John Townsley

Special to Veterans Advantage

In one of the dreams John Townsley had about his war, the singer Lou Rawls, whom he had first heard in high school on one of the black radio stations in Little Rock, was the heavy, the leader of the enemy. "I'd spend all night killing people trying to rescue my friends," Townsley said. "What was really interesting, though, was that each night this dream picked up where it left off the night before."

This particular dream endured over ten days. Townsley's tour in Vietnam, the inspiration for his firefights in slumberland, lasted 23 months.

Townsley, son of an Air Force officer, had had two years of college when he flunked a semester. He lost his student deferment, and his draft board pounced. Faced with conscription, he chose to enlist instead. Trained in avionics, his first assignment when he was sent to Vietnam in May 1968 was in supply for Headquarters Company, 82nd Airborne. He became the brigade scrounger, he said, not without a measure of pride, during a telephone interview from his office in Raleigh, North Carolina.

After eight months in country, Townsley transferred to the 205th Assault Support Helicopter Company. Over the next year, he logged 1,400 hours of flight time, working variously as a door gunner, crew chief, and flight engineer.

He experienced "so many hard days. One day I'd been flying with people I didn't usually fly with. We landed in a field - there was fighting still going on - to take away the dead. They just loaded us with ponchos full of body parts. The door gunner was puking. The crew chief was getting sick. I had to lay down on the floor, blood oozing everywhere, to call the load off.

"That was the day I knew I was cold," he said. "Because it didn't bother me. When we got back to base, after the ponchos were removed, I just washed out the chopper with a pressure hose."

Despite the rigors of his work and knowing he couldn't make it in the stateside Army, Townsley extended his tour of duty in Vietnam to take advantage of the early out program. He returned to The World in April 1970 "a pretty vicious character who carried a gun everywhere." He went to school at what is now the University of Central Arkansas. Majored in sociology and philosophy. Earned his undergraduate degree. Earned an advanced degree in counseling psychology.

‘The Perfect Place’

In July 1980, realizing that his onetime ambition of becoming a doctor would be undermined by "too many science courses," he expressed a measure of interest when a friend told him about a work-study position at the Vet Center in Little Rock.

"This is the perfect place for you," his friend said.

Townsley visited the Vet Center a few days later.

"You have a resume?" his friend asked.

"No."

"Well, write me one out and you're hired."

Townsley demurred. "I don't know if I want the job."

"How about working 20 hours a week?" the friend said. "Just give me your schedule the week before."

Townsley accepted. And found a home.

When the team leader job opened at the Vet Center in Jacksonville, Florida, Townsley applied. He was hired. After three years, he moved to the Vet Center in Tampa. After four years there, needing a change of pace, he got out of the program. Moving back to Little Rock, he worked as a family therapist and as a consultant in psychological and chemical dependency.

In 1995, when a new Vet Center opened in Raleigh - it's the second to last of the 206 centers in the system - John Townsley applied for the team leader position. He was hired. And this year, under his stewardship, the Raleigh Vet Center was acknowledged by the VA as a "Center of Excellence," one of the ten best Vet Centers in the country.

"He’s one of the unsung heroes who has never lost his zeal to help his fellow veterans," said Ed Henry, who took Townsley back to Vietnam a couple of years back to explore the possibility of bringing some of the Vet Center's clients back to the scenes of the fighting that forever changed their lives.

Although Townsley is quick to credit the "great people" with whom he works - five are paid staff; another 25 are part-time volunteers - others note that it is his leadership, and his willingness to expand the parameters of treatment, that have made a distinct difference.

John Townsley thinks out of the box. One day he met a social worker who had a private practice. "Do you do any pro bono work?" Townsley asked him. And got him to volunteer his services two days a week.

"I’ve been willing to ask people in the community, and they've responded," he explained. "I'm willing to push the limits of creativity." Which is one of the key reasons why the Raleigh Vet Center, which last fiscal year logged some 7,500 visits with 350 people, has been making a significant difference in the lives of its clients. Townsley's center has a spirituality group, a writing group, a group comprised almost entirely of "medical people who are still second-guessing themselves 35 years later."

Clients go on camping trips, on canoeing excursions in the Everglades, in pig pickin' on Townsley's seven acres out in the country.

And at the American Dance Festival in Raleigh three years ago, three clients performed to raucous applause. Last year, 20 danced in their own productions, "Veils of Violence," at the performing arts center in downtown Raleigh.

Townsley, who describes himself as an "old hippie" who is known for not ever wearing a three-piece suit, knows how to play the game. Every month he is sure to meet with the director of the VA Medical Center in Durham to update him on "what we're doing so that nothing we're doing here will come as a surprise." Because the work John Townsley and his colleagues do in Raleigh - and what other teams do at 205 other venues, "keeps a lot of vets out of the hospital and a lot of vets out of the news."