REPORTS, STUDIES, AND COMMITTEES OF INQUIRY have shown that Vietnam veterans are an unhealthy lot, and that our children are at high risk of ill-health as well. For most of my life, as it happens, I have had good physical health. But therein lies the confusion. In fact, I have been very sick. My illness isn’t measured by my pulse rate or my cholesterol levels. I haven’t been a drunk in years, I eat well, and my doctor always compliments me on my fitness. My illness has been in my head, as a result of memories I carry around with me. Some I found repulsive, sickening, and disgusting. They made me angry — very angry, at times. Others were so sad I would rate them as the most painful things I have ever experienced. The good memories were swamped. I was rarely able to plug into them.
For years after returning from Vietnam, I kept my illness hidden with long hours of work, study, sporting pursuits, and anything that produced total exhaustion and allowed me to fall into a bed and sleep. It was a successful ploy. In the early years I had endless energy and lived as a recluse. Then I married, kept to my demanding schedule, and continued to live in a cone. On the surface, I am well educated, have had a successful career, and my family are to be admired. But I was wearing out; my resilience to the flashbacks and nightmares was weakening. Two hours’ sleep a night, or sometimes four, was the norm. I became hyper-vigilant, wary of crowded places and doorways, and my general physical health deteriorated.
Other veterans I knew well were in mental health care or struggling to work at a job. Some were close mates — blokes I went through Vietnam with — and their deterioration frightened me. Then there were the suicides, and others who died too young. It was becoming all too common. I was no longer able to hide Vietnam from myself. It was similar to when I first returned. There was too much happening, but this time I wasn’t able to shut it out by working longer hours and studying. It never occurred to me, even though I was told, that I could get help. I considered mental illness or a failure to cope as a weakness. This was a warped idea I held and grew up with; men just get on with it.
The warning signals were there, particularly when I made appointments with my doctor after I started suffering chest pains. Every visit found my heart to be sound. I was declared fit, but exhausted. Then one night I collapsed. I knew I was dying, and I now believe I welcomed the event. Obviously I survived, but the episode left me with many problems and the life of a loser. It was hard. The changes required to get my life back to some form of normality were daunting. I had no strength, mentally or physically. But I had a vague will to live. Perhaps more important was the fact that I didn’t want to die that way — ever. It wasn’t right or fair to those around me. I wanted to be me … whoever that was.
This book is about a series of events that covers most of my life. Some, particularly at the beginning, I enjoyed writing about, and I hope you will smile along as I did when I wrote them. Writing about them brought the memory of the pleasure I experienced at the time.
Then there are those powerful moments and events that I wanted to take to my grave. My putting pen to paper about these incidents and torrid times in my life was an attempt to finally purge many demons. It started as a journal, and then I connected events into short stories or chapters of my life. With some hesitation, I showed a piece to a psychiatrist. He encouraged my writing, which led me to open up about my deep guilt over matters that soldiers are reluctant to share. For me, this was a first. Usually such revelations took endless patience and cajoling from the psychiatrist, or the security of a safe haven like the one that was offered at the psychiatric ward at Heidelberg hospital, where I was a patient for a time.
I never planned to put this work into print. I simply felt that my family, particularly my children and some very close friends, would be able to understand me a little better after reading what I had struggled to write and, until recently, had refused to say. Even then, my attempts at verbalising my thoughts and feelings, particularly about Vietnam, would always be cut off by tears and a dry throat that refused to let the words flow.
But good fortune has been my companion for the last eight years. I have had a caring wife and family, along with good professional help. Slowly I have regained strength after nearly allowing death to take away my pain and experience. Gradually I wrote the frightening stories, in between writing about the better times.
My fear when writing about my painful memories was that if I touched on the Vietnam War, or the protests that followed, I would pay for it later that night. For many years I had tried unsuccessfully to push intrusive flashbacks of those experiences from my mind. All too often those fleeting visions were signals that the nightmares would be returning. They were violent episodes that would wake me, sweating in a wet bed and petrified. Then I would bewilder those close to me because I would offer no explanation.
Finally, I became able to write about the dark times without nightmares. Today, most people I meet are repulsed by war. But war is often only a small part of the battle that determines the rest of a soldier’s life. That is what this book is about.