Troubled vet journeys back to Vietnam to offer help

Troubled vet journeys back to Vietnam -- to offer help
By Moni Basu, CNN
November 14, 2009 3:31 a.m. EST


STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Veteran who suffered 40 years with nightmares is returning to Vietnam
Kevin Roberts, now 64, will build houses for poor families along the Mekong River
Psychologists who treat trauma say his return could be healing -- or harmful

(CNN) -- He is a former Marine who has lived with battleground nightmares for 40 years and now plans a return to the land that haunts him.

But Kevin Roberts' decision is not fueled by remorse. Nor is it about healing a life defined by 13 stinging months in Vietnam. Rather, late-in-life altruism has led him to volunteer to build houses for poor families residing along Vietnam's Mekong River.

"I wasn't thinking, 'Oh, I blew up half the country and now let me go and build it back," says Roberts, 64, of Pleasantville, New York, a small town 30 minutes north of Manhattan, where he owns a house-painting business.

As for a sense of closure: "I hate that word," he says without hesitation, thinking both about the war and his 13-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, who died in 1995 from a congenital heart problem.

"I was there and did what I did; that's not going to change," he says. "My daughter died and is not coming back. Things like this don't close."

So why, after years of heroin addiction, alcoholism and untreated post-traumatic stress disorder, has Roberts decided to do something good in the land he remembers as bad? And how will it affect him?
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