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40 YEARS LATER, LINGERING EFFECTS OF VIETNAM
WAR TORMENT VETERAN -- "I don't have an answer
for that. And all these people with the Ph.Ds
and stuff,
they don't have an answer for it, either."
For more on PTSD, use the VA Watchdog search
engine...click here...
http://www.yourvabenefits.org/ses
search.php?q=ptsd&op=and
Story here...
http://www.mysanantonio.
com/news/metro/stories/MYSA0804
07.03B.stroud_column.326b2b2.html
Story below:
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40 years later, lingering effects of Vietnam
war torment veteran
Scott Stroud
San Antonio Express-News
Forty years on and Pete Hernandez can still see the man's face.
Hernandez was 18 years old, less than two years out of high school,
walking the point for his platoon in the jungles of Vietnam when he saw
him peeking out above some bushes around a bend.
"I'm still here," Hernandez said. "He's not."
The man wasn't armed, it turned out, but he was the enemy — a combat
surgeon for the North Vietnamese Army.
Hernandez joined the Army in 1967, four days after he graduated from
Kennedy High School. A year later, he went to Vietnam for the first of
two tours of duty.
Back in November, Hernandez looked up some of the soldiers he served
with. He got in touch with two of them. After talking about the old days
he experienced dramatic mood swings that included fits of rage.
He went to a VA facility but said, "They didn't really talk to me."
"They just said 'All right, we'll put you on medication and see how that
does.' And I just wanted to choke the guy."
Hernandez lives by himself in a room at the American GI Forum
Residential Center, a transitional shelter for homeless veterans on
North Medina Street.
He has soft brown eyes, meaty hands and arms, a thatch of white hair and
shrapnel in his body.
He doesn't seem angry but he is taking medication now.
Nearly 40 years after the experiences that caused it, he was diagnosed
with posttraumatic stress disorder. PTSD wasn't fully recognized until
the 1980s, and there are still people finding out they have it.
"I must've had stuff buried pretty deep," said Hernandez, now 57.
He spent six months walking point in Vietnam, and he was good at it.
"Walking point, your nerves are like this, like piano wire stretched."
He held his hands together in front of his chest, his index fingers
locked together. "You're just under constant pressure."
The pressure, it turns out, never really goes away.
Hernandez drove an ice-cream truck around the North Side of San Antonio
for 27 years. A nice, low-pressure job.
But for a long time he had trouble leaving Vietnam behind.
"I'd be driving, and everything to me was about military situations," he
said. "I'd see a hill, I wouldn't bother with 'Oh, look at the beautiful
flowers.' It was 'Where's the tactical advantage?'"
On Sunday, the chairman of the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs,
Rep. Bob Filner, D-California, will hold a hearing in San Antonio.
He'll listen to soldiers and perhaps tell them he wants the country to
give them what it owes them.
After talking to Pete Hernandez, I wonder if veterans of the current war
will be able to explain what has happened to them.
"Some of them won't even know that they're suffering from PTSD," he
said. "I didn't. I figured if I'm not having nightmares and flashbacks,
I don't have it."
People sometimes talk about war in terms of ripple effects, but I think
it's more violent than that. It changes those who fight, turns them into
different people.
Forty years from now, some kid who's in Iraq right now will wake up in
the middle of the night with a rage he can't explain.
"That's really hard," Hernandez said. "And I don't have an answer for
that. And all these people with the Ph.D's and stuff, they don't have an
answer for it, either."
Scott Stroud is the Express-News politics/government editor. E-mail him
at jstroud@express-news.net
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Larry Scott --
