OTTAWA CITIZEN
BY CHRIS COBB
MARCH 28, 2014
After struggling with the effects of PTSD for 50-odd years, 82-year-old Korean War veteran James Purcell began treatment with psychologist Sarah Bertrim, left. ‘If there’s anyone out there thinking the way I was, I want to tell them to get help,’ he says.
Photograph by: Wayne Cuddington , Ottawa Citizen
PEMBROKE, Ont. — It was a nightmare Jim Purcell took to his bed every night for more than 50 years.
It featured his best buddy, Bob Casey.
The two grew up together in a hardscrabble section of Halifax. They played together, went to school together and, when they were 18 years old in 1951, they joined the army and went to fight in Korea together.
Jim is 81 and has lived his adult life in Pembroke. He has a daughter, two sons and grandkids.
Casey didn’t live to grow old.
In the muddy, rat-infested trenches of the Korean hills, they had a bunker to sleep in and, like many 18-year-old boys, Casey loved to sleep.
The Chinese shell scored a direct hit on the bunker while he was napping.
“He got his head blown off,” says Purcell. “Casey come out there like a chicken with its head cut off, except it wasn’t quite off. He come to the door of the bunker and just dropped. That stayed with me for years. I’d wake up screaming, ‘Get out of the bunker, Casey. Get out of the bunker.’”
When the former Royal Canadian Regiment corporal says the image haunted him for years, he means 48 years.
That translated into an adult life of hard drinking, bar fights, trouble with the cops, anger, depression, failed treatment and, in his later years, what the psychologists and psychiatrists call “suicidal ideation.”
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