8:12 a.m. - Friday, Nov. 17, 2006
Just Deep Breaths
I broke down once again the other day; telling a new therapist an old story. It was about Craig, the young man who routinely traded his coveted �C ration� eggs and ham for my disgusting ham and lima beans, who guarded my exhausted body as it slept shivering in the mud, and who ultimately helped to carry me, bleeding and screaming, to the helicopter that would take me from one nightmare to another.

Craig was killed a month later, ending his own nightmare forever at the age of nineteen years. I still wish I could have taken his bullet.

A few years ago, my therapist gave me something I treasured. As I sat in her office, in the chair closest to the door, weeping yet once again, exhausted and broken from the PTSD that has shaped so much of my life since Vietnam, she explained a contribution I had unwittingly made to combat veterans, disaster victims, and battered women.

She told me that upon my shoulders and the shoulders of all veterans who came home from Vietnam suffering from the spiritual wounds of PTSD rests the overdue awareness, study and treatment that its victims deserve.

My heart breaks when I think of the pain I�ve endured and the pain I�ve inflicted over the years, but knowing that I had in some way helped insure that others might evade some of that pain made me proud. I was not, after all, trained to serve my country, I was trained to take care of my fellow soldiers. Anything courageous I ever did was only to play my part in helping us survive. So I felt this last bit of information was a final contribution I had made for the young soldiers who have come and who will always come after me.

I wonder then, if you can imagine my feelings when I read about an article last summer in the New England Journal of Medicine (http://mentalhealth.about.com/od/traumaptsd/a/iraqptsd604.htm)) which reported that our young soldiers are not, after all, getting the needed access to evaluation and treatment of PTSD after having been exposed to combat.

My pride has collapsed into humiliation. I am reminded once again that absolutely nothing was gained from that arrogant and deadly war that was not a war. Those of us who died did not die in vain. We died for our valor, but nothing else. Those if us who did not die in the flesh have lived with the memories, dreamed the dreams and cried over losses for all these years. And then, when our own courage has finally run out, we�ve ended it for ourselves.

I am very sorry for those children our country has sent to fight for us. We ask so much from them and then give so little in return. They need more than a magnetic ribbon on the trunk of our cars, or a little flag wave and a �thank you�.

They need someone.. anyone.. even you.. to ask them to tell their stories. They need to be asked how they felt then and how they feel now. And they need to be told that there is no dishonor in their own tears.

I wish you had learned that from me.

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