Blog 94 October 2, 2014 Gary

The journey continued.  Just when you think you have closure, you don’t. 

Sue convinced me to sign up for VA medical care.  I have resisted for a short time, only forty-seven years or so.  I didn’t want to use something that I didn’t feel worthy of.  Walking in the door made me nervous, but all was good.  Nice facility and nice people.  I signed up for a physical and told the doctor about my fatigue.  Then I was off on a series of scans and MRIs, treadmill, and such.  All good, except I was low in vitamin D, had a large kidney stone (dormant for over ten years) and some deterioration of the lower spine and lungs simply due to age.  So basically it was all good.  However, I didn’t feel any better, and I noticed every time I went to the VA for anything I teared up.

I was on to another chapter.  My wife connected me with Lori Carter, LCSW, and I did a 14-hour Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Intensive.  The EMDR cleared most of my trauma from Vietnam.  After another individual session the tearing stopped.  I walked around the hospital to my spots where I would sit and cry, and I was good.  It was now just a hospital.  I could breathe.

            However, I always seem to find another door to the dark.  One of my recent clients turns out to be the daughter of a Marine and a Vietnamese woman from Nha Trang where I was stationed.  In other words, she was one of the children left behind during the war, half white and half Vietnamese.  She had divorced her American husband and now they were back together working with me in therapy.  I disclosed that I had been stationed in Nha Trang.  They told me Nha Trang had changed.  Later on they emailed me a picture they had taken of the old air base.

            The picture triggered emotions for me.  They explained that they couldn’t get on the base, but the picture taken through the fence around the hanger gripped me.  I called Lori for more EMDR.  I was able to shrink that picture and close the screen so to speak.  Then it triggered the images of my office on the base, and the people I worked with.  More EMDR.

            It was astonishing to me what happened next.  I felt this dark energy.  I remember feeling somewhat harassed by my sergeant and the first sergeant.  They wanted to take me downtown and get me laid.  They offered to pay.  I was engaged, and always had my girl’s picture on my desk.  I was studying my catechism, and was baptized at the Cathedral in Nha Trang.  I was a good, Catholic boy. 

            In the process of doing the EMDR I realized that they may have been addicted to alcohol and sex, but I was just as addicted to my fantasy way of being with the woman who was my fiancé.  I was probably a pain in the ass with my obsessing about the mail and about her.  They were just trying to break the spell, and connect with me.  It really wasn’t so much about getting laid or drunk.  That was a WOW moment.  The darkness with which I held them and that office went away.  I wanted to thank them for caring or at least attempting to wake me up.

            In my work with the couple mentioned above, and hearing about the woman’s trauma as an outcast in Vietnam for being half white, I realized that I wanted to do further research on the men I served with.  I went back to the journal I kept in Vietnam, and made a list of the names of men I had mentioned.  I had looked for the first sergeant and my sergeant in the past without any luck.  I had noticed the armorer’s name before, and realized he had to be the one who issued me my M16, my pot (helmet), and one hundred rounds the night of the grey alert when we prepared for an attack.  

            “We” sounds strange as it actually felt like Sam F. and I where the only ones on base, and Sam was in a separate room.  Yes, somewhere out there were some guards on the fence a distance apart.  But talk about feeling alone and disconnected.  More like abandoned.  This was my post, and in the military to leave your post is an offense meriting court martial.  What was I supposed to do?  Turn my desk over and fire from there through a shuttered window?  Open the shuttered window and then turn over my desk?  Wait in the scant light for directions?  WTF big time.  All the time, in the NOW, I still live there part-time.

            Sam F. seemed more scared than I.  All our senior staff and most of the base personnel lived downtown.  We were on our own.  The last intelligence report I heard said there were 5,000 NVA (North Vietnamese Regular Army) in the mountains preparing to attack us, but we didn’t know when.

            I smirked and half laughed.  It had to be a joke.  If we were attacked we had no defensive perimeter.  Command had ordered that the sand bag bunkers be dismantled.  They were replaced during a base beautification project with little white fences and freshly planted palm tree saplings.  My windows were shuttered to keep the heat out but the walls were thin boards with Styrofoam gun boxes inserted between the studs for insulation.  We had no firing positions.  We were dead if we were attacked.  I had put a lot of faith and allegiance into duty, honor and country, my training, the Air Force and my superiors, and it was immediately shattered. 

            My journal provided no contact information for Sam F.  I had to search the Internet.  I found his name along with Airman D.’s, and a couple others on a web site, and my first reaction was that they had been killed.  I was really upset, to say the least.  Then I realized they were listed as the honor guard for someone else who had been killed in Nha Trang.  

            That brought up the memory before our situation, or after.  I can’t remember.  One of our guys from Security Police was left in the bush while protecting the repair of a downed chopper.  Our lieutenant forgot him.  Our guys were not trained to fight and survive in the jungle.  Shit!  Fortunately, he ran into some of our Special Forces and was brought in.  Talk about abandoned.  No doubt he will have that one to remember.  He complained to his Congressman.  He and his family were just a tad pissed, and rightly so.  I have to call both incidences incompetence and arrogance on the part of command.  It somehow feels good to say that.  There you go.  That is the truth.

            I found Sam F. in two different places, but it was obvious the addresses were old.  I only had a phone number, so I called.  A machine answered.  I left a message, and the next day I received a message that just said, “Call me back.”  I did, and it was Sam F.  He said he didn’t remember much, but he would try to recall some names.  We exchanged email addresses.

            He sent me an email, and said he had lived with my sergeant and his girlfriend.  I wrote back asking if he had any contact information for Bobby R. S.  It turns out they both left a girlfriend and a child behind.  Sam said his girlfriend’s family was from the north and at the end of the war they probably went back north to join the rest of her family where they would have been killed.  So terribly sad.  He didn’t answer me regarding Sgt. S.

            As I come to rest on the subject now I feel like I am bringing home that twenty-two-year-old I had been in Vietnam.  It has taken years of work to bring him home.  Maybe because there was nothing anyone else could do that would have done it anyway.  I realize now that a brass band, or a hero’s welcome, or a girlfriend’s embrace would probably not have done it.  No matter how many “welcome homes” I might receive, I was the only one who could bring that twenty-two-year-old home.  I now have a sense of him, that part of me, being here. 

            I shared this feeling with my psychologist friend, Barry.  He said when in his forties, he had burned out in his private practice, became sick, and took five years off in Mexico.  On an evening when he was returning to his villa in Yelapa he found himself being followed.  Someone was walking on the trail behind him.  He felt scared.  He stopped and reflected back to the sense of being his eighteen-year-old self.  It was perhaps a healing moment for him as well.

            I now no longer feel so desperately alone.  I went to a former client’s wedding reception during this time, and Roberta, a Native American shaman friend of mine I’ve known for years, was there.  We chatted and we took the only two places left at the table.  I was then sitting across from another Vietnam vet, and we had a brief conversation about our experiences.  He denied any PTSD, but he said maybe it was because he was deployed from Germany where he was having a great time, and returned to Germany.  I still thought it was interesting to land there.  

            I left that party and went to Los Altos for my High School Reunion.  I found my old friend Dean and his wife.  Dean and I had worked together for PG&E, so it was always great to see him.  I mingled and chatted.  Somehow Vietnam came up, and I realized several of my classmates had been there.  Dave C. was suffering from severe PTSD; he has a one hundred percent disability due to the effects of Agent Orange.

I brought up the name of Robert Burns, and a woman said he was in terrible shape after Nam and would smoke and let the cigarette burn down through his fingers.  He had died two years after his return from Nam.  That would make him twenty-three years old.  That was hard to hear.  It left me with a new sense of pain.  Why couldn’t anyone help him? I had seen him in San Francisco while I was on leave before I had gone to Vietnam.  I saw him on Broadway as a buddy and I were going to a Dave Brubeck concert.  I had to yell at him.  “Hey Burns!  It’s me man from San Mateo High.”  He didn’t recognize me, and it seemed to take a bit of effort before I could connect with him.  He said he was in the Marines.  He said he couldn’t join us because he was waiting for a friend.  That was the last time I ever saw him.  I was plagued with the story of Burns.  The red-headed kid from San Mateo High who was a good athlete. “Don’t mean nothin’” they used to say in Nam.  Pain.

            Two days later as I am running my trail, trying to put my earphones on, I’m thinking about Robert B., and I almost run two women off the trail.  Almost two years later, at almost the same spot on this two-mile trail, whom do I run into? It’s Roberta and her sister.  We exchange “I love you” and “déjà vu,” and I go back to running.  It’s very strange to have this running all together.  The trail I now run is relatively flat, and it provides a challenge in weather, but it is not The Hill, and I no longer need it.

Not long after I received a call from a Vietnamese woman who wanted to say “thank you” for helping her country.  This I was not expecting.  As I am on the phone with this stranger a helicopter just happens to whop-whop-whop above my car while I am on my phone.  I chuckle about this perfect little test of my usual triggers, and find that it is no longer a trigger.  The woman and I agree that the hardships in Vietnam have made both of us wiser and stronger.  I appreciate her “thank you” and am taken by the call.

            Maybe in a way it’s all coming together.  My position attached to the Air National Guard as a volunteer may be running its course.  The colonel who was supposed to take command changed his mind.  He would have been a key player to move our unit forward.  Now we are like a three-legged horse, and the new wing commander may not find a need for us.  Now my colleague for the last two years, and senior to me, is leaving.  I am again left to command alone.  A two-legged horse, no, just a two-legged person, how perfect.  I am very aware, and believe, that we create or are given exactly what we need to learn or what we need to get over.

Maybe our walk is complete.  A necessary walk of healing that we were destined to do.  But right now it’s time for us to stop all of this writing.  Time to climb The Hill again.  Time to gear up and gather up my brother.  What is next for us I don’t know, and we are always grateful for a walk up The Hill to help us find out.

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