Veterans Aware: The 'golden years' | St George News

RP Member Vietnam Veterans what is your Opinion?

Written by Bruce Solomon

OPINION — I get to sit in several discussion groups made up of people who have experienced serious physical or emotional trauma during active service in the military – combat, catastrophic injury, military sexual trauma; stuff that bludgeoned their entire biosociopsychological frame of reference into another form trendily called “the new normal.”

Essentially these folks have survived physical, visual or audial experiences that more kindly would have killed them. The remainder of their life will be, for them, like seeing through the window glass of the 1700s and 1800s homes; distorted by their trauma.

The most recent group had a veteran who flew HU1E, or Huey, gunships and slicks in Vietnam. The gunships were for the insertion and support of combat troops, the slicks were for Medevac, now “Casevac,” of wounded and dead troops.

I witnessed these pilots fly these paper-skinned rotary-winged taxi cabs into heavy enemy fire so many times I could not even put a number on them. Sometimes they got shot down and the bird and everyone in it were killed. Most of the time they got in and got out and only some of the people inside got killed. Sometimes they got in and out and everyone was OK … given the circumstances.

So this guy’s telling us that he is having a hard time coming to the discussion group because it puts right-in-his-face that he participated in doing something terrible to Vietnam and the Vietnamese people.

In his mind, now that he is retired and has lots of time to re-envision (through that distorted glass) those battlefields and landing zones, he was the thresher and the troops were his flail.