Vietnam Vet Don Alexander learns to heal himself

'Something's left unfinished'
Sarah Overstreet

Vietnam veteran ready to make his peace with war memories.
August 10, 2008


For 42 years, Don Alexander has woken up in the night, terrified.

The terror is not for himself, but for another.

It is always the same: "Why didn't I do something?" he asks himself. "Why didn't I DO something?"

But as he wakes further and the cobwebs clear, reality sets in: There wasn't anything he could have done. He'd just been shot and his pelvis shattered. He couldn't move.

Across his legs lay the body of the window gunner of the helicopter that was trying to pick up Alexander and take him to a MASH unit in Da Nang. The gunner was shot in the chest while firing back at North Vietnamese soldiers shooting at the copter. Alexander could do nothing but lie there, feeling his fellow Marine bleed to death on his body.

He didn't even know his name.

"The utter futility," he says now, on the 42nd anniversary of the man's death on Aug. 10, 1966. "Couldn't I have at least rolled over and held his hand?" Earlier, waiting for the helicopter, laid out in a creek bed with other wounded while the bloody fight went on above them, he had been able to get to another man's hand as he heard the soldier's throat begin to rattle. He was holding it when Staff Sgt. Ernesto Amador died.

It was Operation Colorado in the Que Son Valley in August 1966, where 500 Marines were sent in to rout out North Vietnamese soldiers who'd had free rein of the territory. "We went looking for them, then they ambushed us," then-corporal Alexander explains. "Then they encircled us -- 2,000 Vietnamese regulars."

When Alexander came back to the States, he finished the wildlife management degree he'd started at Missouri State University. But news from the war front "drove me nuts," especially the Tet Offensive, thinking of his brother soldiers and wanting to go back to Vietnam.

Then he realized there was one important and far-reaching way he could continue to help warriors mired in the hellish bloodshed: "I probably was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, but I don't think I realized it. I thought, 'Hey, I could work with vets.' I thought maybe if I could get another chance, here's my chance to give back to (the window gunner) and other vets."

Alexander earned a master's degree in guidance counseling at Missouri State University, then specialized in counseling veterans and other victims of trauma for 25 years.

And he never stopped thinking about the man who lost his life saving his. He wondered who he was, what his life had been before the war brought him to Vietnam. Did he have a family, a wife, small children, as Alexander did? "Something's left unfinished," Alexander reflects now. "I think I've always been serious about it (finding information about the man) somehow. It was always in the back of my mind.'"

For 25 years he led veterans through the horrifying ghosts of post-traumatic stress, and slowly discovered he was bleeding from the condition, too. "When I was counseling people, I could hide behind the mask of working with other people." But as the men opened up their wounds, it brought Alexander's to the forefront and he began to work through his own PTSD. "It was like, 'physician, heal thyself.'"
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