The Very Rev. Jim Munroe, dean of the Diocesan Cathedral is also a Vietnam War veteran. He believes that people who have fought for the United States and the military and foreign wars and have shed their blood for our country have a right to stand up and talk about their experiences. 

   Jim has been an active member of the Veterans Education Project (VEP) since the spring of 1984.  Jim says the VEP “sponsors veterans telling their stories in schools to try to combat the myth/ romance of war.” He makes a point to say that every veteran’s story is different, but his mission is to not only tell the truth about the brutality of combat, but to “sow some kind of seed for peace; find an alternative to combat as a way of solving problems.” 

An alternative to war should be sought out, Jim says, because “combat and war is obscene and horrific and inconceivable.”  

Jim does his part by partaking in discussions with high school students, teenagers in correctional facilities, church groups and college campuses throughout the western Massachusetts region.

The VEP has approximately 30 volunteers, made up of both men and women who have served in a multitude of different wars.  There are volunteers that have served in Korea, World War II, the first Gulf War, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.  Jim says that the VEP is, “The one activity outside of the church that I really throw my heart into.” 

The Veterans Education Project began 25 years ago in response to a helicopter landing outside of a local high school. Men jumped out of the helicopter wearing combat gear. The military men were on hand to be a part of an all-school assembly to recruit students into the military.  A local Vietnam veteran read about this stunt and decided that it would be great if he could travel around to schools telling his story about the military and Vietnam.

In 1982, a group of Vietnam Veterans got together and spent quite some time planning to go into local high schools to tell their stories.  Jim says the idea was to “provide a balance to the excitement and the intrigue and the romance that was portrayed by that helicopter landing at that school.”  

Jim says, “At the beginning it was very difficult.”  The VEP members were thought of as, “commies” and “pinkos” and “draft card-burning anti- Americans.”  Although it was hard for some time, Jim says it eventually got better and “as the years went by the integrity of our group finally won out.” 

The VEP are routinely asked to return to high school classrooms.  Jim says, “VEP is incredibly well-received with gratitude and respect.”

“For years after Vietnam, I assumed that it was over, and it was time to get on with my life,” says the Rev. Jim Munroe, dean of the Cathedral in Springfield, who served in the Vietnam War from December 1968 to March 1969.

What Jim slowly started to figure out, though, was “that it had a profound effect on me and the effect was sitting inside me, affecting me, but I wasn’t conscious of it.” 

Jim was just a young man when he joined the U.S. Marine Corps and was sent to Vietnam during the war. He says that on some level he was aware that he might be injured in battle; that there was the possibility of death.  “But what I really knew in my gut is that I wouldn’t be killed, and I wouldn’t be wounded… I wouldn’t be afraid and that I would be able to brag about it the rest of my life,” says Jim. 

Jim found out quickly that this was not how his life was going to unfold.  He says, “When the reality came and the level of fear that I hadn’t known existed – a sense of obscene waste of the casual ending of human life – there came a pain that I never could imagine.”  

The pains of Jim’s experiences were not only on an emotional level but on a physical level as well.  Jim was injured when two grenades detonated in a foxhole his unit was in when it was overrun.  Jim suffered a fractured skull, punctured eardrums and many shrapnel wounds.  

Eventually, there was a light at the end of Jim’s tunnel.

Jim was ordained a priest in January 1976, and in January of 1983, roughly 15 years after Vietnam, he traveled with a group of clergy members to east Africa. Their first night there, the group took a walk in a nearby park.  No one had told Jim or the members that the park was a lot like Central Park in New York City, and they didn’t know it wasn’t safe to be there at night. 

“Our group got jumped by some Kenyan men,” says Jim. “They took some purses and wallets and cameras… it wasn’t horrific, but it was no fun at all. It was unnerving,” says Jim. 

The next morning Jim woke up and decided to take a walk down the street.  “Out of nowhere this fear just hit me, and rose up in me and filled me up, and it was so overwhelming that a friend had to take me into a building and just sit me down, with my back towards the wall.”  Jim says that he just sat there, “paralyzed with fear.” 

It took Jim about an hour to realize that he had been carrying around that fear for 15 years.  Jim says, “It had just been sitting there, and I had been unconscious of it, and then this little trigger brought it back with all the intensity as if it had just happened yesterday.”  He also says, “It was a great despair in feeling that fear, thinking that I would be stuck with the fear forever.”

That afternoon, Jim and the clergy members visited a small church.  The church looked like a concrete garage made out of cement blocks, says Jim.  At the same time that Jim was noticing the church’s appearance, women started pouring out of the building. Jim says, “There were 20-25 women all dressed in beautiful robes and dresses, dancing and singing and clapping their hands and smiling.” 

The women started walking towards Jim and the clergy members and Jim says, “I stood there, absolutely frozen. This one woman headed toward me. She was singing dancing and swaying.”  Jim says the woman could have easily been 6’6” and over 300 pounds. “She came up to me, and she opened her arms and enfolded them around me, and I kind of literally disappeared out of sight, my head into her bosom,” says Jim. 

Jim’s tunnel then became illuminated. 

“In a totally unexpected way, I discovered, in her embrace, the fear that was paralyzing me beginning to fade away, to fall off. Like leaves falling of a tree here in New England in the fall, and then to be replaced by a kind of peace that passes human understanding.”

 Jim says, “It wasn’t like the reality of fears of this world went away. It wasn’t as though I became numb. It was that I was given this gift of some peace that permeated fear and encompassed fear and said to the fear: You’re not the last word. I’m the last word.” 

   Jim holds this woman in the highest esteem.  He says, “Even though I don’t know if she’s still alive or what her name is, I count her my closest sister in Christ because God gave me a wonderful gift through her… and I can’t wait to see her in Heaven.” 

By Suzie Scott, a frequent contributor to Pastoral Staff.