PTSD: When the Problem Had No Name, But Plenty of Faces

August 10, 2009 By Susan Katz Keating
Posted in Uncategorized

If you are reading this blog, you most likely are a veteran. So I’d like to start by saying, thank you for your service to our country. If you deployed in a war zone, welcome home.

I learned to say those words in 1982, when a PTSD-afflicted “brown water rat” taught me that the phrases resonate deeply with veterans. This was only two years after the American psychiatric community formally put a name to PTSD. At the time, certain newly validated vets – my brown water friend among them - threw themselves passionately into advocating on behalf of their fellows. Advocacy included education, and teaching the noncombat-experienced public how to talk to veterans. I will write about “Brown Water Randy” and his good work in a forthcoming post; but today, I want to highlight an even earlier time. 

Before 1980, PTSD was a mysterious, nameless malady. It was unrecognized by mainstream society. but was very much known within a secret brotherhood: The veterans themselves. One of those vets was my own father.

Dad kept his malady a secret. I learned about it by accident when I was a young teen, eavesdropping on adult conversation.

One night around 1970, I was awakened from sound sleep in the middle of the night. Somone was pounding violently on the front door. The visitor was in a desperate way. He urgently shouted for my dad to let him in, right now.

The visitor was a family friend. He was a doctor. The last time I had seen him was at his going-away party to send him off to Vietnam. The doctor had been full of good cheer at the party, determined to save young lives. At one point during the festivities, he and my dad went off to sit alone under a tree, talking in earnest. It looked as if my dad were giving advice to the younger man.

Now the doctor was freshly back from war. He had stepped directly off his flight home and immediately came to see my dad. I listened from my hiding place while the doctor, speaking in tones I never before heard from a man, blurted out a horrific story. He was on board a medevac chopper, he said, leaving a combat zone, when the enemy lobbed a grenade directly inside the rescue Huey. A young medic instantly threw himself atop the doctor, saving our friend’s life – and losing his own in the process. The doctor could not come to grips with the experience. He said he kept reliving the moment. Over and over again, the scene replayed in his head; his mind; his heart.

The doctor thought he was going cray. I thought he was, too.  I figured my dad would know just what to do. He would make some excuse to leave the room, and would secretly call in the white-coats. But Dad reacted to the story with complete calm. He listened as if this were an ordinary tale. In fact, Dad said,  this sort of thing happened all the time. Dad said that many other veterans – himself included – experienced flashbacks from war. The flashbacks were troubling, he said, but they also were perfectly normal.

This came as a surpise to me. I already had intuited that my father felt guilty for surviving war while others died. But I did not know that he sometimes returned, in his mind, to the battlefield.

Still, the revelation made sense.

My dad, a former flame-thrower operator in the Korean War, was proud of his Purple Heart, but seemed to get upset when we asked how he earned it. It wasn’t just the Purple Heart questions that bothered him. He got upset whenever we tried to talk about his war experience. Once, my mother asked point blank if Dad ever killed anyone face-to-face. My father seemed to age visibly before our eyes. His silence - and his expression - gave us our answer, and also commanded:  Do not ask this question again. Another time, during a father-daughter outing to our favorite restaurant, a man rushed up to my dad and tearfully hugged him. When I learned that my dad had saved the man’s life in battle, I asked to hear more. Instead, my cheerful father disappeared into a state of mourning.

Dad also slipped into moods in response to the sights and sounds of war. He did not like fireworks. He loved war movies, but could not watch them. The combat scenes plunged him into an unsafe place deep within his own mind.

In early1970’s-America, scores of other veterans also occasionally slipped into unseen places. They weren’t crazy, and they overwhelmingly weren’t a danger to anyone except themselves. The biggest risk most of them faced was depression and a reduced capacity to be all they could be. Many, like my dad – who actually knew about the syndrome – did not understand that the flashbacks were not the only symptom. Some sank beneath the weight of their PTSD-induced depression. All were left to find their own coping skills. It is such a frustrating irony that at a time when t.v. news crew brought daily combat  into American living rooms, and when throngs of citizens took to the streets to voice their opinions on the war, the actual combatants, the veterans themselves, were left to cope alone with their personal aftermaths.

I am happy to report that our doctor friend adjusted well enough to lead a productive post-war life. I lost track of him after my father died, but I would like to think that he became part of that informal network of veteran insiders. These were the brave souls who endured mockery, dismissal, and derision in order to state the truth: PTSD is real.

Among these men were Brown Water Randy. He suffered from PTSD, and he didn’t care who knew it. He wanted the entire country to know it. He wanted the nation to reach out to help the vets they relied on. Stop in at this blog tomorrow to learn how Randy was at the forefront of advocate-veterans who reached out to their fellows and worked to improve one life at a time.

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