Portland State Magazine Fall 2021

I ’m a Portland boy. I wanted to study speech at PSU, but I simply couldn’t afford it. So I volunteered for the draft instead. I took my chances in what we called the ‘Go to Vietnam and if you live, you can go to college’ lottery. In Vietnam, a rocket hit my bunker. The explosion damaged my hearing and gave me a traumatic brain injury. I had to learn to talk again. I had to learn to walk again. But I was lucky to come back.The VA told me I couldn’t become a professional speaker, because I was deaf and it would affect my speech—and no one would want to listen to me. So I talked with Ben Padrow, a PSU speech professor. He looked at me and said, ‘Who told you that? Don’t believe it. We can do this.’ He was one of the more powerful, influential people in my life—and one of the nicest. It was 1969 and the perfect time for me to be at Portland State.There was a lot of energy around war protests and other social movements on campus. We veterans got together a lot, but we didn’t wear our fatigues or medals. I dressed like a hippie like everyone else. And we didn’t talk about our experiences, except with each other. It wasn’t just the war protestors who had a problem with us. We tried to join the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars, but they didn’t want us either. We figured out that ultimately, people’s opinions of the war become the opinions they have of the warrior. If you are fighting a popular war, you’ll come home to parades. If you’re fighting an unpopular war, you’ll come home to demonstrations. Some of us could live with that, because we didn’t much like the war either. My friend Art Honeyman, a fellow PSU student who had cerebral palsy, was a fierce advocate for all sorts of causes. He was beyond a force of nature, and he inspired me to start helping student veterans with disabilities find jobs. Eventually, I turned it into a profession, creating training programs to help employers rethink disability issues—not to assume someone can’t do something, but to ask how they can do it. I would tell employers, ‘You may think I’m here to change your mind about people with disabilities, but I’m not. I’m here to change your mind about yourself. To give you confidence in your ability to do what’s necessary to hire and work with people with disabilities.’ People sometimes say I gave a voice to the voiceless. I did not. We’ve always had a voice, but we were in a soundproof room. I just opened the door so everyone could listen. PORTRAITS OF PSU VETERANS We figured out that ultimately, people’s opinions of the war become the opinions they have of the warrior. U.S. ARMY, 1967-1969 Richard Pimentel Richard Pimentel HD ’ 08 with his wife and children in Nampa, Idaho. The 2007 movie Music Within, shot in part on the PSU campus, tells the story of how he became a disability rights advocate after returning from Vietnam.