Tag: Veterans’ PTSD Project

Throughout the last few weeks on our Facebook page, we’ve been talking about the effect PTSD has on families. Our Veterans’ PTSD Project story this week comes from Leila Levinson, a gifted writer who speaks about this issue with compassion since she has lived it herself.  Leila founded the online community veteranschildren.com where Veterans and their children share their stories. Leila just launched the e-book version of her award winning book, Gated Grief, on February 16. It is one of the most poignant accounts I have ever read about WWII liberators, PTSD, and families. The e-book will be available to download on Amazon for $1.99 until February 23. I believe that you will be as moved and inspired as I was by this Veterans’ PTSD Project story. -Virginia

My Father’s War Cursed Me Before It Became My Blessing

by Leila Levinson

Until I was five, I knew the silence of a mother who sat at the kitchen table smoking endless cigarettes and drinking bottomless glasses of wine. Then, one day while she and I were shopping, policemen appeared and arrested her for shoplifting. On the way to the station, my mother clutched my arm and pleaded, “Don’t leave me. If you let them take you, I’ll never see you again.” At the station they did take me from her. And I never saw her again.

Silence became my family’s language as well as its atmosphere.

For weeks I begged to know when my mother would return. My father looked over my head, my words inaudible. The word “mother” disappeared from our home. I entered the silence of forbidden grief, a silence whose external frame of melancholy encased my two brothers and me. Instead of conversation at dinner, my father played records on a stereo, the voices of Barbara Streisand or the Yale Whiffenpoofs occupying the space. The one song I remember is “A Motherless Child;” its refrain “sometimes I feel like a motherless child a long way from home” repeated over and over like a mechanized needle driving into my brain. Yet no one else at the table seemed to hear the words.

I became the perfect daughter—the star pupil in school, the well-behaved child at home, never having a problem, an issue, an upset—until the middle of my first semester of law school when the nightmare began to visit, when depression and anxiety sucked me down under the water.

I flew back to New Jersey determined to learn from my father what had happened to my mother. We sat at the linoleum-topped table in the small kitchen of his office, the only place he might open up and talk. “Do well in law school,” he urged. “Because no matter what else happens in your life, you always have your work.” He kept a lock on my eyes until I nodded assent.

We took our dishes to the sink, and as I rinsed them, I took a deep breath. “Dad, I need to tell you something.”

“What?  Tell me.  I’m listening.”

“I’ve been seeing a therapist—at school. I had a hard time this past January, having nightmares, being depressed.  It all seemed to catch up with me.  We’ve acted as if nothing bad happened to us, as if everything that went wrong didn’t affect us, but it did, and I’m trying to figure out how it did.”

He turned his face away from me..

“So, Dad, I really need to know what happened to her—to my mother.”

Silence.

“Can you tell me, Dad, please?”

Tears ran down my father’s face—tears falling onto his beautifully pressed light blue Brooks Brothers shirt.

“I can’t talk about it—not yet,” he said in a voice so soft I leaned over to hear him. “Maybe someday…”

I wrapped my arms around him, his arms by his side, as my own tears spotted his shirt. He pulled away. “We can’t cry. We have to be strong. We can’t stop now, after all this time.”

When my father died several years after I graduated from law school, I thought I’d never know the story of my life.  But then in the basement of his medical office I found his WWII Army trunk.  Inside was a shoe box full of photographs he had taken as an Army doctor in the European Theatre.

Most brought to mind the little he had told us about the war: crossing the English Channel on June 2, 1944.  Prelude to the invasion at Utah Beach.”  Photos of GIs lying on the ground, covered in white bandages.  “The Clearing Station on Utah Beach, Mountains of rubble next to the remains of churches and homes. Fields of snow, of tanks and bodies covered in snow. “The Ardennes.”

I flipped through the photos, repetitive with war’s destruction until, at the bottom of the box, blurred stripes seized my eyes. Rows and rows of stripes that cascaded into a wave. A foot emerged from the chaos, a leg. Many legs. Grotesque, frozen faces. My fingers pinched the top corner and turned over the photo. “Nordhausen, Germany. April 12, 1945.”

Nordhausen. What in God’s name was Nordhausen? Another, more focused: a long canal-shaped ditch filled with bodies. Body after body. In a row. An endless row of bodies. “The burial of the concentration camps victims. April 15, 1945.”

It took me twelve years, major episodes of depression, and teaching a course on the Holocaust before I became ready to understand what these photographs were showing me.  I went to my aunt, my father’s only surviving sibling.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Your father’s medical battalion liberated that camp. It’s where the Nazis forced prisoners to make the V-1 bombs that hurled fire onto London. After more than two weeks of trying to keeps its survivors alive, your father had a nervous breakdown.”

My father? A nervous breakdown? Impossible. He had always scorned psychologists and therapists; the mere mention of the word depression aroused ire. “I didn’t raise you to be a princess,” he had said, when in law school I had confessed my crippling depression to him. “We pick ourselves up by our bootstraps.  We keep the flag flying.” But I remembered that in one of my father’s photographs, he was sitting on a beach, barely dressed, his face bleached with despair. On the back his handwriting noted “Cannes, May 1945.”

Over the next year I located and interviewed more than seventy World War II veterans who had also liberated Nazi concentration camps. “I was never the same, never,” one man told me.  Another said, “The shock was complete. My mind froze.” “I’ve never told anyone,” a Veteran Army surgeon said. “Words cannot convey… .” “I’m still not prepared for Mauthausen,” an 86-year-old veteran whispered.

Sixty-five years later, these men and women remain traumatized. Yet very few have spoken about it with their spouses, and even fewer have shared their memories with their children, though their children—like me—know on a deep nonverbal level what their fathers and mothers have witnessed, because, like me, they absorbed the repressed grief in their silent childhood homes.

A few months ago I was lucky enough to attend a listening circle for Veterans and their families in Atlanta. When my turn came, I described how my father exiled grief from our home and was unable to see the consequences of his silent rules. A veteran of Vietnam began crying and said that as he heard my words, he saw that he had also banned grief from his home. “I was terrified,” he said, “that if my children grieved, I would have to feel my grief.”

The grief is so vast, the memories so horrific, that—as one veteran told me after I had packed away my tape recorder—“I was certain they would destroy me.”

In discovering my father’s trauma, I discovered my own. For years my therapist had suggested I had been traumatized. No, not me, I insisted. Not me. But as I met these Veterans, I came to see that what we call PTSD takes different forms. The media shows PTSD as rage that leads to alcoholism, abuse, suicide. I observed none of those in the Veterans I met.  I saw profound melancholy along side a deep abiding drive to do good. I saw repressed grief, a resistance to looking back at the moment of the trauma. Because looking instantly transported them back to that moment, the horror happening again, never having stopped happening. I saw disassociation from the person who witnessed the unthinkable, a sudden switch to speaking of themselves in the second person—“you” rather than “I.”  Rather than rage, I saw anger and resentment that the rest of us have no idea and don’t want to have any idea.

Many of these attributes are my own. I absorbed and reflect my father’s trauma.

PTSD is more than a disorder of the brain. It is a wound to the soul from witnessing and participating in killing.

We know we are more than capable of killing. Are we as capable of healing?

I can say yes, because I now live free of nightmares and– except for fleeting days– of depression and anxiety. Writing has played an enormous role in my healing. For fifteen years now, I have written and rewritten my memories, recreating the scenes, recovering the details, opening up the empty spaces between memories. At first, my intent was to recover; I did not realize that my giving words to my trauma also defused the power of the trauma.  My words took the memories out of me, exposed them to air and light, and there, the terror shriveled.

Writing– and therapy and yoga– have given me not only a way to quell my fears but the means of recreating my future.

Over the last several years I have met many other children of Veterans and found how much we shared, how in all those years of living within suffocating silence, I was not alone.   Children absorb and manifest their parents’ unresolved trauma.

Now I work with Veterans and their family members, sharing what I know about writing and how it can become a tool for healing. As I help others heal, I continue to heal myself. Now I see my heritage as a blessing, because it gives me work that can help others.  This past January I published a book about what my father’s photographs revealed to me.  The most satisfying moments the book has brought me are when people tell me how I have opened a window for them to understanding and having compassion for their Veteran parent.  I have helped them to find peace.

Healing is a journey.  I’m not sure if we ever arrive at the place where we can say, “I am healed.”   I see life as a spiral, not a straight line, but if we maintain our practices, whatever ones we find that bring us light and peace, we will keep moving forward.

About the Author:

The daughter of a Nazi concentration camp liberator and army surgeon, Leila Levinson is the author of Gated Grief: The Daughter of a GI Concentration Camp Liberator Discovers a Legacy of Trauma which won the President’s Award from the Military Writers Society of America. A graduate of Vassar College, Indiana University at Bloomington and the University of Texas School of Law, she has appeared on CNN, is a regular contributing blogger for Huffington Post, on veterans’ issues and has written for the Washington Post, the Austin American Statesman, the Texas Observer, WWII Quarterly, and War, Literature, and Art. Levinson found the online community veteranschildren.com where veterans and their children share their stories, and is now organizing a network of services for veterans and their family members in Austin, Texas, where she lives.

Vietnam Veteran Ernie D’Leon lived with Post-Traumatic Stress for 25 years before a friend and fellow Veteran recognized Ernie’s suffering and encouraged him to get the help he needed to come back stronger. Across generations, we can learn much about PTSD from our Vietnam Vets. While the AO is different, these experiences ring true from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan and beyond. We are so honored to highlight our Vietnam warriors this month and give them thanks from a grateful nation.

The Silver Bullet

by Ernie D’Leon

For 25 years, I lived with all of the symptoms of post-traumatic stress.  I fought in Vietnam in the year 1968, but rarely, if ever, did I speak of the war. All of those memories had been compartmentalized and neatly boxed up into a safe little area, in the back of my mind.

When I came home from Vietnam, at the age of 22, I went back to college. It wasn’t easy, it was difficult to concentrate. My mind would constantly wander back into the war zone. It took me longer than most, but I finally graduated and I began to move forward in my chosen profession. I tried hard to fit back into society. I married, bought a home and had three children. The stresses that came along with that were normal for most; but at times seemed insurmountable to me. Stress aggravates PTS and my symptoms of anger and depression became chronic. I began to over react to everything that occurred in my life. I had night sweats and I thought that was normal, but nothing about me was normal anymore. Combat had changed me and the changes were dramatic.

As the years progressed, so did the memories. The façade that I had created long ago began to deteriorate. The recollections that I harbored of the war were breaking through the barriers and entering into my everyday thoughts.

I began to self-medicate with drugs and alcohol. I was trying to sleep, I was trying to forget, but nothing helped.

It was difficult for me to relate to people, the war had made me different and I knew it and much worse, I felt it.  Problems began to arise in my marriage and career. My life was spiraling out of control and the world I lived in now, began to collapse. Eventually, I lost my job and then my family.

I faced each day with a sense of dread and despair. The dimly lit essence that had flickered in my soul, was surrendering to the complexities of life.

The same recurring nightmares haunted me. I began to isolate. I knew that I was exhibiting abnormal behavior, but I couldn’t stop myself. The flashbacks of the war became more frequent and like a pack of hungry wolves stalking its prey, they soon began to follow me through the day. The physical wounds I received in battle had healed, but the emotional scarring continued to fester. It felt as if the flame that drove my spirit was slowly being extinguished and I began to get desperate.

My life became painful and I had fleeting thoughts of ending it all, but I was unwilling to surrender. I was a combat warrior. I had succeeded in performing the most dangerous job in the world and now I wanted desperately to come home. I wanted to belong.

I needed help, though I believed that no one, save another combat veteran, could understand my pain. I went to visit my friend Curtis, a former Navy Seal. We were in Vietnam in the same year. I wasn’t a Seal, I was Army Recon, but we were brothers-in-arms and he understood. He knew I was suffering greatly and that I was struggling with all of the symptoms of PTS. Curtis had also been wounded in the war and was already in therapy for post-traumatic stress. He advised me to do the same. With ominous feelings of guilt and shame I began therapy at the Vet Center in my area.

I was always reluctant to talk about my life. My behavior hadn’t been exemplary as a civilian and I wouldn’t talk about Vietnam. I didn’t want to be judged by someone who hadn’t been there. Instead, I blamed my depression and anger on everything and everyone around me.

Then one day, I spoke about my recurring flashback, an ambush, a firefight that took the lives of the two men on either side of me. I remembered listening to the screams for medic as I stood there unscathed. I had been in firefights before, but nothing this terrifying.

I remembered diving into the thick jungle carpet and firing my machine gun non-stop. The explosive outbursts of hand grenades and rockets jarred my body. My bones ached with the force of each impact. I could feel the heat of the enemy’s barrage of bullets as the projectiles danced around me. The sweet smell of spent gunpowder permeated the jungles lush, impassable surroundings. The crackling of the bullets whizzing past was bizarre and unnatural, like the noise a horse fly would make, if it traveled at the speed of sound. I heard the order to regroup and move out of the kill zone. In my haste, I grabbed the barrel of my machine gun. It was nearly white hot from the firing, but I couldn’t drop the weapon. As I spoke to my therapist, I again felt the searing in my hand go all the way up my arm and then I began to cry. I couldn’t understand why I had made it home alive, when so many of my brothers did not.

“They were all great warriors”, I told my therapist.

“Then honor their greatness,” she said. Be the best that you can be, the best father, the best son, the best friend. You need to fire one more bullet”.

“What‘s that,” I asked?

“A silver bullet, forgiveness, you need to forgive yourself,” she said. “You made it home alive; you survived the war and its ok, its ok.

So, I fired one last shot,” the silver bullet” and I began to understand.

These feelings I have, this abnormal behavior is all the product of serving my country honorably. I was acting normal, for having gone through very abnormal circumstances. War takes no prisoners, not even the survivors escape the aftermath. The things I saw in the war zone were horrendous and I was punishing myself for having survived it all. I know these memories will haunt me forever, but I felt now I had some choices. I couldn’t save anyone then, but I could save myself now.

When I left my therapist’s office, I felt as if a tremendous weight had been lifted from my heart. Something had ended or maybe just begun. It was an amazing feeling, both uplifting and calming at the same time. It was like the end of a storm, when the rain stops and the heavens open to sunshine and blue skies. It was an emotional breakthrough. I walked outside, closed my eyes and I literally felt the warmth of my spirit ignite. I looked up at the heavens and acknowledged my fallen brethren with a loving smile. I felt alive for the first time in many years and I knew that my life had changed. I had forgiven myself for surviving, and it was okay.

Ernie D’Leon: I was a reconnaissance scout with the 7/17 Air Cav. I was wounded in action in April 1968 and awarded the purple heart. After 17 years of individual therapy and 6 years of group therapy, I have a much better understanding of PTSD. I now volunteer at the VA hospital in La Jolla, CA with a group called ACVOW (American Combat Veterans of War). We are peer-to-peer mentors and help the new warriors through the transition after the war zone.

This Veterans’ PTSD Project Story comes from Carl Hitchens, a Vietnam Combat Veteran. Our Vietnam Vets have incredible perspective on Post-Traumatic Stress. PTSD was not a diagnosis until the 1980s, and many Vets from this era lived with undiagnosed PTSD for decades. They have first-hand experience of life with PTSD – and can speak to  the miraculous change in their lives once they sought the help they needed. Carl Hitchens truly came back stronger once he was diagnosed; his resilience is an inspiration to Veterans of all generations, and especially his fellow Marines. -Virginia

The Hero’s Journey – by Carl Hitchens

Since my childhood, I heard the cultural hero tales that every nation passes on to generations. I wanted to reach the highest human potential and join forces with World War II legend Lt. General Lewis “Chesty” Puller, the most decorated U.S. Marine in history. My idealism ripened as I pushed through my childhood rites of passage to that inevitable, act of daring – in November 1967, I joined the United States Marine Corps and headed to Boot Camp. Five months and two weeks later, I entered the crucible of the Vietnam War.

I am on the other side of that war now, forty-two years later, and through the benefit of a stubborn nature, a Marine Corps never-give-up attitude, and a late-coming Post-Traumatic Stress diagnosis and counseling, I can say that life for me is much sweeter, much fuller. There is a completeness to it, a sense of integration between my war and after war selves that was sorely missing.

Chesty and I went up against General Vo Nguyen Giap, Commander of the People’s Army of Vietnam. Battle joined, it was a combat mind that got me and my brothers in arms through each day and each month. Hyper-vigilance, hyper-sensorimotor response, and hyper-suspicion gave us the ability to anticipate danger and stay alive. The adrenaline-rushed instincts of this combat mind were necessary for our survival. When we returned home, however, a different norm existed; one taken for granted by those unconditioned like us to instant chaos and death.

War is always, ultimately, personal. The finality of premeditated killing strips away any casualness from war. It is serious business with serious consequences, the ramifications of which are borne by the individual Warrior. This prolonged exposure to stressful events took its toll. Like a physical wound or injury traumatizing the body, my emotions and mind were repeatedly shocked in war’s literal reality.

Once I returned from war in Quang Nam Province, confusion about any good I had done for myself or my country obscured my quest for human potential. My dream to elevate the human condition got lost in the details of war and was eventually replaced by ambivalence over my plunge into mortal combat.  Simple things like a car backfire, an overhead helicopter, the click-clacking of a child’s toy meant something entirely different to my senses: booby trap, medivac, gunship, AK fire is what went off in my mind. Quick movement of any kind, unidentified sounds and noises; crowds – spontaneous, excitable, unpredictable – were threats.

My stateside duty felt like a joke, compared to the real thing. Civilian life felt more akin to life imitating art than reality; all the rhetorical yakking, signifying assent or dissent to the war, was based on populace ideas and not reality.

GI educational benefits seemed like a good idea, until I got in school and had to contend with students my age that hadn’t seen anything of life, but “knew” everything – especially about the war and our innate bloodthirstiness. Other population groups were no better; they somehow knew, from journalistic reports and the rumor mill, everything about Vietnam. I might as well have been a door for their opening and closing arguments.

Then there was the working thing. I went through jobs with the same casual manner as shopping in a department store, merely going through the motions of wanting a career, of living in a nice neighborhood, of retiring one day and going fishing. When in reality, I wanted… Well, that’s just it. I didn’t know – aside from wanting some clue on how to fit in the accepted norm. I saw the unending pursuits requiring hard work, academic degrees, and meaningful relationships all ending the same way: aging, decrepitude, and death. Relative satisfaction in acquiring things, fortune or fame, felt empty. Compared to Vietnam, it all seemed dull and pointless; just some mediocre substitute for true contentment, whatever that was.

Still, connecting with others in some way appeared to be a human instinct. So I married around three years into civilian life, into an already-made family. I guess I was still used to being part of a “squad.” Marriage turned out to be a two-edged sword; I had no time to focus on my own issues, but didn’t know I had issues. Weren’t people just as mindless and stupid as I thought? This incompatibility led to divorce after an eight-year run. Tried again, different situation, same result – that’s when I decided companionship was overrated.

Serial unemployment, poverty, social isolation, and substandard living was my norm for several years, even when married (the marriages themselves were characterized by periodic separations). Maintaining distance seemed like a better solution than trying to mix it up with others and having the same unsatisfactory results. On weighing the dubious benefits of typical, upward mobility career options, resulting in forced association with colleagues and bosses who I had nothing in common with, I chose, for the most part, to rotate every few years to different employment. I was the perpetual short-timer, you might say.

Then destiny intervened in September 2004. While doing research on the 7th Marines, I stumbled on a website devoted to the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, my unit in Nam. In the roll call section of the site, I ran across an e-mail address containing both a machine gunner’s nickname in my old company and Hill 55. This particular gunner and I were in Alpha Company together and had run patrols off of Hill 55.

I e-mailed “Rican” and he e-mailed me back. It felt like things had come full circle; this was my first contact with anyone in my unit since I had left the war. Rican (Orlando Ramirez, that is) got me in contact with my old squad leader, Elmer Sangster, who lived north of me in Tuba City, Arizona.

Both Sangster and Ramirez, independently of each other, diplomatically suggested that my life description fitted PTSD symptoms to a tee. Naturally, I thought they were mistaken, but I knew they were well-meaning and concerned for me. They pointed out that my penchant for staying off trail, anticipating enemy contact, and locating cover were classic symptoms of PTSD. It was my combat mind, still on patrol, reaching into post-combat life.

I didn’t buy it, though. My life was disciplined, minimal by choice, and emotionally restrained for when the other shoe (jungle boot) dropped. Incoming rounds were inevitable, and the poor saps that didn’t get that were fools. Still, after all these years on patrol, I was exhausted, disillusioned, and damned depressed; living out a life of “quiet desperation” – too stubborn to quit and too tired to be hopeful.

But it seemed that my Alpha Company past had slyly maneuvered me into checking out this whole Post-Traumatic Stress deal. If nothing else, investigating this matter would at least put the idea to rest. I tentatively agreed to follow up on Sangster’s e-mail introduction to Carlena Hart, a PTSD counselor at the VA Northern Arizona Regional Medical Center in Prescott, AZ, where I live. Thirty-five years after Vietnam, I made an appointment to see Carlena and opened the door for the very first time to learning about PTSD.

Carlena asked me why I was there to see her; I floated the idea that I was indulging my Alpha Company buddies. During our conversation, she asked me to read a list of PTSD symptoms to see how many applied to me. Just about all of them did. Carlena said that, if I wanted help, I could start counseling.  Curious, I agreed, even if only to debunk the idea. By doing so, I had “tricked” myself into letting the cat out of the bag – a cat that I didn’t even know was there. Ultimately, I was diagnosed with PTSD and this changed my life for the better.

Eventually, I got up the courage to consider getting into a group counseling situation at the local Prescott Vet Center, and this was the start of my journey to fully recover the part of myself lost in Vietnam. Ken Hall, the director of the Vet Center, conducted some initial one-on-one counseling to get a sense of whether group counseling would benefit me and what group might be a good fit. Ken found a place for me in an appropriate group.

I ended up in a small, intimate group of Vietnam combat Marines and Soldiers. It was a good fit and I got a lot out of meeting with Veterans of my own era. Through these group sessions, I found acknowledgment, support, fellowship, and a reference point for where I had come from and where I was going on this Hero’s Journey. I found a place within myself for that idealistic, young Marine who went to war to make the world a better place, but got disillusioned and self-abandoned along the way.

I now fully occupy myself – the dream of who I wanted to be and the reality of who I have become; they’re not far apart at all. Family, friends, and complete strangers get the whole me now.

Thanks to PTSD counseling, I’m now better (not perfect) at coping with the ebb and flow of society and family life. I’ve become aware of those personal triggers that bring up anger and feelings of alienation, and of how to mentally shift from strongly conditioned reactions to reason-based responses. I KNOW there is a solid place for me within life – a place that is not lonely, painful, devoid of happiness or purpose.

By applying what I’ve learned through readjustment strategies, I have adapted Marine self-discipline that once served me appropriately in war, to serve me appropriately after war. Nothing weak about that: Once a Marine, always a Marine.

Just a little over a year ago, I married a wonderful lady, have left my sub-standard lifestyle and living situation, and became a first-time homeowner. We enjoy a compatible, mutually supportive relationship. Oo-rah!

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Carl Hitchens is a Vietnam Combat Veteran who served with Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, 1st Marine Division: (Republic of Vietnam) April 1968 – May 1969.  Mr. Hitchens was born in Washington, D.C., and is the author of Sitting with Warrior, a historical-mythical journey of war and redemption. He currently resides in Prescott, Arizona.