In this episode of the Veteran Led Podcast, John Stevens Berry Sr. shares the incredible story about his time serving as a JAG Officer in Vietnam. Hear how Berry Sr. never backed down from helping those in need; including the time when he subpoenaed then sitting President Richard Nixon during the Green Beret Affair.
Tune in now and learn how Berry Sr.’s fearless actions carried over into building a multi-generational law firm that continues helping veterans and serving those in need.
My mission was this. I was going to provide legal assistance. If I got shot at, fine. If I got a general yell at me, that was his problem.
Welcome to the Veteran Led podcast, where we talk with leaders who use their military experiences to develop great organizations and continue to serve their communities.
Today, we are honored to have Vietnam veteran and founder of Berry law, John Stevens Berry, Senior, as our guest. He was commissioned as an Infantry Officer, and then later served in Vietnam as a JAG Officer. During his service in 1968 and 1969, Berry was the Chief Defense Council for Second Field Force in Vietnam, the largest court martial jurisdiction for American forces in Vietnam. During this time, he defended the commander of the Green Berets and other officers against murder and conspiracy charges in a trial famously known the Green Beret Affair.
The reason that I applied for active duty, I had been commissioned Infantry, completed the Infantry School, and gone and pushed troops through basic training. I had been in the reserves. I’ve worn insignia of Infantry, Engineer, Artillery, and I was the Infantry liaison officer for an artillery battalion. I began to hear and read that in Vietnam there was a shortage of defense council, that sometimes there may be a special court martial in which the prosecutor was a lawyer. The defense council was someone they pulled out of ranks. So I wrote a letter to the JAG School, said, I fulfilled my military obligation. I will volunteer to go to Vietnam if I can be assigned as a permanent defense council. The JAG Corps accepted my offer. They sent me through a short course and put me on a plane. I arrived in Bien Hoa in October of 1968. We had a armored bus, if you would, take us to the 80th Replacement Depot. Somebody came and picked me up and took me to the headquarters of 2 Field Force. At the outset, I had 80,000 soldiers in my general court martial jurisdiction, and I was trying a lot of felonies, and I was succeeding.
So I got requests from all over the country. Up in I Corps, down in the Delta. So I had cases with the first Infantry Division, the first Cavalry Division, the Fifth Special Forces, the 199th Light Infantry Brigade, the 82nd Airborne Division, the ninth Division. And if I’ve left any out, and I’m sure I have, I always enjoyed going. I went many places where no lawyer had been before. I remember, particularly, Firepoint St. Barbara. It was at the base of Nui Ba Den. That’s Vietnamese for Black Virgin Mountain. The Viet Cong owned the mountain. It’s full of tunnels. We owned the top, which was a signal operation. All day long, we were firing artillery into that mountain. Well, I went there because someone was charged with murder, and we needed to have an Article 32 hearing. But the Article 32 officer wasn’t there. So I got somebody. I said, Make up a big sign that says the lawyer’s in town. Now, one thing about the army, wherever they can get a bullet, they can get a typewriter. So they got me a clerk typist, and you should have seen the line, kids wanting to write a will, kids wanting to write a power of attorney, kids wanting me to write back to a civilian lawyer and say, No, he’s not going to waive his rights under the Soldiers and Sailors Civil Relief Act so that his wife can get a divorce while he’s over here.
You’re not going to do a damn thing till he can get back and defend himself. That was how I lived, and it was all law all the time. Now, I was in places where I was involved in action. I was involved in actual combat in a number of places, a number of circumstances. I joked about where I called it the orange pill and the white pill, because everywhere you had to take an orange pill for malaria on Thursdays. If you were out in the field, way out in the field, because of the mosquitoes, you had to take a little white pill every day. If I was in a place that there wasn’t, you weren’t out in the woods, weren’t in the jungle. I called that orange pill duty. When I was out there, when you were getting eaten up by mosquitoes and had to take a white pill every night, I called that white pill. That’s how I designated where I was. And because I had permissive travel orders, I could get on any helicopter. I could get bumped by a major, and as it happened, I could get bumped by a journalist. But once I was getting bumped and the journalist looked at me and he said, Wait a minute, you’re Captain Berry.
And I said, That’s right. And he said, Well, I’m supposed to get on this chopper to cover your case. So I’m not going to get you bumped so I can go up there and you can’t be there. Another time I was on a C-130. There were scout dogs who were doing what dogs do. There were a number of Vietnamese soldiers who were vomiting because they weren’t used to flying in airplanes. And there was a whole bunch of duffle bags at the end. And there’s a safe place to sit. The enlisted man said, Would you like to sit here? Sure. I said, No, you go make yourself comfortable. He said, Sir, you’re a lawyer. That JAG insignia meant something to them. They meant there was someone who would stand up for them. It meant that there was someone who was not afraid to look at a guy with stars on his shoulders right in the eye and back him down. I did that more than once. I say that not as some self-praise. I say it because you’ve asked me about my mission, and my mission was this. I was going to provide legal assistance.
If I got shot at, fine. If I got a general yell at me, that was his problem. I actually went so far as to file a subpoena for the President of the United States in federal court in Guam.
At the time, the President was Richard Nixon?
Yes. He didn’t obey my subpoena on the one hand. On the one hand, on the other hand, the charges did get dismissed. I’m getting ahead of myself. But I just want to say that when I lectured at the JAG School, someone said, Well, aren’t you afraid? Aren’t Are you afraid that if you take this hardline approach, people will think you’re a jerk? And I said, If you’re afraid, get the hell out of the JAG Corps, because there’s no place for fear among trial lawyers. There’s no room for it. There’s no place for it. If you’re going to call yourself a trial lawyer, then you will stand up for your client and you will face anybody and anything down. Now, I want to say something else. I volunteered for the job of foreign claims officer because we had a policy that for collateral damage, the people got paid. Now, it wasn’t much. I think if you lost a 15-year-old kid they’d give you $55, a bag full of rice, a silicium certificate. As I recall, a bag full of candy and cigarettes. I had a Tiger Scout translator that sat in the back of the Jeep. My driver had an M79 grenade launcher under his seat.
My Tiger Scout had an M16 and a lot of ammo. Anyway, he was my interpreter. Well, the first time I did that, I drank something. I don’t know what it was. They offer you a drink, you take it. Somebody later told me it might have been absinthe, but my brain couldn’t handle it. So my boss, Bob Jones, God rest his soul, he said, From now on, when you go into a village, you take a Steel Mermite box, you fill it with beer and ice, you have your drink with a village chief, but you provide the drink. You don’t ever drink that stuff again. And by the way, I once made the mistake of drinking some rice wine with some mountain yards in the central highlands. And I will say that I should have stayed with beer. I mean, that was the only safe thing. And then you’d leave that steel box, and they’d use it as furniture. So it was a nice thing. But meeting with grieving families who had lost someone, expressing my sympathy, I learned a few Vietnamese phrases. I only remember a few now, but I knew enough then to get by.
So it was… I did not want to be a tourist in uniform. This was a war, and I wanted to fight. I’m dealing with aggrieved people, and I wanted to help out. Now, I mention this because this desire to help carried over into my civilian practice. I had guys, people didn’t even use the expression PTSD, but I knew they weren’t right. They were in the middle of a divorce. They couldn’t afford a lawyer, and they didn’t know what they were doing. So I represented them. I didn’t charge them. I wasn’t a wealthy man. I had a very small firm. At one time, it was just me and a young lady up front who was my typist and my bookkeeper and my receptionist. She was married to a railroader, so she already had health insurance, so I didn’t have to do that. Anyway, I was not a wealthy man, but somebody who was a veteran who came in and was clearly suffering and didn’t have the wherewithal to get good assistance, of course, I never turned them down. In order to do this and still make a living, I would come home. Maybe you remember this.
I’d come home, we’d play a little in the yard, we’d have our supper, we’d say prayers, the kids would go to bed. Then I’d go back down to the office. The cops all knew that whoever was on patrolling, he’d pull in at midnight, knew there was a coffee pot on, sip some coffee, use the restroom, gossip a little, and get back on his rounds. Because everybody knew that Berry was there with a pot of coffee at midnight. I had to do that in order to both make a living and give free representation to the suffering veterans who were not getting… We have to be honest, the VA was not very generous. This was before they came down with a duty to assist. Now, of course, there was now a duty to assist, but in those days, they’d say, Well, if you can’t fill out your claim form, that’s just too bad for you. So I’d help them fill out claim forms. Wouldn’t use my name because you couldn’t represent veterans. But back to the Civil War, you charge a veteran five bucks to represent him. You’ve committed a felony. But yeah, I’d help them a little bit on the regional level.
My name doesn’t appear anywhere. But I don’t think I ever turned down a suffering veteran. I don’t think I ever did. And now I’m, well, I’m 85. I became a lawyer in 1965. So I’ve been doing this for a while, and the passion is still there. But now I can enjoy vicariously seeing what you, what you and what is now your law firm does for veterans, and it makes an old man’s heart happy. When it comes time for me to make an accounting of myself, I go with a light heart because I know that Berry law continues to do the work that I would have done. So I don’t leave. I won’t leave with my work unfinished. That’s a great comfort.
If you could share for some of the veterans, how did you continue to grow the business being a solo lawyer with one assistant and then growing it into a thriving practice?
There were a number of things that happened. The newspapers were different then. They were much thicker, and everybody read newspapers. Seems like a strange thing now, but that was true. I tried a lot of high-profiled cases. I tried cases. The Native American Rights Fund knew that I would represent them without compensation. The Civil Liberties Union knew that if someone had a constitutional problem, I’d go in without compensation. So the only way you could advertise. Advertising was illegal in those days. People would get hauled up before the bar for doing it. And so that was my way of advertising, of trying them and trying them and trying them. I’ve been in situations where I was picking a jury in Omaha while I still had a jury out in Lincoln. I’ve been in that a situation. But so what? It isn’t like anyone was shooting at me. It isn’t as if it was stressful. It wasn’t. And as far as if I didn’t always get paid, well, in Vietnam, I wasn’t getting rich off that $65 a month combat pay either. It’s never been about money, but I have cast my bread upon the waters, and as it happens, I have been rewarded.
Looking back, and I got to brag a little bit, I have three sons. You are an airborne ranger. You led a platoon in Bosnia. You commanded a company in Iraq. You had a battalion here in the National Guard, retired as an ’05. Your brother Chris, he got the Air Force to send him through med school. He was a physician at the NATO Hospital in Kabul, Afghanistan, and also got out in the field. Your brother Rory, the Navy, sent him through Stanford, and he was attached to the army in both Iraq and Afghanistan. On my father’s World War I victory medal, it says, The War to End All Wars. And that’s what everyone believed. But Plato, maybe the wisest of all philosophers, said, Only the dead have seen the end of war. I think of what’s happening now in Ukraine and in the Middle East. I think of Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander of our Forces during World War II, who said, Peace is our only profession. Among us are fellow soldiers. And by the way, John, we’re still soldiers. You don’t stop being a soldier. And because I was attached to the third Marine Amphibius forces outside of Da Nang.
Of course, I will be going to the Marine birthday party on November 10th, and I will be sipping some port in the various toasts. You don’t stop being a soldier. You don’t stop being a sailor, an airman, a Marine. You don’t stop being that. Someone told me a story about you that once you showed up, you’re wearing a nice suit and tie, and you were being reined on. They said, Where’s your umbrella? You said officers don’t carry umbrellas. Well, that’s just the way it is. There are things that stay with you. The sense of duty, the sense of honor, the sense of achievement and achievement on behalf of your country. These things stay with you. It’s not on your DD 214. You don’t have an extra ribbon for it, but they stay with you. And there’s a pride. I can almost always… This is strange, but I can recognize people who have served. I just can. And there is something different. And I don’t mean that everyone has to have been in war. I know people who have paid a terrible price for their service who are not in war. I know that, and so do you.
There’s a thing, okay? When the VA found me to be 100%, they said, Well, we want you to talk to a shrink. I said, I don’t need to do that. They said, Well, you really ought to, just now that we’re doing this. This was a two-hour thing. Halfway through it, he said, This is too hard on you. I’m finding you 70% disabled for PTSD in addition to everything else. He said, I hope you’ll talk to someone. Because, he said, If you will meet the dragons during the day, they won’t come and get you in your sleep at night. That was his exact words. I did talk to someone, and that’s how I wrote my most recent book, my fourth book, my Book of Poetry, Footsoldier. I encourage my fellow veterans, I know you don’t want to talk about it. Some of you are in groups where people talk about PTSD experiences, and others should not because it might trigger you. Some of you have talked on our triumphus thing we have that we celebrate you and you can tell your story and be filmed. Others choose not to. There are people who should talk to a psychiatrist or a psychologist, and there are other people, yes, who need hospitalization or various kinds of medicines.
The point is, the thing is, you hear this again and again, my dad was in this war, but he never talked about it. We knew better than to ever touch him unexpectedly. We knew he’d have nightmares. Well, to my fellow veterans, talk about it to someone. It might be your pastor or your priest at two field force. Our chaplain for a while was a rabbi. We called them all Padre of course. So you can talk to your padre. Talk to someone. Talk to your veteran’s advocate. But if you talk about it during the day, it won’t come and get you at night. And you won’t have… There’s two kinds of war dreams I found. There’s the technicolor ones that are not very nice at all. You wake up with night sweats. Then there’s the black and white ones that are almost nostalgic. You’re back there seeing old friends. Of course, in the army, and I suppose the other branches Which is you never say goodbye. You might say, See you on the other side. And nobody knows what happens. I know a good friend of mine says, You go to Valhalla and eat boar meat and drink and fight all the time.
And not me. I’d find a comfortable place and a nice book, I suppose. But the point is, I’m 85, and when I come to cross the river, whatever happens, I’ll be ready for it. Nothing will happen that I can’t handle. I say this to my brothers and sisters in arms, You’re in the same situation. You have faced problems. You faced difficulties. You don’t have to have been in war. Do not ever minimize your service if you didn’t get shot at. You doubtless had other stressors. If these stressors are in any way impacting your life, whether by hypervigilance or in any other way, the VA may have something for you, and it’s worth exploring. Remember, you earned it. The laborer is worthy of his wages. I threw out a few Bible quotes every now and then, it’s my nature.
Getting back to your success, it came from helping the veterans, living your mission and doing it really well. You got what we call now earned media. You couldn’t pay for media back then. Lawyers couldn’t advertise. But because you tried the big cases and you won the big cases, you were celebrated in the media. The media, whether it was television or newspaper, people learned about you, and you became legendary. And that’s how you built the reputation. And we see today that a lot of people who wish they were legendary will advertise and make claims that they’re great. But the reality is, eventually, they never get to where they’re going because their greatness is a mirage. They have not done the thing at the highest standard to get them the reward that they want. And you have done that through representing veterans, through your stellar advocacy as a lawyer, and your reputation has carried you. As you said, you didn’t have much to start with, but you had a mission, and you wanted to help veterans get all the benefits they earned. You wanted to help your clients get justice, and you had to work extremely hard to get it, make a lot of sacrifices, and you got there.
Now you seem to be at peace with both the work that you’ve done, the results that you’ve got, and your own struggles or your own, I don’t want to say demons, but your own difficulties in dealing with some of the residual problems from your service. It’s all come full circle, and you’ve gone to the VA to get help, and you waited how long to get help?
Well, this is embarrassing because I left Vietnam. I was there ’68 to ’69. Then I went back twice in 1970 under special orders. I think I waited till three years ago before I was willing. The Department of Labor, United States Department of Labor, gave you the platinum award for hiring veterans. You’re a veteran I’m a veteran, but think of all the veterans we have. Think of all the marines. I say marines because they always seem to have a little better time with a bottle of port and a big cake and a saber, and the oldest Marine cuts the cake and gives the first piece to the youngest Marine. I love the Marine birthday parties. I wish the other services… I wish we all did it, too.
Well, that’s probably a hiring problem on my end. We have over 24 Marines on the team, and so our Marines outnumber our Army veterans. Of course, we still have a few Navy and a few Air Force veterans, but by far at Berry Law, we have more Marines than any other branch.
As I got involved, there’s a kind of empathy. It’s a different thing. Representing veterans, and I’ve tried, as you know, I’ve tried death penalty cases, I’ve tried a number of murder cases. I’ve tried a lot of very serious cases and personal injury, divorce. Representing a veteran is a sacred trust. It is holy. And if you have someone who shares that sense of the sacredness of helping veterans, the sacredness of representing them, it really does have people go the extra mile. There are people who really have that sense of duty. I’d like to think that of the troops that I pushed through basic training, that I gave some of them, a few of them, some values that carried with them through their lifetime. I’d like to think that that happened. I hope I have. I’ve certainly learned from a number of other people, and I hope that we have. There are a number of people in our firm who are not veteran or military affiliate, but they pick up the sense of pride in this outfit. It is now your outfit, Berry Law, and there is a sense of pride, and they present themselves with that sense of pride.
You do that. You do it very well. Pride in your work is contagious. If you get people who do not have that pride, who do not pick up on it, they don’t last very long here. They just don’t. Either you send them on their way or they don’t, simply can’t take the intensity. Because this is a very intense place. Because what we do, we crusade. We crusade for the rights of veterans. When Douglas MacArthur retired, he quoted an old Barrack’s Ballad saying, Old soldiers never die. They just fade away. I think that at some point, I suppose, I may start losing interest, but for the time being, if there’s anything I can ever do for a fellow veteran, I will. For as long as I can, I’ll hobble over there and get it done.
Let’s do the After Action Review. What are three positive leadership lessons that you learned in the military?
Okay. I’m going to give one person that gave me both a positive and a negative. His name was George Patton. His father was the great Patton in World War II. This Patton was a bird colonel at the time. He was the commander of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment. He retired with two stars. But anyway, I went up to Black Horse, and I had some legal matters, and I had to spend the night. He said, Captain, would you like to… I have an air-conditioned trailer. You can stay there. I said, What? And the specialist took me aside and he said, The colonel takes his track out in the woods every night to draw a fire. I thought, Yeah, the guy wants to go where the action is. He doesn’t want an air-conditioned trailer. He doesn’t want something fancy. He wants to go out there looking for a fight. That influenced me in a good way. Now, in a bad way? Well, when this chopper got shot down, he radioed back, Don’t let anyone wash the blood off my shirt. I need it from my museum. So that was an ego thing that was a bad thing.
Now, another bad lesson. When we finished, it was time for supper. The general, by then, he would set us over. He says, Okay, you can eat at the general’s mess. It was a bunker underground. I said, Okay, thank you, sir. I sat at a table with some other captains. Who were the waiters? Lieutenants. Now, that was a terrible idea to use a lieutenant to wait tables. That guy had been through some school, whether it was Infantry or Artillery, or he’d been somewhere, and he’s bringing me a steak. That is not the job of a lieutenant. You hire a civilian to do that. But it turned out to be good because he asked me if I’d like another steak. I knew the next day I’d be eating sea ration, so I said, Yeah, that’s a good idea. I think I’ll do that.
So you got to see some good leadership from that lieutenant. Good initiative. All right. Well, I guess we’ll count that as a good. So then one more good leadership lesson that you’ve learned. You’ve already hit the three bad. So it’s one more good.
All right. I am called to MacV, UserV, excuse me, in Long Bend. I’m told that I have a client. They can’t describe his name. Just say I’m looking for number six. I went up, did what you always do. You dry fire your pistol into a sand bucket, turn it in, go in, say, I want number six. They take me out to a steel box. It’s Captain Lee Brumley. He and Bob Rheault, Commander of the Green Berets in Vietnam were charged with a conspiracy to murder a double agent. Here’s what Bob Rheault did as a leader. He somehow kept the morale up of all those guys, kept them together. Now, imagine the amount of time, effort, and money that was being spent to try to get one of them to flip on the others, and nobody would do it. That’s one of the ways we got that thing dismissed. Just the strong, and you’ve met him. You remember Bob Rheault very well. He remembered you. But the strong leadership of the commander of the Green Berets. Now, he was on the Boston Social Register. He had inherited millions. He didn’t have to serve at all. He went to West Point.
He wanted to serve. The fact that those men were so with him knew he was…Loyalty’s a two-way street. He had so much loyalty for those men that they had loyalty for him. Nobody flipped. Eventually, for a lot of reasons that I won’t go into here, but the commander of the Green Berets and all of his men got their charges dismissed. They got on the Freedom Bird going home, and the captain announced they were on the plane, and everybody cheered. It was a nice thing to happen.
That was, of course, a huge national story. For any of our listeners that want to learn more, they can get a copy of your book, Those Gallup Men on Trial in Vietnam by John Stevens Berry. You can hear the entire story there. But once again, sometimes, I heard this from Dan Sullivan, and I like to say that as we get older, we get to choose who we’re going to be a hero to. You got to be a hero to the nation’s heroes, the Green Berets, the Fifth Special Forces in Vietnam. That’s got to be one of your greatest accomplishments you can go back and look at and say, When I was a young man, I helped some of America’s best. I helped America’s best when their country failed to have their back.
John, you are a hero, and you have a lot of heroes working with you here at Berry Law to help other heroes. Can you think of anything better a guy could do? I mean, think about it. It’s almost like you don’t have to work because it’s such a great honor to be able to do what you do on a daily basis. I thank you for carrying on the work that was the center of my life.
Well, every Monday, we have stand to. One of the things I tried… I heard this from a general, from the first Infantry Division used to say this every single day. I think it was Paul Funk Jr. He said, Go out and be a hero to someone today. I think that that’s what we’re going to do as veterans. We’ve served, and now we’re going to use those skills, use that leadership to be a hero to someone else, whether it’s our fellow veterans or someone else in our community or even our customers and our clients. We get a chance to be a hero because we know what it’s like. The military taught us a lot about heroism. It also taught us a lot about bureaucracy. It seems that those are the two polar forces in the military that on one hand, we want to develop heroes, but we do have a large bureaucracy. I’ve learned by growing this organization, that there’s a healthy tension between the two, that you do need a little bit of bureaucracy, and in order to take care of those heroes. But when you have too much bureaucracy, it can suffocate heroism in the organization.
That is something that may he rest in peace. James Martin Davis always said to me when we were trying a case together, We’ve been in war. We know how to cut through the, and I won’t say the word, but we’ve been in war. When it comes to the government bureaucracy, what can they do to me that the Viet Cong hasn’t already done? Do your worst. I’m going to cut right through your red tape.
Thank you so much today, dad, for sharing your stories. It has been an absolute honor, and I’m glad we get to share this with the rest of our community. Thank you and thank so much for your continued service to our American heroes, our United States veterans.
I salute you. I salute Berry Law, and I thank you.
Thank you for joining us today on Veteran Led, where we pursue our mission of promoting veteran leadership in business, strengthening the veteran community, and getting veterans all of the benefits that they earned. If you know a leader who should be on the Veteran Led podcast, report to our online community by searching @veteranled on your favorite social channels and posting in the comments. We want to hear how your military challenges prepared you to lead your industry or community, and we will let the world know. And of course, hit subscribe and join me next time on Veteran Led.
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