Following the Long Walk Home (Part 1)

He’s in Nashville now, a stop on his way towards visiting all fifty states. He doesn’t use a small plane, an automobile, or even a bike as his mode of transportation. Ron Zaleski is walking all across America. With his petition in hand, he doesn’t even wear shoes. When there’s no one around to solicit signatures from, sometimes he’ll lay down that document to pick out one inch shards of glass or repair a torn off heel. Passion can’t even begin to describe how fervently he believes in his cause.


59-year-old Zaleski is the founder of the The Long Walk Home, a nonprofit organization that seeks to raise awareness and solutions about the mental health problems that veterans face during and after their service. He wears an impressively-sized sign around his neck on his daily 10 to 15 mile barefoot walk that reads: “18 VETS A DAY COMMIT SUICIDE(‘commit suicide’ in red, bold letters).” A veteran Marine himself, Zaleski’s quest is a very personal one. “I get that sense that everybody that’s in the military is related to me in some way,” he believes. “That could be my son, my daughter, my loved one in there.”


And the grief of his walk gets more personal more often than he likes. “The hardest part of this journey for me has been when a car pulls over, and a mother will stand there and cry.” She’ll tell him that “her child came home safe, committed suicide, and then she’ll hold me,” Zaleski shares, also tearing up.


Zaleski joined the Marines in 1970 even though he came from a devoutly catholic lineage and did not believe in killing. His family, he also notes, was “a dysfunctional World War II family.” His father had brought the war home with him as it continued raging within his mind. That rage manifested itself as alcoholism and mental abuse towards his family. Zaleski joined to intentionally anger his parents in a passive-aggressive kind of way.


But when the orders to go to Vietnam arrived for him and five of his buddies, the reality compelled Zaleski to follow his convictions. He told his commanding officer that the only way he was going was “chained to a helicopter,” and he was willing to face the jail time for his decision. Miraculously, they decided he could stay because of his other critical skills. “I became an office squirt because I could type and had brains,” Zaleski says, emphasizing his Long Island accent and vernacular. 


He saw one of those men later. Zaleski asked what happened. “We all got shot and two of us are dead,” his buddy told him.  He decided to embrace their sacrifice for freedom -- so he stopped wearing shoes in 1972. Understandably so, people would ask why he didn’t wear shoes and Zaleski would respond combatively, “because I don’t feel like it; you got a problem with dat?”


In 2005, after years of slowly destroying the family business he inherited and a horrible divorce – all problems stemming from his arrogance and bitterness (most likely learned behavior from his father) – a girl asked the same question he had been hearing for the last 33 years. “Why don’t you wear shoes?”


“I had been doing it so long,” Zaleski recalls, “I couldn’t really have an answer. God spoke through that child.” What were you doing? He questioned of himself. 

(Continued tomorrow)

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