Kalpakian applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Undesirable: The Vietnam War and a Father's Battle for Justice, and shared the following:
Page 99 is taken from Chapter 10, “My Boy Must Be Saved” of Undesirable, a book created from letters that chronicle my father’s struggle on behalf of my brother Doug Johnson (1950–2021) who went to Vietnam at the age of nineteen in 1969 and paid for it with the rest of his life.Visit Laura Kalpakian's website.
Page 99 offers portions of letters both to and from my father, Bill Johnson, when Doug was still in a military hospital in Japan suffering from hepatitis. Doug had been airlifted to Japan from Long Binh Jail in Vietnam where he was imprisoned in December 1969 following a court-martial for AWOL and drug possession.
Page 99 also offers bits and pieces of letters from and to Army personnel, chaplains, senators, congressmen, up to and including President Richard Nixon.
Page 99 is indeed a sort of microcosm of Undesirable. “My Boy Must Be Saved” was my father’s mantra for three years as he besieged various entities on Doug’s behalf.
Here on page 99 his efforts were aimed at getting Doug removed from combat after the hospital. Later, in the summer of 1970, my dad’s approach would evolve into attack as he desperately cage-rattled politicos, chaplains, and the Army in an effort to discover Doug’s whereabouts after he went AWOL in Cambodia. In late August 1970, Doug Johnson left the Army with an Undesirable Discharge and shattered health. His father was there to meet him on the tarmac at McChord AFB. From October 1970 to 1972, Bill Johnson assailed (in turn) the Army’s Inspector-General’s office, the Army Medical Department, the Army Discharge Review Board, the Army Board for Correction of Military Records. My father created and dispersed documents—thousands of words of testimony—in support of his conviction that the Undesirable discharge was not only undeserved, it was unjust. In response, he collected replies from uniformed brass (all of which he kept, all of which I found in the safe fifty years after these events) telling him: No, Mr. Johnson, you may not have our cooperation. Indeed, you can only have our obstruction, a brick wall of No.
So, imaginatively speaking, take these few replies (or lack thereof) from page 99 and multiply them by the hundreds. Then, dear reader: consider what that avalanche of persistent rejection, deflection, defeat, and denial would do to the psyche. My father despaired, but he did not give up. Such was his dedication to his son that through all the dismissals, the kiss-offs cast in Officialese, the paragraphs of stale BS that the Army swathed all over their responses, he persisted. In December 1972, the Army offered a compromise, a General Discharge Under Honorable Circumstances. My book argues that this was a cover-up. Did my father know this? I have no way of knowing. In any event, he and Doug accepted it. But his boy was not saved. Thirty years of addiction, PTSD, mental illness, and heartbreak lay ahead.
--Marshal Zeringue
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