For Vietnam vets, another chance to serve and to heal

For Vietnam vets, another chance to serve and to heal
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Tomas Dinges
STAR-LEDGER STAFF
For the small group of dedicated Vietnam veterans who arrived at Fort Dix early every morning for 16 days in a row last month, it was an opportunity to give what they never received, a warm welcome home, a hug and a handshake.

The Vietnam veterans were there to welcome home the newest waves of veterans from Iraq and at the same time come to grips with the emotional fallout they are still experiencing from a war that ended almost 35 years ago.


"For years I haven't been emotional, there was a wall," said Michael Walters, 61, of Middlesex, "but I think it's breaking down the wall a little bit, so every time I said something, or expressed myself to the veterans, I felt better."

Walters, a Vietnam Army veteran diagnosed with post-traumatic stress syndrome and a host of physical problems, helped usher some of the 2,800 men and women of the New Jersey Army National Guard into a transition from their military service to their civilian lives.

The days spent in the hangar of the National Guard's Joint Training Center were part of these Vietnam veterans' first attempts at addressing mental and emotional wounds that were ignored, locked away or went unrecognized since they returned home from an unpopular war in a time of social and political upheaval in the 1960s and 1970s.
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