Decades After Vietnam, Retired Veterans Get Help for PTSD

The Long Shadow of PTSD
Decades after Vietnam, retired veterans reunite and seek help
AARP Bulletin
by Brian Mockenhaupt
May 2015

After two tours as an infantryman in Vietnam, Dave Dillard came home to a country that he felt didn't understand where he'd been, or how the war had affected him. The Army discharged him with no advice about the lingering mental strains of combat. His family told him to get on with his life.

Some of the World War II veterans he met at the Veterans of Foreign Wars post weren't much help, either. "Just forget it," they told him.

Dave Dillard, 66, of the 101st Airborne Division. — Brent Humphreys

He couldn't forget, but he moved on. He studied theater arts in San Francisco and later taught elementary school. But he gradually withdrew from friends and family. He avoided crowds and standing in lines. While mowing the lawn one afternoon, a loud noise sent him diving under a bush. Sleep was tortured. He dreamed that he'd been sent back to Vietnam for a third tour, and always he saw the same North Vietnamese soldier, his face lit up in the darkness by a rifle's muzzle flash.

In the mid-1980s he started searching for the men with whom he'd fought. He found them one by one over the next three decades. Many of them, he discovered, had been suffering as he had, and most hadn't gotten help until years later, if they'd sought help at all.

This is a common story among older combat veterans, who have contended with both the stigma of appearing weak and the lack of knowledge about the mental effects of combat. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) — characterized by hypervigilance, intrusive thoughts, nightmares and avoidance — wasn't a formal diagnosis until 1980, and effective treatments weren't widely available until the 1990s.

"They came home, stayed quiet and tried to muddle on as best they could," says Steven Thorp, a San Diego psychologist with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. "They worked really hard as a distraction, 70, 80 hours a week, so PTSD didn't really hit them full force until they retired, or the kids left the house, or they're reminded of loss through the deaths of their friends."

"What they do know is that they're different," Thorp says. "But they don't know why it happened, and they don't know how to change it."

Dillard didn't know how to right himself, but he knew exactly what had changed him: one long, terrible night in the jungles north of Saigon during his first tour, when Delta Company, his unit from the 101st Airborne Division, was nearly overrun by hundreds of North Vietnamese soldiers. That night he witnessed heroics by his captain, Paul Bucha, and waited with Delta Company buddies like Calvin Heath and Bill Heaney for a dawn they feared would never come.

"That night marked all of us," says Dillard, 66, who now lives on a ranch in Livingston, Texas, and assists other veterans with their disability claims. "It's been the source of lots of nightmares."
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