Rick Weidman

Special to Veterans Advantage

I have known Rick Weidman, the director of government relations for Vietnam Veterans of America, for more years than I’d care to count. I had known that Rick was committed to justice for veterans, not only of our war but of all wars. Working with him for the past two and a half years at VVA national headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland, I have come to respect and appreciate him for far more than that.

Rick is well read and outspoken, focused and forceful if at times forgetful, unforgiving of those who don’t acknowledge, or give lip service to, what veterans have contributed to our nation. Seemingly disorganized, he can pull out the one memo or report he needs from the toppling pile that usually litters his desk. He is one of the few people I’ve ever met who, without notes, can give an off-the-cuff speech in entirely logical and progressing paragraphs.

He is, beyond doubt, the most intense and passionate advocate, and one of the most effective, on behalf of veterans in our nation’s capital.

Had Rick not served as a medic in Vietnam, assigned to an aid station at a fire base in the Central Highlands in 1969, you might have seen his name in lights on Broadway. His rich bass voice is unmistakably memorable. His experiences in Vietnam, though, and a serendipitous snowstorm, altered the course of his life.

A Niche in New York

Richard F. Weidman, the son of a career military man, was born in Greenville, Texas, about halfway between Dallas and Texarkana, in 1946. He doesn’t speak in a Texas twang, though: He left there before he started school when his father was assigned to a base in Okinawa. He has never been back.

His father, Lou Weidman, had joined the Army Air Corps early in 1940 "to get enough to eat," Rick said in a conversation in his house on a tree-shaded block in Silver Spring. He served in the China-Burma-India theatre in World War II; during the fighting in Korea, he was sent on temporary duty to a place that would come to dominate the psyche of his son 20 years later: Viet Nam.

After the fighting ended with the armistice, 1Lt Weidman brought his young family to Fort Lewis, Washington, where he served as provost marshal. He cut short his military career to start the security operations for National Airlines in Miami. Soon this operation was moved to New York City, where Lou Weidman found his niche; Rick, his son, also found his niche: Despite the fact that he would live in Vermont and Washington and Maryland, he’s a New Yorker, a child of that city, through and through.

The Weidmans lived in Fresh Meadows, Queens, behind a bagel factory. Rick attended an overcrowded Francis Lewis High School, sitting on a windowsill in many of his classes. He found an outlet for his energies by pulling pranks and running track – "I was not a good enough athlete to play anything else," he said – and, although he was "dead last" in many of his early meets, he wouldn’t quit. His idol was the British miler, Roger Bannister, the first runner to break the four-minute mile. Running track, Rick reflected, played a "big part in my life."

He learned outdoor skills as a Cub Scout, Boy Scout, and Explorer. One of the earliest lessons had nothing to do with scouting or athletics: "Wherever you go, make friends with the janitor and the ladies in the office." Even today, when he goes to a meeting with the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, he makes sure to greet the secretaries and rent-a-cop guards with a sincere smile and hello.

Rick attended Colgate University on a scholarship. Why there? Because Rick, whose early ambition was to "figure out how to make a lot of money," knew that at a school like Colgate he would "have a network of guys who were going to be successful."

His network today is comprised of veterans and public officials from all walks of life, some who need help, others who give help.

Rick ran track at Colgate – he sprinted the 100-yard dash in ten seconds flat – gave this up to take drama classes and perform in the college theatre, majored in philosophy and religion because the "best minds in the school" were in that department.

In the summers he worked at Idlewild (now JFK International) Airport. In the summer of ‘65, unloading cargo at Braniff Airlines, he handled some of the first caskets coming home from the fighting in Vietnam.

As the war in that then-obscure corner of Southeast Asia seeped into his consciousness, Rick contemplated dropping out and enlisting – "I didn’t want to miss my war," he said – but his father convinced him to finish school first. He got active in student government affairs, becoming student body president as a junior. He attended the National Student Congress in 1966, where he met Allard Lowenstein, for whom he would later campaign in one winning and two losing contests for Congress.

When he learned that there was going to be an anti-war demonstration at Colgate in 1965, "a rather conservative place at the time," as he put it, Rick got upset. Then, as he started to learn more about the war, he became "convinced that, by the time we’d committed ground troops, we had already lost. It was the wrong war fought in the wrong way at the wrong time, for all the right motivation of the American people."

He had the gumption to write to his draft board, explaining why the war was "stupid and not in our national interest." He explained that he was working in the national interest in the congressional campaign for Al Lowenstein, and requested an occupational deferment. His request was granted.

Doing It His Way

Still, Rick Weidman would not miss "his" war. After the 1968 election, he gave up his deferment. While most of his classmates "ducked or dodged the draft," he "volunteered" for the draft. "I did not want to duck. I believed then and I believe now: If you are going to reap the choicest fruits of our society, you had better be willing to lift the highest burden."

Rick, ever the maverick, would insist, however that the only MOS he would accept would be 91B: Medic.

Once he was in the military, he remained true to his principles. He had to apply for conscientious objector status, the only way, he was told, the Army would train him to become a medic. After the Army assured itself that Pvt. Weidman was neither maladjusted nor crazy nor a threat to national security, orders were cut sending him to Fort Sam Houston.

There, despite his continuing irreverence for military correctness, Pvt. Weidman excelled. He was Acting E6 of his class of two platoons. Understanding that "we would all be going to Vietnam," he worked hard to instill in his comrades the adage, "If you’re going to do something, learn to do it right."

Early in October 1969, PFC Weidman was sent to Vietnam. He was assigned to Charlie Company, 23rd Medical Company, 196th Light Infantry Brigade, part of the Americal Division. For most of his tour, Rick worked at the aid station at Fire Base Hawk Hill.

On his second day there, he experienced his first mass casualty arrival. Three days later, he performed his first chest intubation on a GI with a sucking chest wound. Three nights later, with Viet Cong "right at our wire, with birds [dustoff helicopters] flying in and out," he and his mates tended to scores of badly wounded GIs.

"I don’t know how many guys we had torn up," he said. Much of the night was a blur of activity, a chaos of small-arms fire and explosions permeated by the unmistakable smell of cordite, grease, and blood. After the last bird lifted off, headed to the evacuation hospital at Chu Lai, Rick smoked a Camel. For the first time that night, he took a look at himself. "My face, my hair, my uniform, my boots were all covered in blood. Where there wasn’t blood, there was mud, and mud mixed with blood."

Standing there smoking, he realized that he had no emotional reaction to all the bleeding and the dying. His thoughts were focused: What can I do, how fast can I do it, and how better can I do it in the future? The numbing had begun.

The next several months saw much of the same: patching up fast and well torn-up GIs and sending them off to the 91 st Evac hospital.

Then one day in December he received a telegram from the Red Cross. His father was gravely ill and not expected to survive. PFC Weidman was granted 10-day emergency leave. Although his father lived – he would die on the day before his 50th birthday in 1973, never really having regained his health – Rick, under pressure from his family, applied for, and was granted, compassionate reassignment.

For most of the rest of his tour, Spec/4 Weidman was stationed at U.S. Walson Army Hospital at Fort Dix, New Jersey, helping run the medical holding ward. Although he was very good at what he did, Rick hated Dix. He wanted to go back to Vietnam. "I’m a medic who knows what he’s doing," he argued. "Why won’t you send me back?" Because he had just under a year remaining to fulfill his military obligation, the Army, in its wisdom, refused to grant his request.

Years later, in PTSD counseling sessions, Rick came to understand his frustration. "Most guys regretted what they had done or witnessed," he said. "Medics regretted what they didn’t do, what they couldn’t do better or faster." He couldn’t do what he knew he did well: saving lives.

Instead, he excelled in his job at Dix. In August of 1970, Spec/5 Weidman was named "Soldier of the Month" of the hospital, and then of the post. Which led to a bit of notoriety. Outspoken against the war in which he had served, this anti-war "Soldier of the Month," to the embarrassment of the Army, got ink in major news publications in New Jersey, New York, and Philadelphia.

Despite his views on the war, his experiences "reinforced my determination to serve," he said. "There is honor in serving your country."

When he was discharged from active duty at the end of January, 1971, Rick "had no clue what to do" with his life. Although he had been accepted to study with the doyenne of acting instructors Stella Adler, he accepted a position at Johnson State College in Vermont. He had hitchhiked there to visit a friend, and met another friend who was president of the college, at a party. He would stay at Johnson for six years, developing a program in theater, directing student activities, teaching courses in the humanities. He instituted programs that welcomed returning veterans to the college. He married, and fathered two sons. He became active in an organization called Vietnam Veterans Against the War. He drank too much.

Serendipitous Snowstorm

Campaigning for Al Lowenstein in 1970, Rick had met the wheelchair-bound Bobby Muller, a Marine officer who had been paralyzed by an NVA bullet. Now, in 1978, having left Vermont, needing to "get back on concrete in the city," he was living hand-to-mouth in New York City, directionless, building sets for theater and selling Time-Life books, venturing to Washington, growing disillusioned by the politics of hiring in the new administration of Jimmy Carter, Rick met Bobby Muller for a second time.

Over dinner, Muller asked Rick to write a memo of his ideas about what was needed – and what was reasonably possible – for an organization he had started, the Council of Vietnam Veterans. The Council soon transmogrified into a membership organization called Vietnam Veterans of America (VVA).

Muller invited Rick to his house in Dix Hills, out on Long Island, promising to pay his way back down to Washington, where Rick was still looking for a job. A one-night stay turned into a three-day marathon thanks to a storm that snowed them in. "Bobby broke me down the second day," Rick said. He agreed to set up an office for the nascent organization in Washington and do some fund-raising.

The organization launched, Rick went off to pursue other ventures. He returned to Vermont, built barns, worked in a program that provided technical assistance to other programs that assisted veterans. It wasn’t long before he felt the lure of the concrete. A call from Muller convinced him to rejoin Bobby in Washington and serve as VVA’s first membership services director.

"We didn’t have a thing," Rick recalled. "When I asked John Terzano, one of Bobby’s closest advisors, for a list of our chapters, he took out a crumpled piece of paper from his back pocket, unfolded it, and handed it to me. I knew then that we had a lot of work to do."

Rick worked, as did scores of other Vietnam veterans across America, and VVA grew. VVA was the first veterans’ service organization (VSO) to push for recognition of what became known as post-traumatic stress disorder. VVA was THE champion of the Vet Centers, where veterans could go to talk out their mental and emotional issues concerning the war. VVA fought for veterans’ preference in civil service hiring and promotion, and for real job training for those veterans who needed it. VVA was the first VSO to realize the lingering legacy of Agent Orange and other defoliants on the health of the troops who had been exposed to it – and push for treatment and compensation to veterans exposed to the herbicide. VVA was, and is, about issues.

When VVA ran out of money in 1982, Rick and other staffers went six months with little or no pay. It was only when VVA became eligible to receive contributions through the Combined Federal Campaign, thanks in part to a half-mile dash through traffic by the still-athletic Weidman that made the application deadline with a scant two minutes to spare, that VVA got on semi-solid fiscal ground.

‘We’re Having a Convention’

In November 1983, VVA held its founding convention in the historic "Blue Room" of the stately Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C. More than 500 veterans from across the country, many of them having hitchhiked, converged on the hotel, where they were greeted with grace and some trepidation.

"Nobody knew if this was going to work," Rick recalled. "But there was a palpable passion, an electricity in the atmosphere. When the late Steve Mason rushed onto the stage to read the poem he had scribbled on airplane napkins, when he looked up and down and yelled, ‘Airborne!’ and the crowd roared back, ‘All the way, Sir!’" Rick knew it all would come together.

One of VVA’s earliest and strongest supporters in Washington, then-Congressman David Bonior of Michigan, gave the keynote address. In his remarks, he said, "Never again shall one generation of veterans abandon another." This hit a chord. Al Jenkins, a delegate from Wisconsin, made a motion that this phrase become VVA’s motto. It was the first resolution VVA ever passed.

Through all the twists and turns and intrigues in the incipient years of VVA, Rick was there. When Congressman Mack Fleming, staff director for the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, told Rick and John Terzano in his South Carolina drawl that Chairman Sonny Montgomery, the crusty Mississippian who chaired the committee, "thinks it’s time for you boys at VVA to get a charter," they were stunned.

Too busy trying to get programs that would help Vietnam veterans and their families, they had never even considered this possibility. A bill was introduced. It should have won passage, but it was attacked by Members, Rick said, basically because VVA was, and is, a politically eclectic group whose membership may agree only on veterans issues. For the next two-and-one-half years, Rick went to the office of every senator, having breakfast or coffee several mornings a week with a senator or an aide, pushing for their support.

The bill needed 60 co-sponsors who would vote for cloture. Once they got a commitment from the sixtieth, Charles Grassley, then a freshman senator from Iowa, the battle was won. Bobby Muller was then able to convince Senator Jeremiah Denton, the Alabama Republican who had been a prisoner of war in Hanoi, to lend his support to the legislation that would grant VVA a congressional charter. With Denton’s key backing, the Senate voted, 91-5, in early May 1986, to pass the bill. The House soon followed suit. And the bill became law when it was signed by President Ronald Reagan just before Memorial Day..

"It was a real grassroots campaign involving literally thousands of VVA members," Rick said. "Once we engaged, it became a fight for our honor and our integrity." More than three dozen House members and 15 senators joined VVA members to celebrate at the "Charter Party" held on the roof of the new Library of Congress building.

In September 1987, when Rick was offered the position of administrator of state veterans programs for Governor Mario Cuomo of New York, he and his new bride, Andi, left cosmopolitan Washington, D.C. for rather less cosmopolitan Albany.

In his eight years working for Cuomo, Rick was one of the driving forces behind all of the employment programs and much of the state legislation that benefited veterans. His proudest achievement was the signing of the "Veterans’ Bill of Rights for Employment & Training Services" into black-letter law.

When Cuomo failed to win election to a fourth term in 1994, this chapter in Rick’s professional life was about to close. He "came home" to VVA, initially as membership director, then for a second tour as director of government relations.

Back Home Again

Rick Weidman is a familiar sight on Capitol Hill, visiting Members of Congress, schmoozing with their staffers, testifying on behalf of VVA on issues and programs that affect the lives and livelihood of veterans and their families. He is the soul of this organization, not only for the depth and breadth of his institutional memory, but for his commitment, his concern, and his passion.

He is fueled in part by anger. He is angry at the "chickenhawks" who send the sons and daughters of others off to war, uttering political platitudes about service yet failing to ensure that the psychosocial as well as physical needs of these men and women are properly taken care of when they return. He is angry at the bean-counting bureaucrats who have never visited a VA medical center yet make determinations that affect the lives and health of the patients in those facilities. He is angry at the elected officials who insist on seeing veterans as just another interest group, not as men and women who have placed themselves in harm’s way to protect and defend our nation and the principles and freedoms we hold dear.

"The most useful thing I’ve ever done," he said, "was being a medic in Vietnam. The only regret I have is that I didn’t go back for a second tour." Yet his time in country changed him forever.

Rick Weidman is still the medic, focusing on the injured, trying to heal veterans by fighting for proper funding for the services they need and the programs that help them. This is his cause and his passion. And veterans who don’t know him are lucky that he’s in their corner, fighting.