Dr. Tim Hodges ’83
Internist and Travel Doctor, Carmel, IN
Randy Henze ’65 was studying for the ministry at McCormick Seminary in Chicago when he was drafted in 1967. He served in the Army as a corpsman and refused to carry a weapon.
On February 22, 1968 he saw an American helicopter shot down and ran to help the injured crewmen. He had carried one man to safety and was running back for another when a bullet hit him in the back on his flack jacket. He fell, then jumped back up and was running toward the injured soldier when a second bullet killed him. The Silver Star he was awarded posthumously was given to his family, including his twin brother, Ron. When their draft notices had arrived, they had driven to the induction center together. Randy was drafted, and Ron was not.
A little more than 20 years later, Ron’s son, Kevin Henze ’99, received his PhD in psychology from the Lynch School at Boston College in 2007. Today he serves as a psychologist within the Mental Health Recovery Rehabilitation Treatment Program at the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs in Boston.
WM: What made you decide to work in the VA?
Henze: It was serendipity in some ways. I moved from Wabash to Boston for graduate school at Boston College. I needed to spend one of those years in a full-time internship and the Bedford VA had a placement. I applied for it, interviewed well, I liked it, and I ended up matching there.
I would have never imagined myself working at a VA, but I have really found a home there. I’ve also made some unexpected connections.
Such as?
I’ve actually developed a better appreciation for my father’s generation. So, the Vietnam-era veteran. And that’s been particularly important because my father and his twin brother both went to Wabash, and his brother—my uncle—Randy, was drafted and my father was not.
Randy died in Vietnam, and I never got to know him.
But there is a way in which the work I do at the VA has given me an appreciation of his sacrifice and appreciation of his life that I wouldn’t have otherwise had.
I’ve also gotten to know my father better because we’ve been able to talk some about those years. The stories I hear from the veterans have given me some language for what my father has gone through.
When I was a kid I would go to my grandfather’s house and I would look up above the mantle and see a picture on the wall of my two aunts, my oldest uncle, and two people that looked like my father. I didn’t know who the other person was. When I was 10 or so I was told the whole story.
Getting in touch with the veterans at the VA has allowed my dad and I to have some more conversations about his time with his brother and what the Vietnam War was like.
And the impact it had on your family?
Even before I got into my job at the VA, my dad and mom put together a photo album about Randy and sent it to me. And my sense is that it was put together as a means of ensuring that he would not be forgotten. It contained newspaper clippings, pictures—everything from when they were two or three years old all the way through Wabash years, even the war and post-war.
I also learned that my grandmother was a ferocious advocate for veterans and their families. I never met her or knew this before. She wrote editorials to the Evansville Courier about the ways that society was letting down veterans and their families. Reading these articles was very poignant for me.
I have a strange sense of connecting with my grandmother through seeing these veterans. Seeing their families and not forgetting.
That’s actually a theme I hear a lot from veterans of all eras. Vietnam veterans, in particular. It’s so good to be seen.
Acknowledging their humanity and…
Acknowledging their humanity and acknowledging their service, in that fundamental way that I think we all have to be recognized and to be humanized.
Is that the reward in it for you?
Oh yeah. There’s a selfish component too—the process actually helps humanize me. Just to be able to connect with strangers. Having that opportunity to see how connection heals.
Back at Wabash in the late 1990s [Professor] Brenda Bankhart gave a [LaFollette] lecture about the web of connection, the healing source of connection, and how we’re all connected in this web of relationships. That stuck with me.
And that’s what I see happening