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What the LZ Means to Me
When I returned from Vietnam, in 1969, I was on a stretcher. Vietnamese suicide sappers had attacked our 300-man Marine Corps unit, an artillery firebase known as LZ Russell. When the battle was over, many of us were shipped to cemeteries and hospitals all over America. My right foot had been severed above the ankle, with two flaps of skin and a couple of arteries staking my legal claim on it. I never paid much attention to that foot in the past. If I lost it, I doubted I would be able to pick it out from a crowd of others. Still, that foot taught me a lesson in appreciation. Only months of operations and therapy would save it. That was the injury you could see, but it was the injury that you couldn't see that would hurt the most.
For political reasons a secret lid was placed on the battle, preventing many survivors from learning the fate of our comrades in arms. It would be 31 years before I found out what became of my buddies at LZ Russell. With all the trauma of the war and returning home, to also be entirely in the dark about what happened to my buddies, or even the details of the battle, prevented me from closing that chapter in my life. It lingered deep in my soul for decades as if it happened yesterday.
After landing at San Diego, California, we were loaded on a green Marine Corps bus that would take us to Camp Pendleton Naval Hospital. It was configured to carry stretchers and had large Red Cross markings it. I wasn't alone on the bus. There were 20 other guys with me, none of whom I had ever seen before this day. We were traveling North on Interstate 5 when the window next to my head exploded and glass covered my face and chest. A leaking beer can fizzed next to me, soaking my blanket. I looked over to see a VW bus decorated with flowers and peace symbols and longhaired kids, in the windows and above the sunroof, using their faces and fingers to convey a message from the "Love and Peace" generation. They were just college age kids, but then, so was I. I realized that the Vietnam War was not over for me, just because I came home. What I did not realize was that the war would last another 30 years for me.
You see I had PTSD. That stands for Post Traumatic Shock Disorder. Our government discovered it after it realized it had not treated Vietnam Veterans for shell shock. If the truth were known, however, the name should have been "Post Traumatic Shock Awareness". Sometimes a person can know so much that he seems disordered to those who don't know. Conversely, those who know look at those who don't as being in a state of innocent, although sometimes obnoxious, bliss. Still, there are some things a person is better off not knowing. During these years I wandered from town to town, job to job, always searching for the place where I could be happy again, never realizing the "place" was inside of me all along. I lost my family; I even lost touch with my own sons. I couldn't laugh, but I could cry. Beauty and joy were always a glimmer in the distance. It would be 10 years after I realized there was such a thing as PTSD before I would admit to myself I had it. In all, I spent about 25 years in the grip of PTSD before a Korean War Hero and a dear friend helped me. He convinced me to allow doctors at the Veteran's Administration to officially diagnose me. That my government recognized my malady and was actually willing to compensate me for it seemed to be therapy in itself. I don't know if this was
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