An "Army Brat", Is Not Just a "Brat"

I was born an Army Brat… I’m as comfortable sleeping in a room at the Guest House, shopping at the PX and working in the Orderly Room signing trainees back in from Chapel as I am anywhere else. I understand how the how the military works. I guess it’s in my blood

During my “teenage runaway” phase, I could walk onto any Army base anywhere in this country without a penny in my pocket and, by sunset, I’d have a place to stay, something to eat, medication if I required it, cigarettes and transportation to wherever it was that I needed to go.

When I needed something, I learned very early in life not to waste time pleading my case to the sergeant over a corporal who had just refused my request when I could go immediately up the chain of command to a Colonel, a Major (or even a General) over both of their heads and get what I wanted right away.

My father was a former Merrill’s Marauder, the epitome of the “battle-scarred NonCom", who fought in the jungles of New Guinea and Burma during WWII and went on to fight in some of the worst battles of the Korean Conflict.

He died on active duty in Letterman Army Hospital in the Presidio, San Francisco, in 1955.

After my father died, my mother moved us to a small town in a rural area where she felt the schools had more to offer and where there was no military “presence” to constantly remind her of my deceased father. We still spent a lot of time going back and forth to military bases, however, for medical and other services.

My mother never remarried after my father’s death and still receives a widow’s pension from the Army. My first few years of college were funded by my father’s unused G.I. Bill benefits for which I was eligible since I was covered under the “War Orphans Act” that gave extra privileges to the children of military personnel who died on active-duty during the years of the Korean War.

Since I was far too young when he died to remember much about him or what he was like, my introduction to the subject of “Combat-Related Post Traumatic Stress Disorder” (or “P.T.S.D.” -- also called “battle fatigue” or “shellshock”) came from my mother’s stories about my father.

In particular, she told me about an incident that happened very soon after they were married:

Soldiers who are forced by circumstance to fight in environments like those of the enemy-infested jungles of the South Pacific during WWII or the rice paddies of Southeast Asia during the War in Viet Nam seem to develop different ways and means to aid them in detecting the enemy. These methods usually employ the hyper-sensitization of one specific limb or organ which increases their ability to physically sense the movements of anyone nearby. A practiced expert can detect the enemy in this manner even when the enemy is well-accomplished at the art of covert military methods and even when the subject is in a sleeping state.

My father developed this ability through the use of his feet. When he slept, he always did so with his feet sticking out from under the covers because it was through the soles of his feet that he had learned to sense movement taking place around him. Even though, by the time he and my mother were married, his jungle fighting days were well behind him, he still couldn’t abide anything covering up his feet while he slept.

When they were first married, my father pointedly warned my mother to always awaken him first before getting out of bed during the night to go to the bathroom or get a glass of water. My father knew that his “hyper-vigilance” and super-sensitivity to human movement that he experienced while in a sleeping state could have disastrous results for my mother should he fail to become completely conscious before he reacted physically.

But, of course, there came one particular night when my father was sleeping so soundly that my mother felt it best not to wake him and slipped out of bed to go to the bathroom.

She was able to make to the bathroom without disturbing him but, on the way back, she accidentally brushed against the soles of his bare feet sticking out from under the covers at the foot of the bed.

My mother described how, in an instant, my father leapt up, put her in a headlock and had already begun pushing her head to one side in a movement designed to break her neck when he became fully conscious of what he was doing and was able to stop himself just in time to avert disaster.

Afterwards, according to my mother, trembling and almost in tears, he admonished her for not having followed his instructions. The deadly -- very nearly lethal -- speed he exhibited during this incident so shocked my mother that she never again attempted to sneak out of bed in the middle of the night without waking my father first.

My First Memories, Letterman Hospital

For most of the first two years of my life, the wards of Letterman Hospital were my playground.

One of my very earliest memories is of sitting on the floor underneath my father’s hospital bed playing with a Christmas stocking given to me by one of the WAC nurses of the type commonly sold by dime-stores in the 1950s that were filled with hard candies and small toys.

I remember thinking that, from my vantage point on the floor --underneath the neat row of beds all placed in a perfect line -- it looked like a tunnel to me.

Since my father passed away in February of 1955, the event from which this memory stems would have to have taken place during the Christmas season of 1954 when I was only a year and 10 months old.

During that same time period, most of the wounded soldiers from the Korean War were cycling through Letterman Hospital in the Presidio in San Francisco. As such a small child, I could not have been consciously aware of this fact, of course.

However, of necessity, very young children are quite adept at reading body language as well as being extremely sensitive to changes in the tonal qualities of adult voices.

This nearly equates to a type of “antennae” through which children seem to be able to sense the emotional states of the adults around them.

So, while I may not have been old enough to grasp the concepts involved in the war, I have to believe that my childish brain was keenly aware of the pain, shock and suffering that the soldiers and their families were experiencing all around me.

My mother once commented that many of the returning soldiers sharing wards with my father were exceptionally nervous and high-strung and would dive under their beds during firework displays, when a car backfired or during cannon fire out on the nearby parade grounds.

So, one could say that I have been acutely aware of the symptoms of combat-related P.T.S.D. (or “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder”) almost from birth. This could be the reason that so many Viet Nam Vets thusly afflicted have been drawn to me -- and me to them -- over the course of my life.

At the age of 18, I married a Viet Nam Vet roughly twice my age who had pulled three tours of duty in Viet Nam in the 1960s (one in the Army and two as the employee of a private satellite-communications corporation).

My first husband suffered greatly from P.T.S.D. but, almost nothing was known about it at that time, so, methods of identifying and treating it were only in their infancy.

The syndrome manifested itself in him through the use of alcohol.(I say “use” rather than “abuse” because it would only require one serving of hard alcohol to turn this normally placid, intelligent and creative man into a raving lunatic who bore a frightening similarity to “Mr. Hyde”.)

This talented writer -- befriended by the likes of John Steinbeck -- and songwriter, whose love song to me later topped the country music charts, was also the same man whose mother felt compelled to shield me by standing between us during one of his “rages” when he drew his pistol and threatened to shoot me.

When I began living with my present husband (of over 20 years of marriage), he, too, was using liquor to self-medicate. My husband was a helicopter door-gunner and crew chief in the First Cavalry in the late 1960s whose tour of duty in Viet Nam began in the months following the infamous “Tet Offensive”.

We fell asleep on a palette of blankets on the living room floor on the first night we spent together. During the night, I woke up, turned the TV on and set the volume down to the lowest possible setting so as not to disturb him. The only show on at that hour happened to be an old war movie.

In deep slumber, my husband-to-be seemed to hear the faint sounds of the battle scene and he began to toss and turn, moaning slightly. Then, I watched as he broke out in a sweat which, in a matter of seconds, completely soaked the blankets.

I got up, turned off the TV and, before my eyes, his sweating and thrashing about slowed, then ceased altogether and he returned to a state of deep sleep.

It was then that I knew without a doubt that he suffered from stress induced by his combat experiences and that he still suffered with it more than 20 years after Viet Nam.

During the first year of our co-habitation, I experienced several of his P.T.S.D “rages”. I had been unable to convince him to accompany me to speak with a counselor at the now defunct Viet Nam Veterans’ organization “The Flower of the Dragon” in Cotati, California, after several nasty episodes, so, I went, alone.

I described my husband’s behavior to a counselor there -- himself a VietVet (as were all of the counselors in that organization) -- and he told me, using no uncertain terms, he believed that my husband was suffering from acute combat-related P.T.S.D.

“It’s a difficult thing,” he said, “Most of the guys who went over there [to Viet Nam] don’t think that they have it [P.T.S.D.] -- they think they’re just crazy… And there’s no way you can make them come in for counseling. They have to want to do it and they won’t because they don’t believe that their erratic behavior is directly attributable to P.T.S.D. The truth is that we all suffer from it to some degree…”

He handed me a brochure that described the symptoms of Combat-Related Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder by relating the experiences of a fictitious, “compilation” Viet Nam Vet and said, “See if you can get him to read this. If you can get him to at least read it, he’ll find out that all the things he’s experiencing are common symptoms of P.T.S.D. and it might make him think about getting some help. Otherwise, there’s not a whole lot you can do.”

I gave the brochure to my husband who promptly tossed it aside and never looked at it again… I tried putting it on the refrigerator door, in the bathroom, on his dresser -- everywhere I could think of where he might idly pick it up and read it before he became consciously aware of what he was doing -- but none of them worked.

Years went by. At times, he was fine. Although, at other times, I might be forced to run and hide in the shrubbery for a few hours until the “rage” passed. During that span of time, however, I was successful in convincing him to give up hard alcohol and this helped forestall most of the very intense rages that plagued him (and, thereby, me).

For me, the final straw came the day that I lost the key to my car during an outing with a girlfriend to the county fair. I didn’t have a spare, so, I called my husband at the shop where he was an auto mechanic and asked him to come down to the fairgrounds, jimmy my car door open and hot-wire it during his lunch hour.

By the time he arrived, he was agitated and completely out of control. Screaming, swearing at me and throwing tools around in such a violent display of temper that an elderly woman who lived across the street came running out of her house with a telephone in her hand shouting that she’d already called the police, they were on their way and my husband should leave the area immediately if he didn’t want to be arrested.

He took her advice and left the scene on foot.

The woman allowed me to use her phone to call another friend to come and get my girlfriend and me and take us back to my house where my friend’s car was parked. This same friend also offered to let me move into her spare bedroom. I took her up on her offer that same day.

A couple of days later, my husband showed up at my girlfriend’s house looking for me but I refused to open the door. I shouted through the locked front door that I would not be going home with him until he could prove to me that he had actively sought -- and was receiving -- counseling for his rages.

He returned a week or so later, this time, with an appointment slip for a counseling session at a nearby veteran’s organization -- stating that I could come with him or that he would go alone but that he was convinced that he did have a problem that required professional help. He added that he would do anything that I required of him if I would just come back home.

I moved back about a week after that and we went to joint counseling sessions for many months. The counselor was able to convince my husband to try a several-week, in-patient program that was just starting for Viet Nam Era Vets with P.T.S.D. at a large veterans’ hospital in the San Francisco Bay Area and, to my amazement, my husband signed-on.

After that extended, intense program, my husband claimed to have more “tools” in his arsenal with which to deal with situations that had made him angry in the past and, with several adjustments in dosage and type, he began taking medications regularly which lowered his blood pressure and helped him to sleep at night.

It was after returning from one of the several in-patient programs he attended for Viet Nam Vets with P.T.S.D. over the following few years that he showed me a brochure he’d been given about the subject.

“When I read this, it blew my mind,” he said, “This guy went through the same things that I did after coming back from Viet Nam.”

I looked at the brochure and laughed… it was the same one that, he’d refused to read years earlier.

After a long, drawn-out battle with the VA which, at first, estimated his disability at ten percent, then, sixty percent, my husband’s disability due to combat-related P.T.S.D. was finally rated at one-hundred percent. It took another eight years to convince the Social Security Administration of this fact so that he could draw a Social Security Disability monthly award as well…

He now receives an allotment that is sufficient to pay the rent and utilities and buy the groceries. Most of my time is taken up caring for him as he still has a tremendous amount of difficulty in filling out paperwork, paying bills on time, getting to and from doctor appointments and communicating with landlords, accountants and others in authority. I also now perform similar tasks for my 92 year-old mother.

I am unable to work at a full-time job outside the home because of the unpredictable nature of these commitments and, so, I have become, in essence, a “personal assistant” in the employ of my husband and my mother. “Employ” is probably an inaccurate term, though, since I really don’t receive wages from either of them. In the last few years, however, I have -- mostly through the use of the Internet -- enjoyed some moderate success as a freelance writer and this earns me a few dollars here and there…

I recently received most of my father’s campaign medals due to a request that I filed with the National Archives and I was also able to produce sufficient documentation to have my father’s name listed on the official “Merrill’s Marauders” website on its “Pass in Review” page for deceased comrades-in-arms.

You might ask why I felt the need to do this and I would offer that, without his or her deceased soldier-parent’s medals, an “Army brat” might risk feeling like just another “brat”. . .

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