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In reply to the discussion: How did you come by your username? [View all]pinboy3niner
(53,339 posts)The memories are both good and bad, but they do need to be processed and reprocessed--a lot.
My psychological catharsis came after 16 years, when I spent a couple of months processing my VN experience very intensely. I felt like I was healed, lol.
A few years later I was freaking out even before Desert Shield became Desert Storm, so I called the psychologist at the Vet Center and told him I was in bad shape and REALLY needed to see him. In the next 2 weeks I spent four appointments crying my heart out in his office.
Finally I asked him, "Doc, how many times do I have to process this same shit?" That wise old bastard told me, "As many times as it takes."
I knew more than 60 guys who died in Vietnam. Many of those deaths I didn't learn about until years later. When I came back I spent 18 months hospitalized, but as soon as I was able I wrote back to my unit to let them know I'd survived. (Good thing, because they'd been told I'd died.) The letters I got back told me about casualties after I left, so I learned very quickly--on a subconscious level--to avoid other vets so I wouldn't risk getting that kind of news. I didn't talk about VN even with my little brother, who'd served there with me.
When I learned, many years later, what happened to people I'd known, I'd jot the information on scraps of paper. It took more years before it dawned on me that I was playing my own psychological game on myself. Those names were never together in one place in my house. Instead, I had one bunch of names in one room, another bunch in another room...one bunch in every room of my house, so I never had to face them all together.
These days I speak about the war to high school and college classes every year, and our small, local vet group has a half-scale, mobile replica of the Wall that we display periodically in our SoCal area. Re-processing things now is especially timely, as I have to set up a new training program for volunteers who will be assisting visitors at the next Wall display over Veterans Day.
btw, I started out enlisted, too. I volunteered for the draft and was inducted at 18. After Basic, a brief leadership course and Advanced Infantry Training (all at Ft. Lewis), I assisted drill sergeants in training troops both at Lewis and Benning before I got my OCS class. After the 6-month Infantry OCS course at Benning, they made me a 2nd Lt. at 19 and promoted me to 1st a year later, around the time I went to VN. The neatest thing was never having to peel potatoes, scrub mess hall pots, or polish garbage cans again.
Thankyou for your service, too, chknltl. In war or not, service always entails hard work and sacrifice.