“Did you have a gun? Did you ever shoot anybody?” Gerald Johanssen asks his father, Martin—who served in Vietnam—in “Veterans Day,” the special episode of Hey Arnold! that aired a little over 18 years ago. The setup is simple. Mildly frustrated by what they perceive as a lack of education or interest around Veteran’s Day, Martin and Phil, Arnold’s grandpa and a World War II vet himself, take their boys on a paternal-bonding road trip to Washington, DC, for the long weekend. Along the way, they field questions like Gerald’s.
“Being a veteran’s not about carrying a weapon or fighting in battles,” Martin explains. “It’s about service to your country, and there’s a lot of ways you can serve.”
Martin is the lynchpin of this special half-hour episode. Throughout the whole process, Gerald asks questions about war stories. Grandpa Phil obliges with wild, clearly exaggerated tales of beating the crap out of Hitler and giving him a wedgie before describing the Battle of the Bulge. Martin’s Vietnam stories are less glamorous, and Gerald doesn’t respond to them. The audience can presume that like any 9-year-old American boy, Gerald’s grown up in a patriarchal pop culture reinforced by blockbuster films, video games, and comic books—all of which depict war with some form of skewed perspective. His dad, an actual war veteran, wears glasses, uses an inhaler, and takes him out for ice cream and snacks. When Gerald learns Martin was out for the flu during basic training, accidentally shot his own commanding officer in the butt, was relegated to the job of file clerk in an army medical records office, and saw no action firsthand, Gerald is disappointed, and tunes out of his dad’s description of the one battle he did he catch a chunk of.
In a crushingly sad conversation that Martin overhears, Gerald laments: “I don’t see how it made any difference that he even went to Vietnam.”
Let’s back up for a minute. This is classic season four Hey Arnold! Step 1: Creator Craig Bartlett and team—in this case, supervising director Tuck Tucker and writer Steve Viksten, among others—introduce a concept their young audience know at a surface level: Veteran’s Day is a day off for schools, and it’s about the military. Step 2: They personalize it by making it about their characters’ trauma and insecurities using both comedy and intimate flashbacks. Step 3: They turn that pain on its head with an uplifting, philosophically progressive conclusion. (The episode that immediately followed this one in the production cycle used much of the same structure.) And in an episode where we literally watch Hitler get a wedgie, that emotional conclusion is the best part. Check it:
“Johanssen? Private Johanssen?” A veteran using a cane to walk limps over to Gerald and Martin at the Vietnam War Memorial. Martin has just explained to Gerald that he wasn’t a big hero, that he “just tried to give my best when my country asked me to.” Gerald has just finished telling him that it’s OK and that he’s proud of his father anyway. That’s when this stranger recognizes Martin.
“Yeah?” Martin replies.
“I knew it was you,” the stranger says. “It’s Miller, Private Miller.”
They met each other at the Battle of An Lộc—a huge 66-day battle in the Vietnam War. This is what Miller remembered about Private Johanssen and what he told Gerald:
I was sitting in that rice paddy for hours. My platoon had moved on. I kept calling out for a medic, for anybody, but nobody came. I didn’t know how bad I was hurt. I just knew I couldn’t move. After a while, I figured that was gonna be it. But then you showed up, out of the blue. Private Martin Johanssen. You had all those file folders with you. I was wondering what anyone was doing out in a battlefield with a bunch of file folders. You kept looking at my leg and shaking your head. Then you took out some of those papers and poured something out on them out of a bottle. Then you pressed it to my leg and taped it up around me like a bandage. I must have passed out because the next thing Iknew I was in a hospital in Saigon. The doctors couldn’t figure out what I was doing there. They figured I should have bled to death. I tried to tell them, but I guess I was still pretty weak. I kept trying to tell them: “It was Private Johanssen.”
Miller reaches out his hand. Martin shakes it. They both smile.
“Private Johanssen,” Miller repeats. “I’ve waited over 20 years to thank you. Is this your son?”
“Yes, my son Gerald,” Martin says.
“Pleased to meet you, Gerald,” Miller says. “Did you know your father’s a real hero?” Miller shakes Gerald’s hand too, before introducing them to his own family. “This is the man I told you about, Martin Johanssen, the man who saved my life.”
All that and a Hitler wedgie.
You can stream this episode on Hulu, by the way.
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