Beyond the military record: What war left behind for one family

By Jen Schumann | Rocky Mountain Voice

A faded military form cannot explain what war does to a family.

The DD214 for Willie Jerome Evans Sr. records medals, overseas assignments and an honorable discharge from the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War.

It does not record the anger that settled over his family, the silence between father and son or the moment decades later when that same son held his father’s hand in a Colorado hospital room and whispered forgiveness.

Willie Jerome Evans Sr. at his 1962 high school graduation in North Carolina. Family photos and documents courtesy of Kalvin Evans

For years, Kalvin Evans knew only fragments of his father’s military story.

The hardest parts of Willie’s military experience did not come directly from him.

In an interview with RMV, Kalvin described spending years trying to piece together parts of his father’s military experience and the trauma that followed him home.

Years later, Kalvin said he learned much of the story from his Uncle Toliver, Willie’s half-brother, because his father rarely talked about Vietnam himself.

During a recent testimony at Rising Fire Ministries, Kalvin described learning that his father had served in an all-Black forward observer platoon in Vietnam.

Kalvin said the unit was routinely sent into dangerous “hot spots” ahead of incoming troops and that his father believed racism played a role in decisions that placed the platoon in extreme danger.

“They would go into hot spots and get it ready for incoming troops. The commander… sent them into a place where they shouldn’t have gone and he was the only one that survived.”

According to Kalvin, his father later contacted the NAACP and spoke out about racial discrimination inside the military while stationed in Germany.

“That investigation launched what we see now today in our military in terms of how everyone’s supposed to be treated.” 

Army leaders were already warning by 1970 that racial tensions inside the military were becoming impossible to ignore.

A July 1970 Military Review article described growing unrest inside Army units and noted that many Black soldiers entered military service carrying distrust shaped by segregation and discrimination back home.

Historian Herman Graham III wrote that African American troops were heavily concentrated in combat occupations during the early years of the war. 

A BlackPast review of Project 100,000 found African Americans made up a disproportionate share of both combat assignments and early battlefield deaths among the program’s “New Standards Men.”

Willie’s military records show he entered the Army in 1965 and later served at the 2nd General Hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, while the military was struggling to respond to rising racial tensions among troops stationed around the world.

By 1971, the Department of Defense had begun launching race-relations training programs and created what became the Defense Race Relations Institute.

Complaints involving housing discrimination, unequal punishment and racial hostility toward Black troops stationed overseas were also receiving wider attention.

Kalvin said his father believed speaking up came with consequences.

“He tried to get back in the military and he said he was blackballed.” 

By the time Willie returned home, he was carrying more than combat trauma.

What waited for many Vietnam veterans back home only deepened the anger.

“Vietnam was the first real war that our soldiers were not honored like they could have been,” Kalvin said.

“He felt he was still in a war when he came back to the United States.” 

Willie would not receive a formal PTSD diagnosis until 2004.

Kalvin said the diagnosis finally gave his father “a name for what was going on” after years of anger and struggle.

Through the VA in Aurora, Willie began attending support groups with other Vietnam veterans.

“I believe that our veterans need each other. A lot of times when we leave the military, we’re on our own.”

A decade later, his son Kalvin was born in Landstuhl, Germany, while Willie was still serving overseas.

Even his name carried part of that chapter.

He said his father saw the spelling “Kalvin” written on a wall in Germany and chose a variation of it for his son.

Back home in Texas, though, the war followed them.

“The anger and the betrayal that he felt from serving his country and trying to do the right thing took a toll on him.” 

“That anger would put me at odds with my relationship with him for years.” 

“It cost him peace. It cost us peace. It cost us being able to have him fully present and fully there.”

Even with all of that, Kalvin never stopped admiring parts of his father.

“I love the fact that he was a strong man. He was about justice. He was about making things right.”

He laughed remembering one conversation from childhood after becoming fascinated with Arnold Schwarzenegger movies.

“I understand you like Arnold Schwarzenegger,” his father told him, “but he’s not your hero like I can be your hero.”

“He wanted to be a hero to his kids.” 

Willie Jerome Evans Sr. during his first Vietnam tour in the late 1960s.

As an adult, Kalvin followed his father into military service himself.

In 1990, he joined the Air Force, serving until 1998 while studying Russian and Chinese and working in intelligence assignments that took him overseas to Okinawa, Japan.

“The military was my rite of passage from becoming a teenage boy to a man.” 

Kalvin said joining the military was partly practical. His mother was raising six children on her own, and college was not something she could pay for. 

“I wanted to be challenged, I wanted to grow and I wanted to see the world.” 

But somewhere along the way, he also began understanding the kind of brotherhood his father carried home from war.

“The pride that my dad had was that he loved his brothers. It was beyond serving the country. It was beyond all of that. It was his family.”

Evans said the movie Da 5 Bloods helped him better understand the brotherhood Black Vietnam veterans carried home from the war.

Kalvin Evans joined the Air Force in 1990 and later said military service helped him understand the brotherhood his father carried home from war.

Willie never completely stopped fighting after he returned home.

Kalvin said Willie carried his sense of justice into civilian life, later speaking out against discriminatory lending practices affecting Black Coloradans.

“He was still an activist when he came back.” 

For years, Kalvin kept his distance from his father.

Kalvin was raising six children of his own while trying to outrun much of the anger he grew up around.

By the mid-2000s, he decided it was time to call his father.

“God said, ‘You should reach out to him,’” Kalvin recalled.

By then, Willie was living in Colorado.

“He loved Colorado. He loved the beauty, he loved the mountains, he loved the clean air.” 

Willie eventually settled near Florissant among horses and mountain country he came to love.

Kalvin moved his family to Colorado to be closer to his father. 

“My kids had the best time getting to know their grandpa.” 

Willie Evans Sr. with Kalvin and granddaughters in Colorado.

The reconciliation did not erase the years between them.

“Did he do terrible things? Yes,” Kalvin said.

Years of anger damaged relationships throughout the family.

Around the same time his own marriage was falling apart, Kalvin was working with Project Sanctuary, helping lead retreats for military veterans and their families across the country.

The work also helped him understand his father.

A lot of the veterans showed up carrying the same things Willie carried home from war—anger, grief and the sense that nobody outside the military really understood them.

Many sat with their arms crossed at first, unsure whether it was safe to talk about what they had been through.

Others were looking for something they had lost after leaving the military—the “band of brothers” connection that once gave them people who understood.

“All of them had the same stories.” 

“They felt safe enough that they could share their trauma. They were people that just wanted to know that they still mattered.”

“That helped me understand what my dad went through.”

But Kalvin also came to see how much of his father’s life had been shaped by wounds he never really knew how to carry.

Willie Evans Sr. at his home in Colorado.

In 2023, Willie was hospitalized near Colorado Springs after a fall at home and declining heart health.

After doctors removed him from a ventilator, family gathered around his bedside praying, singing and telling stories together.

At the end, the years between father and son came down to a few words.

“And I remember telling him, ‘Dad, I forgive you.’ Please forgive me for how I treated you, how I didn’t care for you, how I didn’t support you. We’re going to be okay.”

His father squeezed his hand.

Then he was gone.

“That was a culmination of many years. Many, many years of cries, of praying, of asking God.”

Willie Jerome Evans Sr. later in life.

For Kalvin, Memorial Day is not about pretending America’s history is spotless.

His father experienced racism. His family carried the cost of war for decades after the uniform came off.

But Kalvin said those wounds never erased his father’s love for the country he served.

Kalvin said Memorial Day is about remembering what families continue carrying long after the war is over.

“We honor them by not forgetting. We honor them by talking about them and the sacrifices that were given.”

With the country approaching its 250th anniversary, Kalvin said Americans should remember both the nation’s failures and what still makes it worth believing in.

“Is America the cleanest country in the world? No. Is it the purest country in the world? No. But what made America great was that we knew we needed God.”

Kalvin said he worries about how divided the country has become, especially when political differences destroy relationships between families, friends and neighbors.

Kalvin said he still thinks about how Americans came together after Sept. 11 and wishes the country could find that spirit again.

“I remember to this day how unified as a nation we were. How people put aside their differences.”

Asked what he would want his father to know today, Kalvin answered:

“How proud I am of him to be called his son.”