John Morton ’68 found solidarity and solace during a mountain trek with American and Soviet veterans of the wars in Viet Nam and Afghanistan.

In December 2023, Moton shared his story as part of the “Purpose and Place: Voices of Middlebury” event during the Boston launch of For Every Future: The Campaign for Middlebury.

Listen to Morton’s talk above or read the transcript below.

Transcript

So, it’s September 1989, and I’m struggling to get out of the back of a giant Soviet army truck in the foothills of the Tian Shan Mountains in Uzbekistan, and I’m beginning to think I made a big mistake.

A couple of months earlier, a friend of mine called and he said, “Hey, Morty, are you up for a real adventure? They’re putting together a group of Vietnam vets to travel to the Soviet Union, and to meet and work with a group of Soviet-Afghan War vets and try to help them learn what we have learned in the 20 years since Viet Nam about post-traumatic stress disorder.” 

And I said to my buddy, “Well, first of all, when I was in Viet Nam, it was pretty much over in 1970, so I was never in the thick of it. Secondly, I don’t know much about Outward Bound. And thirdly, I don’t have PTSD.” 

And he said, “Look, one of the guys that was supposed to be on the project had to bail out, and you’re a Viet Nam vet, you’re in relatively good shape, and we got to fill a slot.” 

So I agreed to go. And then I began to have the opportunity to meet the other participants in the project, and these are all real, legitimate warriors, including former general Hal Moore, who was credited with saving many, many American lives in one of the worst pitched battles of the Vietnam War. 

And actually, another Middlebury ROTC graduate, Mike Haney, who was wounded when his platoon was ambushed and lost most of his platoon members, and I’m just thinking to myself, “Boy, I’m way over my head here.” 

Then the leader of the whole project is former colonel Bob Rheault, who was in charge of the 5th Special Forces in Viet Nam, and ended up on the cover of TIME Magazine for defending some of his Special Forces troops. After the war, he ended up spending a second career with the Outward Bound program and used Outward Bound techniques to help vets deal with PTSD.

In addition to those guys, everyone else was either a combat medic or had been an instructor at Outward Bound. There were many special forces guys that had been working with Rheault in Vietnam. 

So I just felt like I was a second string high school football player who had just been put into an NFL game. I was way, way over my head.

Then we start interacting with our Soviet counterparts, and these are all young guys, 20 years younger than we were, just back from Afghanistan. Most of them have scars, tattoos. They reminded me a lot of the young athletes that I’d coached at Dartmouth, except these guys didn’t have the twinkle and enthusiastic spark in their eyes that I was accustomed to with my athletes. These guys had a sort of a real dull look in their eyes, and they were constantly scanning the hillsides, presumably out of habit, looking for possible threats.

While we unload the trucks, we camp out that one night. And at one point Rheault pulls us all together, and he’s got this pathetic hand-scratched, totally illegible map. And he says, “Well, we have no idea where we are. We don’t know where we’re going. And if we get in trouble, there’s little chance we’ve got any kind of backup, but we’re here to help these guys. We’re going to do our best to tell them what we’ve learned and we’re going to make this work. Everybody on board with that?”

And of course, we all said, “Sure.” 

The next thing that happened was that Rheault and his counterpart of Soviet Afghanistan, Lyosha, pulled everybody together and say, “We’re going to form up into three groups, A, B, and C,” and they divided all of us up into these groups, Soviets and Americans.

Then he says, “Morty, you’re going to be co-leader of group A.” 

And I’m thinking, “Oh, this is just terrific, and it’s probably some kind of an Outward Bound policy that you take the least-qualified person, and make them a leader, and work it all out.” 

So, the next morning we start this trek, which is going to be about a week-long trek up into the Tian Shan mountains. No Americans had ever been there before. We have really no map and we’re heading up the trail into these mountains. We see these snow-capped peaks in the distance. 

And that first night, we divide up in our three groups. After dinner, we gathered around a fire, and one of the medics of our group says to me, “Hey, Morty, can you help me demonstrate to these Soviets how we deal with PTSD?” 

I say, “Hey, Tom, I’m happy to help, but, first of all, I don’t have PTSD. Second of all, I was never really in the thick of it the way the rest of you guys were.” 

He says, “Look, just work with me. It’ll all be okay.”

So, within about three minutes, he gets me talking about this incident that occurred to my mobile advisory team down in the Delta when a village nearby got mortared and we were overwhelmed by these Vietnamese civilians, all seriously wounded. Fortunately, my medic sprung into action. He’s triaging all of these people that are coming in off boats, off the canal, and he’s got me holding a compress on one little girl’s abdomen. And then lying next to her is a little Vietnamese boy, who’s got a compound fracture in his leg, and I’m desperately trying to stop the bleeding, looking down at these kids who have just a remarkable poise and bravery. 

And I’m realizing now that there are tears streaming down my cheek. And then all of these other vets around the fire patting me on the shoulder and squeezing my knee. Then as this is all being translated, the floodgates open, and all these Soviets are saying, “Well, let me tell you about what happened in Afghanistan.”

My counterpart, Vilya Rakhmatulin, said that they have typically two-year tours in combat. He said after the first year as an infantryman, he saw so much death and destruction that he volunteered to retrain as a medic, so he could try to save lives. 

Then there’s this really tough-looking guy, really almost mean-looking, big, long mustache and tattoos, and scars, and tears are running down his cheeks. His name’s Hassan. He said that for more than a year after he left Afghanistan, he hasn’t had a full night’s sleep, but he thought he was the only one. 

Then there’s Lyosha, who’s Bob Rheault’s counterpart, and he just pulls out a guitar, and starts playing and singing, and he’s singing both Russian songs and popular American songs as well. By the time he finishes, there’s not a dry eye in the place. And before long, we’re all referring to each other as brother, or in Russian, мой друг.

So, the project continues. We climb up over the Nakhodka Pass, which had never before been seen by any Americans, down over a snowfield. An ultimately successful event, we’re all unified as brothers who had experienced combat.

On our way home, we had a layover in Moscow and some more of these vets take us out to this remote park in a suburb of Moscow. And to a corner of it, this unmaintained grass is kind of scraggly, but there in this remote corner of this park is this stone with a brass plaque on it, and it’s translated for us. It says, “To those who did their duty in Afghanistan.”

We had brought some flowers, and somebody put a small American flag there. As we’re paying our respects, this middle-aged woman in a threadbare coat and a kerchief is clearly sort of bewildered by all of us standing around this stone, but she walks up to the stone, places a flower before the stone. 

And as she turns around, you can see tears streaming down her cheeks. One of our guys—we’ve referred to him as “Big” or “Bolshoi” Tom Dinsmore, two tours in Viet Nam as a Marine—he just goes up to this woman and gives her this giant bear hug. So the two of them are weeping together; there’s no need for any translation. And it’s very clear that the grief of a mother is the same in any language.

In the 35 years since then, I’ve been very grateful of two observations that I made on that project in Uzbekistan. The first is that anyone who has experienced combat is changed, whether they realized it or not, whether it’s apparent or not. You can’t experience combat and not be changed. 

The second thing is: even among the real warriors, the career soldiers, they all recognize that war is not the answer.