Once a Warrior

Photos by Jim Lommasson ’72
Stories as told to Suzanne Pardington Effros & Katy Swordfisk

To understand Portland State, you should know this: It was built by and for soldiers returning from war. They were our first students and teachers. And 75 years later, they remain an important part of the University. Our emphasis on service, embrace of nontraditional students, and spirit of innovation all started with the World War II veterans who created PSU from nothing but makeshift classrooms and a desire to serve their community. They were mostly older, often had families and saw PSU as a “people’s college,” giving “all those who want it the kind of training they want as cheaply and conveniently as possible.”

Hundreds of veterans continue to enroll at PSU each year and though it hasn’t always been easy, they’ve been as resourceful as those first World War II vets in finding ways to support one another. This fall, the Veterans Resource Center—a national model for student support conceived at PSU—moves into expanded offices in Smith Memorial Student Center. To mark this anniversary year, we asked six alumni and faculty veterans to share their experiences for the University’s oral history project and have their portraits taken by award-winning photographer Jim Lommasson ’72. We hope their stories provide new perspectives on our shared history.

Bill Lemman HD ’04 at his home in McMinnville, Oregon. An original Vanport student, he served as an administrator at the college during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, eventually becoming PSU’s chief fiscal officer.

Bill Lemman
U.S. Marine Corps, 1943-1946

“I joined the Marines three weeks after my 18th birthday in 1943 and served in the Pacific. When I came back, I enrolled in the Vanport Extension Center—which later became PSU—soon after it opened in 1946. I moved in with my parents in Southeast Portland and bought a 1933 Ford Model A sedan for the commute. My dad wouldn’t ride in it, because he didn’t want to be seen in my old, rickety car.

The extension center was created for returning veterans like me in Vanport, a city built for wartime shipyard workers on the Columbia River. I went there because it was the easiest option. It had the business administration classes I wanted, and I didn’t have to move to Corvallis or Eugene.

Our classes were in a group of converted buildings, sometimes blocks apart. Many students and faculty members lived in the former shipyard housing with their families. We formed clubs and started co-op stores. It was easy to make friends. Many faculty members also were veterans, and they were just a few years older than we were. So 26-year-old faculty members were teaching 21-year-old students.

The day the dike broke and Vanport flooded, I drove to the edge of the water on Denver Avenue. Some people had time to drive out in cars; others had to wade through the flood water.

For the next few days, we helped people whose homes had been wiped out to find food, clothing and shelter.

I remember seeing my literature professor out in the street looking through tables of clothing trying to find something to wear, because her home had washed away. There was also an administrator who left his unfinished doctoral dissertation on the second floor of his apartment when he fled with his wife, so he rowed back in a boat and climbed through a second-story window to rescue it.  

I finished my bachelor’s degree at the University of Oregon and then returned to Vanport to be the assistant business manager. My former teachers became fast friends.

I continued to work in higher education in Oregon for 41 years. After the surge of World War II veterans subsided, some people wanted to close Vanport. But we worked very hard to keep it open and help it grow into a full university.

Now PSU is 75, and I’m 96. I’m blessed to still be here.”

Paul De MUNIZ
U.S. AIR FORCE, 1966-1970

“I did not view the Vietnam War as a looming danger when I registered for the draft in 1966 at age 18. I saw the Air Force as a good way to get career training.

At my first duty station in Maine, I worked in a supply warehouse, taught ski lessons on the weekends, and took my first college classes at the University of Maine. It was a positive experience. Then my base closed, and I got orders to go to Vietnam.

I was 20 and running a civil engineering supply point at a remote air base with millions of dollars of supplies. I worked with a team of six to eight Vietnamese men for my year-long tour. When I left, they gave me two brass vases made out of spent shells and a card that I still have. Then they took a hold of my legs and wept.

I came back to Portland in 1970. I lived in an apartment on the east side, took classes at PSU in the morning, and unloaded freight on Swan Island at night. I didn’t participate in any war protests. I wasn’t hostile to anyone. I knew there were serious problems with what we were doing in Vietnam.

You learn in the military to practice and prepare, so that you don’t get confused when it all starts to go bad.

I was not one of those people who always knew I wanted to be a lawyer. I started working at 16 to help my mother pay the mortgage. No one in my family had gone to college, and I wasn’t about to get any academic scholarships with my high school grades.

But I kept my head down at PSU, then went to law school, became a lawyer and an appellate judge. As I look back, the things I learned in the military really helped guide me through my career. For me, it was a life shaping experience, although I did not understand it at the time.

You learn in the military to practice and prepare, so that you don’t get confused when it all starts to go bad. Trial work is like that. Prepare. Prepare. Prepare. So when you’re in the courtroom, you know what you’re going to do. You’re not making it up.

Looking back, Vietnam seems so unsettling and dangerous. I am proud of my service, and I have a great admiration for those who have served.”

Richard Pimentel HD ’08 with his wife and children in Nampa, Idaho. The 2007 movie Music Within, shot in part on the PSU campus, tells the story of how he became a disability rights advocate after returning from Vietnam.

Richard Pimentel
U.S. Army, 1967-1969

“I’m a Portland boy. I wanted to study speech at PSU, but I simply couldn’t afford it. So I volunteered for the draft instead. I took my chances in what we called the ‘Go to Vietnam and if you live, you can go to college’ lottery.

In Vietnam, a rocket hit my bunker. The explosion damaged my hearing and gave me a traumatic brain injury. I had to learn to talk again. I had to learn to walk again. But I was lucky to come back. The VA told me I couldn’t become a professional speaker, because I was deaf and it would affect my speech—and no one would want to listen to me.

So I talked with Ben Padrow, a PSU speech professor. He looked at me and said, ‘Who told you that? Don’t believe it. We can do this.’ He was one of the more powerful, influential people in my life—and one of the nicest.

It was 1969 and the perfect time for me to be at Portland State. There was a lot of energy around war protests and other social movements on campus. We veterans got together a lot, but we didn’t wear our fatigues or medals. I dressed like a hippie like everyone else. And we didn’t talk about our experiences, except with each other.

We figured out that ultimately, people’s opinions of the war become the opinions they have of the warrior.

It wasn’t just the war protestors who had a problem with us. We tried to join the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars, but they didn’t want us either. We figured out that ultimately, people’s opinions of the war become the opinions they have of the warrior. If you are fighting a popular war, you’ll come home to parades. If you’re fighting an unpopular war, you’ll come home to demonstrations. Some of us could live with that, because we didn’t much like the war either.

My friend Art Honeyman, a fellow PSU student who had cerebral palsy, was a fierce advocate for all sorts of causes. He was beyond a force of nature, and he inspired me to start helping student veterans with disabilities find jobs. Eventually, I turned it into a profession, creating training programs to help employers rethink disability issues—not to assume someone can’t do something but to ask how they can do it.

I would tell employers: You may think I’m here to change your mind about people with disabilities, but I’m not. I’m here to change your mind about yourself. To give you confidence in your ability to do what’s necessary to hire and work with people with disabilities.

People sometimes say I gave a voice to the voiceless. I did not. We’ve always had a voice, but we were in a soundproof room. I just opened the door so everyone could listen.”

G.L.A. Harris, former public administration faculty, taught at PSU for 17 years and was instrumental in the creation of PSU’s Veterans Resource Center.

G.L.A. HARRIS
U.S. Air Force and U.S. Air Force reserve

“Soon after I started teaching at PSU in 2004, I noticed the veterans were not participating in class. Many individuals at the time were returning from either Operation Enduring Freedom or Operation Iraqi Freedom and didn’t feel that the civilian world would understand what they were going through.

A chance encounter with the then-dean of the School of Extended Studies Mike Burton led from one thing to another and we decided we needed to do something about the situation. We started meeting with a third veteran off campus and eventually formed a veterans task force.

At the time, despite PSU’s founding, the campus climate was one of hostility towards the U.S. military. And, even though my students knew that my area of research included the military, I never disclosed that I had both served on active duty and was, at that time, still serving in the reserves.

I conceived of the idea that we should study these veterans’ needs during their academic pursuits at the university. We collectively learned what we had anecdotally surmised all along—that student veterans indeed felt estranged. Yes, they were attending the university as students, but they didn’t feel connected to the university as a community.

We convinced the State Legislature to give us the seed money to do a pilot for one year for what we then called the Student Veterans Service Office.

Given the success of this project, Gov. Ted Kulongoski—a veteran himself—helped push House Bill 2178, which said any higher education institution within the Oregon university system that received funds from the state had to create a student veterans service office.

The federal government got wind of what we were doing at PSU. General Eric Shinseki, who was the head of the USVA [United States Department of Veterans Affairs], visited in 2009 to give us accolades. A few years later, the Student Veterans Service Office was renamed the Veterans Resource Center.

What was created at PSU, based on my research, was used as a model for creating veterans resource centers around the country. Little did we know that something this small could have resulted in such a phenomenal thing for the benefit of so many.”

Jose Coll, dean of the School of Social Work and interim dean of the College of Education, is known nationally for his research on counseling veterans and their families.

Jose E. Coll
U.S. Marine Corps 1996-2001

“My parents and I were born in Cuba and immigrated to the U.S. in 1980 during the Mariel boatlift. As our boat reached the shores of Key West, the first image that I have is the American flag and that of a Marine. I was like 8 years old, and to me he was this enormous African American Marine with a rifle. Growing up in Cuba, the propaganda was that the U.S. was always going to come in and invade. As this little kid seeing this Marine, I got scared. But I remember my dad saying, ‘These are the good guys now.’

When I made the decision to join the service, I easily gravitated to the Corps. This was my opportunity to serve a nation that provided so much to my family and immigrants historically.

After serving honorably for four years, a combat training incident—which fractured my back—prohibited me from reenlisting. I started taking courses at Palomar Community College on base while going through physical rehabilitation.

This was my opportunity to serve a nation that provided so much to my family and immigrants historically.

I had this remarkable anthropology professor and Indigenous scholar named Dr. Featherstone. They were able to shed a light on so many things that are happening to our communities of color and Indigenous communities. Up to that moment, I had never been able to articulate the systemic challenges that exist and that I had experienced.

I decided I wanted to be an anthropologist, but the VA said there’s no jobs. I go back and say ‘OK, I’ll study political science.’ They said, ‘Sorry, no jobs.’ So I threw my hands up in the air—‘I just need a job. I’ve got a family and will be discharged in six months. What have you got?’ They literally said, ‘Obviously you’re a person of service. Why don’t you become a social worker?’

I remember taking home this book called 101 Careers in Social Work and going through it. Everything Dr. Featherstone talked about, I felt I could do with a degree in social work. So I decided then this would be my path and career.

A lot of our veterans are similar to me in that they find social work to be the perfect profession. Portland State University has a long and rich tradition of serving student veterans and as dean, I take pride in continuing this legacy of serving those who have served.”

Recent graduate India Wynne MSW ’21 with service dog Daily. Wynne serves as Fellow Veteran Case Worker in the office of U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden.

India Wynne
U.S. Marine Corps 2000-2005

“I wanted to be a Marine because I wanted to do something that most men are afraid to do and prove that I could do it. Marines are honorable, they’re dependable, they’re loyal, they’re courageous. I wanted to be all of those things. And their uniform. They have the best uniform of all the branches, you gotta admit, if you see a Marine you’re like ‘Damn, they look good.’

Serving as a queer person was fine at first. You know they can tell and they didn’t care. But then a female Marine outed me. I started getting threatening phone calls to my barracks. I was told ‘Don’t do things that might be seen as gay.’ Just my very existence is gay.

I went for a run on the beach and I got attacked from behind by three guys who sexually assaulted me and left me there. I crawled back to my barracks and then spent a couple of weeks in the hospital. The higher ups were like ‘We’re going to keep this in house so that we can make sure you’re taken care of.’

Nothing changed. They gave me a bottle of antidepressants. But the phone calls didn’t stop. I had to live across the street from where it happened.

I eventually got deployed to Afghanistan and actually welcomed the distraction because it got me off the base. But at the same time I didn’t know if any of the guys that were with me were the ones that attacked me.

I left the military not sure if I was going to be proud of being a Marine anymore. When I got to PSU I didn’t plan to go into the Veterans Resource Center, I didn’t plan on hanging out with veterans and I didn’t plan on talking to people about the fact that I was a veteran. But this big dude said, ‘You’re with your family’ and carried me to the VRC. (I was like ‘Put down the lesbian!’) He told me he suffered from military sexual trauma. The fact that he shared that with me, so openly, it just instantly started my healing in a way that no counselor could. My service dog, Daily, named because she saves my life on the daily, also helped improve my life. Before her, I slept on the couch with a knife under my pillow.

Because of the healing I felt from the veterans at school, I started wanting to help other veterans. Before I knew it, I’m in the School of Social Work and doing an internship as a veteran caseworker in Senator Wyden’s office. I continue that work to this day. The school gave me back my identity that I thought had been taken from me and that I thought I would never want back. I am a Marine.”

If you or someone you know needs help, call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 800-656-4673 or the Veterans Crisis Line at 800-273-8255.