The Vietnam Reader (47 page)

After four months on the Vietnamese ward, I asked to be transferred again. So I was put on the GI medical ward. That was more depressing than the first two wards I’d been on. Mostly because the people that I had labeled as cop-outs were on that ward. The drug abusers, the alcoholics, the guys in there with malaria—because rather than go out in the field they would not take their malaria pills so they could come down with malaria. I was really very unsympathetic to them. I didn’t try to understand them. After so many months of taking care of “legitimate” injuries, I couldn’t handle that. I just figured, “Hell, even I can take this. Why can’t you? You’re supposed to be braver and stronger than I am, and somehow I’m managing.”

We were shelled monthly, at least monthly. The closest call we had was when I was on the medical ward. I remember mortars were falling all around us. I had just gotten my sixty patients under their mattresses, and I dove under a bed myself, finally, and then this GI next to me says, “Hey, you forgot …” whatever his name was, and sure enough—he was one of our drug ODs—he was lying on top of his
bed singing. I had to get out, crawl over to him, pull him out of bed, and put the mattress over him. I remember screaming at him. I was so mad at him for making me take any more chances. This happened the same day that my sister got married. In fact it was almost the same hour, and I thought, “My God, they’re partying, and here I am.” We had a sapper attack too when I was on that ward. That’s when somebody infiltrates our perimeter. There’s a certain siren that goes off. At the time, my corpsman on the ward was a conscientious objector, so he wouldn’t handle any firearms. I remember I had to grab the M-16 and stand guard after I had locked the doors. I didn’t even know how to fire the damn thing! I finally had to haul one of my patients—he was a lieutenant, I remember—out of bed and had him stand with me in case the gun needed to be fired. Once again, I had the preconception that women were supposed to be taken care of, and it seemed like I was doing all the taking care of.

A lot more happened; I just don’t like pulling it out.… It’s behind me now, and I think what became of me is more important anyway.

I remember on the plane home I held my breath until we were probably a thousand miles from Vietnam, because I was so afraid that something would happen and we’d have to go back. We landed at Sea Tac. I remember getting a hotel room and calling my parents, because they wanted to come out from Michigan to meet me. I ended up going back to the airport to meet them on my way home from Vietnam. They wanted to stay for two days in Seattle and sightsee. I can vividly see me sitting on this tour bus, looking out the window at nothing. Feeling up in the air, lost, disoriented. I was still back there. I didn’t smile much. They thought I was angry. Well, they didn’t know. They were trying to act like things were just the same as always—that a year hadn’t gone by and that I hadn’t gone anywhere. They were doing that to relax me.… I’m sure they were hurting too. I jumped at any noise. I looked at people walking the streets, and there wasn’t even fear in their eyes. All I could think was, “If you only knew … you wouldn’t be so damned complacent.” I didn’t even feel like going home. I wish I could have gone somewhere for a while—just to be by myself. I was pushed right back into everyday
living, when I was still so far away from it and so disjointed that I couldn’t possibly fit in. Everybody tried to ignore where I’d been. I guess some people did ask me about Vietnam, and I would say things like “It was okay.” Or “Actually it was the pits.” That’s all I said for ten years.

I got married about six months after I got home. Rick and I had met in Japan. It was my second R&R, and I remember it was a month before I was DEROSing. All I was going to do was have a good time. I felt like I hadn’t laughed in months. And I remember getting to the hotel in Osaka and people could just say “Good morning” and I’d start giggling. Everything was funny. I just laughed because I was releasing tension, I know that. But at the time I just couldn’t stop laughing. I had no thoughts of commitments. And I met Rick. It was a good thing he was persistent. He’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.

After we got married, we lived in Utah for four years. I put him through college. I worked in the local hospital there. I started out working newborn nursery simply because I wanted a happy job. So I worked for six months in the nursery and found I was bored. I was promoted to nursing supervisor after that, which worked out well, because I was in charge of the emergency room. I was coordinating emergency surgeries, assisting with deliveries, running the pharmacy. It was a nice challenge. But still, nobody knew I was a veteran. I had a desire to meet another veteran, but I wasn’t broadcasting. I was having periods of real depression at the time—very happily married, a good job, wonderful husband, a beautiful baby—and I would consider suicide. I didn’t understand why I was so depressed. I had nightmares, but I didn’t attribute them to the war. It took me many, many years to even interpret those nightmares. All of a sudden one day I realized that a lot of them were centered around gooks; I couldn’t see a slant-eye without getting upset. And a lot of it was centered on being misinterpreted, being misunderstood, but I didn’t realize it at the time. As soon as I woke up, I tried real hard to forget them.

I’ve pretty much grown out of nursing. My last nursing job was at an ER in a run-down section of Richmond, California. Something happened there that was literally the straw that broke my back. It was
six years after Vietnam, and one evening this fifteen-year-old black boy comes in to our ER with a two-inch laceration above his right eye from a street fight. It needed stitching, and soon. At first, he had refused to even come to ER, and after an hour of pleading, his mother finally got him in. But he absolutely, flat out didn’t trust any white person touching him. I begged, pleaded, reasoned, and even threatened him, but he wouldn’t let me touch him. He ended up walking out with his eye swollen shut, a gaping wound, and full of mistrust and hostility—and he was only fifteen! He took me back to Vietnam. To the hostility I felt from the POWs. To the mistrust I felt for any slant-eye—we could never be sure
who
the enemy was. I saw those young kids again, with their so old faces. And I couldn’t handle it. I had one of my worst episodes of depression—it lasted for days. I still can’t go back to nursing because I’m afraid of this happening again.

About nine years after I got out of Vietnam, I read an article in the paper about this guy in Oregon who’d gone berserk and shot somebody. At his trial they named his condition delayed stress syndrome. I had never heard of it before. But the article described some of the symptoms. And I kept saying, “That’s me, that’s me! This is exactly it. I can’t believe this!” So that evening I brought the article to Rick and said, “Don’t laugh, but …” Rick and I are very open about everything, talk about absolutely everything, but I never talked to him about my nightmares or my depressions. I didn’t want to burden him, I guess, or I didn’t want to talk about it. I’m not sure which. I asked, “Did you ever notice things like that about me and just not say anything?” And he said, “Yeah, exactly, I figured when you were ready to talk about it, you’d talk.” He was in Vietnam too, of course, but where he was at was relatively quiet, and he never saw combat. So anyway, I spent six months reading up on delayed stress. And it was a relief just to find out what it was making me do this stuff. But I still had the nightmares; I still had the depression. I’d go through periods of relative calm and serenity, and then I’d turn around and start screaming at the kids, or at Rick, or the dog. I’d ventilate that way for a while, and then we’d go back to serenity again.

I was reading the Sunday paper, and by God there was this article on women Vietnam veterans in it. First one I’d ever seen. I read that
article like it was saving my life. It mentioned Lynda Van Devanter and some of the things she’d gone through. It mentioned several psychologists who were interviewed, and they talked about delayed stress in women veterans.a It was like a lifeline. I thought, “I’ve got to talk to Lynda.” So I called our local VA. They’d never heard of her, and they’d never heard of women’s Vietnam veteran groups. They gave me a number to call—and I got a runaround for three or four different phone calls. So I read the article again. When I read it I knew I wanted help and that something had to be done, but God, I was scared to reach out. But I did it. I made a long-distance call to the vet center in Los Angeles somewhere, asked for the psychologist that was mentioned in the article. I told her I was trying to get ahold of someone I could talk to who was a veteran. And I made it very clear that I wanted to talk to another woman veteran. She didn’t know how to help me. She said the only thing she could figure out was that I should call Vietnam Veterans of America in Washington, D.C., and see if they could locate Lynda Van Devanter. I remember sitting down before I lost all my nerve and writing a seven- or eight-page letter. I wrote down all those things I’d been bottling up and wanting to talk about and not being able to. I didn’t have to preface anything with explanations or details or justifications. I just wrote it down straight from my heart. She wrote me a real nice, supportive letter back. She sent me a whole bunch of material on other women veterans who had been interviewed, and I remember poring over those and underlining everything that I could identify closely with. I felt literally like she was the lifeline, that I had been sinking in a sea unable to swim and she was holding the rope.

A few months later a friend of mine in Anchorage, Alaska, whose daughter was also a friend of mine down here, had read an article where Jan Ott from the Seattle vet center was interviewed. She cut it out and sent it to my friend to give to me because she thought I’d be interested. And it mentioned that there was a support group being formed. I thought, “There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m functioning fine.” I called Jan anyway to say I thought what she was doing was a good job. She convinced me that it was just a talk group, there was no therapy, nothing else, it didn’t mean there was anything wrong with
us. So I said, “Yeah, okay.” I figured they needed numbers to make the group go. I sat there with my legs crossed and my arms folded, and I wasn’t going to talk; I was going to listen. But they were saying the same things I was thinking. It was hard to sit there because in my head I was going, “Oh yeah. Oh yeah!” And it started coming out. It took me a long time. Some of the ladies there—maybe they’d had more practice, I don’t know; maybe they’re more open with themselves—but they shared really well. I would share but more superficially. Not because I didn’t want to share deeper. I don’t think I could have at that time. It was a slow evolving through about twelve weeks of the group. I had something more to think about every week. They’d brought out new things that I hadn’t ever thought about before.

I think the turning point in the group came when I watched a certain movie on TV.
Friendly Fire.
I remember being just overwhelmed because the guy who played the part of the GI in that film looked exactly like the guy in my nightmares. He was blond; he was young; he was so innocent and so naive. He went over to Vietnam just like most of us did, thinking he was doing what he should be doing … and you could just see him evolve. He went from being naive and innocent through being scared and confused into being hard-nosed and cynical. Exactly the way I had gone through it. The movie was done with such perception; they really had a handle on it. I remember sitting down with my notebook and writing as I was going through this movie—thank God for commercials. I had started out describing him as I just did, and how I could relate so well to that. And then something snapped. At the end of the movie, when he was killed and brought home, another useless death, I didn’t even realize what I was doing. My letters were all of a sudden three times as large. I was tearing the paper with my pen! I was writing about how angry and bitter I was. It was because those people, whoever they were, who sent us over there made us do all these terrible things, wasted so many lives, so much time and money, and so many resources, are not accountable and will never be really accountable. They’ve hidden behind so many other people that they will never be brought to justice. I felt really frustrated and impotent knowing that they would not be
reckoned with. And I remember saying that I hope that their day of reckoning would come.

I got through the movie, and it just opened up so many things that I hadn’t thought about. I realized finally where my anger and my hostility were directed. I realized how sad I was and that it would never go away. For twelve years I’ve wanted it to go away, to get on with life, and not have that thing hanging around my neck. I realized how badly I felt about the way I saw myself treat some of those GI patients in intensive care. How I wasn’t perfect with them like I probably should have been, and how much that affected me. I realized how much each of those GIs had taken of me with them. And how much I wanted it back. Everything came all at once. I had written all this down, and I was going to share it with the group.

I remember reading what I had written because I don’t think I could have said it straight on. My one hand bled from my nails biting into my palm because I was still so angry. I think that’s where most of the tension and frustration and stress went that evening. I really got it out. Then, a week or two later, we had the male GIs come to our group. That was very powerful. It was really great for me to see the whole GIs. But even more important I remember Dan, this great big hunk of a guy. He was big but he was gentle, kind, caring. He started talking about how he tried to injure himself in Vietnam so he wouldn’t have to go out on another firefight. And my first reaction was to tense up and say, “Oh, Goddamn you! You had to be one of those, didn’t you.” But Dan sat there and went through the buildup to how it got so bad he would get almost physically sick at thinking of having to go out there. To wonder where the next shot was coming from, if it was coming for him, was he going to live or die, was he going to have to kill somebody. He said he got to the point where he just couldn’t take it anymore. He honestly thought that he may even have gone a little crazy for a while. He had a friend of his take the butt of his rifle and try to break his collar bone so he couldn’t carry a gun. His friend did it as hard as he could, and he ended up just bruising Dan. And he said, “That guy probably saved my life, because I don’t think I could have lived with myself if it worked. I still humped and it hurt with every step, but it was almost like it was my punishment.” And this big,
gentle man is sitting there crying, talking about how traumatic that experience was for him. It gave me such an insight into what I had labeled as a cop-out. I saw that we all had our own ways of coping. Where I built my walls and hid behind them, that was my form of copping out. I could not judge anybody else for whatever form they took.