Nick was never the same after Vietnam. He would lapse into deep depressions. He let his teeth go, chain smoked cigarettes and pot and drank way too much booze, fought with his wife and would leave home for days at a time after suffering nightmares about the people that he had killed and seen killed.
I was one of the very few people who knew about Nick’s Vietnam experience. It was horrific — skippering a Navy river boat that patrolled the Mekong River.
You know what I’m talking about if you’ve seen “Apocalypse Now.” Nick lived “Apocalypse Now.”
It helped that Nick (his real name) was married to a drug counselor who worked with psychiatrists, and he was diagnosed fairly early on with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) from his Vietnam experience. Even with the military’s tough standards, he was an obvious candidate for 100 percent disability and got it with little hassle.
Nick couldn’t hold a job, although he did remarry after he destroyed his marriage to the drug counselor, and became a house husband to the children he had with Wife No. 2.
But the demons that he brought home from the war were never far away and he battled them until his lungs packed it in from cigarettes at age 60.
Emily is a psychiatric nurse who works in mental health outreach for the Veterans Administration.
Her clients are predominately Vietnam veterans like Nick, although she has a few Korean War and even World War II veterans. The wave of vets from Iraq and Afghanistan with PTSD and other problems is just breaking on the shore, and while Emily has enormous respect for the psychiatrists and other professionals with whom she works, she knows that the VA — with its overweening bureaucratic managers, outmoded ways and overworked and under-resourced professional staff — is unprepared to deal with this epidemic.
I have known Emily (her real name) for over 25 years. She is a consummate professional who wears her heart on her sleeve but does not abide those damned bureaucrats, whom she blames for the VA’s inability to adapt to the times, let alone prepare for that wave of what is conservatively-estimated to be several hundred thousand new PTSD cases that will be diagnosed in coming years.
“The VA is very conscious of potential suicides,” she was saying during a long chat after we bumped into each other in a supermarket parking lot the other day.
“But they obsess on identifying these people, not figuring out how to treat them. They’re statistics.
“We used to have to ask each client if they were thinking about killing themselves during each visit,” Emily continued as I tried not to think about the fate of the two pints of ice cream that were melting in the hot sun beating down on my shopping cart.
“A new regulation came down the other day that finally addressed the problem,” she noted without a hint of irony. “It stated that we only had to ask them once a year if they were thinking about killing themselves.
“It’s so typical.”
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