Vietnam’s Heartbreak Played Out in a Hero’s Tragedy

He returned to Detroit from Vietnam in 1968 with ghosts buried deep in his psyche. Several months later, Sgt. Dwight Johnson was called to the White House, where President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded him the Medal of Honor for valor in combat.

But the ghosts would not go away, and Johnson always said he did not know what he had done to deserve the medal. Three years later, Johnson lay dead, shot to death a mile from his home by a grocer during a failed robbery attempt.

Johnson’s odyssey from a child of a Detroit housing project to Vietnam hero to the unlikeliest of robbers is chronicled in Tom Cole’s award-winning play “Medal of Honor Rag,” which will be staged at 7:30 tonight and 4 p.m. Sunday at Inglewood’s Miracle Theater in celebration of Veterans Day.

Ernest Johnson, who owns the theater at 226 S. Market St., donated the 500-seat space for the production, sponsored by the veterans organization VietNow.

“This is a pro-soldier, anti-war play,” said executive producer and co-star Harris Shore. “It’s set in the Valley Forge Army Hospital in Phoenixville, Pa., where Dwight Johnson was sent for treatment. It’s also my hometown.”

The play’s action centers on therapy sessions between the African American Vietnam vet and his white Army psychiatrist.

The vet is tortured by the fact that he survived the bloody carnage that resulted in his getting the Medal of Honor. The doctor survived the Holocaust in a Nazi death camp.

“The real message here is about how we find out how we are similar, regardless of race or religion--how a tall, black guy in his 20s and and a short, white guy in his 40s learn from each other.”

Playwright Cole developed his drama from a riveting account of Johnson’s life and death in the New York Times.

On patrol in Vietnam’s Central Highlands, Johnson’s tank unit was ambushed by North Vietnamese regulars. Johnson saw a tank he had been assigned to go up in flames, with his crew of just a day before inside.

Johnson, known to his friends as Skip, ran to the burning tank and pulled one soldier out just before the tank exploded, killing everyone inside.

When the tank blew up, Johnson went into an uncontrollable rage. He hunted down enemy troops, killing between five and 20; no one knew for sure. Morphine was needed to calm him down afterward, and he was taken to a hospital in a straitjacket.

The telling moment in the Vietnam combat, and in Johnson’s death, came when he confronted a North Vietnamese soldier whose weapon misfired. Johnson killed him. But that soldier, and the fact that his AK-47 misfired, would haunt Johnson for the few remaining years of his life.

After the Medal of Honor ceremony, Johnson became a celebrity, in demand on television and radio. Every civic group in town wanted to honor him, and Gen. William C. Westmoreland showed up at a huge testimonial honoring him.

But antiwar protests were at their peak, and black radicals began using the cruelest epithets to describe Johnson, who then was an Army recruiter.

“The Army used this guy because of the color of his skin to recruit more black young men for cannon fodder,” Shore said.

Johnson openly struggled with what might happen if he went into a rage at home like the one he experienced in Vietnam. The question would not go away.

During the robbery that claimed his life, the grocer told police that Johnson just stood there, gun at his side, saying he was going to kill him while the grocer emptied his gun.

“Medal of Honor Rag” has been called an engrossing “psychological and verbal duet,” a work that “brings the horrors and truths of the Vietnam War to a personal level.”

When the final toll is tallied from that war, the greatest may well be found on the personal level.

“The process of healing is still going on among these vets who are now in their 50s and 60s,” Shore said. “This play is, unfortunately, very significant and timely.”