Anybody wanna know what we did with PTSD cases in Vietnam?

[Jackpine Radical]

Well, actually, PTSD hadn't been invented yet back then. We called them Combat Reaction cases.
We medevacked them back to the Division medical unit, where we shot them full of Thorazine IM, which knocked them out for about 24 hours. When they woke up, we told them they were OK now & sent them back to the field. Turnaround time less than 48 hours.

[Monkeyman]

1. We know better now Brother

How many of us came back to jail and others are died by cop. Families were tore up. Nightmares, drugs, drinking and Hospitals. 1/3 of the homeless vets suffer from PTSD. These pukes sending back into the shit should be charged. You Know That the T SHUFFLE is not the right treatment.

[madokie]

2. way too many

Vietnam was different that ww2 in the fact no one attacked us, it was a war of choice as this Iraqi war is.

[Jackpine Radical]

4. Indeed, MM, Indeed.

But military medicine was never about the well-being of the troops. The motto was "To Maintain the Foxhole Strength," & the military never much cared about the long-term effects of this or any other "treatment" on the grunts, as long as they met the short-term objective of keeping the TO&E filled.

[DemoTex]

15. Don't forget: Many PTSD victims ended up in the LBJ (Long Binh Jail)

The illness was rampant .. compassion was not. Viet Nam was the quintessential "Cuckoo's Nest."

[Crabby Appleton]

25. My company area was right next to the LBJ

and next to the 24th Evac Hospital, with MedEvac Hueys flying overhead to land there. To this day the sound of chopper blades is the most mournful of sounds. There '68-'69, got ther just in time to see the LBJ riot, prisoners set the place on fire and th MPs put the prisoners in our motorpool while parts of LBJ burned in the night; thought I was in one seriously fucked-up place.

[A HERETIC I AM]

3. Well what did you expect for cannon fodder?

I mean...REALLY......Viet Nam was about a Texas Aerospace company's survival!!! (Bell) It didn't matter that Americans died so long as the Bell 214


and the 206

and the 222

were able to be developed.

I mean...after all...what is a few tens of thousands of lives when tens of thousand jobs are at stake?

God damn, you fucking liberuls...get with it.....

LIFE = NOTHING.
JOBS = POLITICAL SURVIVAL

Sheesh...get it straight.

[Jackpine Radical]

5. I'm kinda desensitized now, but the sound of a Huey

was enough to weird me out for many years after DEROS.

Edited to add--Hell, I didn't even remember the DEROS acronym until just now when I was thinking about Hueys.

[catnhatnh]

9. I was a stateside chopper mech,

UH-1 and OH-58 with the occasional cobra.My brother was an honest-to-God airborne type and combat vet....if a huey passes by we both stop dead and watch-still....

[formercia]

20. The door gunners

always liked seeing those bright little faces looking up.

[TahitiNut]

10. Same here. (Chuff-chuff-chuff) Still puts me into a 'zone' a bit.

I don't recall a single day at Long Binh without choppers ... maybe 20-40 every day ... incoming and outgoing. Not only did we have the heliport between us and Bien Hoa, we had pads all over the post. The 'Iron Triangle,' just a few klicks northwest of us, was crawling with VC (not to mention the Cu Chi tunnels) and was a favorite destination - as we were for Charles.

[DemoTex]

17. DEROS = Date Estimated to Return from OverSeas

You didn't remember DEROS!!??? Jeez, Jackpine, I thought that was burned into the 'Nam psyche, to the tune of "We Gotta Get Outta this Place (If It's the Last Thing We Ever Do)".

[Jackpine Radical]

21. Repression is a pwoerful defense mechanism.

I just don't think much about Nam on a daily basis. I know people who are still living it. I know WWII vets who are still down at the VFW telling each other the same old war stories until they drink themselves off the barstools. I just didn't want Vietnam to be the most important thing that happened to me, so I did my best to get on with living.

[TahitiNut]

29. Yep. Avoided it for many, many years.

I haven't thought about Nam anywhere nearly as much as I do on DU. I deliberately blocked it out for the first decade back - even with the nightmares. After a while, they pretty much stopped. The only other time was when I was the Veteran's Rep on the Diversity "Task Force" when I was employed at a federal contractor. Lots of closed-door sessions with fellow Viet Nam vets. Heavy shit.

[TahitiNut]

28. Oh gawd! That song! Last song most nights at the NCO club.

Everyone singing. At the top of our lungs. No dry eyes in the place. Man, talk about "the Viet Nam experience"! That sure was " burned into the 'Nam psyche" ... in spades.

DEROS. ETS. The twin pots of gold at the end of a 365-day short-timer's calendar.

[unhappycamper]

33. Add "Leaving on a Jet Plane" & "The Letter" to songs of the time.

After 35 years, I still know the lyrics.

I was cleaning house earlier this year & found some paper dimes and quarters.

[TahitiNut]

35. "Leaving on a Jet Plane" takes me back to a Total Hell ...

... and will always be connected, in my mind, with the adultery my wife at the time was engaged in. It was literally her 'romanticized' theme song - wistful for her lover while I was in Nam. Even thirty-seven years later, I can't hear that song without flashing back to the specific time and place I became fully aware of being cuckolded. Nightmarish.

[A HERETIC I AM]

6. BTW..instead of another edit...amuse yourself with a search of worldwide

Bell Helicopter usage/sales since 1975

Bell was a podunk company before Viet Nam. Now they are part of the Textron Group

http://www.bellhelicopter.textron.com/

a HUGE Military contractor.

[Viking12]

7. ...and when they came home we put them on the street

and let them suffer some more :(

[KoKo]

8. What? You mention Vietnam...that old dead history? Don't cha know

Vietnam was wiped out the day we invaded Iraq and re-did Vietnam with killing and Napalming(white phosphorus) and mayhem.

Bushies are very good. They created their OWN..."NEW REALITY" so that Vietnam would be wiped out of memories for good...and that those of us for whom it was ever REAL...would be looked on as old codgers who, bordering on senility and taking money from young folks with SS and such would be forever trashed in the VideoGame/I-Pod kids memory. PTSD...would become a NEW ISSUE to be battled over and fought for years for funding. Like, as you say, it just didn't exist and doesn't exist..until it's NEW all over again.

:shrug:

[Lisa]

24. yes, and the senile old codgers (!) who tried to warn us about Cheney

... and Rummy, and the rest of their cronies who are running the show now, would be made to look like burned-out freaks and hippie has-beens, and laughed at by the media for being "alarmist".

You put it so well, KoKo01. My boss (who was part of the exodus to Canada during the war) came in the day after the 2001 Inauguration, and said, "there's going to be trouble -- I saw what those guys did the last time they were in power, and they're getting set to do the whole damned mess over again, with more guns and more money".

[lonestarnot]

11. Or shoot 'em yourself so they ddn't get you killed.

[windbreeze]

12. yes, and only the wives and children knew how that turned out....

after they returned home...
windbreeze

[PsN2Wind]

13. A good friend I worked with

spent some time in the "Thorazine ward". Blew himself away a few years ago after he was diagnosed with colon cancer. (Agent orange?)

[cassiepriam]

14. Tours were much shorter in VN than Iraq. So at least they

would be coming home quicker?

[H2O Man]

16. Interesting point.

I do not think that PTSD results only from an extended exposure to the horrors of war, although you make a valid point regarding the length of tours that the soldiers in Iraq are experiencing. Another variable is the intensity of the experience. Thus, for example, my grandfather who served in WW2 for a long time, returned with many of the same symptoms and behaviors as had my great uncle after a shorter time in WW1. (Of course, it was not called PTSD then. Uncle Pat was "shell-shocked.") There are also individual differences in how people respond to these types of experiences. But there is no doubt that warfare creates significant changes in the grey matter for those who participate and/or witness its horrors.

On an added note, the History Channel had an interesting series of documentaries on about parts of the Vietnam War yesterday. I watched a few hours of it. Very intense.

[suegeo]

23. Abused women

Freud treated abused women and he blamed their hysteria on penis envy. Actually it was later thought that his patients were abused and isolated, much like prioners of war. Freud pegged their behavior as due to penis envy, when probably these women were afflicted with PTSD. Abused women and abused military have much in common.

I think one of the first people to study PTSD (and peg the behaviors correctly to to abuse and isolation) was one of Freud's abused women. He labelled her behavior as penis envy, she found out that being beaten to a bloody pulp can impact one's spirit, in predictable ways, behavior that is now thought to be PTSD.

All of this description doesn't use the proper clinical terms, and is my laywoman's rendering of my very brief study of PTSD.

[H2O Man]

26. Good point.

For all of his insight, Freud had limitations that were the result of his seeing human relations in often rigid terms. We do best when we do not assign certain qualities to people based on sex. In terms of PTSD resulting from family (domestic) violence, we find damage from all types of relationships. These include spouses/S.O.s abusing each other; parents abusing children; and even adult children abusing elderly parents. No one can accurately attribute abuse to any one group, including one sex. It's a serious, wide-ranging issue.

[cassiepriam]

30. The PTSD is going to be much worse in Iraqi vets than VN

for a number of reasons.

The tours were much shorter in Viet Nam so the exposure
to the trauma was of shorter duration.

The death count was higher in Viet Nam so many soldiers suffering from PTSD were killed outright, they never came home alive for their symptoms to be manifest.

Along the same lines soldiers with the horrific injuries, life altering injuries will be much higher in returning Iraqi vets which will in itself be quite traumatizing.

The fighting by many accounts is much different in Iraq, seems much more vicious, intense and on going.
More involvement in the deaths of women and children which soldiers latter cite as particularly disturbing.

And yes trauma actually changes brain chemistry. The longer the traumatic events, and the more severe the trauma the worse the damage. In some war torn countries with very prolonged intense hardship the rate of psychosis is high in addition to PTSD, as well as all psychiatric diagnoses.

So I think we are going to be seeing high rates of mental illness both in the returning Vets and in the Iraqi population.

And yes there are many variables to consider of course. But there is enough info trickling in at this point for the professional community to start paying attending and making observations.

[H2O Man]

31. One of the things

that I remember a friend who served in Vietnam telling me was that he had really believed in the war when he signed up. He resented people like King, RFK, and McCarthy .... and hated the people like Abbie Hoffman .... and actually had made a "sport" of getting into fights with non-violent anti-war protesters.

He said that after being in Vietnam a week, he knew he had been lied to, and that he was terribly wrong to have despised and hated the anti-war people. He had that awakening at the beginning of his tour of duty, which included experiences that made PTSD part of the rest of his life.

There's a Michael Moore book, "Will They Ever Trust Us Again?", that details how many of the soldiers in Iraq are aware, as a result of their experiences, that they, too, were lied to. It surprises me that the book hasn't gotten more attention, because it forces the reader to come face to face with the damage that is being done to these young people. I think that it would be difficult enough to be involved in combat if you knew that you were fighting for a just cause. But they know that this isn't a just cause. They must also be aware that many polls show that more than 60% of the Iraqi population supports the violent attempts to force the US to leave their country.

You raise many very good points .... I hope you would consider putting them into an OP.

[cassiepriam]

32. Yes we are seeing karma time for the American soldier.

All those who blindly followed Bush propaganda are having their eyes opened the hard way. The truth will set you free, but first it will hurt like hell.

The troops have become totally demoralized at this point as reality sets in. And you raise a good point I had not thought about before, from a clinical standpoint this will have to make the PTSD worse. Knowing that the pain and trauma was totally unnecessary and that soldiers were duped into fighting has to increase the rage, anger and sense of futility in all of it.

H2O man I have no idea what an OP is! I have been posting info about the troops on and off for a couple of years now on DU and been royally flamed. I was predicting that the troops were becoming more out of control, heavily using drugs and alcohol, and that there would be widespread crimes against civilians, very high rates of PTSD, etc. I just got horribly flamed. I knew that if DUers could not accept this reality, it was going to be a long time before the average American would be able to deal with the reality of the returning vets. But all of it is finally sinking in here on DU and elsewhere.

I have a unique perspective. I have extensive psychological training. And I grew up in the military. My father was US active duty combat in Viet Nam and the family lived in south east Asia for 4 years during the war. My growing up was a bit unique to say the least.

[KharmaTrain]

18. I See Them In Bus Stations, Parks, Under Bridges....

They knew about PTSD during WWII (called "shell-shock")...and yep, there was not much treatment...but there was knowledge of this condition. My father served in a MASH unit and it was common to "patch up" any and all bodies and have them back ASAP...even though there were elaborate PTSD studies that were done following the war. It's not that they didn't know about PTSD then, it just wasn't considered an illness...even in the Vietnam days, little was done for those exposed to the worst of war and, sadly we see some of these people on our streets now...the homeless. These are people still fighting in the Mekong Delta of their minds and negelcted by both the military and American society. Sadly I see this scenario repeating itself with Iraqi war veterans...especially by Repugnicans who will see them as the "loser" of Iraq.

[Joe Chi Minh]

27. Sending men back to the front in that condition cries to Heaven,

for vengeance, but then what acts and attitudes of those old villains responsible, doesn't?

[exlrrp]

19. Going back brought it all into focus and some peace

I went back to Vietnam in 2003. I spent a year there Apr 67-68 as a grunt and a lrrp. Going back was my way of trying to make it all right again. I have a PTSD rating
I was blown away by what I saw. The memories I had were like black and white faded movies compared to the reality which is in living color. It ws very cathartic
The Vietnanmese seem to have gotten by the Vietnam War a lot better than Americans have. There's virtually no trace of "The American War" not even old deuce-and and-a-halfs. No Barbed wire, no sandbags, no bunkers. I went to some of the old places I had been to in the War--Pleiku, Anh Khe, Qui Nhon, Nha Trang, Ban Me Thuot and some places I hadn't been, like Saigon. I spent my whole war in II Corps, first along the coast as a 101st grunt, then with the lrrps, along the Cambodian Border scoping out the Truong Son route that we called the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
I got a chance to retrace some of my steps, re walking the route I'd ran down barefooted, waving a .45, the night the NVA took over Ban Me Thuout while I was spending the night downtown. I ran all the way back to the helicopter base I was staying on where we were continuously mortared for days. (They were trying to keep the slicks on the ground and were being mighty successful about it.)
I was traveling with another Vietnam vet (and our wives) who had also been at that base, tho not at the same time. When we got to where it had been, we discovered that it was now a--wait for it------- a Waterslide Park. We both broke down in tears, it was a real moment. The best use of a former military base I ever saw.
We drove down MAngYAng Pass. My lrrp platoon made many patrols here and always got into fights. Looking at it again, I could see why. They could see every square inch of that pass from the heights, we were just kidding ouselves thinking we were sneaking in. I had always fantasized myself being driven in a limo through here, throwing MPC and piasters out the window to the deserving poulace. This was almost as good
I didn't go back to one of the places I should have--the Song Ve Valley. SOme of you may have heard of this, this is where the Tiger Force massacres took place. I was just a grunt in the 1st/327 which played a minor part in this but participated in running people out of their houses and burning them down. I am more ashamed of taking part in this than anything else I have ever done, It is the worst memory I carry of the war, possibl of my whole life.
Something else I REALLY undersood was our national, and my own personal, racism towards the Vietnamese. We thought of these people as gooks, slopes, dinks, peasants, but never as people. They looked foreign with their black PJs, pushbicycles and woterbuffalo. Well theyre all up and mobile now, you see soccer moms taking their kids to school, hard hats on the way to work, people out jogging in sweat suits. They don't look like the "gooks" we remember, they look like people you'd see at the mall. It made them easier to kill to dehumanize them, no doubt.
The people here were incredibly friendly, little kids would come up to us saying: hello hello. No beggars, no whores, no pickpockets. Unarmed police too. We slept in the best places, ate the best food, for $50/day. Tjis is turning into the real sleeper vacation spot of Asia, even South Koreans come here

I recommend going back to anyone who seriously wants to put it to rest. I can't tell you how much its done for me but I can tell you this--I'm going back again, this time I want to see Hanoi

[Jackpine Radical]

22. Chao Ong, Bro.

I was 1st Cav, almost exactly contemporary with with you. Pleiku, Anh Khe, medevacked to Qui Nhon to have a few bullet holes plugged up, Bong Son, Nui Mieu Mountains etc.

[Art_from_Ark]

34. Interesting anecdote about the transformation of the military base

It reminds me of something similar here in Japan, where a former Air Force bombing range near Hitachi was transformed into an amusement park.