“I attribute my success in the military and in life to my experience at Gonzaga,”
Roger Johnson should have walked the commencement stage in 1966, but that didn’t happen until nearly 50 years later.
While at Gonzaga, studying psychology, Roger Johnson was part of the Army ROTC program, where he says he had “wonderful training under an excellent military professor.” (Major Clem)
The conflict in Vietnam was broiling and Johnson wanted to know more about what was taking place. He says, “I was given the inquisitive search of knowledge, as the Jesuits would say.”
Johnson deferred his studies at Gonzaga in order to graduate in January 1966. As a ROTC Distinguished Military Graduate, he was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant, Regular Army, into active military duty. (Deferring his graduation put him in front of the West Point class of 1966, granting him a better chance of plumb assignments, and one more winter ski season.) That winter, instead of entering the workforce with a fresh degree, Johnson would leave the snow-laden campus of Gonzaga for Fort Benning, Georgia, where he completed the Infantry Officer Basic Course and trained as a paratrooper, earning his Jump Wings at the US Army Airborne School, learning to jump from planes in a time of war. Prior to reporting to the 101st Airborne Division at Ft. Campbell, Kentucky, he completed the Officer Communications Course at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma.
Read more about Roger Johnson’s heroic experience and how he picked up where he left off at Gonzaga in 2015, Completing the Circle: 50 years after Vietnam.