PTSD From War

Leaving the deck of the USS Okinawa in an H-34 chopper/BLT 1/3 Vietnam 1967

PTSD From War

  I read an article this morning about a Navy Public Relations Officer taking his son to Vietnam for a visit. He had spent six months in Saigon during the war and wanted to see the place again.

  He talked about Hanoi, and how the people make 8.00 a day and work seven days a week, and how the Uncle Ho Burial place, where he was on display, was the highlight of the peoples’ lives.

  The more I read the angrier I got, from their claiming to have shot down 35,000 American war planes to their claiming to have won the war. (When you lose three million and the other side loses 58,000, that’s not a win. Politics ended that war and got many Americans killed. We didn’t lose nothing on the ground.)

  Then, he talked about how the Hanoi government claimed the American prisoners were all treated good and showed pictures of them playing volleyball and other ridiculous stuff.

   I know most of the Vietnamese who were alive when I was in Vietnam are gone...but I can’t get my hatred of that war or that country out of my mind. It’s not even so much hate anymore. It’s a rage at how that place changed all of our lives.

  I could never go back there. I left myself over there, and what came home was someone new who was lost. I didn’t even know who I was. I came home and sat in a chair and just stared straight ahead, not believing I was home, and wondering what I was going to do now that I was home. My parents didn’t know me. My mother would stare at me, knowing something had changed but she felt helpless to understand what was wrong.

  I couldn’t go back and I don’t know if I’ve ever gone forward in the sense that I left the war behind.

  I didn’t understand PTSD when I came home. I didn’t even know it existed or that I had it. I understand it better now, and I imagine I used to be a lot worse than I am now. I know I was because at one point I blacked my living room windows out with garbage bags so know one could possibly know where I was inside and take a shot at me.

  But even now after dark, I can’t sit in a room to relax unless I have the shades drawn.

  My feelings have never changed about Vietnam. Some guys can go back to the actual place and make peace with themselves. I could never do it. I would either breakdown and cry or I would want to begin shooting. In my heart, I still feel that Vietnam and the  people  are still my enemies.

  I imagine a lot of people from WW2 and Korea feel the same way about their enemies and their countries. The same with veterans of the new Iraq and Afghan Wars.

  Like many vets with PTSD, I try to keep it hidden. I do believe if you were in Vietnam  or any conflict and under fire or forced to deal with the dead and wounded, you have some symptoms of PTSD. You are not the same person you were after you came home. Some veterans can’t handle it as well as others.

  I believe PTSD is worse for Vietnam veterans in part because we felt everyone in Vietnam hated us and everyone back home hated us, and we didn’t know why the people back home hated us.

   I get angry today when the media and others call anyone who even joins the reserves a hero. If you are in boot camp you are a hero, if you are on a ship you are a hero, if you are in the military at all you are a hero.

  To me, a Marine with PTSD, this is overkill; an attempt by the media to now display phony patriotism. It has nothing to do with the actual veterans. Their families will always consider them heroes. This is an over-attempt by a media that hates the military to make people think they respect the military...when they actually think anyone who serves is a fool, just like they thought anyone who served in Vietnam was a baby killer.

  I guess I’m just one of those people who can never go back or make peace with myself about that war,

 from the S-2 Report Newsletter

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