Iraq conflict rekindles local Vietnam Vets' trauma

Iraq conflict rekindles local Vietnam Vets' trauma

By ROBERT M. COOK
Staff Writer
bcook@fosters.com


Article Date: Sunday, December 16, 2007
While many Americans may find daily television news coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan disturbing, Joe Carroll finds it especially difficult.

"This war that we got now has brought everything back to me, especially the roadside bombs," said the Rochester resident, who is a Vietnam veteran.

The war on terror has sparked a resurgence of his post traumatic stress disorder symptoms, sparking a flare-up in the condition he's battled since returning from Southeast Asia 40 years ago.

He said he's started to have the same nightmares he had several years ago, nightmares that would make him wake up in a cold sweat and feel disoriented.

Carroll worked in a transportation unit that operated convoys. The trucks faced the threat of mined roads and often came under attack from snipers, he said.

"Getting hit in the convoys," is one dream Carroll often has, "or being shot from the side of the road on rice paddies."

One of his worst nightmares is related to one of the worst days he had in Vietnam. One night, members of his Army unit, the 573rd Transportation Co., were ordered to do a nighttime convoy run at high speed to reduce the risk of attack, Carroll said.

The soldiers were told that if anything or anyone got in their way they were to ignore it and keep driving. That proved tragic — Carroll said he hit and killed a Vietnamese man and child, but didn't realize it until after they'd reached their destination and saw body parts underneath the truck.

"I can still see them there," Carroll said.
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Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam is an Emmy award winning 1987 documentary directed by Bill Couturié. Using real letters written by US soldiers and archive footage, the film creates a highly personal experience of the Vietnam War.
Roger Ebert commented, "There have been many great movies about Vietnam. This is the one that completes the story."
For my husband, it was watching Dear America, over and over and over again. He'd sit on the sofa, beer in on hand and the other holding a cigarette, both hands shaking. It came out in 1987 a year after that horrible day when I miscarried the twins. The only war back then was the one he was still fighting in his mind, Vietnam. I was fighting my own battles for him and against him, trying to get him to go for help. It didn't matter how much I knew about PTSD or Vietnam or what was happening to him. Nothing could get him to go for help. Yet even knowing what I knew about PTSD, I thought he would be willing to go for help if I had been a better wife, if I had a healthy baby, anything and everything ran through my mind because no matter what the facts were, I refused to think that it was all hopeless for us. I refused to think that his love for me was too weak to fight against Vietnam. I was wrong.

It took three more years to get him to just go to a psychologist, then to the Veterans center, then another three years to get him to go to the VA. All in all it took 14 years of watching him die a slow death for him to really begin to heal. He came home with signs of PTSD in 1971. All the issues he was dealing with, he was dealing with them. He coped. He covered up. He dealt with the flashbacks and nightmares. We dealt with the mood swings and his need to get away from crowds and his back needing to be against the wall instead of out in the middle of a restaurant. It took the secondary stressor of losing the twins to send him over the edge so extremely that I had to beg him to come back to the hospital that very night. All that was going on inside of him were no longer quirks. They were destroying him.

By the time Dear America came out, I was living with a stranger. My father passed away in 1987 but by then my best friend was cold, angry and ambivalent. When I discovered I was pregnant again, I was pretty shocked. Sex was a rarity but it was enough to begin the next chapter of our lives. Our daughter will be 20 next month. Looking back on those days, it astonishes me that we made it through all of those times. He is living proof that with therapy and medication, there is always hope. He is the reason why I keep drilling it into heads that it is never too late for healing to begin.

He is also the reason why I push so hard for help to be delivered as soon as possible. Had he been helped when he came home from Vietnam, we would not have spent so much of our lives dealing with the horrors, stress on our relationship, financial hardships or anything else that came with the lack of help. Instead of being retired early, he would still be doing the job he loved and still making a good living. I would be able to work full time again and financially we would be a lot better off as well as our marriage would be healthier, because of how close we had been in the beginning. The lost years ate away at him. We can never get those years back and no matter how much I have tried, there is still much more to overcome as far as my own painful memories.

It saddens me beyond belief when I hear of today's veterans heading into the same altered reality as he did knowing how much is possible right now. Things that were never even envisioned back then are possible today because of the work the Vietnam veterans did to make it all possible. Yet the delays, the backlog of claims, the sporadic help available to these veterans is basically killing off their futures as well as eliminating hope in them. You would think that with a mountain of studies the people in charge would be mobilizing every mental health professional in the nation to get every veteran dealing with PTSD into treatment as soon as they show the slightest sign of needing help, but they don't. They talk about doing it instead of doing it. They hold hearings as if they are going to hear anything new. They waste time as lives slip away. If they have not heard all the facts by now, they have not been listening. We need such a loud voice, they can never say they did not hear us again. Our veterans need our help today so they won't need help 20 years from now. How much time are we going to waste? How many lives are we going to let suffer with PTSD needlessly? How many more people will look back at lost years and wonder what could have been done to spare them the pain they had to go through? How many more veterans will be beyond reach next year? kc