News

A veteran keeps finding ways to help other veterans

Maj. Bob Johnson at Forward Operating Base Lion in Panjshir, Afghanistan

By Bill Moss, Published: November 11, 2021

Robert D. “Bob” Johnson was gainfully self-employed as a custom home builder in his adopted hometown of Hendersonville in 2007 when his country invited him to go to war again.

Retired from the U.S. Army 16 years before, Johnson got word that the surge in Iraq along with the ongoing war in Afghanistan with had presented the military with depleted leadership.
“What they needed was infantry majors, which I was,” he said. “They needed people everywhere.”
So Johnson volunteered, gave away all his unfinished home-building contracts, got back in shape and shipped off to Fort Bragg, where he joined one of the teams the Army was organizing to stabilize provinces.
Made up of 37 men and women, Johnson’s Provincial Reconstruction Team had Army and a few Air Force troops, civil affairs officers from the Army Reserves, representatives from the State Department, U.S. Agency for International Development, the Department of Agriculture and Army Corps of Engineers, plus a rifle platoon from the Pennsylvania National Guard to provide security.
An operations officer under the base commander, Maj. Johnson was surprised at the beauty of the remote mountainous region of the war-torn country. Forward Operating Base Lion in Panjshir “was beautiful, much like the Italian Alps with snow still on the peaks in the Hindu Kush region of northeast Afghanistan,” he wrote in a feature in the October issue of VFW magazine about combat veterans on the 20th anniversary of the start of the Afghanistan War.
“Our province was the only province that would not allow the (U.S. Army) National Guard to come in,” Johnson said. “The governor guaranteed our safety and assigned us 25 Afghan soldiers to guard our FOB.”
The forward operating base was small, surrounded by a berm, barbed wire fencing and two guard posts, though in the VFW magazine he described it as “a lot nicer than the tents we stayed in at Bragg.”
“The thing that surprised me the most was seeing CONEX boxes in the villages alongside the mud and stone buildings that looked like they went back to biblical times,” he said. “That and all the blown-up Soviet tanks and BMPs everywhere, left where the mujahideen took them out in the USSR war three decades earlier.”
Johnson’s PRT recruited Afghan contractors to build judicial buildings, schools, roads, even aqueducts to channel water to power a micro-hydroelectric dam. The soldiers created a voter registration system complete with photo IDs. Johnson toured the province’s court system and its prison for a report the Army wanted on how the Afghanistan judiciary worked.

After he came home from Afghanistan, the Army assigned Johnson to the Pentagon. But aside from his day job, he had another idea that he thought would help wounded veterans.

“I got the idea for the writing program at Walter Reed from my experiences in writing my 2004 book Natural Born Heroes where I was surprised that many of the 55 World War II veterans I interviewed for this book had never talked to anyone, family included, about the war,” Johnson, who earned a masters degree in writing from Johns Hopkins University, wrote in a 2014 article about the Walter Reed writing program. “Collectively, their experiences were fascinating and touched every major event and personage of the war, from Roosevelt to Churchill, D-Day to Iwo Jima, movie stars to generals and even a future president. The common thread in Heroes was that they were all living in my 300-house neighborhood in North Carolina (Haywood Knolls) and because I was both a neighbor and a veteran, they agreed to talk with me. From their stories I produced an oral history of World War II.”
His experience writing Natural Born Heroes taught him that sharing personal memories, even painful ones, was cathartic for the aging soldiers. He thought it would be for young veterans, too.
“I told the staffers (at Walter Reed) that it was easier to write about the war than it was to talk about it because talking sometimes brought on tears and, in the stoic culture of the military, you don’t show your emotions,” he said. “In writing, no one can see you cry. And if you do cry, you’re among friends with similar experiences in the safe environment of a closed door.”

His boss let him start the writing program at the Army hospital but only on his own time. The group met Tuesday evenings at 6. Later, on a trip back home to Hendersonville, Johnson met for coffee with Jeff Miller, the HonorAir founder. Miller had adopted a new veterans service, the Veterans Restorations Quarters in Asheville, which houses and trains veterans. Johnson asked for a tour and, once he saw the energy of the place, decided to create a writing program there, too.
“I visited the group in September 2013 and watched and listened to the veterans’ stories,” he wrote. “They were heartbreaking and talked both of their war in the military and their war with homelessness. Still, I could see their enthusiasm for the class and felt they, like my veterans in Natural Born Heroes and at Walter Reed, benefited from sharing their stories.”

Johnson was not done serving the Army, or those in the military who sacrificed all. He was invited to join a task force that was directed to find the problems with graves at Arlington National Cemetery and fix them.

“I told my boss that my father and grandfather are buried there,” he said. “Also the commander of the team that replaced my team in Afghanistan was there too, killed in action in 2009. I had skin in the game and I wanted to do it.”
The leadership of the national cemetery “had lost accountability,” he said. “They had a couple of burials where people thought they were buried in the wrong place. Congress actually passed a law telling the Army to do a full accountability of it.”
They had taken the soldiers of the Old Guard, the Army unit that conducts burials at Arlington and guards the Tomb of the Unknowns, and given them iPhones to they photographed every headstone, front and back.
“Doing that with an iPhone established exactly where the photograph was taken, within an inch or two,” Johnson said. The team developed a program and 70 analysts compared the photo to existing records. “If it matched, they’re good to go. If there was any anomaly — like a date was wrong or a name was misspelled — we would flag them in the program.”
Eventually, the task force identified 64,000 instances where the headstone or the record had a problem.
“That made above-the-fold news in the Washington Post,” Johnson said. “I kind of saw the mission early on that we need to figure out what is right and fix it.” The task force proceeded to do that under a driving principle of not trusting any records that were not original and official. “We had to find another source of information to see what was right,” he said. “I took the better people and created kind of a tiger team.” They realized that the Social Security Administration keeps a master death list that was reliable. They bought 20 memberships to ancestry.com so analysts could search original records there.
“At the end of the project we certified that about 4,000 headstones needed to be replaced, moved or corrected,” he said. “One of the best things that came out of it, now if you go to Arlington, all the work we did is in a ‘find the grave’ system and all the photographs that the Old Guard took are in there.”
The work of Johnson and his “tiger team” lives on in a way that protects the historical accuracy of military graves across the U.S. “The Army had a bunch of other cemeteries so they took our system and went through all their cemeteries and did the same processes and put them in the ‘find a grave.’”
Johnson left the cemetery task force and the Army on Sept. 30, 2013, 27 months after his initial 90-day assignment. He still works for the federal government, as an inspector general in the field for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. When he’s not traveling, he works from his home in the West Side Historic District. And for Johnson, in a lot of ways, every day is Veterans Day. He’s currently a trustee with Hedrick Rhodes VFW Post 5206. The post is temporarily homeless, since the county bought the post home and is working on plans to renovate it. Old soldiers have been meeting at Guidon Brewing Co., which is owned by a U.S. Army combat veteran.
“We continue to get new members, like one or two,” said Johnson, 69. “They said by the next meeting we would have a new space that is not a bar.”
Meanwhile, the retired Army major will likely still be looking for ways to help his fellow veterans.

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For information on the VFW, contact commander Ed Skrivanek at skylarke1968@yahoo.com or 828-606-6725.