What Happened After Your War
Proof of combat in the stressor letter is important in obtaining a disability rating for PTSD, especially if service records are incomplete or lost. The combat shows that you have had trauma beyond the normal range of human life. Showing combat stressors is enough to obtain the service connection .
But what really determines the rating percentage is the part of the stressor letter which I call After Your War. It is here that you record the symptoms of PTSD which have changed your life since the war. And it is here that your actual percentage is figured, based on your ability to support yourself when compared to non-veteran peers. This can be difficult because many veterans, in addition to blocking out horrible experiences, do not realize that many of their adverse behavior patterns and thoughts are directly related to war.
For example(a short version): I grew up in a tough Cincinnati neighborhood called Northside, I belonged to the Upper Northside gang, a loose knit group with about 15-20 members. We fought other gangs, and never went out of our own neighborhood unless in a group. Your reputation was based on how good you could fist fight. Fifteen of us went into the military. Six were killed and four wounded. Vietnam virtually destroyed the group we once had.
Upon returning from the war, I dropped back into the same style of living and fighting with the survivors of the group. We never talked about the war or those who were killed. But I had started carrying a gun. I would pull it out and fire it when threatened by strangers, usually when I was drunk and meaner than hell. If the person was a stranger, I didn’t care what I did to them. (I stopped carrying the gun for awhile after I almost shot a woman during a fight when six of us were attacked by about 30 people). I picked up a reputation of being crazy. Many people I had known for years were suddenly afraid of me. I came back to a job at the Post Office, but I was wild and couldn’t take orders anymore. I quit after four months. I couldn’t sleep except in two hour shifts. My mother used to look at me and cry because she didn’t know me anymore. She said I was cold and showed no emotion.
I got married because most of my friends did. The marriage lasted three years and I had over 30 jobs during that time. My jobs always ended the same: me attacking the boss or telling the boss off.
I jumped all over the country, singing in a band. No one ever knew that I was a Marine Vietnam veteran. In 1977, my mother died, and I didn’t feel any emotion. In 1978, I returned to Cincinnati after living in Atlanta with some psycho woman who I thought might kill me in my sleep. It seemed that I was always putting myself in situations where I could be under stress and live on the edge.
That day in 1978 when I came home, I had nine cents, no car, and a gun. At age 31, I didn’t even have a dime or a future. And I kept thinking about my best friend who was killed on July 4, 1968 in an ambush where I should have died, too. He was a better man than me. Why did he die and I live when I had no future? I had failed at everything I tried. I sat on a hill looking out over my old neighborhood, crying and holding the gun to my head. All my friends were gone. I felt like an old, lonely, useless man. I decided right then that if I did kill myself that Vietnam had me, too. I couldn’t let that happen.
A few months later my father died. Once again, I didn’t feel any emotion. Death was like the rain in Vietnam. It happened and you lived with it. I married again in 1981. I slept with a loaded gun, and my wife said that I tried to strangle her in my sleep and kept calling her a gook. We couldn’t go to fireworks or stadiums, loud noises would put me on the ground, and I had no friends I could trust.
Still, I accepted all this as normal behavior for me, and felt that I was the only one in the world who acted this way. The marriage lasted two years. I finally went to a Veterans Outreach Center because I had heard that I could find mercenary work there. I wanted to die in combat, I guess.
The counselor handed me a booklet with symptoms of PTSD, and I went into shock. It described me. I couldn’t believe it. All those years, I thought it was just me. I didn’t know that what I had been experiencing was typical for other combat vets. I joined group therapy for five years, filing a claim in 1986. It was approved from my stressor letter and service records: first 30%, then 50% on appeal, primarily due to my work record and how I acted or may tend to react.
This is why I tell veterans to take their time composing the stressor letter. The very act of writing it can bring terror by just remembering some of the things we have done since the war. For most combat veterans, combat stressors are a matter easily proved by service records.
After The War can be as horrible as recalling combat because we have finally accepted that something isn’t right. It can also be part of the healing process, and a step toward controlling PTSD. We can’t change the past, but we can learn to control what we do in the future.
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