#45 Sgt. John Kapphahn

What I have a question. I'm looking from medical perspective. Yeah, I just had soup and kind of a bull o Bays, you do not have what's a bull base?

Why did you say I was trying to impress you so good?

Anyway, the point is, after I have a bowl of soup, it really sloshes around in my stomach, like I really hear.

I've done that. I've always heard your stomach, They're going for years.

How would you have heard my stomach?

Because everything about you is noisy, your finger lickings, noisy, your stomach.

In some cultures, you know, it's considered a compliment.

I'm not doing this no.

From Gimblet Media. I'm Jonathan Goldstein and this is Heavyweight Today's episode Sergeant John Capon. Right after the break.

When I told some people at work that I would be talking with someone on a podcast, they all immediately said, oh, for murder.

It's about murder.

Melanie has never murdered anyone, and at the risk of sounding like an old softy, neither of I. But the story you're about to hear does involve a murder of sorts. Thirty years ago, Melanie snuffed out the life of a family heirloom. But as they say on the Murder podcasts, more on that later. The story all begins in rural Minnesota, on the bean farm where Melanie grew up. All her friends lived miles away, so for company, all she had were a couple Measley TV stations.

Channels that we can could get through our bonnied Ear antenna. Like there'd be days where like my dad's up on the roof, like, okay, tell me when you can see the picture.

And on February seventeenth, nineteen ninety three, Melanie really needed to see that picture, because that was the night ABC was airing the television event of the century, a special starring Melanie's favorite.

Artist, Billy ray Cyrus.

Billy ray Cyrus.

So cool, he could dance, great mullet, tight pants.

Oily biceps, Miley's dad, hip, soul patch, denim clad. The special was.

Called Dreams Come True.

For Melanie, the name couldn't have been more appropriate. She loved Billy ray Cyrus so much that she'd spend hours plunking out a key breaky Heart on the family piano. The only problem Melanie was nine years old and the special came on after her time.

So my plan was to record the concert on a VHS tape so I could watch it later.

Melanie's parents kept all the VHS tapes in a dining room drawer, so she pulled one out from way in.

The back, slided it in, and pressed record.

Melanie's memory of what happened next is fuzzy. It might have been the next morning, as she got ready to watch the special in her PJS, that her mom asked, Hey, by the way, what videotape did you record that on? That would have been the moment Melanie learned the horrible truth.

The tape that I had grabbed to record an hour of Billy Ray Cyrus over was an interview that my father had done from Vietnam while injured and hospitalized.

And the interview was with Walter Cronkite.

On this videotape.

Yes, that had now been recorded over by Billy Ray Cyrus.

Of course, as a nine year old, Melanie could only understand so much about what she'd done. She never watched the tape of her father's interview. She didn't know who Walter Cronkite was or anything at all about the Vietnam War.

But you know, I was able to comprehend that this was something we weren't going to get back. I have an older sister, she's six years older, and I think she probably helped me realize that by rubbing it in.

Why did you put this on?

Here? Do you know what was on this?

This is Melanie's older sister, Sam, who was old enough to understand the significance of the tape and to remember her father's reaction when he found out it had been erased.

Oh, it was like World War seventeen because there was none of the interview left, like there wasn't like, oh, here's where the beginning of the interview is. And then it cuts to Billy ray Cyrus. This was just straight up Billy Ray Cyrus on stage singing.

Can I ask, if you're a Billy ray Cyrus fan, did you feel like, well, this isn't all bad. I mean we lost a family heirloom.

No, no, not be something where I would have said that, I would have considered that an equivalent swap.

Look was it?

Like, well, at least we've got Achy Breaky on VHS.

Now that Melanie's an adult, she feels terrible about her mistake and wants to make things right. She wants to unerase the video and return it to her father, But after combing the CBS website emailing the network, her mom even mailed them a physical letter. Melanie's had no luck with finding a copy. She's not even sure the interview still exists. So much from that era doesn't. Until the late nineteen seventies, networks with white TV shows once they'd aired.

Because growing up Vietnam was just kind of a subject that we knew not to bring up.

Everything from her dad's time in the army felt off limits. He kept his uniform deep in the closet, his purple heart in the back of a drawer. On the rare occasion their father did bring up Vietnam. It wasn't to share memories.

There's times where my sister and I are just running around and you know, him commenting to us, pick up your feet. You wouldn't last five minutes in Vietnam. You guys would all be blown up.

Pick up your feet. God damn it.

You wouldn't have lasted four days, and.

Now you would have been shot.

So basically, all I knew about Vietnam was that I would not survived.

I knew it was someplace where you needed to be quiet, and that he had gotten hurt there.

John had been caught in an explosion of shrapnel in Vietnam, but his daughters only knew this because of the pieces of metal that would occasionally fall from his body.

I remember him sitting at our kitchen table, and every now and then there would be this little piece of metal that would get worked out of an arm or a leg. He's like, well, that's shrapnel at shrapnel working its way out. And of course they would be very small. They weren't shiny, kind of like a very dark, dark gray, not black.

I remember that, although Sam and Melanie are now adults, their understanding of their father's time in Vietnam is as piecemeal as when they were kids, and they're still too intimidated to broach the subject. So, as families tend to with big conversations, they kick the topic of Vietnam down the road to deal with someday. But given her dad's age and temperament, Melanie worries there might not be a some day.

He recently was hospitalized with heart failure.

Oh no, I'm sorry.

He's okay, but you know, some imminent health issues and he's getting older, Like we don't have forever. It would be it would be nice to know him. And I feel like maybe this is something, you know, I kind of effed up as a kid, and maybe I can undo it.

Getting the video back is something Melanie wants to do for her father, but she also wants to do it for herself. The tape feels like her strongest hope, possibly her last hope for understanding her dad. If she had the video, she could hear about her father's experiences at the moment he lived them, which is why she's come to me, her fellow Minnesotan. Let's see what we can do.

Oh, you're so nice.

The nicest thing that you could tell the Minnesotan is that they're nice.

Yeah, but I actually mean it.

Well, I can't really know, but it's nice to be nice to the nice and no matter what state you're from, I think we can all agree it's always nice to hear from our trusted sponsors. Get ready to raise the roof with savings. During the conversation with Melanie, I'd asked if, after learning she'd erase the tape, she could bring herself through her shame, through her mortification to actually watch the Billie Ray Cyrus special.

Heck, yes, I did, you did? Yes? Oh yes.

The intro to this special, he has his back to the camera. He's wearing a cutoff T shirt, skin tight jeans, and it's just him like bopping back and forth with his mullet swaying.

And that went on for like a minute.

And a half before you even see his face.

Oh yeah, yeah, it's just the back of him.

Man. That is confidence.

I don't know if they were like wanting to showcase his body or just the mullet.

Was it like in an arena?

Yeah, and there's you know, ladies bawling and.

Wow like Beatlemania, billy mania. My mission is clear. I'll need to begin my research by watching the Billy ray Cyrus special for myself. Well, maybe not need to, but watching an hour of Billy ray Cyrus seems easier than search for a fifty year old news clip. In the special, Billy stands on stage as the audience shouts for him to take off his shirt, but Billy is demure, keeping it classy.

How is my mom gonna feel when she wakes up to read the flat Woods Kentucky Times Tomar and finds out that her baby boy came all the way to Reno and gotten naked on his first ABC special.

Yet sadly, Billy succumbs to peer pressure.

I lived my life on my fans, and if that lets you run out too.

Just when it feels like things cannot possibly grow anymore, sexually unhinged, Billy reaches behind his back and in one fluid motion, unleashes the rear end of his lush mullet. It wafts free in the arena vents like the main on a majestic stallion.

Sing it to me one time Reno and is his tongue?

Where am I going on?

Ria?

I'm not get home.

I want to emphasize this is what supplanted John Capon's legacy.

This is where I was born raised.

This is McDow Elementary School.

The special is also filled with autobiographical interstitials. Billy visits his old elementary school, where the kids receive him as a hero. He stops by his hometown church, and then he races up the walkway of a small, unassuming house. It's one of those moments you'd see on American Masters where some American Master journeys back to his childhood home.

This is Cindy, my ex wife, Sandy, how you doing.

It's fine, But the house is in fact not Billy's childhood home. It's his ex wife, Cindy's home.

This is the lighty that had the courtesy to set my stuff out in the yard about four point thirty in the morning into drisling right.

Cindy, he explains, is the inspiration for the song where am I gonna live when I get home?

And she was laying on this couch when I said, uh, where am I gonna live when I get home? My old lady stowed out everything home.

She meant what she said when she wished.

I was dead.

All the while Cindy stares into the camera teeth clenched in a smile. The special ends with one last number, one highly ironic number. It's a song called Some Gave All.

This is a song I wrote about a Vietnam veteran I met back in Huntington, West Virginia, in the spring of not ten eighty nine.

As it turns out, Billy Resyris is well known for his work on behalf of veterans, and so as one West Virginian vet is being elevated in song, another Minnesotan vet is being brought low by song, his service to his country erased by don't to my heart?

Oh Hi, Hi, how are you good?

How are you?

I'm good?

Best thing I found the clip of your father get.

Out of Town.

That's crazy, that's amazing, that's wonderful.

Sounds like a lot of digging.

I want to say yes, but I can't. One night, over dinner with friends, I brought up the difficulty of trying to find a news clip that's over fifty years old. Oh, said Matt, my journalism professor friend. You just have to search the Vendorbilt TV news archive. He pulled out his phone. He had the app right there. And when you search Melanie's father's name, Sergeant John Capon. The clip comes right up.

Well, you can't make it sound like it was super easy, otherwise I'm going to feel like an even worster.

No, no, no, it was very hard. Oh my god, the reams of microfiches that we had to go through. Now that we have the interview, Melanie and I strategize about the best way to return it to her father, when to do it, and where to do it, which is somewhat complicated.

So fun fact, my parents are still married, but they live in separate houses that are half a mile apart with a lake in between them.

Do you think he would open his home to us?

No, you say that without hesitation, No, he won't.

No.

All entertaining, Melanie says, is done at her mom's place, never at her dad's.

I haven't even been in there for probably fifteen twenty years.

His house, Yeah, where I grew up. Yeah.

What about your sister? Has she been in there more recently?

No?

And what about your mom?

Uh?

I think my mom like maybe broke there, wants to try to get something.

And she had to break in there.

Yeah, he's like growing up, we couldn't have an answering machine because he didn't want people listening to his.

Messages, seeing is how private Melanie's dat is. I wonder how he'll feel about the recovered interview being accompanied by a stranger with a microphone. But I hope for the best. So if things went really well at your mother's, what do you think the likelihood is that we would go over there for cake and coffee afterwards?

Two percent?

I like those odds because two percent is how I like my milk when it's clouding my coffee. Then I'm drinking alongside the cake I'm being served in someone's house that no one's been inside in twenty years. The interview only exists as a digital file, so I decided to have a transferred to VHS. Presenting John with a tape, I'll have a certain poetic symmetry, So I start calling video transfer services, the first of which informs me they don't put things on VHS tapes, and in fact, quote

Hi.

I greet Melanie outside her mom's house. There's a dog running around and a big American flag waving in the wind. For COVID reasons, we all settle down in the garage where the airflow is better.

Hello.

Melanie's mom, Diane, and her sister Sam are already seated inside. Sam's four year old runs up to say Hi, Hi, Hello, Hello, nice to meet you. And there's Melanie's dad, Sergeant John Capon. He's large and imposing. I introduced myself and ask if I can hook him up with a mic. I clipped the microphone onto John's lapel. John, can you tell me what you had for breakfast?

I had a piece of toast and some pretzels and a hard boiled egg and two domus.

Yeah, the videotape is in my backpack. I consider how the best surprise John present the tape with a flourish, without a flourish, perhaps with a hearty handshake. Would it be offensive to hand it over with a salute? But before I can do any of these things, John surprises me.

Needs to be more of this, What more younger people finding out what the hell went on?

How many years were you in Vietnam?

I was only there for about eight and a half nine months.

And just like that, John is talking.

No, I'll tell you what. When he got off the airplane, they opened up the plane, the air conditioned plane door, and it was one hundred and twenty gays, just like somebody threw a hot pail of water in your face.

Maybe having a stranger present somebody doesn't have to worry about burdening is actually helpful. Or maybe John just needed someone to pose the question.

And I'll never forget this. They took us stone.

Like, And so the Sunday conversation becomes a Today conversation. For the next couple hours, John shares stories that his daughters have never heard, stories that even Diane, his wife of many decades, never heard. It turns out that a lot of what John did in Vietnam was called long range reconnaissance patrol, which meant acting as a scout, tiptoeing through enemy territory. John was often the one who stayed out in front, the most exposed of all the men.

Anything that don't look right isn't right. If you've seen a leaf that was turned a little color where the bottom of the leaf was up, there's something there was there?

Really, are you just exaggerating?

Well? Is that exaggerating? Because there'd be a trip wire there? And the other thing is if you were walking along and all of a sudden the birds didn't start singing anymore, why because there's somebody else there.

You had to be careful about smoking too, John says, or showering because the Vietcong might smell you. You had to be on alert twenty four to seven. And of course you had to pick up your feet and walk real quietly. John shares the everyday things, like the food he ate, sometimes bananas, which he said were the best he'd ever tasted, plucked right from the trees. John looks from Melanie to Sam, telling them about the guys he served with and the nights they spent playing cards and

Always used to tell us war as hell than it is. But there's one time we had come along and there was a school teacher with their head cut off, sitting on a post. She was like a twenty five year old woman. So that's the worse to humanity as far as I'm concerned.

Eventually, John winds his way to the day he was wounded. He'd been sent to check out an area by the river, and there was a moment, he says, when he noticed something feeling off no more than a leaf, turned it a strange way, and suddenly his men were caught in a hail of gunfire. John was shot in the leg. A helicopter came to evacuate him, but as John limbed

And I woke up on my birthday, so that would have been three days later. I remember this one nurse telling me happy birthday. Yeah, okay, yeah. And then anyway, she said, well, you've got some very important there's people here from CBS television.

She said that what John and his family have not discussed the news clip in easily thirty years. Hearing John bring it up now on his own, I'm struck by how baked into the story of a service it is, John says. So that he'd look presentable for television, the nurse spent a lot of time washing his hair. He'd be in bed with his eyes and face bandaged over, but at least his hair would look nice. And on December thirtieth, nineteen seventy one, the nation tuned in to see John on TV.

Felt kind of privileged. You know how many people are on Walter Cronkite News, You know, not very many.

And John intended to commemorate that privilege by preserving it in the form of a videotape cassette, but alas.

Got wiped off of the achy breaky heart.

It seems that Justine baked into the story of his military service, as the TV news clip is so too is it's erasure and what it was erased by?

I hate Billy because he raised my table.

I actually hi the tape. Let sleep Billy out of it.

When's the last time you watched it? Right before the achy Breaky insid, Yeah, where did you get it?

The guy who was my.

Officer, he knew what was going on with this filming and stuff, so he had his dad recorded and that's how I got it.

And then Melanie tells John the news.

Well, Jonathan got it.

He did.

That's the whole reason we contacted him was to get this for you.

Really, more than during any of the stories he told, even the one about his being wounded, hearing about the news clips recovery makes John grow more emotional than I've seen him all day.

Do you want to take a look at it?

Yeah?

Yeah, yeah, okay.

Sadana CD.

Well as I offer John an impromptu lecture on the importance of poetic symmetry. Melanie sets up the VCR Lucky for us, her mom still uses one. Then we pop the tape in and hit play. As it turns out. There are a few things Melanie got wrong about the clip. For one, Walter Cronkite was out that day, the anchor replacing him as a man named Charles Collingwood. The segment opens with him seated at his desk beside a graphic about Vietnam War injuries.

Some of the best evidence that American involvement in South Vietnam is drawing to a close may be found.

In the military hospitals and medical evacuation units.

There.

As the tape plays, John shuts his eyes and leans back. Sam says, this is something she'd seen her dad do at his father's funeral. It's hard to tell what John is thinking. Bob Simon, the anchor, turns the segment over to the reporter, Bob Simon, and this is the second thing Melanie had wrong. John was not merely interviewed. He was the subject of a documentary news report. Simon and his film crew began following John right after he was injured out in the field. Simon shouts to be heard

We're going to pick up an American. He's been hit by shrapnel.

And then we see him, twenty three year old Sergeant John Capon. He's lying on a stretcher, completely still, looking like he could be dead.

Sergeant John Capon is rushed aboard the chopper.

Melanie and Sam stare at the TV screen as the camera cuts to a close up of John's face, which is completely bloodied. Breathing is normal, says a man in aviator glasses of John's wounds. He says, it's just superficial. Seeing his young self. John lets out a pained sound, but is riddled with shrapnel.

His wounds look worse than they really are.

John is taken to a surgical unit in Long Bin. There we see him operated on by a frenzy of people in medical masks, his insides on full display across the living rooms of America.

Four surgeons work on Sergeant Caupon for more than an hour. They remove dozens of metal fragments. Fortunately, the wounds are all superficially, aside from an injury to his left eye, which may cause problems.

The potential problem Simon's referencing or blindness. So much shrapnel had entered John's eyes that at this point he still was without his sight. The last thing he'd heard before going under was the surgeon saying, I don't know if this guy's going to see again, and I don't know about this leg. We might have to cut that off.

Hey, you feeling okay? Okay? Nowhere?

Oh tt and a leftne and my hands kind of sorry yet what about your face?

Ah, not too.

Bad not to worry about. It's like John's echoing back the tone of the report. He's being stoic, protecting his parents, who he knows are back home in Elbow Lake watching, but he probably also understands that nobody really wants to know how he's doing. By this point in the war, America didn't see the likes of Sergeant John Capon as a hero so much as a living reminder of an unwinnable, unpopular war that they wished would go away.

What does the doctor tell you about your eye?

Ah says that it should be okay.

How do you feel about it? You're worried? Oh?

No, scene worse.

Melanie later points out one the bitter irony of her father, saying he's seen worse when at the moment he's literally unable to see anything, and two that like any kid, the wounded soldier on the hospital caught can't really grasp what's to come. Even though her father would regain his vision when he returned home, he would become prone to angry outbursts, outbursts she remembers vividly throughout her childhood. He'd also begin drinking a lot, trying to blot out his memories.

Stay here your mind wonder.

That's beautiful, and then it's over.

Bob Simon, CBS News Long bin.

All told the entire news report lasts no more than six minutes.

I can't see you.

As John stares at the screen, a nineteen seventies perfume ad plays It's jingle, repeating over and over again. I can't seem to forget you.

Say so, you haven't seen that for how many years?

Oh?

Thirty?

The cadence of your voice is the same, but your voice sounds so much different.

Recognize your father and that.

Guy, No, not at all. I mean it looks like a young, blown up kid.

That's where it was, so we were everybody was young. The average person that fought in Vietnam was nineteen years old.

When John returned home to life in a peacetime town, he wasn't welcomed as a hero. In fact, he was advised by the army not to wear his uniform so as not to advertise his service in Vietnam. As it was in Elbow Lake, John was shunned. He remembers attending the local basketball game and how he ended up sitting in the bleachers alone. All the other spectators had moved away from him. Just like the country at large, the town wanted to distance itself from the likes of John.

They were in there drinking with their wives, some pictures of beer sitting on the table. And well, there's one guy come walking up to me, and he said, are you one of them losers? And I said, excuse me, yeah, you one of them Vietnam veterans that you gave us a bad reputation. And I said, I'm a Vietnam veteran. I'm in here to have finished my beer, and I want to leave. You leave right now. I said, I'm going to drink my beer first. I paid for it. I'm going to do that.

Well.

Let He grabbed me by the arm, and I grabbed him by the and just shoved him. He fell over backwards onto that table all full of beer and it went flying all over the place. The bartender come out with a night stick and he was going to club be over the head, and I grabbed him by the wrist and I twisted it. Two of them, I found out later. Two of them were World War Two veterans who had never been in combat, and there was another one. I was a Korean veteran who had never left the United States.

John says he only had one friend who also saw combat in Vietnam. Many were for f and didn't have to serve, So while his classmates were getting on with their lives, John was left struggling to cope. And yet his experience also showed him the expanse of the world.

I was in a restaurant here about a year ago, and there was people in there talking about Black lives matter and all that there, and then in order to shoot him, all and all that there. And I said, how many black people do you know? Nobody knew any He said, how many have been on the ground county for more than two months out of your life? None of them? And nine people. And I'd have probably been sitting there right with him. I wouldn't have had those

For better and for worse. The moment John left for Vietnam, his life diverged from everyone he'd grown up with. Melanie's nephew, John Z has been coming in and out of the garage while we've been talking.

John Z, do you know that grandpa was in the army?

Should Maybe John never fully felt like the country, CBS News, or even Elbow Lake really wanted to know what he saw and how he felt. But hopefully after today j family does. Although John has opened his Achi breaky heart, it doesn't look like he's about to open his achy breaky home or offer me any achy breaky cake. So we all adjourn to the living room where the family piano.

Sits, and don't worry, there will be plenty of miskeys, just like there are in life.

Knowing what an advocate Billy ray Cyrus is for veterans, I'd asked if he could show up to Elbow Lake and serenade John, girl.

You can burn my clothesmend I am gone.

And while Billy's people initially said that that sounded like a great opportunity for Billy, it fell through as did my more modest request for Billy to sing over speakerphone, and my even more modest request that he leave a voice mess at John John's phone. And so in the end I asked Melanie if she could dig out her old Billy Ray Cyrus sheet music.

Or you can tell my lips to tell my brother Cliff.

As Melanie sings and Sam plays the out of tune piano and John checks his phone, possibly while wishing he was wearing a pair of noise canceling earphones, I stand back and save her the poetic symmetry.

To tell my heart, my aby, breaky heart. He might.

Tell my heart, my heart. Just don't think you don't understands.

Now that the fern entures returning to its goodwill home, now that the last month's rant is scheming with.

The damaged possible take this moment to dissolve.

If we mess him, if we talk.

Of Felder from the Dames at Accident Lee Bos.

This episode of Heavyweight was produced by senior producer Khalila Holt and me Jonathan Goldstein, along with Moheeney mcgauker. Our supervising producer is Stevie Lane. Production help from Domiano Marquetti Special thanks to Emily Condon, Matt Carlson, Peter Mullen, Sanya de Sani, Mitch Hansen, Jonah Delso, and Jackie Cohen. News footage courtesy of Veritone and CBS News Archives, and concert

Wow, I think.

That's as good as we're gonna get.

You recognize some of it