A War Objector's Life Beyond Borders | Robert W. Norris

00:00
we would have to sometimes practice how to put down a demonstration. You know, they would have like mock demonstrations and we and the security air police had to go through training of what to do, you know, to sort of put down these demonstrations. And I just was thinking very seriously, you know, if that really happened, I would probably throw down my weapon and join the other side. And so as it turned out, my order.

00:30
was coming maybe around June of 1970, well, when my order came, again, I had basically three choices. One was go to Canada, one was to refuse the order, or the other was just, and face the court martial, where I would potentially be sentenced to five years in prison and a dishonorable discharge. And then the third option was, of course, follow the order and go to war. Well, I chose, you know, to refuse the order.

00:59
Today's guest is Robert Norris. Robert is a former conscientious objector to the Vietnam War, and he's a long-time resident of Japan. His life journey is really a testament to courage and resilience and really the power of individual conviction in something so powerful. His story's not just about defying a war, but also about embracing peace and finding the boundless opportunities that life can offer as we move through some of the most challenging moments in our lives.

01:26
Robert's decision to stand up to the Vietnam War was a move that was really rooted deeply in his belief in the sanctity of human life. The act of defiance led to a court-martial that forever changed the course of his life. In our conversation today, we explore the transformative power of language as we learn how Robert's strategic choice of words during that court-martial trial saved him four and a half years of his life. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Robert Norris. I'm Matt Gilhooly, and this is...

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The Life Shift, candid conversations about the pivotal moments that have changed lives forever.

02:11
Hello, my friends. Welcome to the LifeShift Podcast. I am here with Robert. Hello, Robert. Hi, how are you doing, Matt? Oh, you know, we were just talking before recording and it's very hot here in Florida right now and it sounds like over where you are, which is in the future to me in Japan, you're entering rainy season. That's right. That's right. We're I think 16, 17 hours ahead of the West Coast. So you're on the East Coast, I guess we're 13 hours ahead.

02:38
Well, thank you for wanting to be a part of the LifeShift podcast. I do want to say this publicly. You sent such a kind email mentioning your story, talking about the LifeShift podcast and connecting it to different episodes that you had listened to. And I just want to publicly thank you for that, because as an independent podcaster, I get lots of pitches, but not all of them are like the way you did it. So just thank you for the way that you approach just wanting to be on the show. It was very appreciated. Thank you. My pleasure.

03:07
just good manners, I guess. My mother taught me well. Thank you. It is it. I wanted to recognize it publicly because it's not something that I see all the time for anyone that's listening, maybe for the first time, because you know, Robert's on the show today. The life shift podcast really comes from my own personal experience. The show came from a school assignment, but my own personal experience when I was eight years old, my mom died in a motorcycle accident.

03:32
And from one day to the next, or actually from the moment my dad had to sit me down and tell me that my mom had died, my life completely changed. Like moved 1,000 miles away from the home that I lived in with my mom. My parents were divorced. I had to go to a new school. And all the things in my life changed. And growing up, I didn't have the tools to process that. I didn't have the tools to go through the grief and understand all that. And the people around me didn't really have it either. And all that time, I always wondered, am I like the only person that has

04:02
pivotal moment in their life where one day is totally different from the next. Turns out I'm not. We all have these pivotal moments in our lives. But as an eight-year-old growing up and into my teens, I really thought, I must be the only person that's ever gone through this. So now I get this opportunity to talk to people like you, Robert, and hundreds of other people so far in this journey and listen to these pivotal moments and how, as humans, we respond to either these external moments that happen to us.

04:30
or these internal moments that we create and kind of move through the world. And so it's just been such a pleasure to kind of heal myself, if I can say that, you know, through conversation and just being humans, like just sitting, you know, maybe across the world, but having these human conversations that I think so many people should be having. So thank you for letting me tell you a little bit about my show, which you already know. Yeah, it's always interesting to hear. I'm excited to hear your story. I know you have a couple...

05:00
really pivotal moments in your life, but I'm sure you have a lot more than that. So before you get into any of those, maybe you can just tell us a little bit about yourself here in 2024, who you are and, and, and yeah, who Robert is. Okay. Well, uh, first of all, thanks for having me on. I really appreciate that. I'm a 73 year old Pacific Northwest native, and I was a conscientious objector to the Vietnam war long, long time ago and from within the military. And I was court-martialed in.

05:29
spent some time in a military prison. After that, during the 1970s, I had my Nomad days, spelled D-A-Z-E, where I was on the move a lot. I had itchy feet and I did a lot of traveling, a lot of working of labor jobs and menial type of work until I finally found something I could use to sustain myself, which was cooking.

05:54
I ended up in Japan in 1983 at the age of 32, and I've been here ever since. That's 41 years of expat life now, and I just retired about eight years ago after spending maybe 25 years teaching in the university system. I'm the author of three novels and more recently a memoir and a tribute to my mother, and I'm relatively...

06:23
healthy and quite happy and content with the way things have gone. There have been a lot of roads and like you said, a lot of shifts in the life up to now, but it's all worked out in the end and all roads led to my destination, I guess, which was here. I'm married to a Japanese. We've been married for 37 years now and we're both quite comfortable with each other still, still make each other laugh a lot. It sounds like you've had quite.

06:50
the life though, like the non-traditional American life, if you will. Like, I'm fascinated. You've already kind of given away some of the pivotal moments, but I'm just fascinated to hear how some of those shifts in your life changed you. Maybe you can paint the picture of what life was like before whatever you feel is the most pivotal to you out of that journey. I would have to say that probably the most pivotal one was the day of my court martial.

07:16
To give the background to that, I'm sure most of your listeners are very much aware of American history of that time. The 1960s were quite a tumultuous time. And I grew up during the 60s. I was a country boy living basically in the Redwoods of Northern California. My father was a logger. And so the outside world seemed very, very far away. But we were very much aware of.

07:43
of the war in Vietnam and what was happening in the outside world, mainly through the media, watching the TV news every night. Quite different then. Yeah. Compared to now. Well, probably the major difference was that there was the draft then, conscription. And so all young men had to register for the draft and it affected all of our lives. That's a lot of what we talked about, even going to high school.

08:08
It was friends that we knew or older brothers that we knew that had either gone to Vietnam and some of them didn't come back or some that did come back and had been drastically changed. And so by the time I was 18, which was in 1969, I was already thinking a lot about the war and what was my position on it. And I had a gut feeling that it was wrong.

08:32
The most fearful thing was that if we were drafted, that we'd be sent very quickly to the front lines in Vietnam. And, you know, who really knew where Vietnam was? And, you know, it was an unheard of country at the time. And why were we fighting there? We never really understood that. But our fathers had been World War II heroes, you know, the greatest generation. So they say, you know, we grew up on a lot of these.

08:58
TV programs that glorified the victory in World War II and our soldiers over there. And so a lot of us wanted to become like our fathers. Was your father? Oh yeah, he was a World War II hero. He flew with the invasion of Normandy. He flew out of England with the Army Air Corps. Went on something like 75 missions. He didn't really talk much about the war after he came home, but I'm sure he had to deal with his own PTSD issues.

09:27
Anyway, in 1969, I graduated from high school. And so not wanting to be drafted, we really didn't have too many choices. Did you want to go to Canada and run away and probably never be able to come back again or go underground or what was the alternative? And at that time, the Air Force and the Navy were a somewhat viable alternative to being drafted.

09:56
The only difference was that instead of a two year commitment, you had a four year commitment. And so a friend of mine and I just went to visit a recruiter to find out what they had to offer. And the air force recruiter promised us that we could play basketball all day long. And you know, I was a basketball, uh, you know, gym rat and we would meet all these beautiful women and we traveled all around the world and have adventures. And I bought it hooked line and sinker. So their sales pitch worked.

10:26
Yeah, so I ended up joining the Air Force in 1969, but on the first day of boot camp, basic training, I knew I'd made a mistake. As it turned out, I was put in the only career field in the Air Force that was combat trained, and my job became as a guard for B-52 bombers that were bombing North Vietnam with all kinds of, well, Agent Orange, which was a horrible chemical that

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not only kill people but to just lay waste to the whole jungle. Since then there have been a lot of cancers and birth defects that are going on for two or three generations now, horrible stuff. Anyway, within the military itself, there was quite a strong GI movement against the war at the time. I got involved with a couple of guys who were producing what was called the

11:24
called a GI rag or an underground newspaper that was spreading news, talking with other soldiers, interviews with soldiers that had come back, reporting on things like the the May Lai massacre, if you're aware of what that was, and some of the war crimes that the American side was involved in. And of course, there was a lot of stuff going on in the 1960s, you know, women's liberation and.

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the anti-war movement, black liberation, all kinds of stuff. The music of the times was very much socially conscious, filled with lyrics. So we were all listening to this music and thinking about the war. I just had a gut feeling that it was wrong and inevitably or invariably my order to go fight in Vietnam would come since I was in a field that was guarding the B-52 bombers that were being used.

12:20
And so I had to do a lot of serious soul searching and thinking. And there was also the option of conscientious objector status. But at the time, you know, I didn't have a strong religious background. So I didn't think that I would qualify for that. It was a really difficult process. Very few were actually discharged with with a good discharge for that particular reason. In most cases, they were a member of some historical peace church like

12:49
Seventh-day Adventist or the Mormons, something like that, which I wasn't a member of. But at any rate, sometimes part of our training was that there were so many demonstrations going on across the nation, and sometimes there would be demonstrations outside the military bases. I was based in a strategic air command base in Northern California outside of Sacramento, and we would have to sometimes practice how to...

13:18
put down a demonstration. They would have mock demonstrations, and we in the security air police had to go through training of what to do to sort of put down these demonstrations. And I just was thinking very seriously, if that really happened, I would probably throw down my weapon and join the other side. And so, as it turned out, my order was coming maybe around June of 1970, well, when my...

13:48
order came. Again, I had basically three choices. One was go to Canada, one was to refuse the order, or the other was just and face the court martial where I would potentially be sentenced to five years in prison and a dishonorable discharge. And then the third option was, of course, follow the order and go to war. Well, I chose, you know, to refuse the order, and I applied for conscientious objector status, and it was refused. And so...

14:17
I had my court martial later on in the year, maybe around the beginning of October, and I had a good military lawyer. He had been an anti-war man himself, and rather than go to Canada and throw away his eight years of law school and his future, he determined that he could probably do a much better job from within the military, and I was his first big case, and he worked really hard on my case. I was really lucky there. And as it turned out, he gave me some really good counsel.

14:47
When I was given my order by my commanding officer in front of a bunch of witnesses, formally write it down on paper and give me one last chance to follow the order, I didn't use the word no in my refusal. And my lawyer had counseled me to do this. Well, at my court martial, which lasted about a full day of deliberation, I was found not guilty of the original charge, which was

15:16
willful disobedience to a direct lawful order. And that carried the five year maximum prison sentence. But I was found guilty of a lesser military crime, which was called negligent disobedience to a direct lawful order. And I was sentenced to six months. And that single sentence saved four and a half years of my life. And so that was a huge life shift for me. It was the introduction to the power of language and the importance of communication.

15:46
Did you realize that at the time? Not really, not really. The power of language? No. I would imagine that's something that comes later when you're reflecting back. Because in the moment, you're just like, I'm going to do what this lawyer says, because he might know a little bit better than me. And it turns out, he, by giving you that information, that was quite a life shift too, by just telling you, don't say no. Say something else. What did you say? Do you know what you said that was not no?

16:12
What I said was, I don't feel I mentally or physically capable of killing another human being. And I just repeated that sentence over and over. And they were in such a rush to make an example of me to anybody else who might have the same feelings. Were the people around you, like in your group of people, were people just agreeing to the orders, or were other people doing similar things to you, either by saying no or by saying, I just, I can't kill another person? I would say that...

16:42
Probably 99% of the soldiers on the base where I was at just shrugged their shoulders and followed the order. Maybe my mother's sense of righteousness or indignation kicked in, I really don't know, but I just felt morally that I couldn't follow that order. I couldn't kill another human being. Well, that's good. That's a good quality of yours. Yeah, I think it's fascinating too, because you think about...

17:11
If we stereotype, let's stereotype now, like an 18, 19-year-old boy. I mean, we're not really adults at 18 or 19, right? But people think we are sometimes. But the aggression that we look at, and if we look at stereotypes and people that have joined in those things, it seems like you might have been in a space where it was not as normal to have these moral feelings against those things. And to lean, is that true? Or was it at the time there was a nice balance of people that were really like, this is wrong? I don't.

17:41
Well, where I grew up, which a lot of people might consider a redneck area, you know, there's mostly loggers and- So more rural. The prevailing political mood was support the war and a lot of sort of right-wing Republicans and a lot of celebrations. I remember the American Legion, I think, was very popular in the area where I grew up in, and they had maybe two or three-

18:10
annual events, including one on the Fourth of July, where a lot of the soldiers from World War II would join in a big parade. Most of our fathers had been in World War II, and growing up on all those TV programs that glorified war, and even the comic books that we were reading in the 1950s were nothing but caricatures of the Nazis and the Japanese soldiers, and the heroes were almost like supermen, the American soldiers.

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patriotic environment to grow up in. And so a lot of kids naively wanted to go to war so they could be like their dads in a sense. Approval, maybe. Yeah, maybe seeking approval. And the culture at the time very much glorified that image. The John Wayne types, and this was before Rambo and a lot of these movies came out. But most of the war movies, the...

19:07
1950s and early 1960s were very patriotic in tone. Yeah, I grew up in that kind of environment, and so there would be a lot of resistance to what I'd done. A lot of people called me a coward and a traitor and this type of thing. But on the base itself, there were very few really openly anti-war soldiers, but somehow I got involved with a small group. Of course, they were underground.

19:37
if they advertise what they were doing, they could be thrown in prison too. Which is fascinating. Yeah. And at the time, nationwide, there were a lot of coffee shops that were set up outside of military bases where a lot of the university students, and where students could meet with soldiers in some of their time off and exchange information. And there were a lot of black, white racial problems. You know, the black soldiers who had been...

20:06
Well, of course in the army had been drafted, but even within the Air Force and Navy, there was a large percentage of minority soldiers who for one reason or another, maybe economically, it was like one way to escape from their environment that they grew up in and maybe have a chance to develop a skill that they could use in society in later years. But there was a lot of, to be honest, a lot of racism within the military at the time. And so at one time,

20:35
especially soldiers coming back from Vietnam and starting to organize into anti-war groups had a Major influence on a lot of our thinking of course the underground network where we were Available. Well, of course, we didn't have the internet but these underground newspapers Were passed from soldier to soldier and everybody was reading them and That's so fascinating. Yeah, and the music of the times a lot of the even the movies of the times were starting to shift over to more of a an anti-war point of view

21:05
So there were lots of influences. Probably I was within a very small minority. Smaller group. Did you feel that way growing up too? Like did you buy into the celebration of war? And I mean, obviously we wanna honor vets and that's important, but did you buy into all that stuff or were you an outlier growing up as well with this like conscientious thoughts of war in that way? I think I was just a naive country bumpkin who accepted

21:35
things the way they were and until I left my little bubble of isolation in the northern part of California, I called it the redwood curtain. We were maybe five years behind the rest of the states as far as our consciousness. So that was eye opening too. Oh yeah. And then suddenly being thrust into an environment that was, well for one thing, I had never met another black person until I joined the...

22:03
military and then suddenly I was in an environment where I was almost in the minority and all of my bunk mates that I had in the barracks were other black soldiers and so that was an education for me too not only culturally but linguistically, musically. It opens your world. Yeah I was a pretty good basketball player and so one of my roommates was also a basketball junkie and so I spent a lot of time with him and his friends.

22:32
playing basketball in our free time. And he turned me on to a lot of really good music of the times. There was a lot of good music out of the black cultural leaders of the time. And then he gave me a lot of things to read. That's where I started reading James Baldwin and Malcolm X and some of these things. And then- You were like drinking from the fire hose of life. Yeah, but I was very much attracted to that. Maybe-

22:59
Within my own heart, I think I was a bit anti-authority. And the interesting thing was that I was in one barracks where I had this one roommate who loved basketball. He was from the South. He was from Louisiana. And the other was from Detroit. And he was a bit more politically radical, a very quiet guy, and kind of scary to me at the time, naive country bumpkin that I was. But it showed me that even within a certain minority,

23:28
there were different elements of what types of thinking. In a weird way, it sounds like the military also opened you up to more humanity. Yes, it was a great education. And especially when I was sent to this... The Air Force had a unique program for their prisoners who had been court-martialed. For those of us who were convicted of non-violent crimes,

23:54
The Air Force had this idea, which I suppose was fairly progressive at the time, that all the money and time that they'd spent training soldiers to be put in a particular career field would be wasted if they just kicked these soldiers out of the service. So for those of us who were nonviolent, we were given the opportunity to retrain into another career field. That was part of our retraining. They called it a retraining group rather than...

24:24
some place like Fort Leavenworth or something like that. This was- Is that part of your sentencing? Yeah. Okay. I spent my six months in Denver, Colorado at what they called the 3320th Retraining Group, which was a bit like going back to basic training again. We weren't put in jail cells. We were in open bay barracks on a separate part of the base and we were around guards all the time. And we had a very regimented and strict schedule from day to day, a lot of menial labor that we had to perform around the base.

24:54
there was punishment elements to it. It wasn't like we're just moving you to a different college. Right, it was almost like a brainwashing program. Like a rehab center? Oh, interesting. Where we had to meet with psychiatrists a lot, they would have discussions about communism and patriotism and military history, and they just pounded into your head over and over and over again, that if you got kicked out of the service

25:24
a bad discharge. You would never make it in life. You would be a dismal failure. You would be rejected by society. You'd be kicked out of your own families. You would never find a job. You would live a life of crime. You'd end up committing suicide. And they just pounded this over and over and over into your head. Did you see through it at the time? We kind of laughed about it sometimes. But after I returned to society, I was like, I

25:54
A lot of that remained in my head, and it was almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy in many ways. I started to believe some of it. I started to lose some of my earlier confidence in myself. Did that lead to your nomad kind of life? Is it because you weren't finding the area that you wanted to be in, then those thoughts came, oh, maybe they're right, I'm not falling into place, and maybe if I go here, that'll be the place. Was that, I mean, did it feed into that?

26:23
Yeah, very much so. Not immediately, but they put a question mark in my head about everything and made me start thinking, well, did I do the right thing? When I returned to society, of course, I returned to my home area and the only type of work that was available was in the saw mills and logging industry. Even there, when you applied for a job,

26:49
there was a section on the job application form where you had to write about your military service and if you got a bad discharge you had to admit it there. Naturally I was kicked out of the service, I refused to go through the rehabilitation process. The idea was that after you served your bad time, in my case six months, then you could retrain and go into a different career field, return to the Air Force and serve out the rest of your obligation.

27:17
I said, no, no, I'm not gonna do that. And so I- Good for you. I got booted out with what was called at the time an undesirable discharge. And so it was like the scarlet letter on my forehead, instead of an S I had a U. Is that like slightly better than dishonorable? Yeah. Or is just another word for dishonorable? In their mind. No, dishonorable is pretty much reserved for real traitors and murderers. Okay. Well, I'm glad you're not that.

27:45
At the time, there were five different types of discharge. There was the honorable discharge. A general discharge was mainly for people who just couldn't adapt to military culture or had some kind of injury or something where they couldn't perform their jobs. And so they were eased into society without any bad effects at all. You know, they were still, what would you say, eligible for some of the benefits, like the GI Bill and these kinds of things.

28:15
probably a less of a quote unquote shame that they attached to it. Like the scarlet letter, like you said. And then there was the undesirable discharge, which was an administrative discharge, not a punitive discharge. Then a bad conduct discharge, which was one step up from the dishonorable discharge. And you would have a hard time finding a job with a bad conduct discharge and maybe not even be able to vote. And then, you know, with a dishonorable discharge, you might as well just leave the country or kill yourself.

28:44
At any rate, I had this image of myself as I'm undesirable. And whenever I would apply for a job, I would have to get into a sort of political argument because with whoever was doing the hiring, because in many cases they were former soldiers themselves who had served, you know, in the Korean War or in World War II. In many cases, it worked in my favor because I would get very passionate about my feelings. And so even though we disagreed strongly about

29:14
the war in Vietnam, they liked my spunk. And so I ended up getting hired for a couple of jobs. They didn't amount to much. Even so, I tried to go to school for a while, but even I was two or three years older than the other kids who were 18 at that time, but I felt like I was 100 years older. Yeah. Well, you had been through a lot more than a lot of those 18-year-olds even in a short amount of time. So I can understand that.

29:42
So one of the first effects post-military prison was, yeah, about two or three years later, in 1973, I came across a book called Europe on $5 a day and how to take a backpack and just bum around Europe. And I was starting to read such books as the Beatnik poets and Jack Kerouac's On the Road and some of the ex-patriot writers like Henry Miller. And I was...

30:12
being influenced by them. And so many of us, the hippie, the counterculture of the time, many of us did the same thing in kind of a search for identity, I guess you could call it. I hitchhiked across the States and bummed around Europe for about six months. And everywhere I went, I met other young Europeans who were playing music or they were writing poetry or singing or painting. And...

30:40
they would gather in small groups at these little rural campgrounds and pass information. It was like an underground network where if you made a friend with somebody and you told them, well, I'm going to Spain, they would say, well, I have a friend who lives in Spain. If you go there in October, you might be able to, you know, get a job picking fruit or something like that. And so I was amazing. And when I spoke about my experiences, there was this great, I don't know, acceptance and...

31:08
admiration for what I'd done and this was a huge boost to the ego. And different from probably what you were experiencing in your hometown. Most people didn't want to talk about it. Right, right. Right, yeah, because I could imagine you almost feel rejected by your own community or people around you with that.

31:31
with that discharge, right? Yeah, in a sense, that's what I felt, but it may not have been so direct, but psychologically. Well, because you absorbed a lot of what they were trying to put into your brain as well. But yeah, your search for home, search for belonging, it was probably that trek of finding that. I can totally see it, because I think the times that you were in, the way you describe it, it feels like you were doing the thing that other people maybe

32:01
didn't do because they felt they couldn't, or they didn't have enough convictions for it, or they felt like they, well, I signed up for it, I guess I have to go forward with it. And here you are, like living in what felt right, what felt truthful, but then you got in trouble for it. So then you feel rejected. So now you gotta find the people that love you for who you are and what you offer to the world. And it sounds like you met people along the way that kind of showed you that's possible. Yeah, and probably the biggest thing of all was that most of these young European hippies

32:31
that I met and befriended on this first journey, they all spoke three or four different languages. And I was so envious of that, and in a sense, kind of ashamed that I could only speak my own language and not very well at that. And so with that motivation, well, influence, I would say, I found that I wanted to express myself as well, in some means. And they also helped provide a kind of itinerary for where to go.

33:02
showed me or sort of introduced me to some of the great museums of Europe and places to go and just the art and art history of Europe just everywhere I went, you know, it was there and America seemed so barren that way to me at the time. I was thinking too the idea of seeing people really passionate about something and seeing them light up.

33:29
by doing music or painting or whatever they were doing, I would imagine that was so foreign to you in the world that you came from and also in the military. It's like, nobody's there and like, yeah, this has lightened me up. And you're now seeing people that are doing things for them. So I can imagine how shocking that might've been at times. When I finally returned to the States, I now had a kind of purpose. I wanted to express myself in some way as well. And so I started studying literature.

33:58
taking some journalism classes in addition to continuing to work menial labor jobs. But I wanted to become a writer. And maybe four years past, you know, I was moving here and there, but always trying to write, starting like a maybe a hundred yard dash runner, turning into a marathon or, you know, starting with very short stories and working my way into longer stories. And four years later, I felt ready to write a novel.

34:26
And I was under the influence of Hemingway and Henry Miller and some of these expatriate writers. I thought you were going to say drugs. And of some of those too. There was that part of the counterculture. I'd had so many weird experiences by then that I thought, well, maybe I can't do this in America. I'm going to go back to Paris. And so I saved up some money and I ended up going to Paris. And within the first month or two, I was there staying in the same cheap left bank

34:53
Motel where I was staying was an Iranian and an Afghan and one day I Came back to the front desk and they were trying to get a message across to the desk clerk who spoke only French And I picked up a little bit of French by then so I managed to help them out and give a crude translation To the desk clerk who understood and they were so happy with what I had done that they invited me back to their countries and I thought well that might be an adventure

35:21
It might be a lot cheaper. Paris was very expensive. My money was disappearing very quickly. And so that was the start of almost a year-long journey around the world. And I ended up going through the old hippie trail, which started in Europe and then went through Yugoslavia, the old Yugoslavia, into Bulgaria and Turkey, the eastern mounds of Turkey. Incredible adventures there. How many countries does that take you through? Oh, god, I don't know. Maybe.

35:49
15 different countries, but the most strongly influential of those were Iran. This was before the Islamic Revolution. This was in 1977. The revolution happened in 1979. So there were still a lot of, well, the Shah was still in power and there were a lot of American oil companies there. And I thought I'd be able to get a job somewhere teaching English or something. And I never did, but had some pretty good adventures.

36:18
My money again was running out, so rather than returning west, I just continued east into Afghanistan where I spent about a month with one of the guys that I'd met. And then finally ended up in India and my money was really running out. I got very sick and I was on the streets, basically staying with a lot of the lepers and untouchables. This just turned my head into scrambled eggs. Everything that I'd ever strongly felt, philosophically, morally, whatever, even religiously.

36:49
although I consider myself more of an agnostic, the idea of God, you know, allowing this type of suffering to occur on earth, it just screwed me up. And so I ended up spending my last couple hundred dollars on a flight back to the States. And I returned to Los Angeles with, I think 25 cents in my pocket. And I used that to make a phone call to an old friend who gave me enough money, $25 or something.

37:17
where I could get a bus ticket and I went to my mother's place. By then she had divorced my father and had remarried. So I stayed with them for a couple of months. But I suffered a severe case of reverse culture shock. And it took about six months or so before I finally... How does that manifest? Like what... Alcoholism. What does it look like for you? Okay. So it was like trying to escape, essentially, where you were? Because it wasn't... Is it because it doesn't feel right or it doesn't...

37:47
jive with who you are now or what what do you think influences that? Super curious. I think that I just I had a feeling that I'd been to hell and back and and when I returned to the states I wanted to explain everything I'd undergone over the last year of life shifts I guess you could say discoveries and you know and I felt so

38:16
I guess you could say ashamed as an American because in America there's so much affluence at that time there was and lack of knowledge about the outside world, lack of care about the outside world. Most of my contemporaries had gotten on with their lives. This was 1977, 1978. I was in my late 20s by now and most of my contemporaries were married, had jobs, careers, raising families. And so there was no connection.

38:45
And so I turned to alcohol and got into the counterculture even deeper. Do you feel like an outcast because of that? Because of your worldly experiences and the things you'd seen, the bad and the good. You come back and you see people living this like checklist life of what you were supposed to do. I can I can see that. That makes sense. Plus the big you on my forehead. Because nobody forgets that, right? Including you, which you because you were kind of brainwashed to believe that you were no longer worthy of.

39:15
the tradition. The only thing that I really had that motivated me to keep going was writing. I was continuing to write and wow, I had a lot to write about after that year on the road. But nobody was interested in what I was doing and so my lifestyle was pretty basic. But I had picked up the skill of cooking by then and so I was able to...

39:42
move around and even spent time in Florida as a cook. I'm sorry. No, it was an interesting experience. But along the South, Louisiana, Texas, I began working on the oil rigs as a cook out there. And that was a good way to save up a lot of money real quickly and then take off for about six months and work on a manuscript.

40:03
But at this time, language was still right there. That original life shift moment of awareness of the importance and power of language gave me a thread to hold onto. And my dream at the time was to live and work and study in a foreign country. And eventually, another four years passed, and I was in Maui. I had a writer friend who was there and had a room that he offered me to stay in for free.

40:33
I could write while I was there, while I was on Maui. Maui, yeah. It was like paradise in a sense. The only writing that I got done there was a couple of letters back to my mother, I think. Good intentions. But he had been to Japan before. He was kind of a counterculture hero and very much involved in the anti-war movement from his college days. He had written a couple of books that were New York Times bestsellers. And so...

41:02
He had become even more famous in Japan. He had a couple of his books translated into Japanese. And so he had been to Japan and really liked it and had a couple of friends who were still staying there. And he planted the idea in my head of it would be possible to go to Japan and find a job teaching English. And he gave me the address of a friend and the friend agreed to put me up until I got set up on my feet. And so...

41:30
I bought a one-way ticket to Japan and had my last $100 or so after my money had run out, my savings had run out, I thought, well, this is it. This is another life-shifting moment. But I had survived so many times in the past. Right, you hadn't taken that chance. Yeah, it didn't seem that big of a risk. I had faith in fate, I think, still. Yeah, within the first two or three weeks I was here in Japan, I'd found a job.

42:00
didn't have any qualifications. I had maybe a year's worth of college credits, but I ended up meeting my wife. We got married, and so I made the commitment to long-term expat life. But the job I was working was as an English conversation teacher, which wasn't a very stable job, even though Japan's economy was booming at the time. This was the 1980s. I had no problems finding sort of piecemeal work, part-time work, and it was enough to get by.

42:30
But it wasn't very stable. And so the best possibility for me would have been as a university teacher, full-time university teacher with benefits, but in order to do that in Japan, I needed a master's degree. So I found a correspondence course. This was back in the day before the internet. It was by real mail with stamps and everything. It took seven years, but while working a variety of jobs and studying Japanese at the same time.

42:57
I managed to get first a bachelor's, then a master's. And once I got the master's, another life shifting moment was that I didn't have a great resume. I was teaching part-time at a women's junior college, one of my various part-time jobs once a week. And an opening came up just about the time I got my master's for a full-time foreign teacher. And so I applied for the job and...

43:25
There were maybe 50 other applicants and they had come from more famous universities, but it all boiled down to the final interview between one final competitor and myself was in Japanese. And I passed it. I was able to make the other professors who were interviewing me make them laugh. I was helping them out with some of their research papers and these types of things because they had to.

43:55
publisher parish and they were in the English department. My competitor panicked during the interview and her Japanese didn't turn out well, so they didn't need to give me any special favors. I was able to participate in meetings and go out and help recruit students to visiting high schools and talking to the Japanese teachers there. All the job outside the classroom was in Japanese, but at the age of 41,

44:21
it came full circle from that court martial and that first awareness of the importance of language to applying myself through years and years of study and work. And that interview in a foreign language got me my first job with benefits. And I stayed there for 25 years and retired with a pension. I mean, you made your life. Like you created this colorful and, you know,

44:49
Obviously there were bad times, there were hard times, there were really hard times. But you created this life for yourself. You envisioned, you sought, you did all the things that probably so many of the people that you grew up with did not. They probably just followed the path that was laid out. So many of us do that. It's just, it's easier. And you took the hard way and you took the honest way. And good for you for creating the life that you did because I don't think there's a lot of people that can say, yeah.

45:18
I did that. I mean, do you see that? Do you look back at your life and like, I made all this happen? Yeah. Uh, I have to be honest. Yes, I do. That was the reason that I wrote this life story and, you know, and my mother's influence was very, very strong. She never gave up on me. She was always encouraging. Not my mother. She became my, my best friend basically, but, uh, she passed, uh, about three years ago.

45:46
just short of her 95th birthday. And I, as you mentioned, you know, I was retired. It was on my 70th or near my 70th birthday. So, you know, at that age, you start reflecting on your life. And while you're living it, you don't really give much conscious thought to, hey, I'm doing this or, you know, you're just surviving basically. But looking back on it, I thought, wow. You made some bold choices that people do not make and like good on you. Cause like,

46:15
To use a favorite word, you might have to bleep this, but a lot of shit happened. You know? And then- But like, if that didn't happen, where would you be? Right? Like, what kind of life would you be living? Would you like it? Yeah. But I, yeah, I've often thought about that. If I somehow had managed to go through everything in my late teens, you know, life on the treadmill, just like everybody else.

46:45
I would have ended up working in a factory or a sawmill and probably become a heavy alcoholic and got married and maybe divorced as well. And who knows what would have happened, but. Not to mention the PTSD that you might have taken back if you had gone through with your orders and all the things that could have happened, had you not, you know, like it just seems. Yeah, I know for certain that I probably would have been affected by Agent Orange because my career

47:16
field in the Air Force was the one that was responsible for handling all these barrels of these chemicals and if for no other reason not only loading them onto airplanes to drop on the jungles of North Vietnam, but those soldiers were also the ones responsible for spraying Agent Orange around the perimeter of the base to keep the jungle from encroaching onto the base perimeters.

47:42
And a lot of those soldiers ended up dying of cancer, or a lot of their children were born deformed. And I've done some research on that as well. And I have no doubt that I would have, I'd probably be dead by now. You have so many sliding door moments of like, had you gone in the left door versus the right door, had you not had the wherewithal to connect with the lawyer, had you not been willing to open your mind and listen to the people around you that were

48:12
counterculture and the underground people that were around you saying, no, we shouldn't do this. That you not listen to your heart. All these moments, your life would have unfolded so differently and you made a colored life of all these ups and downs and all arounds that it's fascinating to hear. I hope that you're happy with all that looking back. Oh yeah, I feel a certain amount of pride.

48:41
in the end, all these different roads that I've trod led me to my wife as well. Yeah. And the last many decades that you've spent in another country that maybe like looking back at like the 10-year-old version of yourself, could you ever have imagined that that age that you would be living most of your life in a foreign country in some way or traveling through a foreign country?

49:07
But my head was filled with adventure stories at that time. My mother was a great reader, and I remember almost every birthday, Christmas, all these incredible books of Gulliver's Travels and Tom Sawyer, and a lot of these great books. I was always interested in stories. And I had a wild imagination. Would you have imagined this for yourself? No, not this far.

49:32
I imagine myself as like a baseball player with two outs in the bottom of the ninth and hitting a grand slam home run or something like that. All the people taking pictures of you, all the flashing lights and all the celebration. Yeah. No, I think it's, you know, coming from my, I lived so much of my life out of fear after my mom died, out of fear that my dad was also going to leave me because it was like this abandonment. And so, so much decades of my life, I lived.

50:01
in the pattern that the people probably in your hometown lived in. Like, you just do the next thing that was required of you so that everyone around you thumbs up to you, you know, gives you the thumbs up and like, just keep going and you look for the next promotion or you do, you know. And so hearing a story like yours that is so.

50:19
intentional, like leaning into the fear, leaning into the fate, leaning into all these things. It's just like mind blowing to me. And like, I'm so jealous. You know, like, like, I love that you that you reflected on that. And you've seen that in yours, because it's just it's so inspiring to like, just lean into what you're feeling and where you need to go. Because look what you can create. Yeah, it's

50:44
kind of amazing. There are times when I've thought, well, maybe there is something to the idea of a guardian angel, you know, where every religion has its version of it, not just Christianity, but the Buddhists have their Dharma bums. And it seemed like at key moments always throughout my life, not only in the States, but many times abroad as well, when I had no idea what I was going to do then.

51:09
The next day I was in a kind of a desperate situation and just sitting and waiting I'm hoping that something would happen and or even like being in the middle of the desert and hitchhiking You know and seeing only like one one shows up. Yeah for the whole day and you see it from miles away Little and how many times somebody some kind person?

51:35
would stop and offer a hand or offer a sandwich or offer some direction or offer a place to stay for the night or offer a part-time job. Just out of the kindness of their heart, I was a total stranger to them. And it's almost as if these people were placed on my path, but at the same time, I was open to the experience. But you also described you were the same way helping those people in Paris at the desk that were struggling.

52:01
trying to communicate with the person. You stepped in and you didn't have to, you didn't need to. And look what the door that opened up because of that. Like, I mean, it just, you know, I think it's a little bit of this karma idea as well as like you put some good into the world and good can come back. And if we choose to accept that or look at it as a good thing, then, you know, like thumbs up. So you were putting that in the world too. I think I kind of tuned into that on that first journey to Europe. And I was meeting all those young poets and musicians.

52:30
Bagabonds and lots of people live in their best lives. Yeah. In the in the smallest ways possible to write. Yeah. Well, it's interesting, too, because like you see or you the the images that I get of you describing those people, it sounds like they're living their best lives in the smallest way possible. Like if they're not expending a lot of like money or like extravagant things, it's like they're living in this small place, but living loud and big and like in their purpose. So.

52:59
That's so fascinating. Your story is so fascinating. And I hope people listening like check out your books and stuff to or in your memoir and whatnot. I'll let you share a little bit about that in just a second. I want to ask that my typical end question is, you know, if you could go back to Robert at that court, Marshall, like about to get your sentence, is there anything that this 73 year old version of you would want to tell him? Because I'm sure that was a scary moment. Yeah.

53:28
I had no idea. I was prepared for the worst. I thought maybe the next five years of my life are gonna be at Fort Leavenworth, perhaps, and the rest of my life is like a dark hole of sorts. No, I think I, but... My mother... You don't have to talk to him. No, I... You don't have to tell him anything. I think I'd sit down and have a beer with him and probably just make a few jokes, but...

53:56
I would tell them just have faith in yourself. Keep moving forward, keep moving forward, keep believing. There is a meaning to all this madness. Whatever you're searching for will find you. You're not gonna find it. It will find you. Just believe it. And that's about all I could say. And here, have another drink. You're gonna need this. Buckle up, buckle up, Robert.

54:25
do you need to get on with this new idea? It's gonna be a wild ride. Yeah, I mean, we can't go back and say those things, but it's so fascinating to think of, and I always visualize it, and so thank you for painting that picture of that visualization for me. If people want to check out your books, they wanna connect with you, they wanna learn more about you, what's the best way to get in your orbit or learn more about you? Probably my homepage, it's robertwnorris.com. Okay, I'll give the link in the show notes, so we'll give them direct links to all that.

54:55
I do have a very basic Facebook page, but I don't have much of a presence on social media. Okay. I have enough problems. That's allowed. Yeah. Trying to keep up to date with my Japanese and communicating with the world outside. But yeah, it's available on Amazon. So they go to your website. They can find information about your books. Yeah. All the links.

55:23
And there's also my email address is there as well. Perfect. So if people like love your story or they want to learn more, or they have a question or any of those things, are you open to people reaching out? Oh, sure. I'll respond to anything. I'm retired. I don't really have to worry about too much other than, you know, what's for dinner. I do most of the cooking at home. But yeah, by all means, please do write.

55:50
Well, thank you for sharing your story and allowing me to ask the questions that I did and follow and just really be inspired by kind of the way that you colored your own life and made it yours. So just thank you for just wanting to be a part of this. Thank you, Matt. I've enjoyed this a lot. You're very easy to talk with and continued success on your end as well. You know, keep up the good work. Thank you so much. And if you are listening and something Robert said,

56:19
inspired you or you want to reach out, please do that. But maybe someone you know in your life might need to hear something that Robert said. We'd love it if you'd share this episode with them so that they can get inspired to move through, move with, create their own journeys, whatever that might be. That would be the best gift that you can give us. So thank you, Robert. And for everyone else, I'll be back next week with a brand new episode. Thanks, Matt.