In the first sentence of his
initial book, Psychological Trauma (1987), Bessel van der Kolk opines that a writer's,
researcher's or clinician’s "frame of mind" usually determines both
the nature and outcome of the therapy and research. With regard to TRT and
Etiotropic Trauma Management, no statement could more accurately characterize
not only their initiations, but the motivational thread, impetus, that has seen
their development to completion. Although the end product of TRT is a
professional therapeutic process that we have attempted to transfer to others
via an academic standard, the process that has guided my efforts, my
"frame of mind," has been a consequence and function of primarily
personal experience - the impact of certain events on my life and their address
through the caring and love of my wife.
My
mother lost her father and one of her brothers to disease when I was young: 9
and 10 years of age. These losses affected her deeply. At the same time, she
also suffered repeated bouts with severe migraine headaches. The combination of
the loss and the headaches resulted in her seeking medical and psychiatric
assistance, processes that eventually would lead to tragedy. The era was the
mid to late 1950's.
Her treatments for
these conditions included individual psychotherapy, major tranquilizers,
hospitalization and shock therapy. She and our relationship changed
dramatically following the hospital visits. She became the child and I the
adult; she begged me to not let her return to the hospital. For her, shock
therapy was a horrendous treatment, and an experience that she said that she
could never stand again.
We also were a
regularly attending and devoutly religious family - Southern Baptists. Before
the illness, my mother sang in the choir. My father was a deacon within the
church. Consequently, when the illness occurred, I also sought help for her
from this group, including its leadership. These religious people did not know,
however, what to do.
Suicide attempts became
regular events. My sisters and I prevented our mother's death as a routine
matter of family life. To take one example of these efforts, which occurred
repeatedly, I remember that I would sit in the hall next to her room, mostly at
night, and wait for her to retrieve a belt from a dress in the closet. She
would go into the bathroom and shower; I would follow her and untie the belt
from around her neck. On each of these occasions I told her that I loved her
and wanted her to stay with us; I said that she would get well and that we
needed her. Sometimes, when I could no longer stay awake while on guard, my
last thoughts before sleep were that I was not strong enough to keep my mother
alive and that when I awoke, she would be dead.
When I was 13 years
old, and after approximately 3 years of the illness, we again placed her into a
psychiatric hospital where, shortly after being admitted, she hanged herself in
the shower with the belt from her dress.
Before and during my
mother's illness, I did well in school and in other social settings. I was a
Cub Scout, for which troop my mother had, before her illness, been the
den-mother. During these years, I remember that I was routinely placed in
accelerated classes for special students and I usually acted in a leadership
capacity; I made student honor rolls. My family participated in many church,
school, sports, and other kinds of social activities, and they benefited from
the full support and attendance of both my mother and father. I also was
stringently physically disciplined, but I believe I had a good early life and,
overall, am appreciative for it.
Following my mother's
death, I became a truant, runaway, and general disciplinary problem in school.
For example, the assistant principal, Mr. Kenneth Gupton,
informed me that I had set a record in our school for receiving the greatest
number of "pops," a kind of corporal punishment where we were hit in
the butt with a board called a “paddle.” The model was used to instill
discipline at the time. I never sought, nor was I considered a candidate for,
counseling, either for my behavior or because of the family's tragedy, although
I suspect that some teachers sympathized with me for the loss of my parent - I
think they accorded me special consideration. Neither did I express any emotion
about the suicide attempts during my mother's illness, nor do I recall
expressing any emotion about her death.
Although I was never a
member of a gang, I remember that their activities in my neighborhood
profoundly influenced my early life; I engaged in physical altercations with
such gangs and their leaders. As a child, I was taught to fight against
collective coercion. All of these altercations were conducted without weapons;
that is, aside from the truancy, I never engaged in unlawful activities, as
morals played an important part of my upbringing and despite the changes that I
was undergoing. The only drug that I used was alcohol, and then only shortly
before leaving school.
I did do some positive
things in athletics. I was in the first group of 3 year varsity football
lettermen to graduate from my high-school; I was very proud of that
accomplishment.
My graduation, however,
was not an achievement derived out of my own character or efforts, but was
solely a function of another person's wisdom, caring, and insight. Mr. W.G.
Burns, the school's principal, provided me with special academic tutoring.
From the time that I
was 16 years old, I lived outside of my home and on my own, except for the help
of a friend and his mother - Sherman and Ms. Anne LaFollette.
I emphasize these people, including Mr. Burns who is now deceased, by stating
their names because not only did they help me at that time, but probably were
it not for them, and others not mentioned here, my entire life's direction
would have been considerably different and more difficult. I also have come to
believe that the kinds of people that they were contributed greatly to the
primary value of my life, as these kinds of people contribute to the value of
others' lives.
Stoicism was the
philosophy that I adopted to cope with my mother's illness, her attempts to
take her life, and her eventual death. In September 1959, I remember, while
standing next to her coffin in the funeral home, thinking to myself that the
most important thing that I do was to be strong and dignified. I especially had
to be this way when walking in front of the large group of people who
accompanied our family to the cemetery. I had to and did show my strength by
maintaining composure. Stoicism also provided the foundation for my beliefs
about how to cope with everything else as I continued with my life.
There are two
additional pieces of information that are important to this part of the story.
First, my father, who had stopped drinking when I was two years old, and apparently had a drinking problem prior to that
time, and who had not used alcohol during the 12 year period leading to my
mother's death, began to drink again within 30 days following that death. He
also is deceased now and I do not wish to engage in discussions that would
detract from or denigrate his character, as it was an admirable one despite his
apparent health problems, and as stated he and my mother gave me, as a child, a
good and safe home where I never wanted for food, shelter and love from them. I
hope it will suffice to say that in addition to the effects of the death of my
mother upon our family, my father's drinking experience beginning immediately
thereafter effected an additional radical change upon the life-style that we
had previously known.
The second element of
information relates to the psychiatrist who treated my mother. He was well
respected in his profession and came highly recommended to my father. However,
when the psychiatrist died two years after my mother's death, it was reported
to our family that alcoholism had influenced his later years, possibly even
contributing to his death. I don't know if this report was true, or if the
prospective alcoholism influenced my mother's treatment, but to this day I have
never felt any animosity toward that person individually, but have considered
the clinical model used for the treatment of my mother and family (which was non existent) to have been incompetent, a view that has
increased with time, experience, and research. Because of this belief, one of
the most important things that I think that I have done is dedicate my
activities to seeing that other people do not experience what my family
experienced - they will not lose the lives of their loved ones because of the
influence of incompetent ways of doing things, regardless of their
political/bureaucratic ascendance. To that end, out of the many people to whom
my wife and I have provided care, including the numerous women whose
psychological profiles matched my mother's, none committed suicide and all of
those of whom I am still aware recovered to lead normal lives.
When I did not receive
the athletic scholarship for which I had hoped on graduation from high school
in 1964, I joined the U.S. Marine Corps. Marines epitomized for me as a boy
personal strength and caring for one's country, two things that were important
to me.
Upon completion of boot
camp in San Diego and Infantry Training Regiment at Camp Pendleton, California
at the end of 1964, I was assigned to a motor transport group at the El Toro
Marine Air Facility in California where I trained and worked as a truck and
staff car driver. I was reassigned on August 1, 1965 to MAG 36, a group of
helicopter squadrons; the Group immediately departed on the aircraft carrier
USS Princeton for South Vietnam. On leaving Subic Bay in the Philippines, and
two days before the landing, I was transferred for temporary additional duty to
a newly forming and so called Air Mobile Assault Company - a group of clerks,
helicopter mechanics, truck drivers, cooks, and supply specialists who were
converted within a matter of days to infantrymen; the mission was to provide
the perimeter guard for the helicopter component of the airbase about to be
constructed at Chu Lai. I did make that helicopter landing with that company on
August 28, 1965 and served a tour of duty in the Central Highlands of South
Vietnam until September 15, 1966.
Because of the
controversy surrounding the Vietnam War and other issues related to
descriptions of war, I interrupt this story to offer you an option. If you want
to avoid this part of the story, click on "No War."
Continue from there and you can still acquire at least a partial understanding
of the importance of these events to the development of the ETM and TRT models.
Following the
helicopter landing from the Princeton, my initial job of providing the
perimeter guard for the helicopter base was, I believe in hindsight, fairly
safe duty because larger and undoubtedly better trained infantry units than
mine had formed another perimeter 5 miles out from ours; however, the perimeter
was not totally enclosed along the coast and mouth of the river that was about
1 mile from our line. Moreover, that perimeter was said to become less
protective depending on different operational requirements. Because of
bureaucratic processes, about which I was uninformed, I never returned to the
motor transport group, spending the first 4 months of the tour in this
temporary duty.
While
there, I engaged in various infantry, also called "grunt," activities
- the mainstay of Marine Corps functionings. The theory at the time was that other (non infantry
related) job assignments did not preclude any Marine from being assigned
without forewarning to infantry duty. We were supposed to maintain ourselves in
a readiness state capable of meeting these primary responsibilities.
Some of my
recollections of the times, places, and distances during this 4 months are not
totally clear, but I know that my missions and areas frequented were varied. To
begin, I remember that the monsoons and the units on the external perimeter
controlled the process. This means that only the Vietcong as opposed to North
Vietnamese Army (NVA) units were expected to and did operate in our area. For
those readers who don't know about the difference, NVA units were large groups
of people that engaged in more conventional military confrontations and the
Vietcong were often local guerilla fighters opposing the South Vietnamese
government and operating from time to time in alliance with the NVA.
In this new capacity as
an infantryman, I, with my group, dug and then refilled many holes while
changing positions. Filling sandbags and stringing concertina (coils of
circular-barbed) wire provided ongoing and extra work details. At night, we
manned bunkers, sleeping in shifts in the bunkers or holes an average of 2-4
hours per evening. During the days, I usually made 2 patrols per week; we
covered an area that extended to the outermost perimeters and along the river
to its mouth, including a long peninsula that adjoined the mouth. I alternated
positions in this squad (between 9 to 11 men) in the beginning, but later was
assigned the point position as transfers removed the more experienced people;
through attrition of personnel, I eventually knew the area better than most.
With the exception of my one friend with whom I had come through boot camp and
who was stationed with me at El Toro, and who was in this unit through my 4
month stay and beyond, most of the rest of the people in this outfit spent
between 4 to 6 weeks with us before transferring back to their regular units. I
remember some of these men’s names: Tom Walsh (the Bronx), Tim "Toad"
Millman (Indiana), John Bryson (Ohio), and Primo
Anthony Clemente (Pennsylvania). They were good men with whom to share bunkers
at night. Each and others whose names I cannot recall contributed special value
to our group - humor, sincerity, selflessness, philosophy, integrity, courage.
I also participated as
a member of one of two 4 man teams that manned an outpost on the furthermost
point of a peninsula that jutted into the South China Sea, our location being
about 1 mile from the primary (innermost) perimeter protecting the landing pad.
Each team lived in a 6 foot wide and 4 foot deep hole dug out of a sand dune
and spaced about 50 yards apart from each other; our position was close to a
large, dark rust colored coral reef. The mission was to guard against sampans
(Vietnamese fishing boats) that might carry VC from the area across the mouth
of the river, bay, and around the peninsula and land on the beaches below the
cliffs that provided one of the boundaries for the helicopter pad where the
squadrons were located. We also provided the defense against the Vietcong's use
of the unsecured corridor that ran along the coast, interrupted only by the
mouth of the river.
Off and on for
approximately 6 weeks, my team also lived just outside of several villages as a
part of the initially referenced Combined Action Program (CAP) and eventually
to be considered "Vietnamese Pacification" programs. We engaged in
numerous activities while on these missions; we were, however, primarily
accorded the responsibility of protecting certain villages from the Vietcong.
The most meaningful of these experiences involved our bringing corpsmen out
(from the base) to the villages; the corpsmen gave medical care to the
children. Getting to know those children and care for them, as they would come
daily to our positions and stay long periods throughout the day with us, was
the truest and probably only treat of the Vietnam experience. Although this was
mostly easy duty, even fun with the children, at night it was not easy, but
intense. Moreover, our protection efforts, although well intended and
administered, were not always successful as the VC hit one of the villages
shortly after we were ordered to another location, the idea of the attack
apparently being to demonstrate to the South Vietnamese that the protection
program lacked efficacy.
This next paragraph is
not intended as a complaint, but to rather show the conditions that influenced
my later decisions. All of my personal belongings and gear, other than what I
had carried in my pack during the initial helicopter landing, were lost during
that landing and limited resupply were available to me. For this first 4
months, I wore one pair of utilities (clothes), 1 pair of socks and no
underwear, which one pair and the accompanying T shirt I wore when landing were
used for cleaning my weapons. A large bottle of Vasoline
Hair Oil sent through either a Red Cross or Care package provided the primary
lubricant that I used for that cleaning. On a trip back to the base I took one
shower, which I did not do again for the rest of that 4 month period; I
discovered that as the dirt was removed, my skin was re-exposed to insect bites
and so forth, and for which I otherwise had no protection while living in the
holes. My leather boots did not do well in the constant exposure to the water;
they rotted away within 6 weeks of arrival. I was fortunate to be issued the
first pair of new and specially designed "jungle boots" in my size;
they had rubber soles and canvas ankle supports, and they never rotted or
otherwise deteriorated for the entire tour. However, I rarely stayed in a tent
or under a roof and because of the constant rain and water that I lived
directly in, that is, the holes I dug often had water in the bottoms and there
was seldom the time or place for my clothes to dry (during the first week of
the monsoons, my poncho was blown away in a storm), I developed a skin disease.
Although it started during that first 4 months, I did not receive medical
treatment for the condition, which was my own fault, until infection portended
the loss of the lower part of my leg about 6 months after my return to the
states. Surgery that removed the affected skin and apparently the fungus or
disease seemed to cure the problem forever.
Periodically, seemingly
about every 10 days to 2 weeks, the VC would become active, firing during the
night at the perimeter positions and engaging in, albeit infrequent, night
ambushes. These small attacks served one apparent purpose of keeping everyone
fearful, but also prompted counter efforts, which counter-ambush patrols I led
on every occasion, as I was informed, that they were
necessary. For example, in one instance the VC hit another team that was just
manning the peninsula area as my team left. In response, we conducted night
ambushes to counter the Vietcong’s. Because I knew this area better than most,
I was assigned the point position on these efforts. Although on the one hand I
was proud of myself for the distinction of having an important responsibility,
on the other I was scared because of prospective booby traps, mines, and so
forth; in the dark, I believed that I had no defense against them. Moreover, an
assumption was that they had hit the first group to draw the larger one out
where greater damage could be inflicted, the intended purpose presumably being
to show us that we were not defendable. These second attacks did not happen,
however, on any occasion that I was involved in such full squad counter ambush
efforts.
On one of the sniper-type
night attacks, the machine gunner in my squad was wounded. Aside from the other
duties that I have described, I was an assistant to that gunner, which meant
that on occasion I carried extra boxes of ammunition and the gun's tripod. This
wounding was not very serious, but detrimental enough to necessitate the
gunner's being sent to the medical facility; he was transferred shortly
thereafter to a squadron in Da Nang. Subsequently, I
was elevated in status, but without promotion as I was working outside of my
primary MOS (job assignment), to that of a machine gunner for this group. Of
note, although I had observed this gun's (M60) operation in Infantry Training
Regiment approximately 1 year earlier, I had never fired it, nor did I know
anything about its breakdown and reassembly; I would, however, become
proficient in these things and the new skills would lead to a change in my
experiences.
From time to time,
suicide or infiltration teams would attempt to (and did on occasion) run
through the landing strip (for jets) and tent areas in other locations from
ours. These people carried satchel charges and light automatic weapons with
which, respectively, they blew up planes and sprayed tent areas where Marines
who ran the airbase had been sleeping. However, I remember all of these
experiences - the day patrols, village protection efforts, living in the holes
during my time on the peninsula, night ambushes and the infrequent attacks on
the bases - to be more frightening than deadly for me and the people in my
immediate unit.
Before leaving this
description of that earlier period, one of the most pronounced recollections I
have of it was the fear that I experienced in carrying out a special assignment
that has always stood out to me in my memory, not just because of the job
itself, but also because when I began it I didn't know how to accomplish the
task. That is, I led 2 man teams on night missions where we would advance,
during indications from intelligence that an attack on the base was imminent,
in front of the various perimeters that protected the main fortifications.
Because I had no training in this specific kind of activity, I borrowed a Marine
Corps Guide Book from someone back at the base,
the purpose of the research to help me learn anew, or
remember from training received a year earlier, what I could and should do. I
read this book by an oil and wick lamp 30 minutes before conducting my first
mission. I don't believe that manual, however, was very helpful, as it didn't
seem to cover this particular subject. The lamp, however, was very helpful; it
provided, before leaving, soot for covering my face.
In some of these
missions, we left from the outpost on the peninsula. These efforts required our
traversing short distances of between 200 and 500 yards and longer ones, where
departure started from the outpost, of up to, as occurred on one occasion,
approximately 2 miles. When exiting the main perimeter, the other person and I
would leave just after the sun set and crawl out through the cleared fields-of-fire
area past our trip flares and Claymore mines, which I also usually had placed.
We would then swim/crawl through a creek that was between 1 to 3 feet deep and
full of thick silt, mud, and some sand on the bottom. From there, we would make
our way into the jungle where I had the freedom as the head of the team to move
to any position that I thought would be the most effective to complete the job.
I led these teams even though I was of lesser rank, a private first class
(PFC), than most of my partners. No one went with me more than once and the
people who were senior to me did not know how to do this work. I remember only
one of these people; he was from Philadelphia and he carried a small 25 caliber
stainless steel pearl handled semi-automatic pistol, non military issue, in his
pocket.
Once I found a spot,
which was never in the same place twice and not where the guns from the line
could hit us, the other man and I would crawl into a shallow trench, usually
dug out with our hands, bayonets, and borrowed K Bar (a special combat knife
that was not issued to people of my rank), and lay back to back, the bayonet
and knife were placed in my boots; we then covered ourselves in brush. I held a
45 caliber semi-automatic pistol, which was also borrowed, to the top of my
chest; I cradled it between my shoulder and neck. Later, after the 45 was shown
to be defective, I carried my rifle, an M14. My partner and I would each take a
turn watching while the other slept and until it was time to return. We timed
our trips back so that we arrived before dawn; the VC were assumed to be
working the same area and we did not want them to know, at least easily, our
entry and exit points on the perimeter.
Our mission was to
intercept and if possible kill the prospective infiltrators before they reached
the platoon area or the main perimeter, or to at least alert the command of the
impending attack by initiating fire - we did not carry a radio; it made too
much noise. The key to the effort was to complete the outgoing and incoming activities
as silently as possible, taking the "surprise" to them, the Vietcong.
The process was always slow-going and intense, not to mention that I became
lost in the dark and rain much of the time. Navigating in the dark was always
my principal intellectual weakness. Significantly, I considered each movement,
step, or even breath, to prospectively be my last. This description is provided
without hyperbole.
I made all of these
missions, which were uneventful, for my platoon. There were, however, several accidents
where my own platoon members, uninformed or forgetting about the missions,
fired on us, or as occurred on one occasion threw a grenade at us, as we tried
to re-enter the secured area.
The monsoons ended in
mid November; I remember this time as the period when things began to change -
NVA activity accelerated and the process became more difficult. That is, there
was an increase in downed helicopters, which caused the formation of a special
emergency response team; downed helicopters required security. This group was
comprised of a reinforced squad and I (carrying the 60) was one of the first
members of the team. We prepared for and participated in rapid deployment
missions. The team was responsible for the area in the Central Highlands
between Quang Ngai province
(I believe approximately 50 miles south of Chu Lai) and Tam Ky, a village half way between Chu Lai and Da Nang. In addition to securing downed aircraft, we also
were supposed to provide rapid reinforcement of and protection for villages
coming under attack by the Vietcong. I also remember that while either as a
part of this squad, earlier ones, or in some other capacity, transporting VC
prisoners and providing security to villagers who were relocating to avoid NVA
regiments. This activity did not result in harm to anyone in our group, that
is, we were not hit by the Vietcong; during these actions, neither were any
prisoners, villagers or any associated people hurt by anyone from our group.
Near the end of my
stint in this squad, which I believe to have been between mid November to the
end of December, there was an attempt to insert us by helicopter into an area
that, unbeknownst to the command, was controlled by NVA. Their response to us
was very intense. As we landed, I remember all of us being on our knees. I bent
my head and placed it next to the man's hip who kneeled beside and slightly
forward of me. I hoped that the bullets could not go through both the bulkhead
of the helicopter and his body, especially the hip bone. We were taken out of
the zone and then replaced by a Company (200 men) that assigned a smaller and
lesser armed squad (they only had 6 men and no machinegun) to assume our
previous duties. The captain from the replacement Company said that he was
undermanned and that he needed our gun and us. He, notably, asked rather than
ordered us to go back with his group to the zone. Our sergeant, who was
recently new to this activity, refused the request, stating that he was under
other orders from another command, which may have been true. I and others in my
squad argued vociferously against the recall and attempted to go with these men
from the replacement Company with whom we had begun to speak and who were
apprehensive about the heavy NVA presence. Our attempts, however, were thwarted
by the NCO's promise that we would be court - martialled
for insubordination. The captain for the replacement grunt company, recognizing
the problem with the NCO - I believed that he was terrified, countermanded his
orders making it legal for the rest of us to join the replacement Company. As
we, absent the sergeant, were about to load back on to the helicopters to go
with this group back to the zone our colonel, who was contacted in apparent
desperation by the NCO, then reversed the captain's orders, putting an end to
the effort.
We listened on the
radio during that night to attempts to resupply the company and the smaller
replacement squad with ammunition. We also could hear the fighting. The
replacement company was hurt very badly. In addition, the position occupied by
the 6 men who replaced us was overrun during the early morning hours and we
were informed that all of these Marines were killed, which was sad beyond
description, and something else - I believed at the time that their deaths
could have been avoided had our more heavily armed group maintained the
position. Every man in my team carried belt ammunition for the gun and we heard
that the other men had run out of ammunition during the evening. They could not
be resupplied. I remember that everyone, with the exception of the NCO in
charge and who believed that we should have been joyous at not having been in
that position with those who lost their lives, felt profound shame and guilt
related to this affair. I don't know how regular grunts would have felt if
confronted with this situation, but a basic attitude that I and my closest team
members in this group shared, was that we always protected each other - we
would never let any one of us take on a more dangerous duty alone. Possibly
this view was held because we were still relatively new at the time.
Things changed for me
when our CO, that is, his helicopter, was shot down on two occasions. In
neither of the these events did he have a machinegun or any kind of automatic
weapon aboard while on the ground - command ships were unarmed at the time and
the colonel carried only a small revolver. Subsequently, I was transferred at
the beginning of the fifth month of the tour out of the grunt
activities/emergency response team and to helicopter operations, where I served
as a part time helicopter gunner, initially on the command ship, and as a full
time body guard for the Commanding Officer of that group while he was on the
ground outside of secured areas. I liked this job and developed a good
friendship with the Colonel's driver, Lance Corporal R. D. Galbraith, who
helped me to get this position. He also became my best friend upon our return
to the states (and following his discharge).
I was surprised and
chagrined, however, when told about 6 weeks later that although I was doing my
job well, I would have to return to my original grunt unit from whence I had
been transferred. During non operational periods, I wasn't useful to the group
like the other people of my (near) rank. I couldn't perform clerical functions
like typing, filing, etc. To avoid this reassignment to what I had come to
believe was hell - living in holes in the dirt and sand and frequently making
intense, albeit usually uneventful, patrols and night missions, I relearned in
a 2 day period how to type, a skill that I had acquired in a course 5 years
earlier while in the 8th grade. I barely passed this exam where I was required
to and did type a minimum of 20 words per minute. Errors were not counted.
Thereafter, I served, in addition to providing the bodyguard and machine gunner
duties for the CO, as an aviation operations clerk, of which I was the slowest
of the 3 typists, and a ground liaison representative for helicopter operations
forward, where there was such a representative, for every operation in which
the group engaged between January and September, 1966. This operations clerk
job and especially manning it in the forward positions opened an entirely new
world to me.
The "forward"
operations positions required our moving the headquarters out and next to the
grunts where they were engaged in ground operations. The purpose of the move
was to match helicopter and fixed wing (jet) operations with infantry needs. In
the beginning, this Operations Unit was staffed with 3 to 6 high ranking (major
to colonel) officers, a master and staff sergeant, and another lower ranked
enlisted man like myself, usually Lance Corporal Wolfe. Other names of members
of this group included Master Sergeant Thompson, Major Dooley, Lieutenant
Colonel Zitnic, and eventually Gunnery Sergeant
Gratton and Major William Goodsell. Again, I regret
not being able to recall others' names. They included another lance corporal,
one staff sergeant, and other officers who rotated through the group; they were
assigned as tempory additional duty from their
primary responsibilities as pilots and commanding officers for their squadrons.
Some of my
responsibilities in this forward unit included implementing and redesigning for
the sake of efficiency aspects of the system that contributed to decreasing the
time required for picking up wounded Marines; the faster we got them to C Med
at Chu Lai or to the hospital ship Repose, the higher the probabilities
that they would live. These efforts were called emergency med evac missions; my part in them, although small, represented
my most valuable contribution made during the Vietnam War.
When an infantry unit
came under attack and sustained wounded that were likely to die quickly if they
did not receive immediate aid, someone from the unit would radio our operations
command where I or Wolfe would take the radio transmission, yell
"Emergency med evac!" to alert the crews,
code the coordinates and the condition, which included determining whether the
zone was secured, delineate the smoke color for marking the zone, and then run
the final information to the crews, who, on the initial alert, had started
warming the engines of the helicopters. I would return to the radio and the map
where the woundeds' positions were marked and then
maintain radio contact with both the helicopter and ground personnel until they
made contact with each other, and continue to maintain such contact with one or
the other as the mission proceeded. If air support were also required because
of ground fire's suddenly making the zone unsecure - the NVA could place direct
fire on the helicopter as it landed to pick up the wounded - then I would turn
the information over to a duty officer who directed the interaction with the
fixed wing pilots, who would then pound the NVA responsible for the insecurity
of the particular zone. As these NVA troops were frequently providing such fire
either directly out of or next to complex tunnel support systems, securing the
zones was not always a function of air support alone, but often required artillery
support or the grunts, themselves, sometimes having to assault the positions in
order to get their wounded out. I or Wolfe coordinated the radio efforts.
Coordination was important because it resulted in speed of extraction. This
speed was everything in these operations, and only tempered with standing
orders to not take helicopters into unsecured zones. We had too few planes and
crews to lose which, when this did occur, it reduced our extraction capacity,
not to mention reducing troop insertion and ammunition resupply capacities as
well.
There were two
complications to the emergency med evac process.
First, the NVA routinely threw out their own smoke
grenades to direct the helicopter into an unsecured area. Second, the
helicopter pilots with whom I spoke on the radio routinely entered unsecured
zones against both the standing orders and as I witnessed against the direct
orders by the CO to not enter such zones. As these men would take fire and hits
to their planes, they would make the first priority the extraction of the
infantry wounded they had landed to retrieve. The flying into unsecured zones
caused upheaval as a crew member or members would become wounded or be killed,
or the planes would go down, or both. A helicopter's downing and prospective
loss of its crew required that the chase bird, an accompanying helicopter
flying as stand by, enter the zone to retrieve whomever, crews or wounded.
Usually, additional med evacs and air support were
also required. Extraction or emergency response team insertion activities were
required as well.
Our group might
coordinate only 4 or sometimes as many as 20 emergency med evac
missions in a day, the latter occurring in heated operations where we also
conducted 2 to 3 different emergency med evac
extractions at a time, and usually coupled with frequent occurrences of downed
aircraft and loss and prospective loss of crews. A part of my job was to relay
these changes in aircraft and crew availability so that replacements could be
brought in. These replacements came from squadrons that were constantly flying
resupply and air cover for infantry activities. Helicopter and crew
availability were always stressed because of the infantry's ammunition and
rations resupply demands, but emergency med evac
superseded these demands, the stress and everything else. With the exception of
the first waves of helicopter troop insertions into strike zones, areas where
the NVA were located (or supposed to be located) and had decided to do battle,
emergency med evac was the priority - the most
intense and conscientious effort made by everyone involved.
While on these
operations, I remember also being loaned out to provide gun support for a slick
(an unarmed UH1E helicopter) to an infantry colonel (I believe also a Fleet
Marine Force inspector) who used the craft to move more readily to various
infantry positions during an operation. This job involved a multitude of
processes including dropping the officer in designated areas and then
retrieving him, sometimes staying with him while he conducted the operation
from the ground, inspected caves, verified enemy dead and captured arsenals and
appraised civilian casualties. That colonel was always giving up the helicopter
to shuttle Marine wounded.
In addition, I also
volunteered for and flew, when I first began to be a part of these operations,
port gunner on emergency med evac, air strike,
resupply, troop insertion, and on limited occasions graves
registration missions. "Graves
registration" refers to those missions where Marines who had lost their
lives were carried to the places that provided for the processing of their
bodies: they were sent home.
Other than that already
described, a stress for me and apparently the operations command, as they began
to send fewer operations' representatives to the forward positions, sometimes
only myself and an officer, Captain Downey, was that the NVA periodically moved
small forces (including the use of VC) from their engagement with the grunts
and swung to attack us, the nucleus of the forward helicopter command. These
attacks happened only about 4 times and involved periodic and sometimes
continual incoming automatic weapons fire, which was countered with artillery,
Phantom and other fighter responses. In some of these cases, we operated from a
large 6 foot deep hole that was dug out by an engineer's bulldozer; other
facilities, like at Binh Son, only included a network
of trenches.
One of the four or so
attacks, however, was not as easily fended off. It occurred at night, I believe
at either the end of January or February, 1966. Only a skeleton crew of the
forward Operations Unit remained at the site, a village called Tam Ky. The NVA
(Vietcong) tried to take our position by running through it. A small Marine
infantry unit that had coincidently redeployed during the evening for some rest
in this safer zone deterred the attack, but not without the loss of one and I
believe several of the Marine defenders' lives. Since first writing this in
1986, I’ve discovered the unit to have been a platoon from 2nd Battalion,
7th Marines. I do not know the name of the platoon unit, and I doubt
that they were recognized for doing anything other than their jobs. This was
not considered a big event in the scheme of things, but this group's actions
that night were not and will never be small or insignificant to me. They saved
my life and the others' lives who were at that
position. I would like to thank those who lived and to emphasize the wounded
and the families of those who did perish. In 1996, I spoke at length with Captain
(then) and later to become Colonel Downey, one of the Huey pilots from the two
helicopter crews remaining with us during the night. We recalled the event
similarly, both reporting it as the worst single episode of the war bar none
(edited 2008).
Aside from the most
obvious concern for those men who lost their lives, this was also a difficult
psychological experience for me. Coming through it affected me more profoundly
than anything has ever influenced my life, either that occurred before the
attack or since. The morning following the event, I remember saying to myself
that the rest of my life would go upward from that moment. I would make it so.
I and others who did this work were always prepared for the NVA to make these
moves and attempt to take our positions, which aside from their several
unsuccessful efforts related, they did not do while I
was in this group.
I left out of the first
publication that I had suffered a traumatic brain injury. That was my second
and last of the tour.
Another extraordinary,
devastating, experience occurred as a result of civilian casualties. Where the
Vietcong routinely killed villagers, usually for political purposes, I
observed, while on one of the later operations, I believe it was in March of
1966, destruction imposed by us. That is, although there was much effort by the
commands, especially by the American commanders that I saw, to avoid civilian
casualties, I did witness the decision by a South Vietnamese General to target
a designated NVA support village near Binh Sohn; tunnel complexes honeycombed the area including the
village and from which village the NVA was delivering heavy fire on a Marine
battalion. The fire was causing substantial Marine infantry casualties. The
village was heavily bombed. The bombing ended the Marine casualties, but at the
same time killed women and children; this was as low a point for everyone
involved, and for me the lowest, excepting only the times when I helped to
carry dead Marines, when my associates died, and when I believed I was close to
death myself.
In the beginning, the
operations in which I participated lasted approximately 2 weeks each, and were
conducted back-to-back during January and part of February. These efforts
involved large task forces of ships and landing craft where we made amphibious
landings that were coordinated with air strikes and helicopter troop
insertions. I had myriad duties which included making the landings with
operations equipment that could not be carried by air. Galbraith, the CO's
driver and I spent several days on an LST (landing craft) preparing the
equipment for the battle that was to ensue. It was standard old school USMC and
Navy amphibious operations where we made landings (Operations Double Eagle 1
and 2) by driving the equipment (in a jeep and trailer) through the surf and
onto the beach. We then linked up with the rest of the Operations and
headquarters group who had come by air.
In these large and
initial (to me) operations, although there were a lot of men, supplies, and
ordinance expended, there were not as many casualties on either side, as were
to occur later. Then, that later time came and during the period from early Spring to early Summer, the character of these operations
changed to become shorter in duration, but much deadlier for each group. All of
these battles “Utah,” “Texas,” “Mississippi,” and “Kansas” to name a few were
against at least battalion and often division strength NVA units who carried
substantial anti-aircraft capacities and who determined when the battles would
be fought. That is, they routinely followed and then ambushed our recon teams,
and then shot down dispatched emergency med evac
helicopters, which downings we responded to with
various and necessary levels of force (increasing troop insertions) and which
increases resulted in the escalation of the battle until the NVA would break it
off by departing the area. These operations came one after another, seemingly
almost weekly (but then thinned out later), and usually lasted 2 – 3, but
sometimes as in “Texas” 10 days. The stand-by emergency response team of which
I was an initial member while performing my infantry duties, grew during this
time from squad to platoon size, and then quickly to strengths having company
and battalion capacities for rapid deployment.
Throughout this period,
both the infantry groups and our squadrons took what the command called
moderate to heavy casualties. That is, a single and particularly difficult
operation where the NVA decided to engage would cause 50 to 200 Marine infantry
to be deceased plus more men would be wounded. Our group would lose 2 - 4
helicopters and their crews or some of them. On the other side of such an
operation 200 to 2500 NVA regulars and Vietcong would lose their lives. Of
note, with the exception of 1 person, every corpsman that I knew or ever came
into contact with, including the two that used to come out to the villages that
I protected as a grunt, were either killed or wounded, preponderantly the
former.
My guess, and it may be
an inflated one, is that during the last 8 - 9 months of my tour I participated
in 12 to 15 such operations, many of which were conducted directly out of Chu
Lai; the Operations Unit did not go to forward positions with the grunts. Aside
from feeling valuable for making a contribution to my unit's efforts, another
really good part of this job was that I was able to return to the base at the
end of a particular operation where I could shower, stay removed from the
insects, eat regular food, and sleep on a cot in a place with a floor and roof.
These facilities in the beginning were made of canvas (tents) and later toward
the end of the tour nice 15 by 30 foot buildings with wood sides and floors,
screened windows, and tin roofs.
I came through the
Vietnam war unscathed, with the exception of the skin
disease already described and two accidents and 2 TBIs. There were also some
other experiences that I have characterized for myself as episodes involving
severe weakness on my part. The accidents and experiences of weakness are
described here.
The platoon on the hill
about 500 yards from my location came under attack during the early morning
hours, probably between 1:00 and 3:00AM. I was ordered to carry the M60 to
reinforce the attacked group and to go as fast as I could. I remember being scared
because tracers were criss-crossing the area. I was
afraid of meeting VC, infiltration teams, who might be coming through this
sector, but I was more afraid of being mistaken for them by my own people. I
remember running very hard along a path that was almost invisible in the dark
and rain, and illuminated only periodically by flares the light of which faded
quickly as the chutes carrying the illuminations dropped behind the hill up
which the path led and on which I was running. I tripped over something and
landed face first on the exposed portion of a steel and pointed stake that had
been driven 3 feet into the ground; the exposed portion was flanged, sharp and
ragged. Apparently, because of the full impact of my body and the added weight
of the gun, ammunition, grenades, flares, and so forth, I was knocked
unconscious. I don't know how long I lay there, but someone en route to the
same area found me lying in the mud and carried me to the medical tent where I
was properly attended to. I discovered that my face was paralyzed on the side
where it was hit below my left eye. The full paralysis lasted for several days
and then diminished over an approximately 3 week period; there were no lasting
effects that I knew of at the time.
In the second accident,
I was aboard a UH46, a dual bladed helicopter, that when leaving the side of a
hill south of Quang Ngai,
dropped, quickly and without warning, between 50 to 100 feet to the ground. The
helicopter and those of us inside bounced upon hitting the ground; my body hit
the ceiling, from where it then was thrown back to the deck. I landed on other
Marines and some landed on me. I sustained no apparent injury, although I was
shocked and numb for several hours. I never rode in a 46 again.
Some of the periods of
weakness to which I have referred occurred when I lost consciousness four
additional times to the one already described. Two of these episodes were a
consequence of heat exhaustion experienced while on day patrols. I was carried
out after collapsing on the trail and flown out by helicopter another time,
where while walking through water I fell onto the side of a dike separating 2
rice paddies. I took many salt tablets thereafter. I never passed out from heat
exhaustion again. From time to time, I still remember the feel of the heat and
the smell of the bacteria that covered the trail as a green slime, and in which
my face lay. The putrescent smell was the last thing
that I recall as I lost consciousness. Two other experiences occurred when
helping wounded. I was holding one man's
head while he was in much pain. He was bleeding from his stomach and a corpsman
was attending to him and I lost consciousness, but could still hear people
talking. When another man was wounded in the leg, which was bleeding profusely
in spurts, I was helping to hold his arms and hands when I again became faint
and then fell over backwards, passing out completely. The last thing that I
remember was seeing the blood and his squeezing my hands hard while I was
trying to give him strength. I remember holding them tightly back even when I
could not see any longer. I returned to consciousness to find a chaplain
(priest) bending over me and preparing to administer whatever they do for
people who have died. He was relieved, happy and amused to find that I had just
fainted. Because of the paleness of my skin he said that he thought I was dead.
I was embarrassed, but too weak, as if an infant, to do anything about it. I
couldn't even get up. I remember laying there in the dirt thinking "I am
nothing and I have no character"; I could not associate this diminished
individual that I had become with functioning in any of the capacities for
which I trained and for which I was responsible. However, those 4 episodes passed, each within a matter of hours; one lasted a day.
The final episodes of
weakness began to occur during the Spring. On
occasion, I began to experience sickness even before exposure to deceased and
severely injured Marines. I thought sometimes, in flashes of fear and panic,
that the same injuries to them were coming for me next, which thoughts, fears
and panic I pushed from my mind as deranged; I worked to concentrate on helping
where I could. I also remember that I was numb for several days following an
operation, as if I had become separate from every thing
and every one. I was always ashamed of these weaknesses and feelings of
incapacitation, but also I always believed that I had otherwise done a good
job. Absent the five episodes of unconsciousness and short recuperation
periods, and despite my fears, I could be depended upon to do my part. I have
not lost consciousness since that year.
There was a time when I
thought that I was dead or should have been, and was separated by an explosion
from my rifle. By the last of the tour, I could not sleep in even the secure
places without it lying next to me on my cot, and under a cover so that the
sergeant in charge of the hut wouldn't know that I had it there, locked and
loaded with a full magazine - something that was against the rules. At some
times, even during uneventful times, I left (at late night) the hut with the
roof and floor, and slept in the hole outside the door; I had premonitions of
attack, but all were unfounded.
I discussed, on my
return to the states, with a Navy doctor some of these things related to the
passing out episodes; I thought they had been peculiar experiences. He said
that I would probably be all right; I apparently was. That is, until 1981 when
I began to have severe reactions to the memories of my experiences. Later then,
my psychology would collapse to a new disorder recognized in the DSM-III.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). I was evaluated stringently by the VA
and then accorded a 100% disability for the condition.
During the last 2 - 3
months of the tour, I remember that my duties, with the exception of 2
extremely difficult operations, were primarily clerical; I don't remember going
to forward positions with the grunts, or for that matter if there were any such
positions manned by our group. I do not believe so.
In one of those
operations, June 16, 1966, my immediate CO and directly supervising officer,
Major William Goodsell, was killed. In the second
one, with only 2 days left in-country, I was sent out, by a newly arriving
(from the states) and in my view obviously terrified sergeant as a replacement
for him, to the same forward position where the night attack on the forward
command referenced earlier occurred. The people that were already there told me
when I arrived that they were periodically taking incoming, mortars.
Subsequently, I finished my tour in, again, the deepest hole that I could find,
a hole that happened to also be filled with 2 feet of rice paddy water; I ended
in the same place from where I had started.
Before departing the
states for Vietnam, our MAG CO and the man for whom I served as a body guard,
Colonel William Gentry Johnson, informed us of his philosophy. He did not
believe in heroism. He primarily wanted his men, us, to come back alive. I and
the rest my group subscribed to this philosophy - I can only recall one award
ceremony where crew chiefs and pilots were given medals for completing a
certain number of combat missions. However, and although I was not heroic, I
personally and my unit were recognized for having done our jobs well. I received
a meritorious battlefield promotion from PFC to Lance Corporal and
recommendation from the base physician for a Purple Heart for the concussion
and temporary paralysis of my face. I was very proud of the promotion, and
recently heard that my family had been notified of it during the war; I'm told
that my father was proud of it also. I never knew of the family's notification.
I declined the physician's recommendation for the recognition traditionally
given to the wounded; I was embarrassed because my injury had occurred from
accident, and the effects were not otherwise serious or long lasting. My unit's
efforts were acknowledged with a Presidential Unit Citation and Navy Unit
Commendation.
Most importantly to me,
I was accorded a special 2 day R and R flight as recognition for my
participation in the operation where Major Goodsell
was killed. In that operation, an 18 man recon team was attacked and encircled
by an NVA battalion. Our unit responded with several actions: attempted and
failed night ammunition resupply, attempted and failed emergency med evac, and attempted but partially successful night air
support and eventual morning extraction by our unit. The sergeant heading the
team was accorded the Medal of. In addition to my boss, many of the men on the
ground were killed and I believe all were wounded. I would find out later (long
after I wrote this the first time) in 1996 that Major Goodsell
was awarded a Navy Cross, the second highest Marine Corps medal for individual
bravery available.
I would like to note
that Major Goodsell was a quiet, nice, soft spoken, and very kind person, a different kind of Marine
Corps officer from the image held by people of my rank. As I also recall, he
was married and had children. Although the members of my group rarely spoke of
it, and I cannot speak for them, I believe that his death hurt us all very
badly.
The special flight,
where I was the only enlisted man present among approximately 14 officers and
pilots who had participated in the operation, was my most valued experience of
personal recognition. It is equally important for me to say that I did not
think at the time that I deserved to be in this unit because these people were
better educated than me; even the few enlisted men had acquired some levels of
college, and they were all well trained to do this work. In this competitive
and demanding environment, I was doing well, the best that I could do, to stay
with them. So the flight meant to me that I had not only kept up, but that I
made a meaningful contribution to these people who I respected very much. I was
specifically told by the Group Sergeant Major, a kindly man, that the trip was
intended to convey this message to me.
I believe that there
were other group recognitions, but I cannot remember their specifics. I was
very proud to have been a part of this operations command unit and to have
worked with these people, especially because of the admiration I held for the
extraordinary character demonstrated by the commanding officers, pilots, crew
chiefs and emphasizing corpsmen - a representation of selflessness and caring
for fellow men that was so profound that it is impossible for me to relate
adequate description in words. Moreover, many of these commanders and senior
NCOs, WWII and Korean War veterans, exhibited routinely, daily, acts of
courage, integrity and bravery. These men epitomized for me at 19 to 20 years
of age what it was to be a Marine and a man. I aspired to be of their
character. There were also some very funny people in the operations command.
Although the grunts
were not my primary associates in the last 9 months of my tour, from my view
they showed a level of personal strength, sheer physical stamina, and
determination that are also difficult to relate. I recall coming upon a squad
resting at the end of a battle, I believe called "Operation Texas."
The officer in charge described to the Colonel who I accompanied how that
during the conflict, the NVA, 10 yards from the Marine Squad, had panicked
while throwing grenades - the NVA soldiers threw the grenades too soon after
pulling the pins, and the Marines were able to throw them back, killing the NVA
who then lay close to the Marine squad members. These Marines seemed amazed at
the opposition's lack of training: throwing grenades while in close conflict.
Some of the squad were even laughing. I don't remember
all of the infantry units represented throughout my tour. But 3 included 2nd
Battalion, 7th Marines; 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines; 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines.
I characterize Vietnam
for myself personally as initially being an attempt to acquire, and then
maintain through the duration of the tour, enough courage to do the job. With
the exception of the 2 months in the latter part of the summer of 1966, the
experience in that country was one of constant intensity and fatigue, mixed
with a few noted periods of little activity, some humor, and then followed by
other periods that involved terror and horror, to include carnage and death on
a scale that I experienced as horrendous. Where I started out as an
adventuresome young person who was willing to take risks, I ended the tour with
the view that death during combat was a random event, and in some cases my
being alive was and still is a consequence of others' courage, but also
accident: NVA ordinance failed to explode and I moved or was moved from
positions where the happenstance of the moves alone resulted in my living. I
attempted to skew the probabilities of that randomness to my favor by becoming
well focused upon completing my missions with my body and life still intact.
The most vivid memory I have of this change, outside of what I have already
told you, was the thought at the end where I began to doubt that had I been
placed again into that situation experienced in the early part of the tour where
I had argued to join the 6 men who had replaced us and then who were killed
during the night, that I would not have volunteered any longer to go and fight
with them - that I would rather have been alive than risk being dead. This was
my most shameful experience that I had about myself at the time.
I believed two things
about Vietnam. On the one hand I had done my job well. On the other, I had
become by the end of the tour a different person who was beginning to be
without courage. I did not allow anyone to know, however, the accompanying
feelings of increasing fear, terror, guilt and shame. I held them deep within
myself and attempted to, and did at times, project the opposite - courage,
strength, will, and determination; but I no longer volunteered.
On
return to the States, Camp Pendleton, California, I was reassigned to my
primary MOS of truck driving where I was supposed to teach new truck drivers
how to drive and maintain their equipment in combat conditions. With the
exception of the company of my good friend who spent that first 4 months with
me, and longer for him, in that infantry unit at Chu Lai, I was profoundly
disappointed at not being assigned to a unit where I could be with some of the
people with whom I had served in Vietnam, especially the last 9 months. With
regards to the new job, this was an extraordinary position to be in because
during the last year I rarely saw a truck, much less drove one. Moreover, I had
almost 2 years left on my 4 year contract. Subsequently, I was not gung ho.
I was promoted to
corporal immediately, and the leadership responsibilities provided me with
another perspective on the situation. The new people who were going over to
Vietnam were not, in my opinion, being adequately prepared, attitudinally and
practically. That is, they were living in fantasy, preoccupied with personal
interests that were totally unrelated to that which might confront them; they
were not being prepared for the advent that they would be transferred into a
different job, as I was so transferred. Because I did not see anyone else who
took this prospective problem for them seriously, I became, in addition to
performing my regular duties, a training instructor, NCO, in this newly
reconstructed (5th Marine) division, of Iwo Jima fame. I taught these new
people, and demanded that they learn, everything that
I knew about insurgency (guerilla / terrorist) and counter insurgency
operations. The instruction included courses that I designed and also provided
the primary instruction on how to protect villages, what to do during an
ambush, how to set night counter ambush positions, how to read maps (land
navigation) if lost or having to call for air or artillery support, or call for
med evac, and I taught every person in the outfit how
to dismantle, reassemble and fire M60 and 50 caliber machineguns. These
training activities were not well received by these men, including some of the
other NCO's and officers, as the general attitude was that these people were
motor transport and not grunts. Despite their arguments, I persevered with the
effort which gave meaning to me and despite my lack of popularity.
During this time, I
became, through meritorious promotion, a "5.0" Marine Corps sergeant.
This means that my proficiency and conduct ratings were the best that could be
achieved or awarded on the measurement scale. Aside from providing many of the
training functions for my outfit, I also was the physical fitness NCO, primary
drill instructor, NCO in charge of the civil unrest response, and the NCO who,
generally, took seriously the idea of order and discipline during a time of
turmoil and upheaval for both the Corps and the country. I worked at being as
strong, stable and tough as a person in my position was required to be and as I
thought those people, the new Marines in training and transition, needed for
what they were about to encounter. The notion that hard and conscientious
training could help to keep people alive was not just a slogan to me. I
received awards for those efforts, and I was proud of them. I should note that
although I gave this effort my determined best, I do not believe the quality of
training was comparable to that which would have been received in standard
division infantry units; everybody in the command structure would have shared
my attitude and conviction, and no doubt would have added greater expertise.
To a man, these people
that I had trained for the 14 to 16 months between the fall of 1966 and the end
of 1967 were transferred, all in an approximate 3 day period during the
beginning of the TET Offensive in January 1968, from their primary MOS's of
truck driving to serve as grunts in infantry units that were flown directly
into the area north of Quang Tri, South Vietnam.
Because of my leadership responsibilities, and although I only had 6 months
left on my 4 year contract, I volunteered to return to Vietnam with this group,
providing encouragement to those people who needed it, as some were sitting in
the barracks crying and all seemed terrified. But, in fact I did not want to
go; not only was I scared, but I believed with certainty that this time there
would be no chance that I would return alive. Moreover, I remember the parents
of a young Marine who had hated me because of the rigors of the training. They
came on to the base and told me that they knew that their son would be safe
because he was going with me, and that he had told them about how he trusted me
to know what I was doing. I will never forget that mother's and father's faces
of stark terror and pain. When this troop movement was over, I, without
understanding, was the only qualified person who did not receive orders. From
thereafter, and for the rest of my life, this experience has haunted me with a
mixture of disbelief at not having received orders to join this group, relief
at the time for not having been sent back in, and tremendous guilt for not
having gone with them. With sadness, I especially regret to say that my very
good friend who had come through boot camp with me and who was the one person
who remained with me during that first 4 months at Chu Lai, was also ordered
out as part of that troop movement. He was then killed.
During this same
period, I was recommended for Officers Candidate School and also offered a
billet (position) as a drill instructor at the recruit depot in San Diego. I
declined both the Officers Candidate School recommendation and the new job as a
drill instructor for recruits. I left military service.
For a person who was a
truant and teenage runaway, and at times a person without a home during my
adolescent years, my service in the Marines was something about which, overall,
I derived much pride - I had been able to do something well that took every
scintilla of my courage and character. During the Vietnam war,
I knew that my efforts had been valuable to the people with whom I served and
to the people of South Vietnam with whom I had contact in the villages. I also
believed that this effort had been valuable to the people of my country. Of
course, my view became the minority one.
The political controversy
about the war was understandable. And as a training NCO, I had studied the
history and rationales underlying the War, including the study of NVA
strategies for fighting it; they included fighting the War so that the
opposition's home support would tire of the conflict. I even taught courses
about why we were fighting in Vietnam, and I tried to include opposing
theories.
Being politically
naive, I did not, however, understand nor prepare myself for the political
strategies that attacked our personages. In that regard, the perspectives
accorded to us, combat veterans, by initially the antiwar activists and
eventually much of the population, were unfathomable, and they carried over
from the War, itself, to the rest of our lives.
For example, some of my
best friends who had attended college during my time in the service exclaimed,
when I did not agree with their views of the War, that my activities in the
Marines had been "reprehensible" - "immoral." Films and
documentaries most always described us as psychopaths, and these fantasies were
also regularly honored.
The attacks affected
after-service employment efforts - I was not employable because of my combat
experience. Interviewers expressed their political views of the War; they
condescended to me. I was lectured to about the value of WWII fighting men and
the ignominious conduct of Vietnam veterans. One person even asked if I thought
that I was a "tough guy" because we had killed women and children.
Tiring of the opprobrium and fearing for my ability to make a living, I regret
to say that I removed all identification of my Marine Corps and combat
activities from my resume. Hence, to right that mistake, I'm adding them back
in now.
These returning home
experiences, of which there were many more but too numerous and disquieting to
continue to report, were a shocking impact upon my life - a denigration of the
best that I had to offer. The experience separated the innermost part of my
soul from the country that before the War I had believed in and loved.
With the assistance of
my father, I gained employment as a computer operator for an oil company (1968
- 1969). With extra money made from overtime hours, and in conjunction with a
partner (another computer operator), I also purchased and rebuilt a 30 year
old, 40 foot A.E. Luders yawl rigged sailing yacht.
Although I did not have any sailing experience, this had been something I had
begun to dream about. I bought books on the subject and taught myself the
particulars, applying the book learning to multiple day and night offshore
sailing ventures.
My plan was to sail
from the Texas Gulf Coast down to the Panama Canal, through it, and then return
to the orient, in the process also discovering the islands of the South
Pacific. However, I married instead and then sold the boat to my partner, as my
plan of sailing back to the orient seemed incompatible with the
responsibilities attending stable family life.
I purchased a run-down
service (gas) station dealership (for 100 dollars), built the sales volume until
it provided a living, and then used eventually increasing proceeds to start a
trucking company out of another franchise purchase, a business that I made into
the largest of its type in the United States. When the parent company attempted
to change to a corporate (as opposed to franchise-based) structure, I initiated
and engaged in anti-trust litigation against that parent, which went bankrupt -
ending in the process my legal pursuits.
I concluded as a
consequence of the litigation experience, which was no small battle,
that the control of the business community belonged to those who
understood the intricacies of the rules and languages governing this field. I
also was confronted during this time by my lack of education and embarrassment
that this lack held for me. Subsequently, I closed my individual businesses and
attended Sam Houston State University and then the University of Texas at
Austin where I received a degree in Business Administration and Accounting,
completing the entire academic effort in 2 and 1/2 years of study.
My next employment
venture was with an investment banking firm where originally I worked as a
stock broker, but which focus I eventually changed to include corporate finance
activities. This is where I learned the fundamentals of research. I recall that
my feelings were, upon entry into this group, of deep inadequacy - competitors
were Harvard graduates with MBA's (Masters in Business Administration) and the
people were, as a rule, coming from a part of society having more social
prestige and economic influence than I had brought from my own background,
coming from whence I have described. By the end of this professional
experience, however, I found that I was adequate and intellectually comparable
to any competitor in this field. I eventually received recognition for my
efforts in this profession by becoming one of the most prolific producers of
revenues for the firm - which was the primary function of the job.
Upon the death of my
father in 1976, a person with whom I had struggled in conflict for most of my
life following my mother's death, I entered therapy, where I addressed marital
problems as the primary issue - my wife wanted a divorce, which did occur
despite the therapy.
During this, to say the
least tumultuous, period, I became involved with the woman who is now my wife
and the person who has had the most profound influence
on my current, and most probably my entire, life. She had been involved in
different aspects of the alcoholism treatment profession since 1973 and near
the time of our getting together was the Educational Consultant for the Texas
Commission on Alcoholism for the Texas Gulf Coast Region; it was her job to
prevent alcoholism in the region, a population of approximately 3 million
people. I am not sure how she did with that group as a whole, but she did save
one individual - me. That is, because of her influence, and for which I thank
her, and in part because of the psychiatrist who was providing me with the
therapy during this period, I identified my drinking as a problem and then
stopped.
In hindsight and with
extensive research and study, 1 year later I identified that problem to have
been alcoholism; I continued to recover from it through my late entry and
participation in the Twelve Step program of Alcoholics Anonymous.
I think that because of that 1 year delay my experience of the Twelve Step
model was not as meaningful or as important to my life as it was to those
people whose initial recoveries were a more direct consequence of that
program's assistance. I did continue to attend several meetings per week for a
period of 5 years and found the fellowship and the opportunity to focus on the
effects that my drinking had had upon my life to be very valuable, and despite
the differences between the Twelve Step model and the ETM and TRT
programs.
At the beginning of
1979, I changed professions to that of an alcoholism counselor; I acquired
training and eventual certification. The training entailed approximately 500
actual educational hours (200 were required for alcoholism counselor
certification) including attendance in schools and internships provided at the
Johnson Institute in Minnesota where the curriculums and internships addressed
family alcoholism dynamics, assessment, counseling and intervention. During
this period, I joined my wife, who I would like to add declined the offer of
the Executive Director's position for her agency (The Texas Commission on
Alcoholism and Drug Abuse in Houston) in order that we could establish a
private community chemical dependency prevention program based on family
intervention, counseling and treatment activities; these activities are
explained in the other development chapters.
It is important for me
to tell you that throughout most of that nearly 20 year period, to include the
times beginning with my mother's illness and continuing throughout my Marine
Corps, business, and therapeutic experiences, and to include the period of
transition into the alcoholism counseling profession, that neither I nor anyone
else ever considered the combat activity to have influenced my life. I know
today, however, that Vietnam and especially the return home did affect me
profoundly. It provided a subconscious motivation to develop TRT. That is, I
did suffer post-traumatic stress disorder from my combat experiences, but did
not come face-to-face with it until I stopped drinking. And I think that TRT's
applications to other people helped me to understand what happened to myself.
This understanding now
underpins one motivation central to my work. I intend that some
day TRT will be applied to young people in combat. They will be accorded
the trauma resolution process immediately and routinely following the
heinousness and carnage that accompanies combat.
I have shared fighting
holes with chaplains (they were not fighting, but taking-cover) and had
discussions with them following events jointly experienced as horrific.
Chaplains are the people who meet the on-the-scene needs of military personnel
affected by such events. And I know that chaplains will benefit from this work;
they will be better suited to meet the needs of future young people who serve
in similarly difficult situations. And when that application of TRT to combat
personnel happens, those fighting men's and women's hearts and minds will
become immune to any denigrations, psychological
warfare, intended to exploit their trauma - it will be resolved. I believe
further that when no trauma remains for these future combat veterans,
advancement of a particular political philosophy through attempts to demoralize
these people will become an idea/strategy that has seen its passing. It will be
replaced with a resurrected and time tested cultural value - the respect for
and honor of service men and women.
Since the beginning of
the Vietnam memorial activities, like the building of the Washington memorial
where families go to express their grief, the delayed parades in the cities
across the country, and the creation of the more recent statue depicting the
role of women in war, I frequently think of the children, wives, and parents of
those men who I saw dead. It seems that on most of those occasions, the first
thing that anyone would say was, "He had 2 or 3 children," or
"He just had a new baby." Now, I still think of those people,
including the dead Marines' family members that I never met. And I would want
to meet and to tell them that I was with their fathers, husbands, brothers or
sons when they died. To my good friend's 3 small children, I would say if I
could: "I knew your father well. He was my friend. He was brave and he
looked after me. He was a fine and good man and I am sorry that you've had to
live your life without him; I wish that you could have known him."
Because of these
thoughts about and memories of these people, I dedicated this book to the men
and women whose names are memorialized on the "Wall," their wounded
brothers and sisters who served with them, the rest of us who also came home,
the South Vietnamese who fought for their freedom, and to the loved ones who
shared the experience and were affected by the tragedy.
Sometime in the latter
half of 1993, I saw on the CBS news magazine show 60 Minutes an
interview of the Kansas Senator, Robert Dole. During the conversation, Senator
Dole spoke emotionally of his wounds received during WWII, the difficulty of
his recovery, and his continuing identification with those veterans that have
become street homeless - people outside the system. Although I did not have
such injuries with which to identify and contend, for the last 15 years I have
felt a deep and never spoken psychological kinsmanship
with those veterans that have lived in the remote forests of the Northwest, in
the deserts of New Mexico, and in the jungle styled foliages of Hawaii. Even
though I have always tried to be successful and so forth, I often used to think
that I should be there with them, where I could return to doing what I did on
those 2 man night missions - being alone in the jungle. I might have joined
these men, who seemed vacant in the interviews, but I believe only to have been
hurt, had it not been for my wife's influence on my life, the specific import
of which I have described toward the end of this appendix.
As a layman who had
entered the experience of therapy in the mid 1970's, my journey
through the different helping processes were growth-evoking. Once I
realized that something was wrong, the goals for this path became simple: I
wanted to learn to understand myself. I also wanted to be able to relate more
meaningfully to other people. As I made the transition to the helping
professions, my goals were to lessen the difficulties of people who were
negotiating similar paths in an attempt to find their own truths. I tried to
achieve those goals by relying on the many philosophies and approaches that
were available.
My
belief at the time, which I took from the literature, my training, and in part
my own therapy, was that people were caught in traps of their own making. Fundamentally, the individual (or client) was seen as
being responsible for his or her own direction in life. In this vision, life
problems occurred because the individual was choosing or allowing the
experience in order to meet basic needs. An extension of this hypothesis was
that people who chose to stay in such a quagmire were indeed sick, and that
when they were ready to get well, they would.
The methods I used
pointed out my clients' misdirections and then reflected other possibilities.
Once these people had attained an understanding of their mistakes, it was hoped
that they would choose, from the broader range of alternatives, new directions
that were more beneficial to their personal healths. Although I believed that
people's emotional experiences were important, to the extent that I was trained
in the administration of client centered and grief resolution therapies, I
relegated both the emotions and the therapies which emphasized their importance
to a secondary status; emotions were always subordinated to the importance of
proper choice-making, positive action-inducing, success-building processes. I
thought that the answer for everyone was fairly simple: people needed to learn
to be responsible and accountable.
The goal was to help
people toward achieving self-actualization. At times, I even condescended to
those who did not make the grade - opining that people that remained in
debilitating states would never get anywhere by just feeling sorry for
themselves. I abhorred the idea of victimization, seeing it as a degenerating
philosophy intended to excuse lack of performance.
These were my general,
but initial, counseling philosophies and approaches. They would change
following the experience reported next.
While writing the TRT
Educational Program educational materials between 1985 and 1987, I wrote a
booklet that described TRT's development from the perspective of my experiences
as a person affected by trauma as a child, and then subsequent progressions
through a psychological experience related to my mother's death. The purpose of
this article was to describe grief so that people who were experiencing it
during the therapeutic process or before entering such processes would
understand that it was natural. Where I have already reprinted part of that
description earlier, that is, the description of my attempts to stop my mother
from taking her life, I am reprinting here the conclusion, which occurred 20
years after her death - now (1993) over 34 years ago, because this experience
marks the changes in philosophical and clinical perspectives I had of other
people who were also affected by trauma.
I was
participating in a continuing education training program for counselors. As I
listened to the speaker, I noticed that red welts were developing on my arms. I
left the training session, which I do not recall as having been especially
important or influencing. In the restroom, I found that the red color was
spreading across my chest, neck, abdomen and buttocks. I found Nancy, who was
in another class, and told her what was happening and that I didn't understand
it. I then set out for home, leaving her there to finish the school.
During the drive, tears
began to fill my eyes, and I felt as though I were drowning. When I couldn't
see the road or the cars in front of me any longer, I pulled to the side of the
freeway and began to cry. I didn't even know what the crying was about.
However, when I finally
did get home, I discovered what was wrong. I was beginning to do what I had
never done before - I was starting to grieve the death and loss of my mother
who had died almost 20 years earlier. The difference was that the experience I
was having was as if she had died just hours before.
For the next three
days, I relived my life as if I were again 13 years
old and my father had just received the call that told us of my mother's death.
I remembered that while he was on the phone, he began to cry as he tried to
tell us what had happened. I felt myself become numb and heard my sister,
seeming to talk from a great distance, ask from the kitchen if I was all right.
I said that I was and continued putting my football uniform into the washer.
Soon the house was filled with people coming to help.
Nancy's part in this
reliving process became very important to me. Periodically, she would come into
the room and lay a hand on my shoulder to let me know that she cared and that I
was not alone. From both her professional background and her understanding of
me, she knew that I was starting to experience a hurt that had not begun to be
resolved until now. From Nancy's view, what might be precipitating this
experience was not as important as the reality that it needed an opportunity
for expression. She also recognized that for my grief to be ended, I would have
to begin where the process had been interrupted and continue through the
experience until it was completed.
Each of the re-enacting
days corresponded to an equivalent time preceding the funeral. Throughout the
experience, I felt as if I were two people. One was an adult living in the
world of today. The other was a teenager who had just lost a parent. The
recollections were vivid, and I found myself living interchangeably in the two
roles.
On the first day, I
moved from the many years of shock, confusion, and denial that my mother's
death had affected me into embarrassment and shame at having a mother who would
take her own life. As those horrible feelings of denigration of her passed, I
returned to being numb and in shock, wondering if this would be the end of the
experience. Without announcement, another wave of grief almost stopped my
breathing and required that I fight for air.
While going for a walk,
I relived the experience of several friends' visits prior to the funeral. As I
stood unmoving on the sidewalk, I remembered the specifics of our conversations
as if my friends were there again and had been walking along with me. The
difference this time was that part of me that was still 13 years old was unable
to make light of the tragedy or to entertain them as I had tried to do then.
This time, it was impossible to be strong and act as if nothing had happened.
Later, after the recollection of that visit was gone, the same relatives
returned in my memory to share our loss. Again, I couldn't be the proper host
or do my duty by trying to be a man, as I had when I was a child, because now I
was incapacitated with mourning.
On the following day,
instead of being in shock, I was angry. By mid afternoon, the anger had turned
into rage. I went into the bedroom and closed the door out of fear and
embarrassment that someone, to include my wife, would see or hear me. Once
alone, I cursed and pounded the bed until I could no longer lift my arms.
In the evening, the
feelings of anger subsided. As my composure returned, I discussed with Nancy
what had been happening. I explained that I felt embarrassed, foolish and humbled
by having had such a strong emotional reaction to something that had happened
so long ago. Her response was that, regardless of the length of time involved,
she still felt sadness for me. Throughout the conversation, she never reflected
concern about the level of emotion expressed, nor did she try to prevent the
emotional cycles from continuing, even though the experience was difficult for
her also.
Later that night, I
returned to the grieving process. I began to experience a hurt as though my
heart had been pulled from my body. What followed were complete emptiness, and
an ache and sadness that I didn't think would end. As the experience of the
loss became unendurable, I thought in exhaustion and despair that I could not
continue to live.
On the third day, I
awoke crying. As the morning progressed, the intensity of the expression of the
pain increased until I was no longer, in my mind, a man at all, but a child
wailing a cry for his mother who was just dead. My chest would not stop heaving
and it seemed that the tears would never end.
In the afternoon, and
during the same hours in which the funeral had been held, a change took place.
While at the height of my experience of the intensity of the pain, it suddenly
stopped. At the same time, and at the center of the inside of me, I felt a
sensation equivalent to that of a small opening. Initially, the feeling was
only of warmth. As seconds passed, though, the sensation grew and took on the
additional experience of fullness. Eventually, it filled a space within me that
seemed to be as large and deep as the whole of my chest. As this change
started, I had at first become frightened. Intuitively, however, I began to
realize that what was happening would not harm me. Then, even though in reality
I remained intact, I experienced my chest as if it were opening. In that
instant, the pain I had known for the last three days changed into a pressure
that was just as rapidly released by the outpouring of a me that I had not
known was there for most of my life. The experience was so pronounced and real
that I was amazed that I could not see what seemed to be rushing from my chest.
Simultaneously, I felt complete: as if a very important part of my life were
finally whole for the first time since childhood. In that combined emotional
and physical moment, I knew, after 20 years of not understanding, that I was
forgiven for not having been able to keep my mother alive.
The
reader should know that there was more to this experience, but that this
description explains the crux of it. Also, it is noteworthy that during the
twenty year span between my parent's death and the expression of the emotion
related to it, I was never aware of a single moment when I realized that I felt
guilt about not having been able to save her life.
Furthermore, I
attribute my ability to have made this passage to my wife's love and caring for
me and the way that she responded as the grief experience finally began. Where
I had in previous years tried to approach this internally retained experience,
but could not because of what I now believe was the interference by control
philosophies and methodologies I had adapted as defenses against it (not to
mention also being blocked by alcoholism), she dispelled those defenses in that
3 day period. First, she never reflected fear or concern over my loss of
emotional control - the collapse of my intellectual controls
over my emotions were accepted, allowing me to continue to grieve until
the process was completed. Second, she never expressed the view that the amount
of time that had passed between my actual loss and the eventual grief
experience was something about which she or I should be concerned - there was
no condescension of me because I had not gotten over something from the distant
past. Third, she did not attempt to change my perspectives by positive inputs
or by trying to help me to forgive my mother for taking her own life; nor did
she suggest that if I desired, I could choose to let go of the past pain - my
pain did not threaten her. And last, but most importantly, she treated me, not
as an individual who was sick or ill, but rather as a person who had been
severely hurt by the loss of someone he loved - she did not need to create
abstractions to obfuscate a lack of understanding of profound emotional pain
because she did understand this kind of pain and was not confused by it. The
key to her approach was her combined uses of existentialism and caring - I
would have to accept the fact that my grief had its own time, direction and
requirement of me and she would show her caring for me by remaining with me
throughout the experience.
Looking back to that
time, I realize that I am the one who finally did the necessary grieving.
However, I know, too, that I needed another person who could lend herself to me
in a way that would help me complete something I had started long ago and not
been able to finish alone.
What I did not know at
the beginning of my counseling activities, and would not become aware of until
after experiencing the life-changing event I have described, was that my
adoption of my initial counseling approaches, like teaching self-determination,
control and responsibility-taking to trauma victims, was a direct consequence
of the philosophies of stoicism I had adopted as a child while trying to keep
my mother alive, and then continued to use as a Marine during combat. I
especially used this method when coming home. That is, my efforts to teach
trauma victims to be strong, tough and self reliant were actually methods that
reaffirmed my attempts to do the same for myself - an attempt to protect me
from my own experience of repressed psychological trauma. I did not know,
however, that in accomplishing those tasks, my personal loss and grief were
simultaneously being kept intact in their places of darkness.
Following the grieving
process through which Nancy had helped me, I began to march to the beat of a
new drummer - I developed a new desire about life. I wanted to learn how to
care about people where they had been hurt, as I had been hurt and hadn't even
known it. In short, I was converted from a cognitive- and behaviorist-oriented
person who emphasized the attainment of successful and better performance
through discipline, education and self motivation, to an existentialist
oriented counselor whose primary motivation and intent were to share acute
emotional experience.
Subsequent to these
changes, I developed a new philosophy. In it, I concluded that personal
responsibility, accountability and striving for success were still important
attributes and guidelines required in economic and other valued competitive
environments, but not applicable in situations where the goal was to get to the
bottom of psychological trauma. In that regard, the responsibility for
addressing deeply repressed emotional pain and unresolved grief did not lie
with the choices of the trauma victim. That is, the concept of individual
responsibility-taking could not be projected on to these people, as I had
originally thought, and as some of my training had theorized. Rather, that responsibility
lay instead with those who surrounded that person. If the individual was caught
in a trap, I began to believe that it assuredly was not one of the
trauma-affected person's making, but instead the making of inadequate helping
methods; they made the matter worse by isolating these people even further.
Those affected by
psychological trauma do not need to be condescended to through admonitions to
be strong, disciplined, different, better people and so forth. They need
someone who has the courage and simple ability to care - to negotiate with
them, to share at the most profound levels of emotional pain, the loss and
grief that is otherwise so difficult to address alone.
Although this journey has been made by many other
people, I've told it to you because it was also mine. It shows my frame of mind
when Nancy and I began to develop Trauma Resolution Therapy. This frame of
mind, validated by our observations of TRT's myriad applications and our
reviews of the literature, would then lead to the development of a
psychological environment, a new life and professional epistemology that
provided a perceptual structure that would advance the creation of Trauma
Resolution Therapy™ and Etiotropic Trauma Management™, also now known as ETM
TRT.