Take Care of Johnny Veteran
by Al Byrne for Patients Out of Time
Between 1987 and 1992 I became involved with a Veterans Health
Administration and Agent Orange Class Assistance Program that funded
Vets, acting as peer counselors, to search out and offer aid to fellow
Veterans. All the counselors who did the field work fought in Vietnam
as did almost all of the clients or patients.
There were a small number of women in the group, all nurses of the
Army and Navy. The majority of the guys were Army or Marine enlisted,
a smaller number of Navy “brown water” sailors and a few from the Air
Force.
My take is that the closer you came to death every day, and there were
many ways to observe that act, the likelier a Vet was to be diagnosed
with post traumatic stress (PTS).[1]
I was the only counselor to have served as a Commissioned Officer and
I doubled as the Contract Administrator for the multi thousand dollar
grants we used to help Vets in the Appalachian region of Virginia and
West Virginia. I had about 200 guys I worked with over those years.
Johnny worked at a wood yard, so did his son. His boss had called us
one day looking for someone to talk to Johnny, get him some help. I
showed up late one afternoon and met the boss who was younger than I
and Johnny by a dozen years. Johnny was his friend as well as an
employee and he was drinking himself to death I was told and it has
something to do with Vietnam he was sure.
Johnny and I saw each other every week for months. He was on parole
for pistol whipping some loser who thought the little guy in the
corner of the bar room could be bullied. Johnny took him for a ride of
terror before knocking him in the head and dumping him and his car in
a big ditch. I took him for rides through the tree-lined roads of the
county, away from the saws, the noise. He was drinking incessantly,
doing lines of coke when he could score some and angry.
My job was to find a way to get him to talk out his pain, not physical
pain for him but the emotional scars he carried along with their
live-in demons. Talk we did about his homecoming, a day late he said
to me, because if he had been there when the flood came he could have
saved his family; father, mother, two sisters and younger brother. He
was convinced that he could have saved them (or at least died with
them), but the Marines had him in a stockade for acting up when he
came to the states, for refusing to get a “getting out “ haircut, for
telling a sergeant to go to hell. Guilt is a primary factor in PTS and
Johnny had more than enough because he had not been at home when he
could have been.
This was on top of a tour of duty that young 19 year old Marines like
him endured in the endless jungles of danger. He was a gunner on an
armored vehicle. Four fifty-caliber machine guns fired at his command
with the power to blow an engine block to pieces. One night he and his
friends were attacked by the enemy. In front of his guns in the
morning were over 400 dead men and he was untouched he said to me, but
it was 20 months of talk before he remembered that morning, that
night, and when he did he cried for a long, long time.
It had not taken the counselors long to determine a trend among the
Vets. Some drank to excess and, like Johnny, took any other
intoxicating drug they could find. Some did not drink or do coke, they
used cannabis instead.
Johnny told me he could not sleep more than a couple of hours at a
time. An exhausted rest at best. He told me he could not relax, his
appetite was only for alcohol and being unconscious. I urged him to
use cannabis and he did. He stopped the coke cold. His alcohol intake
decreased to only a few beers a day and he slept.
A cannabis researcher in Italy has coined a phrase about the
endocannabinoid system. It helps us eat, sleep, relax, protect, and
forget. Cannabis is the only plant that has phyto-cannabinoids (made
within the plant) that are similar to the endogenous cannabinoids
(made within the body) recently discovered in the human body. When I
use cannabis I do not dream and I told Johnny that and I told him that
he could sleep again too if he used cannabis. It would help him eat
again, real food. That he could smoke a bowl and relax for a while,
and concentrate on good thoughts and forget the painful images he
carried in his head and while these positives were replacing the
negatives, his body would enjoy a return to homeostasis from feeding
his system with cannabis compounds.
Johnny called me a couple of years after I no longer worked as a
counselor. He was fine now he said and wanted me to know that. “You
helped me man” he said on the phone and told me he stopped drinking,
was married now, his son with him and he used cannabis every day.
In the US military Veterans like Johnny are denied the use of cannabis
for any purpose in 34 states. In the 15 states with medical marijuana
laws an illogical and ignorant law enforcement and lawyer generated
medical protocol for medical cannabis use is in place. These “medical
marijuana” programs are morally unjustified, medically unsound and
designed by men and women with no medical training at all. A clear
case of “practicing medicine without a license” by politicians and
other lawyers who should know that action is against the law of the
land if not the law of sanity.
Johnny and I use cannabis illegally in Virginia to help us cope with
the trauma we endured, for what we did for our country. That is not
right.
I’ve got a suggestion for the citizens of the US, support your troops
by allowing doctors and nurses to take care of Johnny and me and the
other Vets. He and I and they have had enough of what this country has
not done for us and allowing Veterans the use of clinical cannabis
would be a great start on fixing that situation.
[1] I choose to drop the “D” for disorder, making it PTS rather than
PTSD. The symptoms of post traumatic stress are a NORMAL response to
an ABNORMAL stress. It is an insult or added stress to diagnose
someone who has undergone severe trauma with a disorder. Some choose
to call it post traumatic stress syndrome.
by Al Byrne for Patients Out of Time |
