Recovering from the War - A Guide for All Veterans, Family Members, Friends, and Therapists

Introduction

Recovering from the War is a book for women who have relationships with Vietnam veterans. Its subject is the problems that arose out of the Vietnam experience itself, and what we can and cannot do about them.

I needed to deal with a Vietnam combat veteran, my husband. His experiences created problems that almost destroyed our marriage, but no one had anything to offer except Valium. I needed to know that his problems were not my fault and that I could not cure them, but nobody could tell me that either. I'm writing the book I wish I'd had back then, in the hopes that my experiences and those of other women and of our vets will help you.

Perhaps you've picked up this book because you have to deal with a Vietnam veteran, too: son or father, husband, lover, or friend. One of the problems Vietnam veterans face is the incredible ignorance of the rest of the population about what went on in Vietnam. I hope to help fill that gap. I also need to know about Vietnam so it won't happen to my son. Perhaps you do, too.

Since the publication of Chickenhawk, a memoir of the year he spent as a combat helicopter pilot in Vietnam, my husband, Robert Mason, has received countless letters. Vets have thanked him for telling it like it was, and non-vets for helping them understand what it was like to be in Vietnam. Mental-health professionals have told me repeatedly how helpful Chickenhawk has been to other vets. If they aren't feeling anything it helps break through their numbness, and if they are having problems it helps them to know that Bob did, too. Bob will tell you that he did no more than the other helicopter pilots in Vietnam. He will also tell you how lucky he was that he was not a grunt. Grunts went through hell.

"You'll never know what you guys meant to us grunts," Greg Cook wrote Bob from Cleveland, one of the first fan letters he ever got. If you're saying "What's a grunt?" and you're involved with a vet, you need to know. A grunt is an infantryman, the guy with the rifle in his hand out humping the boonies. Humping the boonies? Going out on patrols, pack on back, ammo clips, grenades, and canteens hung all over him, walking. Helicopter pilots took them in and brought them out when they were wounded, or done with that day's, or week's, or month's sweep.

In another of Bob's fan letters, a woman wrote Bob that he was a hero for flying into all those hot LZ's (landing zones under hostile fire). Her husband had been "just in the artillery," no hero. You probably know that being "just in the artillery" could have been pretty hairy, along with a lot of other jobs. As a matter of fact, lots of vets have told Bob they had no idea being a helicopter pilot was so much work. "I always thought you guys dropped us off and went back, got drunk, and fooled around with the nurses," admitted Mike Costello, author of A Long Time from Home and a LRRP (long-range reconnaissance patrol) in Vietnam, when he first met Bob. "I had no idea that you went back and got another load, and then another, all day long."

"Hey, that's what we wanted you guys to think." Bob laughed. "We used to lie about it all the time."

Men.

Two million eight hundred thousand men is a conservative estimate of the number who served in Vietnam. The U.S. Department of Defense doesn't know the exact figure, which may surprise the reader but will not surprise any veteran of the Vietnam War. They don't expect much from the government.

Recently, Bob and I talked to a history class at the University of Florida. One of the students said, "I thought with all the recognition and the Memorial and all that Vietnam veterans would be okay now."

"You are laboring under a misapprehension if you think the United States government built that Memorial, or organized the parade, or anything else," I informed him. "The Vietnam Memorial was paid for by money the vets raised themselves. Vietnam veterans gave the Memorial to the government." My eyes were flashing, and I was trembling, and suddenly I felt really badly for this young guy who was only trying to understand. I'm glad he was trying.

Vets do need and want to be understood, yet for a number of reasons they have a hard time talking about Vietnam. When they came back no one wanted to hear what it was like. We all know the feeling of starting to confide in someone who turns away. We never try again.

Vietnam vets are also afraid that most people can't face what they had to face. Some combat vets fear that no one could love them if they knew what they had to do to stay alive. They also feel that talking about it will bring it all back. They'll crack. They'll go crazy. They'll cry and you won't respect them anymore. Or they'll experience flashbacks to Vietnam or to the years when they first got back and felt violent and self-destructive. They're afraid to set off a volcano of feelings. It's safer to forget.

Many men don't feel that they were combat vets, so they have no way to understand why Vietnam still bothers them. They don't want to talk about it, because they think it shouldn't bother them. What about the guy who was in the rear, who was greeted with "How many babies did you kill?," when all he did was run a forklift at Cam Rahn Bay and endure the occasional rocket attack and the daily harassment of the lifers? He doesn't know that rocket attacks are traumatic stressors whether you're hit or not. He doesn't know that every human being on the face of the earth has to talk out traumatic incidents with someone, not necessarily a psychiatrist, or the incidents go on hurting and hurting and coloring everything else in life.

Other veterans succeeded in forgetting Vietnam and are annoyed by those with problems. I hope this book will heal some of that split, as luck is the only thing that sets them apart. It is not their strong character, their guts, their morals, their good family background, just the same blind luck that kept a bullet from adding their names to the names on the Wall. Many of them do not realize that workaholism and lack of emotional connection can be symptoms of stress just like substance abuse and other more visible problems.

I'm not saying that all Vietnam veterans have problems, but that if a vet does, he should see himself and be seen by his family, friends, and society as normal, not defective. As John Wilson, Ph.D., and Gustave Krause, M.A., two respected researchers in the field, put it: "If conditions are favorable, especially if there is a supportive recovery environment, the individual may gradually assimilate and 'work through' the trauma….If conditions are not favorable, the survivor may need help in the working-through process.." Or to put it in my terms, luck.

"At least 250,000 and possibly as many as 500,000 Vietnam veterans who need various forms of help in order to have a productive life…unhampered by problems of adjustment…" exist in this country. These vets display some or all of the symptoms of PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), a normal reaction to the stress of battle.

People with PTSD symptoms are hard to live with, and more have killed themselves since the war than died in the actual conflict (according to several reports, starting with one by the National Council of Churches in the late seventies). Living with traumatic experiences buried inside is difficult. Sometimes it's impossible. A lot of the guys credit their wives or girlfriends with keeping them alive. We love them and we want them to be happy. We can't stand it when we see them in pain. Why does it hurt so much? I'm hoping this book will give you some of the answers.

My husband, Bob, went to Vietnam as a helicopter pilot with the 1st Cavalry Division in August 1965. Jack, our son, was a year old. Bob and I wrote each other every day. Once he wrote that he was surprised to be alive, but usually he told funny stories about the army or just said he loved me. In one letter written after he'd been there eight months he counted up the days he hadn't flown—ten. He was sent to the 48th Aviation Company three months before he came home. The stories got funnier, but he wrote that they had to start giving him tranquilizers so he could sleep.

We moved to Texas, where he taught at the U.S. Army Primary Helicopter School. For a while he even flew two shifts, training guys in the H-23 in the morning and the TH-55 in the afternoon.

Bob began to have dizzy spells at Fort Wolters. He was grounded twice and finally sent to Fort Sam Houston to be evaluated. He came home with a million-dollar piece of paper that said he had combat fatigue and could never be sent back to a combat zone. He also came back with a look on his face that I will never forget as long as I live.

"There are kids there, Patience," he said—Fort Sam was the burn treatment center for the army—"eighteen-year-old kids with their faces burnt off from napalm. They aren't ever going to look any better, and they have their whole lives in front of them."

When his obligation to the army was completed, he left—a grounded and, in his eyes, useless pilot. We went back to school at the University of Florida. He studied fine arts, I worked and took English courses. Bob went to the VA for the Valium the army had started him on and was declared a 50 percent disabled veteran for "nervousness." He had all the symptoms for which he would have been rated 100 percent disabled for PTSD, except that the diagnosis didn't exist until...