The Decision to Ask for Help
The news about Pat Tillman’s death hit me harder than I ever imagined it would.
When the military’s original story of heroic death by enemy fire began to unravel and “friendly fire” became the accepted explanation, something inside me snapped.
I had heard that phrase before.
I had lived through situations where the official story didn’t quite match what those of us on the ground believed had happened.
The Tillman case didn’t just make me angry.
It forced me to look backward.
I was about fifty years old by then, and for the first time I started taking an honest inventory of my own life.
Failed relationships.
A string of jobs that always seemed to end badly.
Sudden flashes of anger that came out of nowhere.
An almost constant state of hypervigilance, always scanning a room, always watching exits, always expecting something to go wrong.
For years I had convinced myself Vietnam had nothing to do with any of it.
When I enlisted in the Marine Corps, I never expected the government to take care of me afterward. Veterans didn’t talk much about PTSD back then. During my generation it was called “shell shock,” “battle fatigue,” or simply “war nerves.” Many people still remembered the famous scene from the movie Patton, where General George S. Patton slapped a hospitalized soldier suffering from what we now recognize as combat stress and called him a coward.
That was the culture many of us grew up with.
You sucked it up.
You moved on.
Or at least you pretended to.
My wife and several close friends had been urging me for years to go to the Department of Veterans Affairs and talk to someone.
Finally, I decided they might be right.
I walked into the VA with no expectations.
I wasn’t looking for money.
I wasn’t looking for sympathy.
I simply wanted to tell someone about the worst experiences of my military service and finally find out whether they had followed me home all those years ago.