BELLE — John Clayton has worn many titles over the years, husband, father, teacher, lawyer, judge and Belle Poet Laureate, but few labels carry as much weight for him as the one he earned more than half a century ago, that of soldier.

Although he had a college deferment, he chose not to use it and was drafted into the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. Clayton didn’t just serve, he volunteered to go where so many tried to avoid, not because he was eager for combat, but because he refused to let others bear more of the burden he shared. That choice, and the memories that followed, have shaped nearly every belief, principle and poem he’s written since.

“I was drafted,” Clayton began during his reflection. “I signed up for an additional year to go to an electronics school to learn to maintain and repair weather equipment. Basic training at Ft. Bliss, Texas. Electronics School at Ft. Sill, Okla. Upon graduation, I was made an instructor at the school.”

Teaching was safe, predictable and steady. But safety didn’t sit well with him when his first class of students received orders for Vietnam.

“At the end of the first class cycle, most of my students from the school got orders for Vietnam. I volunteered to go with the rest of the class,” he said.

Clayton arrived in Vietnam during April of 1969.

“I was assigned to the 8th Target Acquisition Battalion, 26th Field Artillery Regiment,” he said. “One part of the target acquisition battalion provided weather data for aviation and large guns.”

Each weather platoon was a small, self-contained operation with soldiers on isolated firebases releasing hydrogen-filled weather balloons with radio transmitters attached. Those signals fed into machines that translated the atmosphere into graphs, crucial for the artillery and air support that followed.

“The GMD  (Ground Meteorological Device) looked like a satellite dish that locked onto the sending unit and received weather data,” he explained. “The weather data ran through cables into a bunker to machines that made graphs of the information received. My job was to keep that equipment operating.”

The machinery was fragile and old.

“The equipment was Korean War vintage so had some glass tubes in them,” he said. “The concussion from the 8-inch and 175 mm track guns caused the equipment to malfunction with each fire mission.”

He spent about 13 months at Landing Zone (LZ) Blackhawk, roughly two miles west of Mang Yang Pass in the Central Highlands, or “II Corps.” His unit operated three weather platoons, each at different landing zones.

“Each platoon should have had a repairman, but because my MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) was not common, sometimes the other sites would go down and I would travel to them because the repairman assigned there was hurt or had rotated back to the ‘World’ (the USA),” he said.

The war left its mark not in just physical and emotional trauma, but in the sharp contrasts in the humanity and inhumanity he witnessed.

“I believe we are molded by all of our life experiences and that past life experiences impact the way we see and interpret what is happening in the present,” he said.

“I saw soldiers who shared meager rations with hungry kids, and I saw other bat (expletive deleted) crazies who wore necklaces made of human ears strung on boot laces,” Clayton recalled. “Those experiences cemented for me a belief that talk is cheap and that I can know what you really value by watching how you spend your time and money.”

In that crucible of chaos, he formed a lasting code.

Clayton said, “I came to believe that the best measures of a person are empathy, truthfulness, honor and character.”

Coming home made him take stock of all he and others had been through.

“I returned from ‘Nam angry at the Army, angry at America and with a cold and lonely heart,” he said. “I trusted no one. I decided to put Vietnam in a box, lock the box and forget that experience.”

For years, he succeeded.

“I was pretty successful in doing that. I actually permanently lost some of those memories,” he said.

It wasn’t until three decades later that a call from an old friend reopened that box.

“After about 25 or 30 years, my best friend in ‘Nam tracked me down,” Clayton said. “Through him, I reconnected with two other men from my platoon. By spending time with them, many of my memories have come back.”

The memories, though, came with boundaries.

Clayton said, “I have concluded that I should not talk about some things I experienced. Some things are just better left unsaid.”

Still, the lessons remained.

“I think I internalized the idea of duty to country,” he said. “I have come to believe that each of us has a duty to serve when called to serve. Individuals do not have a right to choose their wars. Everyone should have skin in the game. When called to serve, you have a duty to serve, whether it is the military or jury duty.”

And he doesn’t mince words about those who fled that call.

“I believe that those who ran off to Canada should not have been pardoned. Someone took their place,” he said. “There should be consequences for that.”

Coming home wasn’t easy, but for Clayton, solitude softened the edges.

“Transitioning to civilian life was a bit difficult for me. I couldn’t speak to my family,” he said. “I was not married so I was able to slip off by myself and think about things. Others did not see me at my worst.”

His wife, Dawn, later captured some of that quiet struggle in a poem titled Where Does He Go, featured in the poetry anthology Reported for Duty.

“It’s pretty accurate,” he said.

While his military experience did not directly push him toward law school, his belief in justice and fairness found a home in the legal field.

Clayton said, “Military service really had no impact on my decision to go to law school. Atticus Finch and Clarence Darrow can be blamed for that, along with not being able to feed my family teaching school.”

He might have earned more money working with the IBEW (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers), building power lines, but he chose a different path.

“I could have gone back to my old IBEW job of building power lines and would have made a lot more money than I did teaching school, but that would have meant spending a lot of time away from my family,” Clayton said. “Some people thought going to law school was crazy but it worked out for Dawn and me.”

Even long after the war, Clayton’s sense of order remained shaped by his military years.

“The military reinforced my belief that if America is going to be a nation of laws, then everyone must be required to follow the rules,” he said. “The Constitution, in my opinion, is the mother of all law. Not all laws are just but they must be followed or changed.”

His respect for civil disobedience comes with the same clarity of consequence.

“While I do believe in civil disobedience, those who engage in it must understand that they should expect to pay the consequences for not following it,” he said. “I do think we have too many laws, but they must be enforced unless revoked.”

That philosophy carried into his years on the bench. Those who stood before Clayton while he was a judge often saw a man who valued fairness but refused shortcuts. In many ways, that discipline mirrored the mindset he had kept since LZ Blackhawk.

“I first discovered I was interested in poetry in the seventh grade when I read ‘Death of the Ball Turret Gunner’ by Randall Jarrell,” Clayton said. “By high school I had moved on to Richard Brautigan. For years I wrote poems on napkins and in the margins of CLE (Continuing Legal Education) materials. I had even wrote poems in a journal I kept in Vietnam.”

He laughs now remembering how Dawn, also a lawyer, quietly salvaged his discarded lines.

“When Dawn became a lawyer, she fished things out of the trash I had written and started collecting them before I got the trash taken out,” he said.

Long after he left the bench, they began spending time in book stores and other venues where poetry readings connected him to others in new ways.

“The Vet poems helped me deal with some of my issues from military service,” he said.

He eventually became Belle’s Poet Laureate during the pandemic, with his term running from Jan. 1, 2020 until Jan. 1, 2022, where the title was passed to Caitlin Jones.

“I’m not sure why I was chosen for Belle Poet Laureate,” he admitted. “It was during COVID. We couldn’t go anywhere so I wrote and put together a little chapbook called Bits and Pieces. Several poems about Belle and the people I know there. You have probably heard me read some of them.”

Though themes from his military service appear in his work, he resists calling himself a “war poet.”

“There are some themes from my military service in my poetry,” said Clayton. “I don’t think my service shaped my poetry, except that service did not kill my creativity. Much of the subject matter of my poetry is about what I saw, the people I met and things I have been told about.”

Asked what Veterans Day means to him now, Clayton offered thoughts as direct as they are unfiltered, words that capture both reverence and challenge.

“Every citizen owes a duty of service if called on,” he said. “Military service is a sacrifice. For the person serving and their families.”

But what troubles him most isn’t war, it’s how easily society forgets those who fight it.

“Americans have to constantly be reminded that Vets must not be thrown aside because they have problems. PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) is a real thing. Self-medication is real,” said Clayton. “Too many Americans want to, and oftentimes do, abandon Vets if they are asked for anything more than a ‘thank you for your service.’ Well, talk is cheap. Put your tax dollars where your mouth is or shut the (expletive deleted) up.”

Then, in one sentence, he distills down a painful irony many veterans feel.

“Some Vets may be suckers and losers, but it is not because they served,” he said.

“I have never known a Vet that served in a combat zone who didn’t have some problems related to service, even though they hid and deny problems,” he added. “America likes its Vets healthy and its heroes dead.”

Clayton’s sense of duty extends far beyond the battlefield. For him, honoring veterans also means participating in the democracy they fought to protect.

“I have spent years registering people to vote,” he said. “In doing that, I knew they would likely vote differently than I would. That is one of the reasons I am proud to have served. Voting should be easier, not harder. Election Day should be a holiday. Voting is a privilege and, I believe, a duty.”

He often returns to a single line from one of his poems, a challenge to anyone who claims to respect veterans while ignoring civic responsibility.

“There is a line in one of my poems that says, ‘Do not thank me for my service if you are too damn lazy to vote.’ That sort of sums up my thoughts on voting,” he said.

For Clayton, Veterans Day isn’t about parades or praise, it’s about remembering the cost of service and the obligation that every citizen shares. His life, shaped by the intersection of war, law, poetry and civic duty, stands as a testament to that belief.

He has seen both the best and worst in people, from soldiers sharing food with hungry children to those lost in the moral fog of war. He has built a career grounded in fairness, truth and consequence, believing, as he once wrote, that “talk is cheap.”

And in his poetry, scribbled once on napkins, saved by his wife, read aloud in a small Belle bookstore, he continues to give voice to the unsaid, the unhealed and the unforgettable.

For Veterans Day, Clayton reminds us that duty, service and empathy are not distant ideals. They are choices, made daily, in how we honor those who served, how we uphold our laws and how we cast our votes.