisible.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Uh-huh.  I know I remember the day I met you in the VA hospital in Grand Junction and I said, “Janis, what are you doing here?”  And you told me.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  Uh-huh.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  And then what happened?

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  It was, probably the most pivotal thing that happened after that was the tenth anniversary of the Wall.  I had seen pictures of vets in magazines or on TV and I knew it was affecting me and I had been there.  But there was something that just snapped in my head and I told my husband, I said “I’m going to Washington D.C.”

And I put my Class A uniform in the car.  I drove to Washington D.C. and I wore my uniform to the Wall and again people are coming out and they’re thanking me and they are hugging me, and they’re — the uniforms tell the whole story if you know how to read them, and people are saying “Oh, she’s a nurse.  She was a nurse in Vietnam.”  And I’m going — and you are going to see this in the speech.  So I don’t want to spoil it but I just, I was overwhelmed.

And I met Diane Carlson Evans, who was the woman who got the Women’s Memorial built, and they were going to dedicate it the next Veteran’s Day.  And I went up to this woman that I thought was her and I shook her hand and I said “Thank you so much for all you’ve done to create this monument.  I know you know how much it means to all the women who never came home, who’ve never talked or shared about it and stuffed all those” —  and I went on and on and on.

And she finally goes, “Oh, you must think I’m Diane Carlson Evans.”  And I just went, “Yeah.”  And she walks me like two paces over and she goes, “Diane, this Colonel Nark.  Colonel Nark, this is Diane.”  And I took her hand and I immediately started crying and that was it.  And she’d just — she’d been there before and she goes “It’s okay.”

And I was so mortified.  I went home, and I wrote a letter to Sue about my experience at the Wall, and I sent a copy to Diane.  And Diane called me and she said “This is a great letter.”  She said, “Can you speak?”  And I said, “I know that you would not know this by our first visit, but yeah, I can speak.”

And so she asked me to speak at the Wall on Memorial Day about the Women’s Memorial that would be dedicated following Veteran’s Day.  And we’re going to show the video in just a second, but here’s the crowd.  President Clinton is there.  Colin Powell is there.  A number of other dignitaries, a lot of security, a lot of Secret Service guys, because the Vietnam vets were not happy that President Clinton was at their memorial.  They were holding up signs and booing and yelling and screaming.  It was — and I’m just sitting there going, “I’m going to give my speech and not cry.  Going to give my speech and not cry.”

In the video, you can see behind me, to my right is a man with a yellow hat on.  He is a veteran of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, and he was receiving an award that day for volunteering so many hours of his — what was left of his life.  He has unfortunately passed now.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Uh-huh.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  And then towards the end, you can see the Secret Service man, who is just over my shoulder, wipe a tear from his eye.  And I got a letter from his wife actually.  Which was really an amazing — it was an amazing time.  So now we are going to show the video.  This is 1993.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  1993.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  The Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial.

(Video played, as follows:)

CORPORAL JAN SCRUGGS:  Lieutenant Colonel Janis Nark.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  Thank you, Jan.  Good afternoon, everyone.

I am really surprised to be standing here today talking to you about memorials and war because for almost 20 years after I came home from Vietnam, I didn’t talk about it.  I think the only thing that I said when it came up was that was a another lifetime ago.  And then three significant events occurred.

The first was the placement of this very powerful monument behind me.  I would see pictures of it and the vets on  television or in magazines and it brought out emotions in me that went far beyond just tears.  And I, like many vets, knew that it wasn’t over.  We knew we had to come here.  We didn’t know why, but we knew we had to come.

I was tree vet at first and I didn’t know what tree vets were ’til last year.  They are the ones that are always back there in that stand of trees, mostly alone, looking at this wall with the safe distance between them and it.  It takes some of us longer than others.

The second thing that happened that television show called China Beach came on the air, where a group of talented actresses gave an excellent portrayal of part of what it’s like to be a women in war.  And people started talking about Vietnam and asking me questions that I’d never answered before, and I started to answer, and it was not a pretty picture.

I have embarrassed my husband on more than one social occasion by my tears, or my tirade, depending on what the question was or what mood I was in.  I wasn’t aware of how much work I had to do in order to heal.

The third event was the tenth anniversary of this Wall, last Veteran’s Day.  I usually come to D.C. and to the Wall on Veteran’s Day with Sue Lazar, a friend of mine who was an army nurse in Tay Ninh during Tet of ’68 and other vets that we’d met over the years.

But last year due to any number of reasons, no one else could come and it was the tenth anniversary and I didn’t want to miss that, so I did two things I hadn’t done before.  I came alone and I came in uniform, this uniform.  Now if you’ve been around the military for any length of time, uniforms get pretty easy to read, and what mine says, other than I’m really good with a pistol, it says that I am a nurse and that I am a Vietnam vet.

I was totally unprepared for the wonderful emotional response that I received from the vets and the Gold Star Mothers who lost their sons and daughters in this war.  I immediately went into, to borrow a phrase “I’m not worthy, I’m not worthy.”  It felt so good.  It took me a while to figure out that it really had very little to do with me personally.  I just represented to them all the women who had cared for them, for their buddies, for their sons.  I was truly overwhelmed because certainly I didn’t deserve all this gratitude.

I don’t know of a health care person who says, “I saved a lot of lives.  I helped a lot of sick and wounded soldiers.  I did everything I could.”

No, what we say is, “Ah, if I’d just seen that, been there, done that, worked harder, longer, smarter.  If only.”  And consequently we never come to peace with our memories of war.  And that’s what this Wall and that’s what the Women’s Memorial that will be dedicated this coming Veteran’s Day is all about.

I’m personally grateful to Diane Carlson Evans for her vision of what this memorial will mean, for her courage and her perseverance to create and see this project through.  I don’t know where you get that kind of strength.  I know where she got it.  I know she’s a nurse and she’s a Vietnam vet.

Also to Glenna Goodacre for her stunning creation, the figures each so unique and symbolic, that each woman will be able to bring her own memories home to it.  There are three women, a standing figure looking towards the sky.  To this day, when I hear a helicopter, I don’t think my adrenaline level does what it used to, but I still look to the sky to find it.  I know what a Huey sounds like in my sleep.

The kneeling woman to me, to me she is every woman alone with her thoughts of war, she’s the Red Cross worker, the entertainers, the air traffic controllers, the dieticians, the physical therapists and all the women who served in so many capacities in this war.  These are the sisters that this memorial will reach out to and say “We know you.  We’ve been there too.  Come on home.”

And of course the woman caring for the wounded soldier, as every military medical person knows GIs are absolutely the best patients in the world, and I am so grateful for having had that experience.  But now it’s time for the caregivers to heal.

In closing I’d like to share part of a letter that I wrote to Sue Lazar last Veteran’s Day.  This is for all the women:

“I carried you with me when I went to the Wall.  I had the strength to be there for me but I didn’t feel the entitlement.  No raggedy remnants of faded fatigues or sun bleached boonie hats for me.  I actually wore my Class As.  I wanted some kind of connection.  God, I wish you could have been there.  They were there for you, and they — you certainly deserve what I received.  Jeez but it felt good to cry the tears that for so long we held and covered with our laughter and let the years bury so deep.

“They came, the 40-something vets, looking so much older than their years.  Some with the same eyes that we saw back then, the pain still very much with them.  They hugged me and most smiled through tears as they tried to speak.  They want you to know they remember that you were there for them and they’re grateful.

“It was a strange déjà vu.  Remember how they always used to take our picture?  They still do.  And all those eyes looking to us, those eyes, how we learned to look right in them and say ‘It’s okay.  You’re going to be just fine.’

“It’s not so hard to see the Wall now, to be near it.  To feel its presence, to feel their absence.  We’re going to be okay.  It’s time heal, my friend.  It’s time for you to come home, to know that you did everything you could and more, that it mattered, that you touched those lives.

“Next year we’ll stand together when the Women’s Memorial will be dedicated and we can begin to forgive ourselves for our imagined slights and shortcomings and our human frailties, and we can begin the process of healing ourselves and coming to peace with our memories and if you haven’t yet I truly hope that you can find peace this Memorial Day.”

Thank you.

(Video Ends)

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Janis, did that change your life in anyway?

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  Yeah.  It changed my life in a whole lot of ways.  I wasn’t prepared.  I wasn’t prepared.  When I said I’d give that speech, I had no idea.  I wrote it like that.  I wrote it probably in one sitting in five, ten minutes.  But it took me months to be able to speak those words and when it was over, and I sat down, I thought “Oh thank God, I never have to do that again.”

But that’s not how it worked and people started calling and I started remembering things and I started writing.  I was able to find about half the books I’m published in.  I’m published in I don’t know, 11 or 12 books now.  Some Chicken Soup for the Soul, three Chicken Soup for the Soul books and lots of them about Vietnam.  I was — we were — this one cracks me up actually.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Yeah.  Well, you gave me a lot of these books you wrote, Janis, but here’s one.  Chicken Soup for the Nurse’s Soul, number one New York Times best selling, and with stories by Janis Nark, and no one else but Florence Nightingale.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  Florence Nightingale.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  So you are right up there with the heavies.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  On the cover, no less.  And I go, that’s really a reach.  The people are going to go who’s Janis Nark?  But the Chicken Soup for the Soul people, Jack — what’s his name?  There are two of them, Mark Victor Hansen and Jack Canfield, I know from National Speakers Association and so that’s probably why I’m in three of their books.

But I’m in lots of these little books that the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial publishes.  And one of the first stories, memories that came back to me I wrote, again I wrote all of these, start to finish with very little editing, because the memories when they came back to me were so clear.  And this is one of the stories that’s in the little books from the Memorial Fund.  It’s called “Brown Eyes”.

“One of the most difficult things we had to do in Vietnam was to send someone back into battle.  These young men had seen the face of war, heard the deafening noise, tasted the fear, had their buddies blown away and been wounded.  They were wounded but not bad enough to get their ticket home and now had to get back to the field.

“They always seemed to know when it was coming.  As well as I felt I knew my patients, I could never know for sure just how they would respond.  Some would just sit there and nod their heads as their eyes lost focus to some distant place in time.  Some would cry and beg us not to send them back.  Some went AWOL.

“He was in his 20s.  I have a picture of him still.  He looks like he could be 40.  He wasn’t the average 1970 GI.  He was a soldier and he took his job seriously.  There was something very strong and quietly powerful about him.  He moved with all the grace and stealth of panther.  All of his senses keen, alert, ready, waiting, every muscle in control.  Unlike the mother role I took with most of my patients I felt very much like a woman with him.

“He had unearthed in me all of the feelings that very early in my tour I had learn to suppress.  I felt very small and aware of myself.  We would talk a lot, sometimes about the war but also about so many other things.  I felt like he knew everything.  Sometimes I could make him laugh and his brown eyes would dance, but most times when I looked into his eyes it seemed like they were bottomless with pain.

“I don’t know when the war ended for him.  I won’t look to see if his name is etched in the black granite of our Wall.  I want to believe that he lived to earn lots of stripes on his sleeves and lots of ribbons and medals to wear with his quiet dignity on his chest.  I want to believe that he is retired now, fishing somewhere, proud of his service to his Country.  I want to believe that he is physically healthy and mentally at peace.  I do believe that even if we hadn’t sent him back, he would have gone anyway.”

And I started to write.  I wrote things like that.  I had remembrances of my patients and of my time there and I started to get more and more in touch and of course the speech that I made was making the rounds.  I met a wonderful guy here in Aspen name Jerry Coffee.  Do you know Jerry Coffee?

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  I don’t know Jerry Coffee.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  He was one of the longest held POWs in Vietnam, seven and a half years.  And I met him here through mutual friends and he invited me to speak in Washington D.C. at the Wall again.  And I said “Well, I don’t know, who would I be speaking to?”  He said, “Oh, just a group of speakers.”  Well, to me a group of speakers is what 20, 30 people?  Well it was the National Speakers Association, all 2,000 professional speakers and so I did.  I went and I gave this little speech and everything just snowballed from there.  And I went from being a public speaker, which is what you saw at the Wall, to speaking professionally.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Well Janis, I want to thank you for writing these books.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  No problem.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  You’ve given me a number of these books to distribute to the Veterans here in Valley and they’ve gone into hands and they’ve helped a lot of our veterans around here.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  Thank you.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Thank you for doing that.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  Thank you.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  So you speak to a lot of veteran’s groups as well as civilians now?

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  I do.  Of course military and medical people are a real good fit.  Every time I think I have a nitch or a niche, I don’t.  I got a call, one guy, a Vietnam vet who’d seen me speak at the Wall.  He said, “Hey, I went to your website.  I like your style.”  He says “I’ve got some guys I want you to talk to.”  And I ended up speaking to 30 heavy equipment operator supervisors who build roads, dams and bridges and these guys are sitting there like this.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Yeah.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  I walk in and they, go what is this chick going to say to us?

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Yeah.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  And I talk about change and stress.  And I talk about things that are — that everyone is feeling and experiencing, and I write stuff that like in Thank You Very Much for That, I write stuff from the heart that touches people and helps them get in touch with their emotions.  Everybody from military, medical, to heavy equipment super operators, and left-brained people like bank auditors and people like that.  Because we’re human and it’s our human nature to feel and to hurt and to empathize, and people want to do that.  Sometimes they just don’t have the skills.

And this is my postcard.  And one of my keynote speeches is called “Finding control in the chaos.”  And I talk about all these human conditions and my trademark is “Change is mandatory.  Stress is manageable.  And misery is optional.”   And it’s something that everybody, no matter what job you’re in, what profession you’re in, whatever you are doing in life, it’s applicable to that.

I went — I joined NSA, the National Speakers Association and I got to know Jan Scruggs better.  I had met him at the Wall, and Jan Scruggs is the guy who got the Wall built.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Is Jan Scruggs —

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  And I met him.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  — the man who built the man who got the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial in Washington D.C. built?

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  Absolutely.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  I’ve been there.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  Yeah.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  And he asked you to be on the Board of Directors?

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  He did.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  How did that happen?

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  He did.  It shocked the hell out of me.  I had gotten to know him at the NSA conventions that we have every year.  If you can imagine 2,000 professional speakers in one place; it’s very noisy.  But he came up and started talking to me and we got to know each other and he invited me to come back to the Wall.

He said “Just come out,” he says, “We’ll put you on the dais.”  I said, “Well, did you want me to speak?  Did you want me to do anything?”  He says “No, no, no just be there.”  So I said “okay”.  We go out and we have a good time and I meet all of these incredible people and I get to sit on the dais again and see all the crowd.

And then we’re going, we’re driving back to his house in Annapolis where he and Becky, his wife live, and we start talking and he says “How would you like to be on the Board of Directors for the Wall?”  And I just, I went “Oh, okay.”  It’s like people ask me to do stuff and I go oh, okay and then I think about it later, and I thought, “All right, why, why, why?”

And I came up with the same reason Diane Carlson Evans asked me to speak.  I still look good in my uniform, okay.  And for the Wall, I’m thinking, okay, I’m the token female, I can live with that, or I’m here to make peace between Jan and Diane.  There was a little friction going on there.  I thought, “Okay I can deal with that.”  Then I thought, Okay, it’s for my sense of humor.  I make people laugh.”  I said “I have no problem with that.”  So I just went “Happy to serve.”

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Janis, I understand you have a big project underway, now a B-I-G, capital letters.  Can you tell us a little bit about it?

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  It’s fricking huge.  And I’m more than happy to tell you about it.  I’m on the Advisory Committee.  We are building a center, underground, next to the Wall.

The Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial is the most visited memorial in Washington D.C.  Each year millions of visitors come to look at the Wall and read the names and mourn, and well before the Wall was built, people started leaving things there.

As they were pouring the foundation for this Wall a man came by and asked if he could put his Purple Heart in the cement and the workers went, “Sure.  Why not?”  That was the first artifact that was left there.  With 3.5 million people having served in Southeast Asia, there are nearly 50 million people who can claim a family member who fought in the conflict.  It’s because of this that the Wall’s become a symbol recognized worldwide.  Since its construction more than 100,000 artifacts have been placed at the wall.  These range from purple hearts from World War I, to photographs and letters, to photographs and letters from Operation Iraqi Freedom.

As a result in 2003 Congress unanimously passed the President, and President signed House Resolution 1442, directing the Vietnam Veteran Memorial Fund to construct a visitors’ center at or near the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial on Federal land in the District of Columbia.  And the funds for this project will be raised just like the Wall, from the public at large and then it will be given over to the park service as a gift to the American people.

Here’s where it’s going to go.  Here’s the Wall and it’s just across Henry Bacon Drive right there and it will be underground so it won’t interfere with any of the vistas from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument.  The architects and the design team developed a dramatic two-story underground facility, again bordered by the Lincoln Memorial on one side and the Washington Monument on the other.  And this is a quote from Thomas Allen:

“This is a place where memories weave, where hearts heal.  This is a place where people can feel what Lincoln called the mystic chords of memory stretching from every battle field and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone over this broad land.”

The education center will be a place to reveal the human dimension of the war as well as to celebrate the values of service and the bonds of loyalty and friendship.  It will enhance the experience of the entire National Mall by providing a journey through deeper layers of storytelling, honoring and history.  It will allow visitors to “go beyond” the Wall and look at the human experience and look at the web of lives affected by it.

When we discovered that over half of the visitors to the Wall are younger than the Wall itself, they don’t remember the Vietnam War, and while the names are compelling, we’re going to go way beyond that with this.  When you walk in, making the names visible.  When visitors come in they will encounter large scale photographs of some of the individuals who made the ultimate sacrifice in Vietnam, highlighted by personal images, media footage, oral histories and letters home.  These will bring the names on the Wall to life and provide an unfiltered glimpse into the reality of lives unfulfilled.

Their faces will be featured on their birthdays, giving friends and relatives a special time to visit and see their loved ones honored at the Education Center.  We are right now collecting photographs of the people whose names are on the Wall, the ones who died as a — in Vietnam and if you know anyone who had a service member die there, we want those pictures and they will go up on the Wall on their birthday.

The whole center revolves around the values.  An overarching construct for the Education Center will be the use of values of servicemen and women as a lens through which to understand and memorialize those who have served and sacrificed.  Words such as loyalty, duty, respect, service, honor, courage and integrity provide a framework for a deeper understanding of the experiences of the soldiers, sailors, marines, nurses, medics, chaplains and all others that served in Vietnam.  At times the images of the faces and the names will fade and words represented by values will appear.  These words are then combined with excerpts from letters and others of those who served.

This is a wonderful addition to a part of this center, it’s called the “Collections Wall”.  Like I said, people started leaving artifacts at the Wall from before it was even done and we have now over 100,000 artifacts that are lovingly stored for us by the Parks Service at a museum-quality storage facility in Maryland.

Everything — the only thing we don’t keep are perishable items like flowers and food.  I don’t think we keep booze.  I know we don’t keep the marijuana, but we keep everything else.  The flags that are not altered in any way are dedicated to schools and churches and hospitals and things, and everything else is stored.  Everything from small ribbons and love letters to a Harley Davidson motorcycle that was made by Vietnam Vets specifically to be left at the Wall.  It has never been ridden and it goes on display at certain times.

And this will — we will have for the first time our own display in our facility of many of the poems, photographs, religious icons, toys, letters and personal effects that are placed at the Wall.  These things just bring me to my knees every time I am at the Wall, the things that people leave.  The last thing that just took me down was a pair of muddy combat boots, that you could tell had been worn in Vietnam.  And just dramatic, poignant things that are left there and we will have an exhibit of many of these things available to the public there.

As well as an Education Center where, it’ll be the centerpiece of the multi-faceted nationwide educational program that we have ongoing right now.  And there will be internet based resources there for people who know how to use computers a lot better than I do.  We’ll be able to follow-up on any questions that they have or they can go to VVMF.org for any other questions that they have after they leave the center.

The exit experience, as visitors leave the Education Center the final exhibit will continue the overarching themes of duty, loyalty, courage, respect, honor, service and integrity by highlighting those who formed the larger national story told on the Mall.  By honoring, excuse me, by honoring these important values visitors will be reminded of the importance of honoring all who answer the called of duty and remind them of the nobility of patriotism.

Fortunately for our cause here, we have what’s called “celebrity endorsements”.  Tom Selleck has just come onboard.  Tom Selleck is not a Vietnam vet.  He was in the National Guard when Vietnam was going on and he was afraid he was going to have to go.  He was in California but they called him up for the Watts Riots instead.  Tom has always been a patriot, always had great empathy for those in uniform and he is very proud, to this day of his Magnum P.I. TV series, where Vietnam veterans for the first time on serial TV were projected, were portrayed as decent honorable, service members and he came onboard just recently as our celebrity spokesperson.  Needless to say I am thrilled.

And here is Colin Powell.  General Powell and I see each other all the time.  We are in meetings all the time when I’m in D.C. and he is one our co-chairs and of course a very influential player in Washington D.C. for us in building this center.

And as you exit this center, visitors view images of service members from the Revolutionary War up through the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and they will be reminded that national service has been an integral part of life for many American families throughout the generation, and the context is that this will now not be the Wall that heals.  This will be the Wall that educates and it will be apolitical, to tell the story of the war and those who served without taking sides and putting faces with the names.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Very powerful, Janis.

I know all of us that have served have been to the Wall.  I was there last year with my family and 40 years ago I escorted the remains of Major Robert Green, my friend.  I picked up his remains in San Francisco and buried him in Arlington in June of 1968.  And I remember specifically looking down — he’s up on the hill by Kennedy — looking down on the bottom, all the fresh graves, that red soil that was being turned of all veterans.  And immediately after that we went over to the Vietnam Wall and did a rubbing of Bob Green, Major Green.  And I have 16 Marine brothers on the Wall there, so the impact is very powerful and thank you for taking the lead in this issue.

Now do you want to talk a little bit about Iraq and Afghanistan?  We have two wars going on and —

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  We talked about that at lunch the other day, and I said, I’m, I tend to be — I know I’m going to saying something politically incorrect and I don’t want to.  I have — and I’m going to tell you why.  I’m a nurse.  I hate war.  I’m also a military veteran of 26 years and a graduate of Command and General Staff College.  I understand combat.

It breaks my heart still that we are at war again.  I got a card when I was on active duty for Desert Storm and again please no cards, letters, emails or phone calls.  This is just Janis, being Janis.  I got a card from a girlfriend who said “Why did the man cross the road?”  Because I always said “War?  What does war have to do with testosterone?”  So why did the man cross the road?  And then you open it up and it said who knows why men do anything.  And her comment was, a military woman, her comment was “If it were up to us women we would negotiate this over lunch.”

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Uh-huh.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  And I don’t want to — again I don’t want to appear flip, but one thing that happens in war as you know, is we have to find the humor because it’s just so tragic.  And I would like, personally I like to see more women — it’s who we are.  Women are the peacemakers.  Women are the negotiators.  I would like to see more true women of substance, not women who are trying to be men, but women of substance in positions of power.

And having said that and gotten that off my plate I want to say that I am so grateful to the American public that they have been finally been able to separate the warrior from the war.  And show respect to those who wear the uniform, those who serve our Country, those who put their lives on the line.  Which you and I did not get until after Desert Storm, a long time coming.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Janis, you being a nurse have recognized and treated symptoms of PTSD.  Has PTSD affected you?

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  Probably more than I ever knew or wanted to admit.

And another thing I am very grateful for is that now the services are recognizing, finally.  PTSD has been around since, since — wells wars, the beginning of wars, the beginning of all time.  Soldiers in the Peloponnesian Wars and way back when were experiencing symptoms of PTSD, we just called it different things over the years.  World War I or World War II, it had different names.  But now we have a — what’s called finally a definitive diagnosis of PTSD and they are starting to treat it.

I’m very grateful that I had been a psych nurse.  I have lots of coping skills, because I have used them over the years and with the help of talking to friends, with writing, with verbalizing what’s going and seeking help and bringing back memories.

The only way out is through.  PTSD doesn’t heal, if you don’t remember those things that you’ve stuffed, you will continue to live out your life on some level as a reaction to them and that’s what I do every day.  The PTSD wolf is never far from my door.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Janis, have you interacted with any veterans in the Valley with PTSD that you have assisted and mentored?

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  I might say it could be the other way around.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Uh-huh.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  You and I recognize — you speak to far more veterans than I do in the Valley because I’m always gone, unfortunately, for Veteran’s Day and for Memorial Day because I have to be in Washington D.C., but I — sure, I know lots of veterans and sometimes it’s very obvious, the ones who have PTSD.  In fact we’ve talked about you on a number of occasions —

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  I know.  I know.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  — because it’s what you do.  Dick, you help everybody else and I remember when we brought the Wall, the traveling Wall to Aspen.  And what year was that?

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  ’93 or —

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  No.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  No, 2003.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  2003 or ‘4?

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  2003 or ‘4, in there, yeah.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  Yeah.  I remember John Hoepfer saying, “We’re going to have to shoot him in the foot to get him in pain to talk about it.”

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Yeah.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  But actually I was taken by the hand by Tom Benny, who I hope you get to interview.  Tom Benny was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, a gallant hero who will shake his head and go “Awe shucks,” but truly he — I had talked to him.  He was one of the few people in town that I did talk to about it.

And finally around Christmastime one year he said “We’re going to the VA.”  And there was no discussion.  We’re going to the VA and, “You’re going to talk to somebody.”  And that’s how it began to evolve for me and it’s what we do.  We sometimes have to slap each other around to get help for those — and some people don’t want help and some people deny that they need help, and there’s a whole spectrum, the whole spectrum of it.  It’s not as stigmatized now, as — I think, as it used to be because it’s just — it’s making — it makes all the papers now, and I’m glad.  I’m glad about that.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Well, that’s very strong, Janis.

Here today I noticed you are wearing the Vietnam service pin and you have a Nurse Corps Emblem, it looks like —

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  Uh-huh.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  — and a wreath.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  Uh-huh.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Do you wear any of your ribbons or medals that you were awarded?

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  I no longer wear my uniform, and I don’t.  I tend to wear really subdued things.  I noticed the first time I saw you at a function for the Valley vets and how you wear your ribbons and decorations, and it just — it made me cry.  I mean it just filled my heart up so full, and I started to cry, because I know what you had to go through in order to be awarded all the things that you wear so proudly on your chest.  And I think it’s wonderful and I think it’s great when veterans do that because we’re like an open book with pictures.  You can see, you know, where you have been and what you’ve done and how you can read them.

I didn’t wear mine for the longest time.  In fact when I was on active duty, for many years in the ’70s, we didn’t wear our ribbons on our Class B uniforms.  And I don’t know why, we all looked alike.  I think that’s why they did it.  They wanted to just sort of push the Vietnam War aside and let’s not talk about that.  And if you wear your ribbons then we are going to have to talk about it.  So they made everybody the same.

And so when you met somebody you saw their rank, their insignia and their name and that’s all you knew and they did that ’til, I want to say the late ’70s, could have been the early ’80s, I really don’t remember.  When all of a sudden now they want you to wear all your ribbons and decorations again.  So we start wearing those, and honest to God I didn’t know — and here is a picture of the ribbons that they put together for me and my unit, I took — you get — what’s it called when you get an award or decoration?   You get a piece of paper that says you earned it.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Uh-huh.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  And I don’t know what it’s called, I’m sure its got it’s got a number.  But I took — our unit had all those and our unit clerk put those together and they put all these on the little bars for me, and there’s my little thing that says I’m really good with a hand gun.  And I’ve never touched it, because truthfully I don’t know what a lot of them are.  I know what most of them are, but there’s a specific order that they go in with the highest being up — where, here, left or right?  I can’t remember.  But it start lowest to highest.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Right.  Up on the upper left is the highest right there.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  Upper left is the highest, right there.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Uh-huh.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  And I’ve actually, I was awarded two other ribbons since this picture was taken and I didn’t put them on there because I didn’t know where they went and I did not want to be wrong.  That was very important to me not to be wrong about that and I just, for a long time I would wear — not these big ones.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Uh-huh.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  I would wear little tiny ones.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Miniature ones, yeah.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  That — and I would just wear these two.  This is the Republic of Vietnam Campaign medal and this is the Vietnam Service medal.  And I don’t know if you know this but there are four stars on mine because I was in-country for four campaigns.  Campaigns were little bits and pieces of the war that were major military things which was certainly beyond my ken.  And I didn’t start wearing this one because we all got this.  This is the National Defense Ribbon —

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Uh-huh.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  — and we used to call it the “road guard badge” because everybody got one.  I had no idea how important this little ribbon is.  Every — this ribbon is only awarded during time of war.  And then I have a star because I was in two wars, involved in two wars.  And so those are the three, if I wear them now, they’ll be the little tiny ribbons which is what I wear, just because I’m more comfortable with it.

Everybody has to be comfortable and this was given to me by — the wreath was given to me by a marine friend of mine with the Vietnam Service Ribbon at the top and the caduceus,  says that I was an Army nurse.

My good friend, Barry McCaffrey, General Barry McCaffery, who was the most highly — I want to get this right — the most highly decorated, youngest general in the history of the US Army.  I see him all the time.  I’m there, I see him, we work together, we’re co-chairs of the advisory committee for the center.  He wears one little ribbon, not even a mini ribbon, a mini, mini ribbon of a Purple Heart on his lapel, that’s all he wears.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  That’s a statement.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  Is it ever.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  That’s a statement.

Janis, can we go back to this pistol badge here.  I’ve seen you up at the Salt Shooting Range, during the — dinging them up there with the Disabled American Veterans at the Winter Sports Clinic.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  Yeah.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  And it means a lot for those veterans from Walter Reed, Iraq and Afghanistan, for you to be up there helping.  I know you do other venues when they  come here, but I think that even though they are wounded, those veterans, some of them are blind and they still have pride in their ability to shoot and they go up there and you’ve seen it.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  Oh, absolutely.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  You’ve seen it.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  Oh, absolutely.  And I am so touched.  About a week ago — we are going to run out of time I know if we haven’t already, but the stories that come out of the Winter Sports Clinic.  And they touch me, so — these guys touch me so deeply on so many levels.  And I was out at —  where we serve lunch, the Elks, we serve lunch hillside at Snowmass and I had walked down to the main lodge and it was snowing so heavily that day.  This was a couple of years ago, and I saw all the guys in the wheelchairs waiting to go skiing, waiting to get in the bucket to go skiing.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Uh-huh.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  And there were probably, oh, ten or 12 of them lined up and they each had a layer of snow like that on them and they were just sitting there patiently.  I looked at that and I started to cry.  And I do, I walk away, I go in the bathroom, I cry.  I pull my shit together and go okay, get back out there and put a smile on your face and that’s what we do.  And they’re, like you said they are just wonderful and they take great pride.

I don’t know if you remember Blind Sam?  He was such a character.  He was from Michigan.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Uh-huh.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  And he’s had some health problems and not able to come out, but he would have people taking pictures of him driving the snow cat.  He’s totally blind mind you.  And shooting weapons and archery and he just thought that was hoot that he could sometimes do that.  Of course they didn’t let him drive the snow cat, but we had blind shooters out at the range.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Uh-huh.  We had a blind shooter who had been a sniper and we have excellent coaching there and we put 20 targets out there.  He missed the first two and then the coach got him the timing and everything.  He hit 18 out of 20, and at the end we asked, “Well, how do you know you hit them?”  He said “I could hear the pellets hitting the clay pigeon.”

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  Sure.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Because the ears are so sensitive.  Yeah.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  Sure.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Well, generally speaking then, how do you feel about our show of support here in Aspen for veterans overall.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  I am so amazed and so grateful for all you do and all you have done to organize.  And yeah, and a lot of people in the Valley, to show support for the veterans.  I knew that that little marble, it’s a granite marble, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial were there in the park.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Uh-huh.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  But I wasn’t ready to see it for many years, and then I was lucky enough to be here for the re-dedication when we gave it — we re-dedicated it to all the veterans —

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Right.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  — of all wars.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  All wars, yeah.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  I thought that was brilliant.  I thought that so brilliant for you to think of that and to make that happen and that I could be there that day and how total strangers walk up to me in the street, and say “I saw you at the re-dedication.  Thank you for what you did.”  And it still chokes me up.  I have a hard time with that.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  And you mentioned Purple Hearts at the Wall in Vietnam, when we put that in, we put Purple Hearts and recon rings, badges, Rick Bush.

And when we dedicated it, I’d been retired about eight  years and I worked and skied with all kinds of veterans and we never, ever talked about Vietnam.  And they asked us to step forward with the candles and there were about 75 of us and then we had come out, so to speak.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  Yeah.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  And it was a wonderful thing.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  Yeah.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Well anyway, Janis —

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  Wait, I wanted to answer.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  — one other thing.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  I have a little further to go with the Aspen Valley Veterans.  The 4th of July parade, and one of the first people I met in town was Ned Sullivan and he said “Oh, you should march in the parade.”  I said “No way, not with the water balloons.”  The same thing you said.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Uh-huh.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  You know, with the water balloons and the disrespect.  I said “No, there no way I would do that.”

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Uh-huh.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  — and then you finally said to me “You know, I think you should do it, I’m doing it.”  And I thought, “Well, if Dick’s going to be there it’s going to be okay.”

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  We were out there today.   We were out there, and we’ll be back there on the 4th of July.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  It’s just amazing and like you said so many veterans come out of the closet when we brought the traveling Wall into town, more and more come because I think they’re just — a lot of Vietnam vets are going through mid to late life crisis now ,and they are remembering things and hopefully reaching out for help.

And people who never served in the military.  I was having dinner, Takah Sushi a week or so ago and there’s Casey Coffman, and she’s wearing this scarf that has all the colors of the Vietnam Service Ribbon on it.  And I said “Oh my god, Casey, what a great scarf.  That has all the colors of the Vietnam Service Ribbon on it.”

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Yeah, yeah.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  And she goes “Oh, really?”  And I said, “Oh, that’s so wonderful.”

So we sit down, we are having dinner.  She comes over to talk to us and again I said “Oh man, I can’t believe that.”  And she takes it off from around her neck and she says “Well, you have to have this.”

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  And you are wearing this now?

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  This is it.  This is the scarf.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Beautiful, Janis.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  This is the scarf that Casey Coffman from Takah Sushi gave me because she is an amazing patriot and wonderful woman, and I thank Casey and I will wear it with great pride when I go to Washington D.C. for Veteran’s Day this year as well.  And that’s the kind of spirit we have in this Valley.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  We do.  Thank you, Janis.  Well, thank you for the time today.  I’d like to present you with the Roaring Forks Veterans History Project pin.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  Oh, thank you.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Here you go.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  It goes with my scarf.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  There you go.  It goes with your scarf.

And we’ve been interviewing Lieutenant Colonel Janis Nark, US Army Nurse Corps, Retired, today.

And I would just like to close regarding the Roaring Fork Veterans History Project exists to capture the personal stories of veterans of all wars, especially those veterans whose stories may soon be lost.  To support this important community project, please contact Kip Hubbard at the Aspen Historical Society.  Call 925-3721 or email Kip, kip@aspenhistory.org.

Thank you for watching and thank you for your financial support.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL MERRITT:  Thank you, Janis.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL NARK:  Yeah.  Dick, thanks.

(Interview Concluded.)