Vietnam Vet goes back to where he never really left

Updated at: 02/28/2008 08:33:45 AM

By: Kim Johnson
kjohnson@wdio.com


Still Searching

"I did this one time before a long time ago," said Scott Cameron as he lowered himself down into an underground tunnel in Vietnam.

On a journey half way around the world, Scott Cameron is re-discovering places that have haunted him for decades. The tunnels he’s exploring were used by enemy soldiers to hide from danger during the war.

"You could escape into here when the B-52s started hitting," he said while looking into a hand-held personal video camera.

As the veteran goes deeper into the ground, bad memories begin to surface. "To be honest, I got to get the hell out of here," Scott said. "I'm getting real paranoid and I'm getting real claustrophobic."

Soon come flashbacks that are too powerful to bear. "This is really doing a lot of triggers for this guy, this old Vietnam vet," he said.

Scott is searching down in these holes, a painful search that began thousands of miles away back in Duluth.

Five months ago Scott decided it was time to take serious steps in his life. He’d been suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder--a crippling mental illness he developed after the war four decades ago.
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http://www.wdio.com/article/stories/S361250.shtml?cat=10335





This is not a picture from Vietnam. It is from Afghanistan. They are not American forces but Canadian forces. Does it look that much different from the other one above taken in Vietnam?





For some, the war is no longer the war they fought with machine gun bullets or bombs. The war is the one they have inside of them. The battles are fought on a daily basis. These battles they try to fight alone. All the haunting images come back to them. They see it all, feel it all, re-experience it all as if time did not exists. They have a TV remote control in their hands instead of a machine gun. They have a Chevy steering wheel in their hands instead of the steering wheel of a military vehicle. They drive down a country road right here in the USA instead of a road in a foreign land. It doesn't matter what they are doing when a flashback comes at that moment because they are no longer here. They are right back there again. H.G. Wells could never manage to bring that kind of imagery to life as he created his time travel machine.

The Time Machine is a novel by H. G. Wells, first published in 1895 and later directly adapted into at least two theatrical films of the same name as well as at least one television and a large number of comic book adaptations. It indirectly inspired many more works of fiction in all media. Considered by many to be one of the greatest science fiction novels of all time, this 38,000 word novella is generally credited with the popularization of the concept of time travel using a vehicle that allows an operator to travel purposefully and selectively. The term "time machine", coined by Wells, is now universally used to refer to such a vehicle.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Machine

For veterans with PTSD, H.G. Wells fiction is their life. They don't need a machine to step into to travel back in time. They purchased a ticket the day they boot on their combat boots and their reservation for this trip was confirmed as soon as trauma collided with normal life.

The return trip back to normal life is up to us to cover the cost of. Without us, too many will never really make the journey back home.