Memorial Day is two weeks past, but this has been a difficult essay to write.  In my youth, Memorial Day was wonderful:  it was the end of school and the swimming pools were open.  Those days are past.

A friend, Ed Duemler, sent me an e-mail asking if we in Cumberland Furnace were doing anything special for Memorial Day.  The answer, which I never gave him until now, was “No.”

About the same time, my VFW magazine had an interesting article on how psychologists, and (I assume) social workers and psychiatrists are working with returning veterans who have “post traumatic stress disorder,” normally a result of combat (June/July 2009).  It was quite an interesting article and some imaginative techniques are being used in an effort to help service people and veterans who need it.  But I don’t believe it will work.

I have some experience in this area, from two directions.  A licensed psychologist, I did volunteer work at Fort Campbell in the social work department for several years.  I developed a high regard for this department and for Major St. Pierre who ran it.  In fact, as a psychology professor at Austin Peay State University, numerous students would come to me with personal problems.  My first question to them would be if they had any relationship to the fort.  If they did, I automatically referred them to the social work center there instead of to local psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers.

From the other direction, I have six months “up front” (not counting the week I arrived on line in December).

The first two were reasonably relaxing; I served as a radio operator at regiment – within range of artillery but not under direct enemy observation most of the time.  During the first month I had five days “on line,” and the second month two weeks.  Then I volunteered for the scouts and for the next four lived and worked on the front line.  This primarily consisted of patrolling with occasional problems, but did include some heavy fighting, such as Out Post Harry where, during an eight day battle, slaughter really, we lost about 2300 men and killed an estimated 7000 Chinese.  

I was still on line when the truce was declared.  Believe it or not, I was unhappy with this.  The front had become my home, I was comfortable there.  All you needed to do to stay alive was to be ever watchful, quick, combat-smart and lucky.  I was confident that I had three of these and I had been extremely lucky on several occasions.  If, I figured, the fighting had continued and I had stayed up front, I would have been sent home in just two more months.  All I had to do was stay alive.

With the truce, life changed.  I was fine during the day, as long as I was up and working, but when I would lie down at night I would get these terrible headaches.  Nothing seemed to help them, although if I bit my lip hard enough, that pain seemed to reduce the headache.  These head aches lasted for years, gradually decreasing in frequency.  I had the last one when I was forty-one.

I had other problems of adjustment also, but these gradually disappeared.  Only two remain.  I don’t like to sit with anyone behind me.  My wife knows this, so we maneuver in restaurants to a place where my back is against the wall.  Another one, silly now, is my inability to walk anywhere without looking on both sides as a walk, whether it is open fields, between houses or in people’s windows.  This one irritates me.  Several years ago I tried to break it.  Walking down the hallway in a school to the principal’s office I told myself, “Do not look in the classrooms.”  A third of the way down the hall I had to return and start over, carefully checking the rooms on both sides of the hall as I passed them.

You wouldn’t think that a short six months of your life would do this to you, I lived a year and a half in Williston, North Dakota and have only fleeting memories and no changes in behavior arising from that.  But those six months were different.

I describe those months in detail in my book, “We Were Innocents,” so there is no point in describing them here except for two or three things.  In combat you are always alert – always – awake or sleeping.  Carelessness costs.  The tension builds so gradually that you are not even aware of it, it is simply “normal,” Quite different from the excitement of patrolling.  Then, when working, not simply watching or waiting, you must see everything and nothing dangerous can be left behind you.   So, at age seventy-nine, I still watch everything and don’t want my back unprotected. 

I would like to tell those working with combat soldiers that they aren’t going to help them much.  It is possible for a psychologist or psychiatrist to help “erase” imaginary problems from the mind, but combat is real.  Memories and life protecting habits from combat are simply something you have to learn to live with.  With the years they will drift into the back of your mind. I seldom have bad dreams anymore, except on Memorial Day.