At his father’s urging, Bernhardt headed off to college. But his mind was still on a military career. He joined not only Army ROTC but a special elite unit run by the Green Berets. Then in 1967, in the middle of his sophomore year, he dropped out and enlisted in the Army. He had only the haziest sense of what was going on in Vietnam: “It appeared to be about a small country that was having communism shoved down its throat, while we were trying, at least ostensibly, to give people a chance to do what they wanted to do. If I didn’t go, somebody’d have to go in my place, which went against everything I’d grown up with.”
Bernhardt ended up in Vietnam with Charlie Company, on the ground as a horrified witness to the My Lai massacre. He was the first soldier to break the silence and talk in public about what had happened in the face of the Army’s cover-up. That decision caused great tension with the father he loved. “He believed that dissent and opposition to the government were uncalled for,” said Bernhardt. “He never doubted authority. Nor did I. Up until Vietnam, it never occurred to me that I’d be opposed to the authorities, not in a million years.”
After Bernhardt left the Army, he found himself sinking into another quagmire, the collapsing American economy of the 1970s. He bounced around Florida, working on a land surveyor’s crew, then at a sign shop that made billboards for Sheraton and Kmart. He lived in a trailer, parked in a vacationer’s lot on the Gulf of Mexico. But it wasn’t really the recession that threw his peacetime life into disarray. Vietnam had changed forever his idea of a code of masculinity. “For years, I had been asking myself, did I do the right stuff? And I had thought that you just added it all up and you could say, This is my manliness score. You get points for going through the service, and bonus points for extra military stuff, and points for a job and a marriage and kids. But it didn’t add up. There were all these people walking around with a high score who weren’t much of a man in my estimation.” Finally, he stopped keeping score, went back to college and got a degree in biology. He married and bought 10 acres of land in the Florida panhandle where he and his wife keep horses and a dozen stray dogs and cats. “In Charlie Company, cowardice and courage was all turned around. If you showed any sign of caring, it was seen as a sign of weakness. If you were the least bit concerned about the civilians, you were considered pathetic, definitely not a man.” Now he’s turned that experience around once more. “If you can define your manhood in terms of caring,” he said, “then maybe we can come back from all that.”
