When students from the Cape Elizabeth High School class of 2007 elected Dwight Ely to give the faculty address, they didn’t know they’d be getting the history lesson they’d been asking for all year.

Though Ely covered the Vietnam War in his classes, he always avoided questions from students about his own experience. At graduation, he finally gave them those answers.

“It was very personal for the students I had,” Ely said in an interview on Monday.

Ely began his speech talking about the “unique personality” the class had developed. He recollected specific experiences he had with students and admitted that he might not be able to teach his macro-economics class in the same way again because of them.

Though Ely said that the class may have had too much fun, as well as the worst case of “senioritis” he had ever seen, there was something positive about the students that set them apart.

“You do have individually and collectively a most redeeming quality,” he told them. “The characteristic that impressed me the most, the characteristic I appreciated most, the characteristic that gives me the most hope for the future and makes me proud to call you my students was the curiosity of the class of 2007 and your desire for understanding.”

It was that quality, along with the realization that many of the students he had and would have would go to war, that inspired Ely to finally tell his story of service in Vietnam.

“I told you I did not discuss my experience in Vietnam,” he said. “However, I have come to believe that that was wrong.”

Ely talked about his experience as if he were answering the questions of new graduate Astrea Campbell-Cobb, whom Ely described as a particularly thought-provoking student who “doesn’t let you off the hook.”

“Did you kill anyone?” he said she asked.

“Of course I did,” Ely said. “That’s what we do in war. We kill people and they try to kill us. That’s why they give us M-16s and hand grenades and Colt 45s. That’s why we shoot artillery rounds and drop bombs from 20,000 feet above the earth.”

With that answer, he said Astrea asked, “Why?”

“Do you want the incantations, Astrea, or the truth?”

The incantations, Ely said, were that fighting there was to prevent fighting here, to help the Vietnamese understand democracy, to set them free. The truth, he said, would require a real understanding of the facts, many of which weren’t available until decades later, when diaries of Lyndon Johnson and true intentions of Richard Nixon were revealed.

“But why did you go?” he said she asked.

“This is the question we all should have to answer,” Ely said. “I went because I did not think. I took the incantations for granted. I went because I never imagined my president would lie. I went because I thought being a patriot meant doing what your country asked of you, never stopping to consider that my countrymen could be so busy with their daily routine that they could be so detached and cavalier about my life. I went because I knew nothing of their history. I went because I did not think. I was not even curious.”

Ely told the members of the class that their curiosity was what made him proud of them and what gave him hope for the future.

“Go forth,” he said, “and be curious forever.”

Vietnam vet to grads: ‘Be curious forever’

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