A War Hero’s Lonesome Death : Vietnam Vet’s Plight Led to Recognition of Post-Trauma Stress

It was not yet dawn in the cemetery where Vietnam veteran John Coughlin was paying another visit to the graves of two friends. Suddenly, his mind flashed back to Vietnam, where he had flirted with death, where his legs had been torn by shrapnel, where he had earned three Purple Hearts.

Though it was 1978, long after his return home from battle, he suddenly sensed that he was under attack. It was May 8, near the anniversary of a battle in which many of his friends had been killed, and suddenly the Viet Cong seemed all around again.

He grabbed a shotgun from his car and fired 14 rounds, yelling insults at the imagined enemy. “I’m going to get every one of you that killed my buddies!” he shouted.

Some of the shot struck the back of a police station across the street from the cemetery in Quincy, just south of Boston.

As officers gingerly moved in to surround him, Coughlin called to them: “I don’t want any hassle. Just leave me alone. I want to die just like Billy and Jo Jo.”

Died of ‘Broken Heart’

John Coughlin died last Nov. 5, alone except for his war souvenirs and his American and Marine Corps flags. The medical examiner said he had taken an overdose of doxepin, an antidepressant, but friends say that he died of a broken heart. He was 42.

His legacy was that tragic episode in the cemetery, which brought a new awareness to the plight of perhaps half a million Vietnam veterans who suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, delayed reaction to the trauma of combat.

Coughlin was the first Vietnam veteran to make successful use of the syndrome as a defense against criminal charges.

Charged with unlawful possession of the shotgun, he was allowed to serve two years on probation while under psychiatric treatment, and the charges eventually were dropped.

“I was convinced that, regardless which tag you put on it, there was a mental illness there and no justice would be served in prosecuting him,” said Gerald M. Kirby, a former assistant district attorney who handled the case. “Fortunately, nobody had been hurt.”

Not a Crusader

Although Coughlin was not a crusader for veterans’ rights, his attorney, Lawrence Siskind, said the court’s action helped to bring Post Traumatic Stress Disorder recognition as a serious mental illness.

“This was a court that said there’s a problem,” Siskind said. “It wasn’t just peace groups or veterans groups marching on Washington anymore. Now somebody could say the VA should do something, because here it was accepted.”

Dr. Ted Nadelson, chief of psychiatric services at the Boston VA Medical Center, said that Coughlin “was kind of a leading edge of a wedge.”

Dr. Terence M. Keane, director of the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Center at the VA hospital, said the disorder has been treated for at least 100 years, but it wasn’t until 1980 that the American Psychiatric Assn. assigned that name to it.

In 1981, the VA ruled that veterans could receive compensation for a service-connected disability if their problem was diagnosed as the stress disorder, no matter when it developed. Other types of service-connected disabilities must be reported within a year of discharge.

Flashbacks and Nightmares

Coughlin was cursed with all the ills of the syndrome--flashbacks, nightmares, intense depression and anxiety, difficulty with relationships and abuse of alcohol and other drugs.

Vietnam was so difficult for him, and yet, like other veterans, he couldn’t give it up, said Nadelson. “That is an important issue for Vietnam veterans, the attachment to it,” he said.

Coughlin felt guilty because he had survived when friends had been killed. In the last years of his life he lived in the past, among his war memorabilia.

He told friends and relatives a few days before his death that he wanted to pull his life together. He said he would get a job and move from the room he rented in a three-story rooming house where a dozen other tenants lived--some of them, like him, down on their luck.

His room resembled a Vietnam bunker. He kept the shades drawn and the walls painted black. A large American flag was draped on one wall over the windows. Two smaller American flags were folded away. On the wall behind his bed hung a Marine Corps flag. He kept cardboard boxes filled with Vietnam snapshots, including a few of Viet Cong bodies, and newspaper articles on Vietnam. Some of the articles were about him.

Dad’s Gift of Flag

His proudest possession was the American flag his father had given him when he returned home.

“I guess that was the first time my father was proud of me, when I got decorated in Vietnam,” he said with tears in his eyes last July, in an 18-minute interview he videotaped with Nadelson to help further understanding of the stress disorder. He said that the father of a friend had taken the place of his own father, a businessman who was often busy working.

Many troubling feelings remained with Coughlin until his death, Nadelson said.

When he signed up for a second Vietnam tour, Coughlin said, it was not just for flag and country. Part of his motivation was rage.

“And liking it,” he told the psychiatrist. “Addictive. I’m talking about killing--the feeling, the power.”

Coughlin was nervous and emotional on the tape, at times shaking and weeping. His comments were often disjointed and lacking elaboration, and at times it was unclear what he meant. One of his front teeth was missing and he wore a scraggly beard.

He said he was scared when he first arrived in Vietnam.

From Fear to Numbness

“The first couple months there you’re afraid. You see everything. Then it doesn’t matter after you see death so much. It just doesn’t matter. You don’t allow yourself to have the feelings. You numb out, and then, all of a sudden, you’re put back into people where things are like it never happened.

“You experience life and death, the closeness . . . and all of a sudden, you’re put back into what they call a real world, a supposedly civilized world, and you cannot cope. It’s not that you don’t want to. It’s that you’re afraid to get close. You’re afraid to express feelings. The whole atmosphere of people not understanding . . . .”

Like many others who fought in that unpopular war, Coughlin received hate mail and calls from people who opposed the fighting, according to relatives and friends. Typical was one letter that contained a picture of a destroyed village and said: “You did this.”

“His look and his attitude was that society had basically thrown him out,” said Robert Solmente, a boyhood friend. “I’d say he died of a broken heart.”

Middle-Class Upbringing

Coughlin grew up in Braintree, a middle-class Boston suburb. His father died in 1981 and his mother and two sisters are his only immediate survivors. He never married. The family would not comment on his case publicly.

He was graduated from Braintree High School in 1963. His loves were cars and sports.

John LeRoy, who was Coughlin’s football coach at the school and is now principal, remembered him as an an idealistic and competitive young man who worked hard. Although he was a second-string guard on the team, he rarely, if ever, missed a practice.

He enlisted in the Marines on Jan. 12, 1965. Fourteen months later, he was in Vietnam.

In one battle he waded through open rice paddies and waist-high water under heavy fire to gain a vantage point on enemy positions and call in artillery fire. For this he received a commendation from the commanding general of the 1st Marines.

Between August and November of 1967, he was wounded three times, the last time so badly that he had to be flown from the battlefield and was sent to a Navy hospital near Boston. He was discharged from the Marines on Oct. 25, 1968.

Nightmares at Home

“I had nightmares right from maybe a month, month and a half after living with my parents,” Coughlin said. “They suggested I go seek help. . . wasn’t safe to be in the house.”

For several years, he lived with four or five other veterans in a house in suburban Holbrook. He went from job to job. He parked cars for a $1.75 an hour, was a bouncer at a Playboy Club in Boston and worked as a salesman. He started drinking heavily and using drugs in search of escape.

In September, 1984, six years after he suffered the flashback in the Quincy cemetery, he draped a flag over his shoulder at his Holbrook home, brandished a hunting knife and begged police officers called to the scene to shoot him. “He stated that he was like a wounded dog and should be put out of his misery,” said John White, the Holbrook police chief.

“It’s hard to relate to someone that hasn’t experienced what you have,” Coughlin said in a taped interview. “It’s hard to have them understand. It becomes very hard to make the split between what is real and what is fantasy. The biggest problem is letting go of the past, especially when you’re proud of something and people are trying to take that away.”

Despite all of his problems, he said that if he had his life to live over he would change little, but he might do some things differently.

“I made private first class out of boot camp,” he recalled. “Out of 78, four of us got promoted. My father came all the way down from Boston to South Carolina to see that. I wouldn’t trade that for nothing.”