Chapter 3 Excerpt

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Walk to the center of the museum, stop in front of the mustachioed mannequin in the flight suit, and shift your gaze right. On the ground, tan sandbags stacked in a semi-circle protect a large mural. The 10 foot by 10 foot painting was colored with greens and browns and grays, and it depicted American soldiers at a fire base in A Shau Valley in central Vietnam, about a mile from the Laos border.* The story that the mural tells is a microcosm of the war itself.

Four bare-chested, helmeted soldiers huddle together in the painting’s foreground as two helicopters hover in the distance. Ap Bia Mountain – “The Mountain of the Crouching Beast” in Vietnamese – and its lush green forest dominate the horizon. The troops had just detonated a bomb called a daisy cutter to clear away vegetation to create a landing zone for aircraft. For 10 days in May 1969, it was the site of a bloody fight between U.S. and North Vietnamese forces. On May 20, U.S. and South Vietnam troops fought their way to the summit, forcing the North to flee. However, on June 5, the U.S. abandoned the hill. Leaders decided that it had no strategic value. Seventy-two Americans and 630 North Vietnamese had died in the 10-day battle.*

The mural was painted by Vietnam War veteran Alan Shotwell and his daughter, Sara. It was Shotwell’s first artistic contribution to the museum. He would go on to decorate the entire interior with scenes that captured moments in the war and also showed off in vivid detail the mountains, forests and skies of the Vietnamese landscape. With his mural work, visitors were teleported to 1960s Southeast Asia. The renderings were that lifelike. As were his dioramas, which occupied crevices in the museum. Shotwell meticulously assembled and painted tiny houses, vehicles, and figurines that told stories of life in Vietnam during the war, on land and at sea. And he spent much of his wartime service at sea, as an electronics technician for the Navy.

But why did he devote his later years to creating art about the Vietnam War? What was it about the painted narratives and the carefully built models that stirred a desire to reconnect with his life in the military while stationed in a war zone?

Perhaps it was a yearning for closure, an attempt to use his art to let go of things that he had suppressed for so long. With every brush stroke and dab of glue applied to a diorama piece, he returned to the site of the complicated conflict and sought peace with his role in it.

When Shotwell’s daughter Sara helped him paint his first mural for the museum, it was the first time that he shared with her the details of his experiences in Vietnam. She learned that some of the American soldiers they were painting didn’t make it back home, and she peppered him with questions.  

“It was therapeutic for her and for me at the time,” Shotwell said. “We were listening to the Beatles, and [Sara] said, ‘That’s something you never talked about – your service in Vietnam.’ And I said, ‘Well, you never asked, and it wasn’t the right time.’”

In listening to Shotwell comment on the larger political calculations of the war, it’s clear that he has probed the depths of the “what-if’s” in his mind, even while acknowledging that those decisions were beyond his control. The museum was his way of working through the dissonance that comes with critiquing something that you’re also proud of.

“I wasn’t assigned the play,” Shotwell said. “I wasn’t assigned my role in the play. I didn’t choose it. But once the play was given, and it was a tragedy, and not a comedy, and once I had my part in it – an electronics technician – I did the best I could with what I was given. And so I can walk away and say, ‘I didn’t harm anybody.’”

Years after he and Sara painted that first mural, Shotwell stood next to a museum guest, a young Vietnamese-American woman, and he cried. He initially apologized to her in Vietnamese, but quickly realized she didn’t know the language. The young woman’s parents survived the war, but she named cousins, aunts, and uncles who were in post-war re-education camps and starved or were worked to death.

“I apologized because there is so much information that has disappeared in two generations,” Shotwell said. “And I wanted her to know how I felt at the time: that I was trying to be a good guy. That I was trying to make things better, and it didn’t turn out that way. I apologized for failing her, for failing her family.”

The interaction reminded Shotwell of the Vietnamese refugees who fled the country by boat in 1975 and thereafter, escaping political oppression and poverty. During his tearful exchange with the woman visiting at the museum, he recalled his chats with American sailors who he said carried guilt about not being able to transport those people to safety.

“The commanding officers and enlisted people who I talked to later said we were ready for them, in spite of the president saying, ‘We’re not doing that,’” Shotwell said. “We had ships in place outside of South Vietnam and didn’t put out radio broadcasts saying, ‘We’ll pick you up.’”

“Sad, sad, sad,” he said.

Shotwell volunteered to join the Navy in the summer of 1964. He had been studying at the University of Virginia for two years, and he was battling a self-diagnosed depression.

“I wanted to see what the world was like and live to the fullest rather than be depressed at UVa,” he said.

Shotwell was also born into a military family, which made the Navy an option familiar to him. His father, James, served in the Navy in World War II and his grandfather was an officer in World War I. On top of that, his great-grandfather James Albert Shotwell rose to the rank of lieutenant in the 62nd Regiment of the U.S. Black Infantry during America’s Civil War.

The Navy assigned Shotwell to San Diego for basic training, though he had hoped for a ticket to the Great Lakes region. After boot camp, he was sent to electronics school. He wanted to be a corpsman working near the front lines, but the Navy charted for him a different path once it saw the high scores on his aptitude tests, according to Shotwell.

He said: “This master chief in Saigon said to me, ‘Son, for the amount of money the Navy has spent on you, you’re going to the safest spot and the most secure area in Vietnam.’”

Shotwell was commissioned to Cryptology School on Treasure Island in San Francisco to learn how to encode and decode messages.

“They moved the inside around every day so that you could never tell where you had been and how to get back,” Shotwell said. “They didn’t allow you any notes. You had to memorize everything. They also told us that if we ever got caught doing anything in San Francisco, we’d lose our security clearance. So I spent a week sweating it out after a free Creedence Clearwater concert in the Haight-Ashbury District, thinking that I’m going to show up on the news and I’m going to lose everything.”

Shotwell’s small act of rebellion never made it on the news, as he had feared.

After his training in the States, he spent 1966 and 1967 as an electronics technician on the USS Vesuvius in the South China Sea. To prepare for this assignment, he endured three weeks of Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training, which taught soldiers survival skills in case they were captured. Shotwell remembered his two hours spent in a tiny box, hot and without water, and also his three days in which he had to live on only a handful of rice. With such a limited food supply, pigeons and cats became part of his meals, Shotwell said.

Shortly after SERE training, there was an episode in November 1966 that tested Shotwell’s newly acquired survival skills. The Vesuvius encountered a menacing storm that sculpted mountains out of the green-hued sea water. The surging waves violently tossed the ship side-to-side and front-to-back, and it felt like “the ocean was out to get us,” according to Shotwell. The Vesuvius took 17-degree rolls, which was about the maximum the boat could handle.  

Shotwell recognized that this ominous occasion called for divine intervention. In a moment of superstition and levity, he and other crewmen paused to pray to the Tron God, which was a small figurine encased in plastic and made out of radio tubes and a jumble of wires that looked like a small creature. When events on the Vesuvius turned serious, Shotwell and others would offer a prayer to the Tron God for protection, sometimes even burning incense during the invocation. The ritual with the faux deity epitomized Shotwell’s quirky, playful nature.

“It was just a little bit of fun,” Shotwell said.

At 2:30 on the morning of November 24, Shotwell and two other electronics technicians were awakened by their superior and ordered to replace the ship’s surface search radar antenna. This instrument allowed the ship’s crew to monitor the merchant vessel sea lanes between the Philippines and Vietnam. Without it, they were essentially sailing blind and risked slamming into other ships.

The three men knew this task would test their mettle. To fix the radar antenna, Shotwell and his fellow technicians had to pull off a daring circus act. They first looped safety harnesses around their bodies and tied them to the mast. Then, they unbolted the burned-out motor, replaced it with a new one, and finally fastened the new unit in place. However, they couldn’t complete the task all at once. Instead, they had to approach it a little at a time, then stop abruptly, clutch the mast, and wait for the waves to tip the ship vertically before resuming. If they tried to work when the boat rocked to a 17-degree angle, they risked getting thrown into the South China Sea.  

When the task was completed, the trio was so tired, wet, and cold that they slept most of the next day, which happened to be Thanksgiving. The men gladly traded in their plate of turkey for some well-earned rest. A few days later, Shotwell noticed that someone on board had stolen Tron God from its usual perch.

“All of that could have been avoided,” Shotwell said with a smile, insinuating that the absence of the Tron God triggered the ordeal with the radio antenna.

After his time in Vietnam, Shotwell remained in the Naval Reserve while completing his undergraduate and graduate degrees on the G.I. Bill. He was commissioned Lieutenant Junior Grade (LtJ.g.) and served as an optometrist in the Medical Service Corps until he retired in 1991 as Lieutenant Commander. He retired from optometry in 2005. 

After his Navy career ended, Shotwell took jobs as a substitute teacher, and he found himself comparing his younger self to the students in his charge. To him, his choice to enlist in the Navy and his subsequent assignment in Vietnam forced him to grow up quickly. As he observed the teenagers in his classroom, he wanted for them what the military gave him: a meaningful, transformative primer on how the mission comes before individual needs. And an instilled sense of duty and honor.

“It should be a basic part of every person’s life that you serve a purpose bigger than yourself,” Shotwell said. “And so it’s duty to society, and it’s the honor of saying I’m proud of that. I think that almost every kid that went through the military said, ‘It was tough, but I’m proud of it, and I’m a better person for it.’”

For Shotwell, there was one conversation that ultimately altered the trajectory of his life, one chat that helped clarify his priorities and nudged him toward a challenge at a time when he needed it. He was talking with his aunt, his godmother, immediately before he decided to enlist.  

“You will probably get drafted," she told him, “so you might as well go in.”

“Do the right thing,” she said.

That simple message resonated with a young Shotwell, and he reflected on its importance fifty years after he received it.

“It’s actually on her tombstone: ‘I tried to do the right thing,’” Shotwell said. “I think that’s closest to how I lived my life. I’ve tried to set a good example. I can’t fix everything, but I don’t want to let people down by not trying to contribute something. That’s why I’m at the museum.”

The Navy veteran continued his pensive mood while seated in the very museum filled with his artwork. When asked what message he’d like to impart on those young people he met during his substitute teaching work, he chose to tell a story, which was not so surprising.

It was a parable about two Native Americans sitting in purgatory and awaiting their fate. To determine their next step, they must speak with the Great Spirit about their place in the Happy Hunting Ground.  

“One Indian,” Shotwell noted, “when he gets to the Great Spirit, eagerly raises his hand and says, ‘Hey, Hey’. I want to get to the Happy Hunting Ground. Listen to my story.’

The Great Spirit says, ‘OK, tell me what you did.’

And the Indian says, ‘When it comes to war and fighting, I killed the enemy and they respected our tribe. People left us alone.’

The Great Spirit says, in an unimpressed tone, ‘Yeah?’

The Indian then says, ‘When it comes to food, our tribe was never hungry because I was a great hunter.’

The Great Spirit once again replies with an unenthused shrug: “OK.”  

Again, the Indian speaks: ‘When it comes to my love life, I have three fine braves that I’m very proud of. They’re doing the right thing and we’re square with the world.’

And again, the Great Spirit is underwhelmed: ‘Uh-huh’.  

The Indian continues: ‘When it comes to religious matters, I smoke the peace pipe and the smoke goes straight up to heaven, and you always answer my prayers, and we’re tight. So I’m in, right?’

The Great Spirit replied, dismissively: ‘Sit down over there.’

The First Indian is shocked at the quick dismissal. “What!?” he shouts in disbelief.

The Great Spirit then turns to the second Indian: ‘OK, what do you want to say?’

The second Indian starts: ‘Well, Great Spirit, I had a tougher time of it. When it comes to food, I told the People of the Air, and the People of the Water, and the People of the Ground: ‘My need is greater than yours. Our tribe is hungry.’ And they were always there. And we just took the number we needed to stay alive. We never wasted anything. We respected them, and told them: ‘Thank you for meeting our needs for food.’

In a curious tone, the Great Spirit replies: ‘OK.’

The Indian then says: ‘When it comes to war, I tied my hand to a tree and counted coup on the enemy. And they respected me and no one got hurt.’

The Great Spirit grows more intrigued and retorts, ‘Well, OK.’

Then, the second Indian says, ‘When it comes to matters of love life, maybe I messed around with the chief’s wife, and it was a lot of fun, but I know not to do that again. That might be why I’m here, but I’m not trying that again.’

The Great Spirit responds, without judgment or reprimand: ‘All right.’

The second Indian continues: ‘When it comes to spiritual matters, there’s a lot of stuff I don’t know. I’m not smart enough to understand. I want to sit at your Council Fire and talk about spiritual matters.’

And the Great Spirit then eagerly extends an invite: ‘All right then, pull up a hay bale. We’re going to talk story.’

The first Indian explodes with confusion and rage: ‘Wait, Wait, what about me? I was the perfect Indian. This guy was a screw-up. He didn’t do anything right.’  

The Great Spirit responds: ‘I gave you a perfectly good life, and you wasted it. Now come back when you can tell me some stories I haven’t heard yet.’

As he ended his tale, Shotwell smiled, gestured with his hands as if to say, ‘That’s what I got’, and then shifted his storyteller’s tone into that of a teacher, sharing the moral of his story.

“It’s about living,” he said. “It’s about doing. It’s about experiencing. It’s not going to turn out the way you want it. You don’t have to be perfect, but you have to pay attention.”

Shotwell’s artwork grabbed the attention of thousands of fellow veterans, schoolchildren, and visitors to the museum. The murals and dioramas sparked many important conversations, including one he had with his own daughter Sara.