While putting together our Coming Home: Iraq Veterans show, I recorded a handful of stories. We were hoping to play them during the broadcast but, as is often the case, there wasn’t enough time.
One of the veterans I interviewed was Robert N. Gibeault, Jr. who served in Vietnam for 20 months straight. As soon as he landed on US soil the effects of nonstop combat were immediatly apparent.
Click to Listen to Robert N. Gibeault, Jr. (50 seconds)
Years later Gibeault was diagnosed and treated for post-traumatic stress. But when he saw the Trade Towers collapse on September 11th, 2001, he knew that he would never fully dodge the triggers that set off bouts of anxiety attacks, or nightmares, or sleepless nights.
Click to Listen to Robert N. Gibeault, Jr. (2:57 minutes MP3)
About an hour before we did this show Robert sent me the following email:
What I neglected to tell you was that a major portion of my post-traumatic stress disorder happened on the day I was wounded, February 5, 1968. I thought that I had accidentally killed some of the troops on the ground that day, so there was no POST in the traumatic stress. I knew the second it happened. It wasn’t until 30 years later, when I communicated with one of the soldiers who was on the ground, that I learned that I hadn’t killed anyone that day.
Here is a picture the ground troops took that day. I’m in that attack helicopter. In the background is an F-4 Phantom and in the foreground you can barely see the outline of a helmet.
Robert N. Gibeault, Jr. in an email to Open Source, March 12, 2007
The following is a poem I wrote a few years ago:
FLIGHT OVER AP CHO
For those of us both friend and foe
Who broke our teeth on the stone, Ap Cho
We stormed that ground
With determination bound
In murderous rage, we took the stage!
On that bloody stone,
Ap Cho
Who dares describe that crimson tide?
Words fill me with a sickening pallor
Heroic they say? Ain’t no damn way!
A survivor I am
Of that bloody stone,
Ap Cho
‘Twas Giants who fought and Giants who died
Curse him who dare replace them!
When heaven bursts wide and out flows the tide
Both friend and foe standing side by side
In unison they hail,
Make way!
Here comes a Brother who broke his teeth
On that bloody stone,
Ap Cho
Bob “Frenchy” Gibeault, March 22, 2003
Gibeault’s story about his boots is very moving. I think of all the people who have these stories but rarely tell them, because when they do, people react as if they’re too strange, or crazy, or worse. They learn to keep these stories to themselves. Think of the millions of people who are living with PTSD and imagine the loneliness. You have a daily experience that is as extreme as wearing out the soles of new boots in one weekend, but you can’t share it (except inadvertently, as he did to the salesman — and you don’t make that mistake too often over time). Their experience with psychotherapists is no different. As late as the mid-1990′s, friends in doctoral psych programs told me they had NOT ONE course in trauma. Judith Herman, in TRAUMA AND RECOVERY, gave an example I have never forgotten (and I hope I’m not misquoting): Yael Danieli, in research with Holocaust survivors, found that 75% of survivors who had been in therapy never talked about their experience during the Holocaust. By the late 1990′s, much had been written about the “contagion” of trauma, or “traumatic countertransference”: therapists were developing symptoms of PTSD because they were seeing traumatized clients. I’m willing to bet that this worked against clients more often than it worked in their favor (such as with enough support built into programs that therapists could handle the work). There is notoriously little support for people who do the work, and that lack of support is passed along to the client.
As I said before, imagine the loneliness.
I served in Vietnam as an assault helicopter pilot with Frenchy in the 187th Assault Helicopter Company, stationed in Tay Ninh. The one year tour exposed us to more carnage than anyone could ever imagine. I applaude the public discussion of PTSD. I concealed its symptoms through denial for nearly 30 years, then sought assistance in dealing with it. I once believed as did one of your guests on the show that I was above the effects of PTSD, that only malingers sought payment for the claimed disorder. PTSD was believed by me to be a show of weakness or a lack of manliness. Society does not wish to discuss the gory details of war or the lasting effects it causes to those who participate in it. PTSD is actually caused by chemical changes in the human brain caused in part by extended exposure to increased adrenalin through the “fight or flight” response of the human nervous system. The degree of effect is unique to every individual, but younger men exposed have been shown to be more affected by the experiences of war. The duration and degree of exposure to life threatening events also factor into the equation.
After my diagnosis as having PTSD, I was surprized to learn how many of my fellow veterans from my unit were also affected by it and the number who succombed to suicide because they did not understand what they had or how to deal with it. Their denial lead to their deaths. PTSD is a casualty of war just as certainly as those who received a purple heart caused by a weapon. Society as a whole needs to learn the cost to those it sends to war. I have long said, “If those who declared war had to fight the war, there would be no war.” The casualties of war are not just the outward wounds which are directly observable, but the psychological wounds are just as real and cause irrepairable harm to the Veteran and the veteran’s family.
In war the concept is the living win, and the loser dies; but to the the suffer of PTSD, that might well be reversed.
You’re my hero Dad!