Therapy to End Guilt : 8 U.S. Veterans Go to Vietnam to Find Peace

Dave Roberts has trouble sleeping at night. He dreams he is back in Vietnam more than 20 years ago going down a dark river on a Navy patrol boat trying to ambush Viet Cong soldiers.

He is 19 years old and scared, having been wounded once already. Startled, he awakens in his bedroom in Tacoma, Wash.

Roberts, now 40, and seven other veterans from the Seattle-Tacoma area are returning to Vietnam to revisit their bases and relive their war days of two decades ago as treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, which includes sleeplessness and restlessness.

Searching for Peace

“I want to come to peace with my mind, the country and the people and put all that behind me because the war’s over,” Roberts said Friday during a stopover in Bangkok en route to Hanoi on the first leg of the group’s two-week tour. “I want to get on with a lot of things in my life.”

Another veteran, Bob Swanson, 39, a Marine who helped build U.S. firebases, wants to rid himself of guilt.

“There’s apologies I feel I need to make to the people,” said Swanson. “There were civilians who were caught in our fire, and I’ve had guilt feelings about that. The other thing is to try to leave the warrior part of me in Vietnam where it belongs. It doesn’t fit in the United States.”

Accompanying the veterans are two therapists, Ray Scurfield, a Vietnam veteran himself, and April Gerlock, as well as a film crew that will make a documentary that could be used in therapy for other veterans.

Will Undergo Therapy

The veterans will undergo therapy during the trip and for two months after they return home. They had been required to attend group therapy sessions once a week for the last five months in preparation for their return to Vietnam.

“Basically we’re utilizing sort of an extension of a very accepted therapeutic practice in working with trauma survivors,” said Scurfield, director of the post-traumatic stress disorder program at the American Lake Veterans Hospital near Tacoma. “That is direct therapeutic exposure to the trauma.”

“By coming over here, our assumption is it will trigger repressed memories and feelings that they need to get out consciously and talk about,” he said. “In doing that it appears they come to some kind of a peace.”

Scurfield said many veterans picture Vietnam today as it was 20 years ago.

“By going now,” he said, “they have to substitute the reality of Vietnam today. It’s not the way it was 20 years ago. That’s a very important message for many veterans.”

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