"Have you waded in and been to Hell,
Will you lie upon the sofa,
See to the decoration of your shell,
Now that the war is over?" - Native Son by James Taylor
I hope the Support Our Troops crowd will support these troops when they get home (99.99% of them won't) because a different battle will begin for many of them. The MPs have it as tough as anyone and they're the guys who come home to work as policemen. That's why I figure Kerry talks about increasing the nationwide police force by 20,000; so that he can provide jobs for a lot of the soldiers who will return to find that they lost their jobs.
But it's not just the MPs that will have a hard time adjusting. Here's another account from a vet of a different sort:
"If you don't think about it and just keep right on going, it doesn't bother you. But if you stop long enough, it gets to you. I went almost eight years without any trouble. Oh, I had my nightmares and those nights I couldn't go to sleep without a light on, but I dealt with it.
Then about a year and a half ago, I was assisting with some surgery when the patient for whatever reasons didn't make it. I had no control over the outcome and didn't cause the death. The patient happened to be a little Chinese-American girl.
This happened in December. By May, I was almost unable to work, unable to get out of bed. I was depressed all the time. I felt terribly guilty. I thought it was all my fault, when really I wasn't at fault or in control. Legally and morally there was nothing I could have done except what I was told to do. The people in my department knew that this incident bothered me, but they didn't know what to do about it.
I wasn't going out, I wasn't doing anything. I'd come home from work and I would forget to buy food, so I wasn't eating. I had a friend come up and visit me from Missouri. She saw me and said, 'What's the matter with you?' I told her that nothing was wrong. But I was at the point where I could barely talk. I could function at work enough so that my work was acceptable, but it was all I could do to maintain my composure. I was in such an anxiety state all the time - I was afraid that something else was going to happen - that I could barely manage the most minor cases. On the outside, nobody knew.
We had a shrink talk to us about the problems that cardiac patients had. So I said, 'Maybe I need a vacation or maybe I'm tired.' So I went to talk to him. He was pretty cool. He said, 'What's the problem?'
'I don't sleep or it takes me three hours to get to sleep. When I do sleep, I'm awake two hours later. I don't know. I had a friend who told me I was acting depressed. I don't feel depressed.'
'Well, what do you do?'
I thought for a minute. It turned out I wasn't doing anything. It took every ounce of energy I had to get from my home to work. Being suicidal didn't enter my mind. When you're really depressed, you don't have enough energy to carry it out.
I've been going to see the guy three times a week for a year now - because I did eventually try to kill myself. I asked him if I had not gone to Vietnam would I have the problems that I have now. He said, 'You've got survivor syndrome and I think your problems were triggered by the fact that the girl who died was Oriental. The guy who takes a gun and holds off the police from a tower, something precipitates that attack. Your problems were precipitated by the Oriental girl. She's Chinese, but she could have been Vietnamese. You were totally out of control and you were doing what you were told when she died. How many times did you do what you were told when you were in Vietnam?'
He's been tying all this in. I was within a breath of being put on the funny farm. The only thing that keeps me out of the hospital right now is seeing this guy three times a week. I was on antidepressants for a year. I feel pretty good now and I've been off the drugs four months. A lot of things are falling into place.
It feels good to tell this guy, 'Yeah, one day I watched this monk. He was really pissed off that Americans had desecrated this cemetery. I was standing right there when he burned himself up right in front of me.'
'How many people did you tell that to?'
'I didn't tell anybody. Who are you going to tell that to, anyway?' Although combat veterans have few people to talk to about their experiences, I have maybe even less. How many nurses could I walk up to and say, 'Oh, yeah, I denied people medication. I saw patients being poisoned because we had no beds and we needed beds for the GIs. That's murder.'
I have a lot of nights I don't sleep and I refuse to put the light on. 'What's so wrong with turning on the light?' he asked me.
'Well, that's like being a little kid.'
'When you were a kid did you have nightmares?'
'No, I never had nightmares until I came home from Nam. I never had trouble sleeping before that.'
It's getting better, but I should have had this guy ten years ago. He is on my side. He is my friend. I also have an empty medicine bottle on the kitchen counter just to remind me that I took the contents of it one night. That was enough to kill ten people.' - from NAM, by Mark Baker
Yep, Idaho is just a state of mind.
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