Healing Combat Trauma

Three Wars, Three Voices: PTSD and the Catharsis of Writing about What You've Seen

Two Marines and a soldier from different eras, separated by generations, write about what they've seen in different wars, and find their way to catharsis, through writing.  At just over 500 posts on this blog, over the last two years, we take this occasion to also take stock on what catharsis there can be through attempting to touch the darkness, and come away unscathed.

We've been reading the superb "Eyewitness to Combat" recollections of one young Marine Vietnam veteran, Pat, who spent 40 years trying to put together his story -- ostensibly to leave it to his family, but I believe, equally as much, in an attempt to explain what he endured to himself.  Pat was kind enough, and courageous enough, to send me his story -- and it was hard not to be affected deeply by the story that he told, about his wounds of war.

Another former Marine, Nathaniel Fick, is whose inspiration I followed to start this blog in the first place, when he came back from war -- in his case, Afghanistan and Iraq -- and kept on caring about the state of his Marines, setting a powerful example in that regard which still echoes today.  Fick is a great writer, and a great leader, and it's hard to settle on just one inspirational aspect of what he has to say.  But here's an excerpt from a little-known original essay he wrote for the bookstore, Powells, in Portland, Oregon, linked here, that talks about some of his motivation for writing the exceptional, award-winning, "One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer."  See how he talks about catharsis, the theme of this blog:

One Bullet Away started as a personal collection of stories. I wanted to write them down before they faded, and thought I'd slide the stack of papers into a desk drawer to show my kids someday. Gradually, though, I realized that something more than an archival instinct inspired me to wake up every morning and write. I began to see the book in terms of what it could mean for four concentric rings of people.

Perhaps self-indulgently, I put myself at the center, at least in the beginning. Writing was cathartic. There were days when I could barely see the computer screen through my tears. In time, I was able to look at the story more objectively, but I hope the emotional immediacy of those early days remains.

Next, I felt that my family and friends had to know about the things I'd done, how I'd changed. Otherwise, there would forever be a gulf between us. Many of the stories in the book don't lend themselves to dinner-table conversation, so writing became my way of telling the tale.

I was also thinking about the hundreds of thousands of soldiers and Marines who were in Afghanistan and Iraq with me, or will be there in the future. I hoped to write a book that any one of them could hand to a friend and say, "If you want to understand what it's like, read this."There are older combat stories I feel that way about, books like "With the Old Breed" and "The Naked and the Dead." You read them and feel that you've glimpsed something that transcends a particular time and place. Their human stories are identical to the human stories in Afghanistan and Iraq, and probably to the human stories at Thermopylae and Cannae, too.

The last and largest group on my mind was the huge body of American citizens who care about what's happening in the Middle East but are dissatisfied with the perspectives available to us. As a junior officer, I had just enough rank to see a bit of the big picture and to feel the weight of responsibility. But I was far enough down the food chain that One Bullet Away is still very much written from a grunt's point of view, where life is invariably hot and cold, dirty and dangerous. I think many of the tactical problems we faced ... continue to resonate at the strategic and political levels. In fact, I've already found the book to be a catalyst for discussion about topics like these. It's a jumping-off point, and people are eager to talk about what's happening ...[in the war].

Finally, a warrior from a third war, the Gulf War, Scott Lee.  Social work graduate student, familiar with PTSD from his own case, son, boyfriend, dad.  Scott has a lot on his plate these days, but he chronicles his struggles, victories and defeats with PTSD at this blog, linked here.  Scott is at that very difficult juncture in the road, when you wonder how much truth you should really tell, and at what cost (primarily, to your own psyche).  While you may long for release, each sentence takes its toll -- and ultimately needs to be paced out over time, balancing the desire for purging the horrors of war with the need to retain some semblance of wholeness for tomorrow.  Rob Honzell, like Nate Fick, a First Recon Marine, but from the Vietnam war, understands that intimately: writing his book over the course of two painful years could not be done without setbacks in his own struggle with PTSD.

Valiant warriors, all.  All with a story to tell.  All deserving of our various "attaboys": for their courage in battle, for their desire to help the next generation and their fellow warriors, and their bravery in facing down their own demons to tell the story only they could tell.  Is writing, on balance, an effective way to achieve catharsis? Only somewhat.  At the very least, it puts the past into some sort of perspective, to allow the combat veteran to approach tomorrow as a brand new day, where he may make another survivor's attempt to touch the darkness, and return to tell us what he saw.

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.

The Pain of Injury - "Weakness Leaving the Body," or Outrageous Endurance Contest Few Can Win?

I've known enough Marines to know they all love that saying, "Pain is just weakness leaving the body," or something like that.

Personally, that just sounds like something a particularly sadistic high school gym teacher or coach might have thought up, to help his students puking in the bushes after a particularly hard race or fight, to "reframe" what had really happened, so he wouldn't lose them on the team when they suddenly wanted to run away and quit. 

I don't have any real expertise in the area, but my gut-level sense is, that's just a quote; not a truth.  And a sufficiently-inspiring "quote," that those who hear it can hold onto their status among other people who learn to handle pretty outrageous amounts of pain, all in the guise of being warriors.  (And the congregation said, "OoRah.")

Here's how Pat, our Marine from Vietnam who we've been excerpting material from in the "Eyewitness to Combat" series, and who was seriously wounded in combat, described his own experience with that.  See if you "read" it as "weakness leaving the body," or else, as I do, as tremendous courage that someone could endure that level of outrage/assault and not lose their mind.  If it still isn't shocking/impressive enough, maybe additionally picture that this is happening to someone still in his teens at the time, and functionally cut off from all possible love, support and comfort -- except his other warriors, and, erm, supposedly the hospital staff -- but they're seeming none too warm and fuzzy:

"When I was shot in the arm and leg they were both "through 'n through wounds": meaning they went completely through the limbs.  I also had a head wound and therefore could not (would not) have any anesthesia or pain medications to reduce the intense, awful pain. 

Each morning they would roll me into the cleaning room, put me onto a stainless steel table completely naked (no one had any clothes on except the bandages and a blanket in this field hospital -- a MASH unit in the Army).  The corpsman would then take a stiff brush and dip it into iodine and run it through each wound to the other side to scrub out all dead and infected flesh.  I would pass out from the pain. 

On the first time, I started to cry, tears rolling down my cheek, and looked over to my side.  There was another Marine about my age who almost had no flesh on one side of him.  They were doing the same procedure on him and he just stared up and let the tears flow.  He made no sound, no quiver, just laid there and stared at the ceiling.  After that, I got calm and did the same from there on out. 

I remember a general coming through the cleaning area on one of the occasions and the head of the medical doctors present, probably a colonel, was explaining how each of us "felt no pain" while this was going on, the general was pleased: BullFuckingShit.  But we were MARINES.  "Take pain and embrace it and make it your friend" kind of shit thing.  Oh well, it gave me a perspective of how much physical pain I could endure and I have actually had to endure it several times since leaving Nam.  It never bothered me after that because I knew I could "hack it".  I did and I have..."

Really, what is even possible to add to that?  Just about nothing, except certain and really involuntary respect for what it took to undergo that, and not just shatter into a million pieces, like the shards of a mirror.  "Courage": the dictionary defines it as, "The quality of mind enabling one to face danger or hardship resolutely."  I think that's what we have here, multiplied by every combat veteran who ever endured it, but maybe didn't have the ability of Pat to describe it for you, so you could if not relate, at least possibly understand and respect or admire it for what it is.

Eyewitness to Combat: What Fluttered in the Trees

Another installment in our ongoing "eyewitness to combat" series.  Beware that this materail contains graphic images of war, not for the squeamish or the faint of heart (although the image to the left that appears to be a human being's body is actually a strangely human- shaped tree root):

During June of 1966, the entire Battalion was committed to Operation Liberty.  I was detached out to Foxtrot Company for this one.  We had been running County Fair Operations throughout the 2/9 TAOR and much of the northern part of it was declared as cleared of V.C. 

However, the southern portion south of the La Though River to the Key Lam River was still not cleared and was literally crawling with the V.C. This operation was supposed to be an on line sweep clear to the Key Lam River with each company having their own objective area of responsibility. 

 

We were to secure Route 4 to the river.  This area was where we had made contact with a large V.C. force in April and it really made me jumpy.  Mines and booby traps were everywhere and the area was covered with punji stakes and spider traps. 

 

As we moved across one rice paddy through a tree line to the next rice paddy, we had cleared a safe area. 

 

However, Nick Sparicino or some reason just cut through an unsecured brush area before we reached the cleared area.  He had just stepped into the tree line when he dropped and screamed in agony.  He had stepped into a punji pit.  The bamboo stakes had impaled his lower leg and calf and the punji stakes around the sides of the pit and pointing down had impaled his thigh pinning him there. 

 

He screamed; “Pat, Help Me! God Dammit! It Hurts. Hurry!”  I ran to him and Bradford and I grabbed him under the arms and tried to pull him up enough to get the pressure off of his leg.  Another guy started digging around the outside of the pit to get him out.  This took a really long time because he was so stuck and bleeding like crazy.  

We were all sweating like pigs and he kept slipping.  We would just about have him out and then he would slip and fall back full weight onto the punji stakes and he would scream out in pain.  The muscles in my arms were starting to cramp us but I couldn’t let him go until we got him out.

 

He continued to scream and started really shaking.  This made it harder to hold him up.  We finally got him free and were able to pull all of the stakes out of his leg.  One went up through his foot into his leg; another went up through the calf and ripped it completely open to the bone. He had three really deep punctures in his thigh where the lateral spikes had got him. 

 

Doc gave him morphine, the chopper came in and just like all of the others, he was gone, never to be mentioned again as if he also never had existed.  I had allowed myself to get close to him and we had been through a lot of shit together and he was gone.  I did not like making friends.  I was feeling very alone as we all did.  Hadn’t had been killed in the last of May, and now Nick was gone.

 

The next morning, around the 11th or 12th of June we moved across one large rice paddy, over a dike across a shallow channel and onto a grassy field bordered by very thick and dense tree lines.  The flanks and point squads had already moved across and then the center portion of the platoon came onto the field.  I was still carrying a flame thrower and could not clear the ditch in one jump, so I jumped into the bottom of it. 

 

When Nick had been wounded, I had to take the tank again and its weight caused me to bend at the knees and waist when I landed in the ditch.  There were several loud simultaneous explosions and dirt pelted me all over.  My ears were really ringing. 

 

When I came up, there were Marines knocked down all over the open field and the dry grass started to burn from the explosions.  We had walked into a mine field full of Bouncing Betties and booby trapped with artillery rounds.   This was some real serious stuff.  I was afraid to try to help because of more mines and afraid not to, too. 

 

I thought of De La Fante and dropped my tank and got to the nearest guy.  He was really messed up.  The other squads were now moving in to help.  I thought: “We are dead if they hit us now.” 

 

There were arms, hands, legs, feet, boots, helmets, busted rifles, and body parts and pieces of Marines and blood swaths scattered all over the field.  The fire was burning toward the wounded and dead and setting off other mines, taking out even more Marines.   I thought to myself, “This is some really, really, bad shit!” 

 

Guys were moaning and screaming out in pain all around me and their bodies were convulsing like crazy.  I didn’t know what to do other than to just try to stop the bleeding of the one that was next to me and put out the fire as it came close to someone.  Everyone around me was down.

 

The clothes on the wounded Marines were starting to catch on fire as they lay in its path. Other Marines started to pour out onto the field from the tree lines and rendered whatever aid they could as they began stomping out the flames around our guys and emptying their canteens on the burning Marines. 

 

When this was gone many of those rendering aid began to urinate on their buddies to put out the flames.  This became a very frantic effort as we also began to take sniper fire from the tree-line dropping other guys as they tried to help their wounded buddies. 

More jets came in and dropped 500 pound napalm bombs on the tree-lines and after a while the snipers became silent.  They had been either killed or had simply moved back down into their tunnels and disappeared. 

 

After the fire had swept through the field and the wounded were finally taken out by media, those of us that were left were ordered to get on-line and sweep across the area to police up body parts, equipment and ammo. 

 

As one of the choppers was taking off, I noticed something flutter in an un-scorched nearby bamboo tree-line. I looked closer and it was the face skin and scalp of one of our dead guys.  It had evidently been completely blown off of his skull and had landed in the bamboo thicket and was caught on one of it branches.  The blade wash from the chopper had caused it to flutter and move to where I could see it. 

 

It made me wonder what in the hell we were supposed to be accomplishing other than getting friggin blown away.  We took all of these horrific casualties and didn’t fire one friggin shot at anyone.  Hell, we didn’t even see anyone to shoot back at.  It took us all day just to clear the field of our wounded, dead and spent equipment and body parts.  I hated it then and just wanted to kill something really, really, really bad.

Eyewitness to Combat: Surviving the Casualties with "Out of Sight, Out of Mind"

(This material in this post is reminiscent of and confirms that in the recent one from the OEF/OIF era, that talks about how it's best to "shut down, block out, give up being yourself" -- if you intend to survive the psychological rigors of combat trauma.  Two different wars, separated by decades: same "coping" strategies of combat veterans.)

 

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In our ongoing series of "eyewitness to combat," here are some more remiscences of Pat, the young Marine's, first tour in Vietnam:

 

Sometime around the middle of April, I was still attached to Hotel Company and we had been moving south toward Highway 4.  It was constantly hot as hell and we had been taking sporadic and effective sniper fire and had encountered a few mines and some booby trapped gates.  However, we had not made any real eyeball-to-eyeball contact with the V.C. even though we knew that they were all over the place. 

 

There was an abandoned ARVN Army outpost at Phuong Thu.  We set in our position just north of Highway 4 right across the road bed.  We dug two man fighting holes or fox holes, and where I was, we were defending an area about the size of a football field. 

 

It got dark, real dark with no moon at all, and was very hot and still.  Again no one had slept much during the sweep and the mines had us all keyed up.  Several squads had been sent out to establish ambush sites and listening posts had also been sent out.  We rotated these every night with different squads going out, ambush one night, parameter defense the next, and sweeps during the day.

 

I had just finished my watch and had passed the watch to Worsley.  Just as he was waking up we started receiving mortar and recoilless rifle fire and all kinds of stuff broke out south of the road where one of the ambush squads were.  Tracers were going everywhere.  Worsley jumped up and said; “What the Hell?” 

 

Then the V.C. attacked from across the road and began to really lay down a high level of automatic AK 57 rifle fire. 

 

Through the flashes we could see that there were really a lot of them.  The mortars kept coming but were primarily hitting toward the center of our position.  Everyone was shooting and hollering and we shot a lot of them as they crossed the road toward our position. 

 

Whenever they came upon the road they were completely exposed and made a somewhat easy target.  A bunch of them were killed in the rice paddy in front of us.  Our own mortars were putting up illumination rounds as well as our artillery. 

 

When our 155’s started coming in, the V.C. shelling of our position stopped but they kept coming in to drag off their dead and wounded.  People were getting hit all around us and the call for “Corpsman Up” was going on from everywhere. 

 

After a real intense period of time, they stopped their main attack but continued to probe us the entire rest of the night, again mainly to get their dead.  I was real frightened and excited at the same time and for a while wasn’t real sure of the outcome.  

 

When daylight finally came, we were all completely exhausted from the intensity of the battle and from the gigantic adrenalin rushes we were experiencing.  However when we finally were able to take an accounting of the fire fight, all that we found of our elusive enemy was a whole bunch of blood trails, body parts and some clothing and a few weapons and scattered ammo. 

 

There were only about ten or so V.C. bodies that could be absolutely counted but we had experienced a whole lot more Marine Corps casualties than that: killed and wounded. 

This really did a mind job on us and made the hatred for them very engrained.  We had fought most of the night and the only thing we had to show for it was a bunch of our guys hit.  I think that we had almost 50 plus casualties but it looked like a hell of a lot to me. 

 

Choppers came in the next day to take them out.  There were a bunch of medivac Hueys. 

This was really discouraging.  I thought that finally we had had a real shot at ‘Charlie’ and we still got our asses kicked.

 

After all of the casualties were gone and the battle field was sanitized; we just filled in the fighting holes and continued on south of Highway 4 toward the Key Lam River, again as if those people never existed and to never be mentioned again.  You learned to survive the casualties by “Out of Sight, Out of Mind”.  Once you were hit and removed, it was like you’d basically never existed.

Eyewitness to Combat: A Farce of Filth, Fear and Killing

In our ongoing "Eyewitness to Combat" series, here's another recollection from Pat, the Marine who went to Vietnam right out of high school, and landed in a completely different world.  Beware: this entry has graphic images of war that are not for the faint of heart.

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"For the next couple of days we continued to sweep along rice paddy dikes, hedge rows, and toward some occupied villas that had been labeled V.C.  During this time we hit more mines and took sniper fire during the day and sporadic mortar fire at night, and lost more Marines but never saw the enemy or returned any fire. 

 

No one had fired a shot in their defense.  We couldn’t even hit back.  And all the while, the villagers just looked on as if we were just cattle.  We would hit a mine and they would look up from their field work, grin, and go about their business as if nothing had occurred.  There was just no one to shoot back at.  I felt like I was in a shooting gallery. 

 

A few more of the guys in the flank squads stepped into punji pits and had been impaled with punji stakes set out along the sides of the trails.  A sniper would open up and take out one of our guys; everyone would dive for cover and become impaled with the punji stakes. 

 

Then when we would try to recover our wounded the snipers would continue to take out our guys, piling them up like the flies that my granddad used to swat on his back porch. 

The incoming mortar fire, at night, became so accurate that we would set in just before nightfall; start digging in, and after dark, fill up the holes, move to a different location and re-dig in. 

 

I had been in-country less than 30 days and was real confused about what I was experiencing.  I kept waiting for this great enemy attack.  I thought that we should be doing something; like getting into the damn fight. 

 

This was a terrible feeling: to know that I could die at any time and not have ever been able to even fire a single shot in retaliation.

 

We were all exhausted, no one slept, we were extremely angry, we were miserable and everyone was real pissed off and we just wanted to get a crack at ‘Charlie’. 

Then we moved into the parameter of a small villa below the Cau Do in the Duong Son II hamlet area.  It seemed deserted except for some pigs, a couple of food dogs, and some Water Buffalo that were left in a pit beside a couple of hooches.  There did not appear to be anyone around.  

 

Then we took some sporadic small arms fire from one of the hutches, which dropped one of our guys.  Everyone instantly opened up and were firing and yelling like crazy men.

The lieutenant yelled, “flames up!” and Nick Sparicino and I moved immediately forward at a run.  The lieutenant pointed at one of the hooches and yelled: “Torch It!” 

 

I moved into the open area, struck the match (sparkler like igniter) and started torching it.  My heart was pounding so hard that it make my ears hurt. 

 

I fired into the doorway, through the front two window openings, and then up over the roof.  Suddenly the most frightening scream I had ever heard up to that time started coming from the inside of the hooch and someone ran out of the doorway still burning with napalm. 

 

I instinctively brought the flame down and followed the gook out into the courtyard and stayed on him until I ran out of fuel.  He was holding some form of weapon to his chest and I used that as my target.  The heat was so intense that it actually burned the hair off of my arms and face. 

 

Nick and I moved back.  The hooch went up faster than I had thought it would.  The screams lasted, it seemed to me, a long time.  The gook was knocked to the ground and was jerking, rolling, and thrashing his arms and legs kind of like De La Fante and in some way I felt a weird sort of satisfaction.  Nick shot him several times and then started firing into the hooch where other screams were still coming from. 

 

One of the other Marines had picked up a couple of the pigs and had also thrown them into the flames of the burning hooch.  They squealed like crazy.  The hooch collapsed and everything got real quiet.  The hooch was burning, the gooks were burning, the pigs were burning and there was an air of electrical energy everywhere. 

 

Nick kicked the weapon away from the gook and it was a small child, and the gook was a woman, probably the child’s mother.  Nick and I looked at each other and felt sick.  He just said: “Jesus Christ, Pat” and shook his head. 

 

This was the first time that he had fired his M-14, the first time I had fired the flamethrower in combat, and this just wasn’t the type of real combat that either of us had imagined. 

 

The other squads started shooting the other pigs, the dogs, and even the water buffalo in the pit.  They had also set fire to all of the other hooches in the villa and there were secondary explosions from the weapons and ammo stored in them. 

 

We pulled back a little further as these intensified.  I refilled my tank from Nick’s five gallon re-supply can of napalm.  Everything burned for quite a long time.  More gooks were pulled out of the hooches.  They were black, raw and burned to a crisp. 

 

Bones in the skulls, fingers and legs were showing.  The teeth on their faces showed and that really hit me hard.  I went over to pull one gook into the clearing and the skin on his arm came off in my hands leaving his arm raw red meat and bone. 

 

This also hit me like a blow in the stomach. When we had gotten all of them out of the hooch that Nick and I had torched there were five bodies; a man, two women, a small boy, and a baby. 

 

Their bodies were grotesque and the smell, like burning hair, was pungent and stung my nostrils.  I could never get that image out of my mind, ever.  Nick and I couldn’t even look at each other. 

 

I was 19 years old, Nick was 18, the Lt. was 21 and the Sergeant was the old man at age 25. The Sergeant just called in a body count with everyone having the same value, big or little, man or woman. 

 

If it had not been for the rage that had built up prior to the engagement I didn’t want to be there anymore.  This was not the kind of war that I had come to fight and I still had 12 months more of it to go.  In fact, this process was repeated more or less endlessly over the next three months in the friggin’ rice paddies.

 

I had lost something important, though, and no longer felt in control of my destiny.  I hated everyone who had sent me to Nam.  I was still numb, I was still angry, and now I was also emotionally dead. 

The Final Score of War: Brotherhood 1; Humanity 0

Periodically we come across great quotes (and poetry) that serve to illuminate the human condition in combat.  One is the Augustine of Hippo quote we learned about from Nate Fick, which we blogged about here, in 2006:

"Anyone who looks with anguish on evils so great must acknowledge the tragedy of it all; and if anyone experiences them without anguish, his condition is even more tragic, since he remains serene by losing his humanity." -- Augustine of Hippo. From One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer, by Nathaniel Fick.

Another one is the great Tim O'Brien one, which Jonathan Shay, M.D., Ph.D. wrote about here:

"As Vietnam combat veteran Tim O'Brien wrote in his novel, The Things They Carried: 'A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil ... You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth; if you don't care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty'." -- Achilles in Vietnam, by Jonathan Shay, M.D., Ph.D.

Do you see where this is going yet?  If a war story isn't brutal, isn't ugly, it isn't true.  People do unspeakable things to each other in combat; and the way they survive is focusing on how to get through (the band of brothers, for whom they fight -- the wet bond of blood -- fighting for the one who stands at your shoulder); and numbing themselves out so that they can keep going on, putting one foot in front of the other, but feeling ... nothing... that they can manage to feel at the time, because there simply isn't psychic space, isn't room.  If they feel at all, that will come later.  But not during.  God help the ones who feel, during.  They're likely to not even be able to go on.

To put this another way, they focus on what they can control (almost nothing, literally) -- like being there for the guy or gal next to them; not what they can't control (everything else, including why they're there, whether the mission now or ever did make sense, whether they'll survive, whether they'll ever see home again.)  By putting one foot in front of the other, by continuing to stand shoulder to shoulder, somehow, they make it through, often, just barely, and are left -- usually alone, I might add, and it's shameful that this is the case, these people we ask to fight -- to deal with the repercussions themselves, when they simply aren't capable of integrating such a great (as in mighty), all-encompassing, horrific, and horrifically graphic experience on their own.  Imagine trying to put these pieces together, yourself.  You simply could not; or you'd be the ridiculously rare and most likley superhuman individual if you could.  That's just not a realistic (or fair) expectation at all; so let's dispense with it, and get on with the business at hand: understanding what they actually went through, and developing some compassion -- fellow feeling -- for it.

As you read Pat's reminiscences -- the series of accounts of this young Marine, 17, in Vietnam, which I'm titling "eyewitness to combat" -- think about these things. 

Remember what Ernie Pyle, the greatest and significantly most humane American war correspondent called it?  "The Powerful Fraternalism of the Ghastly Brotherhood of War."  And he made the point, too, that these guys did it -- sometimes the only thing they could adequately focus on was that:

"He did it for the kid next to him; he couldn't let him down.  They needed one another so bad." 

So don't get up on your high horse and be horrified by what Pat's saying, if he has to say something that strikes you as terrible.  War IS terrible; it IS never moral; and it DOESN'T make for perky stories told in three points with a snappy introduction and a great takeaway message to mull on with your popcorn.  It's dirty, messy, evil business that often breaks those who participated in it, who rarely even come to terms with what went on while they were.  And we just stand by and WATCH that, and wonder, or criticize them, for not being able to cope "better" with what they went through.  What would be "better" be, exactly?  Would WE know it if we saw it; would THEY?

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Remember too, you weren't there.  Our "Representative Veteran," Pat, was -- and he's still trying to process why he had to experience that, and what it means to him that he did.  The remiscences, of which we'll only be sharing some, took 40 years to get down in transmissable form.  That's a lot of painful "elephant" being fed through a very small aperture, so that it can be understood by the rest of us -- and hopefully taken to heart, so that we treat this generation of returning warriors better, and don't make them beg for the services, and the appreciation, that they deserve.  Remarkably, scratch a Vietnam vet -- lonely, neglected, cast off by society, EXILED in his own land -- and you find someone who would give half a paired something to see the current generation better than they were.  Not bitterness, a desire for betterness.  Well, most of them at least.  And the bitterness is easily understood, where and when it exists, as to why.

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And by the way -- we never did give these guys an offical, actual "Welcome Home."  Chew on that instead, if you want to point fingers about who should have done what in war.  WE should have done THAT.  And in some small way, by making one combat veteran's experiences known in this manner, on this blog -- heh -- that's exactly what we're doing now. 

Welcome Home, Pat, Rob, Claude, Grif, Jeremy's dad, Ray, Shad, John Paul's dad, Steve, the other Steve, Congressman Thompson, Max Cleland, Kathie's husband, Bet's husband, Cecil, the cute flirty guy with the eye patch, who sat next to me at a photography exhibit (still learning!) and who'd just survived a stroke -- everybody else who didn't get that at the time, and we can guess with great certainty hasn't been able to since, either.  Oh, and that would certainly include the abandoned and forgotten guys on the streets (homeless), and the various guys lolling off to sleep in wheelchairs at the veteran's homes, with their little American flags staked into their chairs, who I am pretty sure aren't having visitors, and are dying by the score every month, lost to us for good. 

I had a conversation lately with Pat: how many of those guys are you still in touch with?  Because it sounded like very few.  This is what he had to say:

"The problem with being attached to [that group of] Marines is that very few of each deployment survived long enough to ever get together.  1/9 tried reunions for a while but too few [were alive] to meet so they suspended it.  2/9 still is trying but no one from my days are there.  The thirteen guys I went into the Marines with were either killed in action; died of their wounds; committed suicide later; [or] were so severely wounded that they are still in VA mental hospitals and don't recognize anyone [so there'd be no point].  Only two of us are still alive 'n kicking and we got together for eleven years on what we called our "kill day".  He drifted up into Canada, I drifted to Texas; we have not spoken for over 20 years so I don't even know if he is still around." Yikes.  See bolded statement for emphasis... 

Really and truly, America -- don't you dare criticize these people.  You haven't walked a mile in their shoes -- and until you do what YOU need to do, and uphold YOUR side of the bargain -- you really haven't earned the right.  If anything, read and learn -- and recognize how very human the motivations, compromises, and eclipsing of characters is.  And just be glad that you didn't have to be there; and do what you can to provide a measure of comfort, acceptance and acknowledgement to those who were.  Don't NEGLECT America's warriors; FAIL to welcome them home; STAND BY and watch them be crippled from what they experienced, for which they have often have no HEALTHY RECOURSE WHATSOEVER; and then have the NERVE to point out their moral turpitude, as if you knew.  You don't; they do.  Point, theirs.  And that's the only point worth hearing on this one; sorry.

"Anyone who looks with anguish on evils so great must acknowledge the tragedy of it all; and if anyone experiences them without anguish, his condition is even more tragic, since he remains serene by losing his humanity." -- Augustine of Hippo. From One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer, by Nathaniel Fick.

"Winners Go to Harvard, Losers Go to Vietnam..."

(Cough, cough -- sounds like bullsh*t to me!)

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The post title comes from a wonderful -- though not to him, and not at the time -- reminiscence sent to me lately by a Vietnam veteran buddy, telling his sad tale of woe about linking up with an old high school friend on homecoming, and getting essentially tossed under the bus.  

I'll include Pat's retelling here, because it's much better than I could do paraphrasing it, but really -- there needs to be a special circle of hell reserved for dirtbags like this guy he mentions.  I wonder if anything happens to them in their later lives that would somehow even the score.  Perhaps they develop some compassion, or maybe if they do, it's just too little, too late. 

(In a reverse post-script added here before the text, not after, I have gone back and checked with Mother Harvard -- who practically keeps a retina scan of all of us who've ever gone there, in the vault, just in case we end up wealthy and can donate the big bux -- and the guy in question seems not even to have attended, let alone graduated from there, which only makes this story that much more painful to contemplate.) 

Herewith, Pat's story about a homecoming moment that has stuck with him ever since.  To set the stage, he had just finished fighting in Khe Sanh, in 1966, on his first tour with the Marine Corps, 2/9, H & S "Flames" Company:

"The C-130 took off immediately with us all tucked safely aboard on our way to the real world, The United States of America and for me; Houston, TEXAS.  On the hop from Hawaii to the world, I was thinking about my mom and dad, my two brothers and two sisters, my sweetheart-Betty Jo and all of the high school friends that I had left behind and even about my coach and teachers. 

I began to daydream that would get off of the plane in Houston and everyone would be there to meet me and they would all run out to me and hug me and cry.  I would take Betty into my arms and kiss her and swing her around in the air as I held her close to me.  We would laugh, we would cry and we would kiss.  She would smell so wonderful and would be so soft and it would be all great.  They would all shout and cheer and clap for me and push around me to reach out and touch my uniform.  I would be appreciated. 

I would go to this big homecoming party and there would be a "Welcome Home banner," eggnog, lots of hot food, every Christmas decoration ever made and everyone would be overjoyed to see me and so proud of me and elated that I had made it back alive.  I would be like a real hero and the center of attention.  

I would borrow my big brother Mike's 1965 red Ford Mustang and cruise by my old high school and everyone would be pumped to see me, have missed me, flock around me and want to know what I had been through.  I guess I really did want to be like my dad, a real war hero.  We had been deep in the bush on the verge of being overrun by a NVA Division, taking many casualties, less than 36 hours before -- and my brain could not seem to make the transition. 

We finally landed at Travis Air Force Base in California, the ramp went down and mules were there to unload the caskets on.  We filed off, were directed to a taxi area and caught a cab to the San Francisco Airport.  And then just like that we were walking around in downtown America.  I was so uncomfortable that I almost wanted to get back on the C-130 and go back to Nam... 

The airport was real busy and I don’t remember much except being real uptight and anxious like I expected something to jump out and get me.  There were mostly military personnel loading and unloading so I didn’t feel totally out of place with the people but just uneasy with the surroundings. 

We caught our flight to Houston, TX and it was very nice.  I remember smelling the perfume of the flight attendants and then the realization hit me: honest to God, I really was back in the “world”. 

But it all still kind of seemed like a dream, like I would move from real time to slow motion and back and always through a haze. 

I then allowed myself to let my guard down and I began to get real excited and almost cried but choked it back.

We landed and taxied into Houston Hobby Airport and my heart was pounding so fast and hard that I could feel it in my ears.  I was really, really excited!! 

As we came down the stair ramp I could see a crowd of people -- moms and dads, sisters and brothers, girlfriends and friends -- all running toward us and hugging the people disembarking from the plane.  They were laughing, crying, and talking loudly and excitedly.  I became to be overcome with emotion and my eyes completely teared up and I couldn’t see.  I couldn’t wait to see all of those I had waited so long to see.  As the crowd moved in small groups to the terminal I searched the area and the realization also hit me; no one was there to greet me. 

I was finally back home and all alone.  My breath went out of me in a gasp and a pain hit me like a bullet in the gut. I actually got dizzy.  I was left standing on the tarmac by myself as the crowd of people cleared out.  My heart sank to the bottom of my shoes with disappointment.  In all of the rush to get home, I had forgotten to call anyone and let them know that I was even coming home.  I had come from hell to paradise and no one even knew about it.  Man, I really felt bad. 

Even though it was my fault, I started getting really angry and went into the terminal to pick up my sea bag. Everyone was rushing every which way.  I guess I thought that everyone should have known I had just returned from Nam but they all just pushed past and around me like I didn’t even exist.  I wanted to shout: “Hey, I just got back from the friggin bush; I left buddies back there. I just came out of combat and was killing gooks two days ago.  Doesn’t anyone give a friggin damn?!”  But no one even looked at me. 

As I was making my way through the crowd, I spotted a friend of mine from Memorial High School, Jim Baird.  He and I had been on the high school swimming team together but he was from the upper class Memorial area and I was from the middle class Spring Branch area.  I thought we were friends, though. 

My heart jumped; here was my chance, someone to welcome me home and it was one of my ole swimming buddies.  I moved up behind him and said: “Hey Jim, where have you been?”  He turned, looked at me in my Class A’s and got a frown on his face.  He said coldly: “I’m going to Harvard”. He then turned abruptly away from me.  He didn’t even ask anything about me at all. 

I touched him on the shoulder and said: “Hey buddy, how have you been.  I’m real glad to see you again.  I’ve been in Vietnam for the past year.”  He said: “Why? Only losers go to Vietnam, winners go to Harvard.”  And he just turned again and walked off like I wasn’t alive. 

I was completely caught off guard and was actually shocked.  I had never expected anything like this.  To be rudely snubbed by someone I thought was a close friend.  I had heard of this back “in country” but really didn’t believe it.  My eyes watered up again but this time from God Damned seething anger and I hated the fucking world and everyone in it.   No one really did give a tinker's damn about us or if we were there or not.  I wanted to track him down and kill the son of a bitch."

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Well, Pat, I wasn't gonna offer to help you track him and kill him -- and I know that's just a figure of speech you're using ;-) -- but I figured even at this long-distant remove, that if I helped you find him -- you could at least leave him a flaming paper bag of cowsh*t on his doorstep, ring the doorbell, and hide in the bushes while you watched, with pleasure, his attempting to stamp out the flames (in his loafers, with no socks?! It's a Harvard thing.  You wouldn't understand :-). 

(The flaming bag of cow poo is an age-old, country-esque revenge fantasy, conflated in my mind with the wonderful one Richard Brautigan wrote about in "The Good Work of Chickens" -- that involves dumping several tons of chickensh*t on someone's lawn who he's annoyed with, to teach them a lesson.) 

But the reality is, it doesn't sound like the guy even went to Harvard, after all.  So I'm not able to be of that much help.

However, Pat might be pleased to know -- in addition to his tormentor probably having been quite the BS-er himself -- than in the meantime, Harvard has developed some sensitivity towards veterans -- there's even a veterans group at Harvard, linked here. (They say that "there are thousands of living Harvard Veterans, and more than 1,200 Harvard graduates have given their lives in war." - 1,200 isn't a lot, proportional to the rest of the U.S., but it's still better than say, "none.")

According to their site:

"It is interesting to note that, on any given day, there are more than 150 members of the Armed Forces of the United States present in the classrooms and activities of Harvard University. 

There are approximately 85 returning Veterans who are pursuing degrees at the Harvard Business School, while 60, mostly active duty officers , are in Master’s Degree or Executive programs at the Harvard Kennedy School. There are small numbers of Veterans at other Harvard Graduate Schools, and 35 or so students are in the ROTC program at Harvard College, which is administered through the Paul Revere Battalion at MIT."

Also, although there's some dispute about whether Thucydides could ever have said this, there IS a quote attributed to him that has inspired smart Ivy League types to also become soldiers and Marines.  The quote that motivates them is this: "The nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools."  Well, it's a catchy phrase, anyhow -- and gets its point across.

I can't remember whether that quote is one that inspired Nate Fick to become a (now a former) Marine officer -- Fick is a graduate of both Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and the Harvard Business School -- he quotes a different Thucydides one in his superlative book, One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer":

"We should remember that one man is much the same as another, and that he is best who is trained in the severest school."

(Not sure whether that "severest school," though, is the Marine Corps, or Harvard, or both :-) 

In any case, just to prove that Harvard has in fact come a long way since not sending very many of its sons and daughters off to war, I was able to be an invited guest several years ago at a celebration honoring Harvard graduates who were veterans, held at the Harvard Business School, around the time of the Marine Corps' birthday.  The room was filled with all sorts of people, in uniform and out, milling around, networking, and really, it seemed like a great cross-section of graduates, from the very old to the very young, from the retired and former servicemembers to those who had just signed up. 

(It also provided me with one of my Embarrassing Life Moments -- asking a smartly-dressed man*, who later turned out to be a multi-star general out of uniform, and the keynote speaker -- what his "outfit" was, because it was so "interesting" and "beautiful."  To which he gamely replied, after explaining what it was, "and who, by the way, are you?!" or words to that effect.  He was probably more so looking to ask, "and who let the riffraff in"?!)  In any case, here's a photo or two from that event, which Nate Fick was actually emceeing.  Just to prove that there are in fact, graduates of Harvard who are also veterans -- though it truly seems that Pat's tormentor, above, actually had spine enough to be neither...

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There's also an interesting OpEd piece from a recent issue of Military.com, in which another former Marine who served in Vietnam -- though later than Pat, above -- talks about the classic town v. gown disparity in who actually serves.  It's called, tellingly, "The Somerville Marines," and I wish someone in the Harvard veterans community would either confirm or rebut it, because it seems to need to a response from the other side of the fence.  (Somerville is one of Harvard University's poorer, working class neighbors, and the article's author, Joseph Kinney, makes the point that it sends disproportionately too many of its sons and daughters to die, versus Harvard.  The article is linked here.)

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Editor's note: * My mistake, obviously, but hey, he didn't look like the guy in the published program -that guy was wearing a khaki green uniform -- and I'd never met a multi-star general before :-)  (Or since, either...)  Of course, it's faux pas like these that clearly explain why I blog :-) No social graces whatsoever :-)