The executive director of the National Council on Independent Living is a United Spinal member who was largely formed by his experience in Vietnam.

By Chris Pierson

John Lancaster, executive director of the National Council on Independent Living, has had a special relationship with Vietnam since he was injured during the Battle for Hue City in 1968.

If anyone embodies the concept of independent living for persons with mobility impairments, John Lancaster does. He’s been living independently (with a special emphasis on “living”) since his rehabilitation from injuries sustained in a firefight outside Hue City during the Tet Offensive at the height of the Vietnam War, in which he served as a second lieutenant in the Navy.

A year ago, Lancaster, whose injuries left him paralyzed at T-5–6 and who has been a member of this association since the early 1970s, began to serve as executive director of the National Council on Independent Living (NCIL, pronounced ‘nickel’), based in Washington, DC. This move culminates a lifetime of work on behalf of disabled veterans and people with disabilities, much of it spent implementing and enforcing anti-discrimination laws from inside state and federal government. NCIL represents the interests of more than 700 centers for independent living nationwide to policy makers in the nation’s capital.

The relationship between Lancaster and United Spinal goes far back, to the moment when veterans who served during the Vietnam era began to build, out of a tiny one-room operation with regional focus, a robust multidisciplinary agency able to influence national policy affecting people with disabilities. A native of Boston who grew up in Hamburg, New York, outside of Buffalo, Lancaster became good friends with Vietnam era peers like current Executive Director Gerard M. Kelly; the late James J. Peters; board member William Murphy; and another veteran of the Battle for Hue City, former President Peter Addesso.

“I’m a proud member,” Lancaster says. “United Spinal has served me well.” Lancaster is not just saying that to be nice. He really means it!

Back In Country

The Vietnam war had a profound formative effect on John Lancaster, beyond its obvious physical one. He was one of the few Americans in the country who spoke Vietnamese, having been selected to undergo intensive instruction in the language upon being commissioned in 1967, and he is genuinely fond of the people and the culture. When the war ended in 1975 with the North Vietnamese prevailing, Lancaster, like so many other veterans of the war, was left with a sense of unfinished business that, he assumed, held no hope for resolution.

He was wrong.

In 1995, Lancaster was working with Tony Coelho on the President’s Committee on the Employment of People with Disabilities in the Clinton Administration, when he was paid a visit by a Vietnamese-born businessman from northern Virginia named Ca Tran Van. Ca told him he had worked for the CIA during the war, and he and his wife had been on the last boat out of Saigon on April 30, 1975. They left in such a hurry that they had to leave their 2-year-old son behind with Ca’s parents in what became Ho Chi Minh City.

Ca had recently returned from his first visit back to Vietnam in 20 years. He had learned that his mother had died, and, at some risk to himself, decided to go find her grave and to meet his son. He was also curious about his comrades who had fought on the losing side of the war. What he found shocked him. While veterans of the North Vietnamese army were well cared for by the government, veterans of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam were suffering under poverty, poor health, and general neglect.

At the time, the US government was in the process of normalizing relations with Hanoi. Upon his return to the states, Ca asked around the corridors of power in the capital to find someone in the government who might offer him some measure of protection on a return trip. “Someone told me you were a disabled veteran,” Ca told Lancaster.

Soon Lancaster and Ca were back in Vietnam, Ca to set up a nongovernmental organization (NGO) to help disabled ARVN vets and Lancaster to implement a special project of the President’s Commission to study Vietnam’s ability to deliver services to people with disabilities. Lancaster fell in love with the country all over again. “It was very emotional being back,” he says. “I felt I could finally close the door on the war. From that point on, Vietnam wasn’t just a war or a period of my history. I could see it for what it is: a wonderful, vibrant culture.”

To the Rescue

In 2000, Lancaster left the public sector to join Ca’s NGO––Vietnam Assistance for the Handicapped. Four years later, as vice president of the Vietnam Enterprise Group, he provided technical assistance to Vietnamese companies on issues related to business in the US, law, and disability.

In a February 2005 radio conversation with Joyce Bender on her “Disability Matters” program, Lancaster described his remarkable accomplishments during his four years in Hanoi: “[W]hat we primarily did was work with the Vietnamese government to help them improve their infrastructure of law and policy for people with disabilities. And we were very successful in doing that. We were able to . . . work with the government, with the support of the disability community itself, convinced the national assembly and the government to pass a comprehensive disability act, not unlike our Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). We were successful in getting building codes and standards passed for accessibility to the physical infrastructure of Vietnam, with a good, solid building code and many other improvements.”

In the summer of 2004, on one of his many excursions between Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, Lancaster was in a horrible traffic accident that left him with multiple broken bones and lacerations. He didn’t know what had happened until he awoke to many hours later in a full body cast in a hospital in Bangkok, Thailand.

“It was the best care I’ve ever had,” he says. His doctors, two Thais and an Indian, had studied at some of the best medical schools in the US and Europe. His nurses were expert at anticipating his needs and responding without delay to his calls. “I’ve never been in a better hospital.”

There were two big problems, however. Lancaster had no way to leave the country to complete his rehabilitation, and the VA insurance system, TRICARE, refused to cover Lancaster’s $33,000 bill, despite his having a 100% service- connected disability entitling him to free health care coverage for life.

It was then that his relationship with United Spinal would come through for him. Executive Director Kelly and Deputy Executive Director Paul J. Tobin arranged to have Lancaster evacuated from Thailand and brought to the Bronx Veterans Affairs Medical Center in New York. As he was completing his rehab there, United Spinal’s Benefit Services staff argued his case against TRICARE, winning a full settlement.

Lancaster was finally able to spend some carefree time with his wife Christine at their home in Potsdam, New York—a home made accessible with the help of this association’s Residential Access Modifications Program (R*A*M*P) in 1986. But not for long. In January 2005, Lancaster resumed his intense schedule of commuting between home in Potsdam and work in Washington. And with hundreds of centers for independent living and their satellites, he is never still for long.

For more information on NCIL, visit www.ncil.org or write to 1710 Rhode Island Avenue, NW, 5th Floor, Washington, D.C. 20036.

Chris Pierson is managing editor of Action.