Living with PTSD for Fifty Years, by Scipio

In the years during and after the Vietnam War I read about some Vietnam Vets going berserk and shooting up places.  Post Offices seemed to be a favorite spot and that’s where the term “going postal” came from.  Another favorite place was the VA. Since my first visit to the VA three years ago, I can see why.

I saw PTSD eat up two of my closest friends from high school.  They shared stories of the things they experienced in the 101^st Airborne and the Second Marines in Vietnam.  It was horrible. I was no help to them because I incorrectly thought they would “get over it”. Besides I did not know what to do and little was known of it then.  I thought by having similar experiences and lending them an understanding ear would help.  It didn’t.  They needed intervention, and I didn’t know it at the time or what to do even if I did.  Mental illness, in all its forms, has a very low priority in America even today.

Bob, the Marine, (not his real name) told me in detail the first person he killed; it was a woman. One day I asked him how he got his Purple Heart. He nonchalantly said it was when an explosion sent shrapnel ripping into the side of his head accompanied by body parts of his buddy beside him.  He went through stuff like that.

Bill, airborne, stationed at Hue during Tet I believe, didn’t talk much about it.  When I asked him about his Purple Heart, he just smiled and said “it was just a lot of shit going on.” I had read stories about Hue, some hand-to-hand combat there, and I could imagine what he went through.

I didn’t experience anything like that.  My most traumatic experience was coming up on a little eight-year-old boy we accidently killed seeing him lying there with his brains spilling out of his head. Another time a ¾ ton truck turned over trapping some of our guy’s underneath.  I helped roll the truck off them and assisting them with limbs going in directions they shouldn’t have.  There were scarry nights on the DMZ locked, loaded, and ready. Then the glorious return home when I was psychologically ambushed at the St. Louis Airport by a bunch of hippies, pointing at my medals asking, “Is this one for murder? Is this one was for killing babies?” and on and on.

I knew I returned a different person, but the way I saw it I had matured in many ways and I now had a world perspective I did not have when I left. I didn’t curse before the Army, but now I cursed all the time and didn’t care who heard me, even my mom. Things and people, especially politicians, I had respect for before, I now held in contempt.

I went to college just because I had the GI bill, not to get an education. I wanted to chill out and enjoy all the “free love” going around campus.  I didn’t know you had to pass classes!  I thought you just paid four years tuition, have fun, and afterwards settle down and get a job.  A letter from the Dean’s office the summer after my first year notified me my 1.26 GPA landed me on academic probation. Further it stated if I wanted to continue my studies, I needed at least a 3.5 next semester. A light bulb went off in my head! So that’s what that 2.0 and 3.0 etc. conversations my classmates were talking about meant?

I pulled it out academically, but failed miserably with girlfriend relationships that kept falling apart.  I never wanted to break up with any of them, but things just seemed to come off the rails, and my girlfriends got hurt. I knew I was responsible, but I didn’t know what I was doing wrong.

After college I got married to the most loving and tolerant person in the world.  She saved me, but at her own personal cost being with me.  Although my children got my best, they also got my worst.  I am sure they are each to some degree scarred by it today as adults.

Yes, I had heard of PTSD, but I thought that was for Vietnam Vets like my high school buddies.  But I didn’t go to Vietnam; I went to Korea. Besides nothing horrible happened to me like Bob and Bill.

As the years rolled by, about every five years, I changed jobs finding fault with my employer. Frustrated I tried different career paths winding up quitting within five years there also.  I don’t have a cushy pension for over fifty years of work because of it. An avid sports fan and athlete, I was interested in all sports; high school, college, and pro, but I began to lose interest. Today I only care about one college football team and my interest there is starting to fade.  I have been a fan since 1962, but this may be my last year pulling for them.  I was once an avid movie buff.  One year I had literally seen every movie nominated for an Oscar. Now I only go to movies about once every three to five years and that’s because it’s done as a family event forcing me to go. I used to be a sharp dresser, dressed in the latest styles.  Now, except for Sunday go-to-meeting clothes, most my clothes come from a thrift shop. I have grown a beard, not because I think it’s cool, but because it minimizes the amount of personal grooming, I have to make daily.

I didn’t have a hint that I may have PTSD until twenty years ago when I had, for lack of a better word, a “flashback” of something bad that had happened to me over twenty years before, and it was completely out of my conscious memory until that moment.  I brushed it off and never thought it might be PTSD, never made the connection, besides I wasn’t in Vietnam, right? Case closed.

Twenty years later circumstances forced me to change to another medical practice.  I had never seen my new doctor, nor he I.  He came into the room to examine me, and though I never knew him, I could tell he was pretty much shaken up about something.  He said, “I want you to tell me everything that has happened to you physically; any moles, warts, operations, etc.  Tell me Everything. I just had to tell my favorite patient they only had six months to live.  I had missed something previously.  That patient is my wife.”

I said, “even the compound fracture of my right arm when I was sixteen?” He said, “Everything”. I was like that scene in the movie, “Goonies”, (without the crying part) where the fat kid, Chunk, spilled his guts about the worst thing he ever did was to bring some fake puke to the movie theatre, throw it from the balcony above to the patrons below making everyone in the theatre start puking.  I told the Doc everything from my cancer surgery to the warts on my big toe.

When I finished, he looked at me and said, “I think you have PTSD from the issues you tell me you are having like trouble sleeping, sleep apnea, hyper vigilance, and other issues.” I was stunned.  I said, “But, I wasn’t in Vietnam.” He said you didn’t have to be.   You just have to be traumatized.  Some people get PTSD from rape or bad car wrecks.  It’s not just Vietnam Vets.” He said, “Are you willing to go to a psychiatrist for an evaluation?” I said, “Sure”, thinking nothing would come of it.

I went to the psychiatrist, we talked, and he said I definitely had PTSD.  Out of nowhere I burst out crying. Up until that time in my life, I didn’t cry.  I had no idea.  Deep down inside I felt something was wrong with me, but I didn’t know what.  Following this it was ten years later before I went to the VA seeking help because I thought my story was wimpy compared to Bob and Bill’s, and they were comparatively. I felt like a Pansy letting the little that I experienced affect me so much. I was embarrassed.  What would “real men” think of me if they found out?

How do I live?  Without thinking, I always sit in a restaurant in the back corner even if I have to wait for that table.  I get startled when a sudden loud noise happens behind me, and stuff like that.  I sleep with a Glock by my bed. I carry everywhere I go.

But, that’s the easy part.  It’s being in a “thousand-yard stare” and not knowing it only to hear your wife say, “Where have you been?” That leaves me empty. Or it’s my grandkids asking me to stay longer at family gatherings which makes me feel I am cheating them leaving early. It’s wondering what psychological damage I inflicted upon my children.  It’s the painful memories of broken relationships I caused. Its wondering how much better my marriage might be. It’s all the friends I no longer have. It’s wondering is there something else down in my deep subconscious that is going to come roaring out someday?  That’s the horror movie I live in, and I’m its main star.