CHAPTER 1: HOME BASE
Notes from my first visit with Lawrence “Law” Doe — a dishonorably discharged, former U.S. Army Vietnam Vet . End Point Correctional Facility, 2020. (Interviewer: The Girl From The East)
When I first met Law, the papers had already decided who he was, The Soldier Who Lost His Mind in Vietnam. But the man sitting across from me wasn’t the wild-eyed figure they described. He was calm. Tired, maybe. But calm. “You wanna know how it started?" he asked. "Then you gotta start before the jail. Before the courtroom. Before the war. Before all that shit."
Law grew up in a world already divided. “They wanted us to know our place,” he told me. “They thought they could break us. They couldn’t. We made our own space, our own rules, our own life.”
He remembered the smell of chalk dust, the echo of sneakers in the hallway, the roughness of a football caught mid-air. “That’s when I learned the way of the world,” he said. “When you’re young and the world’s already saying ‘no,’ you learn to build your own yes with the people who’ll stand next to you.” Law, reflecting on his high school days.
Outside those hallways, history was cracking open. The March on Washington. Selma. Motown on every radio. “The 60s… It felt like everybody was waking up at once,” Law said. “We were seeing what we could be. Black folks were building banks, making good ass music, fighting back, and sticking it to whitey. You could feel it.”
He smiled at the memory. “It made you proud. Made you want to carry yourself a certain way. Dignity… That’s what it was all about. Dignity and pride.”
“Most of what you need to survive, you learn young,” Law told me. “Who to trust. How to watch. How to keep your temper when somebody’s testing you. That’s the kind of training we had before anybody handed us a gun.”
The way he spoke, it was clear these memories weren’t just nostalgia. They were the fragments of a life he was still trying to make sense of.
When our first interview ended, he stared at the floor for a while before looking up. “They think I went crazy,” he said softly. “But if you’d seen what I seen, if you’d heard what I heard… you’d know the difference between madness and memory.”
This is where the story begins. Not in the jungle, not in the courtroom, but here, in the quiet hallways of youth, before the noise swallowed him whole.
TO BE CONTINUED…
Chapter 1 now showing at Hay Street Gallery
901 Hay Street Pittsburgh, PA 15221
Gallery Hours:
October-December: Mondays & Tuesdays | 11 AM – 6 PM
Closing: Friday, December 5
