Eyewitness to Combat - Misplaced Guilt Trip - Even the Survivors Lost (Survivor's Guilt)

This is possibly the most intense and heart-wrenching of the reminiscences of Pat, the young Marine who served two tours in Vietnam, whose recollections we are excerpting in this "Eyewitness to Combat" series.

 

He is shot five times, in the arm, leg, back and head, seriously wounded, medivaced out of Vietnam, and recovering stateside in Balboa Naval Hospital, when he gets some news that will change his life forever. If you read the foregoing episodes in the series, you learn a little of what the combat he saw was like. 

 

But let's pick up in his own words with how that affected him:

 

"Almost everything that I had done and experienced generated a corrosive guilt that continued to diminish any hope of a joyful life that I could have had. But the one event which brought overwhelming guilt and probably attributed more to my “death wish” than anything else was the one event which I had not even taken part in.

My unit had been completely destroyed and I wasn’t there to die with them. I was a coward: I had run away and hid and because of this, I was responsible for the complete elimination of “Bravo” Company.

 

That is what my mind was telling me -- even though I was stationed in the Balboa Naval Hospital, being treated for severe wounds that I had received when my platoon had been ambushed and annihilated on Hill 861 S. in Khe Sanh, South Vietnam.

 

I was notified of this event when a Navy Corpsman came into the ward that I was confined to and said “Weren’t you in Bravo Company, 1/9? I found an article in Time magazine that has an article about them getting wiped out. I thought you would like to read it.”

 

He could not have affected me more if he had hit me in the stomach. I read it and I silently cried for the first time since I had returned.

 

I was completely overcome with shame, and survival guilt took up permanent residence in my heart: I swore that I would never let the memory of them get lost, and that I would always carry the torch for them.

 

I looked out the window and there on the street outside of the Hospital entrance a large “anti-war” demonstration was in progress and the hatred was directed at the wounded vets while my beloved Bravo Company was gone, they were all dead, wounded or missing. I was twenty years old and I absolutely hated America.

 

The article epitomizes what the misplaced guilt trip was all about: “115 Dead, 276 Wounded, 26 Missing, A Battle Without Victory: The Wipe-Out of Bravo Company.” There were no winners, only losers again; even the survivors lost."

And then, in an echo of why other teenagers self-harm, such as by cutting themselves, in an attempt to "balance" the pain externally with the pain they feel within, we hear Pat describe the aftermath for him:

 

"I spent the next 35 years trying to find out “why some people survived and others didn’t”. More specifically, I needed to understand why I had “dodged the bullet” when so many other Marines had “bought it”. I constantly sought a place where the pain going on around me and outside of me matched the pain inside my head and which was literally eating me alive.

 

As weird as this sounds, the more I hurt physically, the calmer I felt. Only physical pain could suppress the mental pain that was always present. It was as if I had to be constantly punished just to survive. "

Despite the thousands of words that Pat has written to describe his experiences, his description of this episode in his life made me wonder if it in fact was the pivotal episode of all.  As to why he didn't deck the world's most insensitive human being -- the Navy Corpsman who "dropped" that bit of "news" in his lap?  Pat says that if he hadn't been lying in the hospital bed, shot up and paralyzed on one side, he would have been happy to.  I can easily see why.