.
A couple of years ago someone asked me if I still thought about Vietnam. I nearly laughed in their face. How do you stop thinking about it? Every day for the last forty years, I wake up with it, and go to bed with it.
But this is what I said. "Yea, I think about it. I can't quit thinking about it. I never will. But, I've also learned to live with it. I'm
comfortable with the memories. I've learned to stop trying to forget and learned instead to embrace it. It just doesn't scare me anymore."
A psychologist once told me that NOT being affected by the experience over there would be abnormal. When he told me that, it was like he'd just given me a pardon. It was as if he said, "Go ahead and feel something about the
place, Bob. It ain't going nowhere. You're gonna wear it for the rest of your life. Might as well get to know it."
A lot of my "brothers" haven't been so lucky. For them the memories are too painful, their sense of loss too great. My sister told me of a friend she has whose husband was in the Nam. She asks this guy when he was there.
Here's what he said, "Just last night." It took my sister a while to figure out what he was talking about. JUST LAST NIGHT. Yeah I was in the Nam. When? JUST LAST NIGHT. During sex with my wife. And on my way to work
this morning. Over my lunch hour. Yeah, I was there.
My sister says I'm not the same brother that went to Vietnam. My wife says I won't let people get close to me, not even her. They are probably both right.
Ask a vet about making friends in Nam. It was risky. Why? Because we were in the business of death, and death was with us all the time. It wasn't the death of, "If I die before I wake." This was the real thing. The kind where boys scream for their mothers. The kind that lingers in your mind and becomes more real each time you cheat it. You don't want to make a lot of
friends when the possibility of dying is that real, that close. When you do, friends become a liability.
A guy named Bob Flanigan was my friend. Bob Flanigan is dead. I put him in a body bag one sunny day, April 29, 1969. We'd been talking, only a few minutes before he was shot, about what we were going to do when we got back
in the world. Now, this was a guy who had come in country the same time as myself. A guy who was loveable and generous. He had blue eyes and sandy blond hair.
When he talked, it was with a soft drawl. Flanigan was a hick and he knew it. That was part of his charm. He didn't care. Man, I loved this guy like the brother I never had. But, I screwed up. I got too close to him. Maybe I didn't know any better. But I broke one of the unwritten rules of war.
DON'T GET CLOSE TO PEOPLE WHO ARE GOING TO DIE. Sometimes you can't help it.
You hear vets use the term "buddy" when they refer to a guy they spent the war with. "Me and this buddy of mine . . "
"Friend" sounds too intimate, doesn't it. "Friend" calls up images of being close. If he's a friend, then you are going to be hurt if he dies, and war hurts enough without adding to the pain. Get close; get hurt. It's as simple as that.
In war you learn to keep people at that distance my wife talks about. You become so good at it, that forty years after the war, you still do it without thinking. You won't allow yourself to be vulnerable again.
My wife knows one person who can get into the soft spots inside me. My daughter. I know it probably bothers her that she can do this. It's not that I don't love my wife, I do. She's put up with a lot from me. She'll tell you that when she signed on for better or worse she had no idea there was going to be so much of the latter. But with my daughters it's
different.
My girl is mine. She'll always be my kid. Not marriage, not distance, not even death can change that. They are something on this earth that can never be taken away from me. I belong to them. Nothing can change that.
I can have an ex-wife; but my girl can never have an ex-father. There's the difference.
I can still see the faces, though they all seem to have the same eyes. When I think of us I always see a line of "dirty grunts" sitting on a paddy dike. We're caught in the first gray silver between darkness and light. That
first moment when we know we've survived another night, and the business of staying alive for one more day is about to begin. There was so much hope in that brief space of time. It's what we used to pray for. "One more day,
God. One more day."
And I can hear our conversatioins as if they'd only just been spoken. I still hear the way we sounded, the hard cynical jokes, our morbid senses of humor. We were scared to death of dying, and trying our best not to show it.
I recall the smells, too. Like the way cordite hangs on the air after a fire-fight. Or the pungent odor of rice paddy mud. So different from the black dirt of Kentucky. The mud of Nam smells ancient, somehow. Like it's always been there. And I'll never forget the way blood smells, slick and drying on my hands. I spent a long night that way once. That memory isn't going anywhere.
I remember how the night jungle appears almost dream-like as the pilot of a Cessna buzzes overhead, dropping parachute flares until morning. That artifical sun would flicker and make shadows run through the jungle. It was worse than not being able to see what was out there sometimes. I remember once looking at the man next to me as a flare floated overhead. The shadows around his eyes were so deep that it looked like his eyes were gone. I reached over and touched him on the arm; without looking at me he touched my hand. "I know man. I know." That's what he said. It was a human moment. Two guys a long way from home and scared sh"tless.
"I know man." And at that moment he did.
God I loved those guys. I hurt every time one of them died. We all did. Despite our posturing. Despite our desire to stay disconnected, we couldn't help ourselves. I know why Tim O'Brien writes his stories. I know what
gives Bruce Weigle the words to create poems so honest I cry at their horrible beauty. It's love. Love for those guys we shared the experience with.
We did our jobs like good soldiers, and we tried our best not to become as hard as our surroundings. We touched each other and said, "I know." Like a mother holding a child in the middle of a nightmare, "It's going to be all
right." We tried not to lose touch with our humanity. We tried to walk that line. To be the good boys our parents had raised and not to give into that unnamed thing we knew was inside us all.
You want to know what frightening is? It's a nineteen-year-old-boy who's had a sip of that power over life and death that war gives you. It's a boy who, despite all the things he's been taught, knows that he likes it. It's a nineteen-year-old who's just lost a friend, and is angry and scared and, determined that, "Some *@#*s gonna pay." To this day, the thought of that
boy can wake me from a sound sleep and leave me staring at the ceiling.
As I write this, I have a picture in front of me. It's of two young men. On their laps are tablets. One is smoking a cigarette. Both stare without expression at the camera. They're writing letters. Staying in touch with places they would rather be. Places and people they hope to see again.
The picture shares space in a frame with one of my wife. She doesn't mind. She knows she's been included in special company. She knows I'll always love those guys who shared that part of my life, a part she never can. And she understands how I feel about the ones I know are out there yet. The ones who still answer the question, "When were you in Vietnam?"
"Hey, man. I was there just last night."

Bro, you have my prayers and my sympathy.

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www.k4mm.org This is the website they have established. I have to post this, we need to support Bob nad all of our veterans. VV

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I think your post means you feel you need to talk to people about this still, but aren't getting it out enough and it boils over destroying your life still to this day.

Not preaching to you or pretending to know where you come from, but maybe you should look into joining a support group with all the younger veterans coming from Iraq and Afghanistan or if there isn't one in your area, creating one yourself. Your experiences and maturity and how you deal with it could greatly help the younger generation now facing the same issues and in helping others you will probably find it helps youself.

I have no idea how PTSD works or how to cure it, I'm merely suggesting something that might help you and others, even if it does nothing to stop the symptoms of PTSD maybe it would just give you something to feel good about by helping others and give you an outlet better than posting on here.



I hope you get support and counseling from the VA or whatever.

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For the rest of his story go here,too bad you did not read it first before telling him to get help.OPH
My Personal Story

I tried to read but I'm too stoned for such a long post. Waaay too stoned this morning. It's wonderful.

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Bukkake Bud: It might taste like splooge but shoots smiles all over your face.
When you'll suck on just about anything~think Bukkake.

well written, like an excerpt from a book. i wish the best for you, dealing with your troubles. i think the outlet of writing is therapeutic at times.

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"We tried not to lose touch with our humanity. We tried to walk that line. To be the good boys our parents had raised and not to give into that unnamed thing we knew was inside us all.
You want to know what frightening is? It's a nineteen-year-old-boy who's had a sip of that power over life and death that war gives you. It's a boy who, despite all the things he's been taught, knows that he likes it. It's a nineteen-year-old who's just lost a friend, and is angry and scared and, determined that, "Some *@#*s gonna pay." To this day, the thought of that
boy can wake me from a sound sleep and leave me staring at the ceiling."


Damn that was powerful. Thanks for sharing. God willing, I'll never be able to relate to that experience, but you have my sympathies and gratitude.

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Wow.What an eloquent and emotional post.

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Mad respect to you my friend... My father was a Vietnam vet (Army) who died less than a week ago... He got ALS (Lou Gherrigs disease) and was never given good care by the VA hospital down here.

Anyways, in the middle of cleaning out his belongings I stumbled across a number of books about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and it appears that he suffered from it. He too saw a lot of really fucked up things happen while he was on duty... So in hindsight as I look back towards my fathers personality, and him as a child I can clearly see how crazy things were... and have a fair understanding of what you're going through.


It's good to see that you've learned to deal with the problems...

Welcome to the forums.

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