Michael Broas helping veterans heal

Michael Broas was deployed to the central highlands of South Vietnam for about a year.

By AMY REININK
Sun staff writer

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He spotted the stack of radios and fought the urge to fall to his knees.

Continue to 2nd paragraph He reeled from the flashbacks. He wept. Then, Michael Broas of Micanopy, who turns 60 this year, looked to the other Vietnam veterans on the trip for support, and started to heal.

Broas served roughly a year with the 4th Infantry Division, 1st Squadron, 10th Cavalry Unit in Vietnam in 1969 and 1970. He spent several weeks alone in a bunker, manning radios like the ones he saw in Vietnam's presidential palace last October on his return trip to the country where he once fought.

Broas said making the return trip with a group mostly composed of fellow veterans helped complete a healing process that should have started in 1970, but instead began in 1995, when he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder after self-medicating for years with drugs and alcohol.

Years of therapy helped. But the return trip allowed for something different. "Upon returning home, I felt I had this burden lifted off me, and felt peace in a way I never had experienced before," Broas said. "Going back brought me closer to memories that had been stuffed away for years. But now I have a whole new set of memories to overlay the first set."

Broas found the trip so therapeutic, he hopes to take other veterans back to Vietnam to find the same sense of closure.

Broas' informal program would follow in the footsteps of many others that encourage veterans to revisit the countries they once fought in, and his trip last October follows those made by a host of other veterans who have sought peace by returning to the places that haunt them.
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