COLUMN ONE : War Stirs New Pains in O.C. Vet : News from the gulf brings back agonizing memories to many Vietnam veterans. Some are heartened by the level of public support.

Under a wintry blue sky, former artilleryman Carlis Ragland stands before the black granite Vietnam Memorial and solemnly stares up at the name of his partner, etched in small white letters.

An Army gunner in Vietnam, Ragland has come--along with other patients in a New Jersey post-traumatic-stress disorder program--to help himself deal with the reality of the Persian Gulf conflict. In the five months Ragland’s son has been serving in Saudi Arabia with the Air Force, the Vietnam veteran’s own nightmares and flashbacks--from the earlier war--have become more frequent.

“Every time I have to look at the 6 o’clock news and they’re talking about the war, automatically I’m back in Vietnam,” said Ragland, silhouetted against the wall in the midday sun. “You see the babies, the kids dying, the dead bodies. . . .” His voice trails off.

For America’s 3 million Vietnam veterans, the Persian Gulf War has produced myriad emotional conflicts.

Bob Kakuk of Huntington Beach only last year founded Vietnam Veterans Reunited, a support group for men such as himself who realized two decades later that they needed to talk about their roles in Vietnam.

“The main thing that hurt was the first day when I knew the GIs were going to go in there and the body bags were going to come back,” he said. “I started shaking and got all choked up and sad.

“Vietnam never leaves you. There’s always a flashback, a noise, the smell of diesel, a campfire. I get flashbacks when I hear a helicopter or the roar of a jet.”

The sights and sounds of anti-war protests are what upset him the most.

“American people don’t understand. (Hussein) is trying to do the same thing that Ho Chi Minh did--get the American people in the streets and against each other. It’s so obvious, it could kick you in the face.”

When he sees protesters, he said, “it’s almost like I want to grab them around their necks and beat them against the wall and make them understand. ‘Don’t you understand people are dying over there? Fighting for this country and doing the job they were asked to do? Don’t you understand the war in Vietnam lasted five (more) years because of the anti-war movement?’ ”

Some are actively protesting U.S. involvement in the Gulf War. Others salute the American military response, saying the rationale for this war is very different from that of Vietnam. Many, confronted with a flood of news reports from the Middle East, simply are trying to cope with having to think about war again. As the bombs fell on Baghdad last week, veterans’ counseling and rehabilitation centers across America were inundated with calls and visits from Vietnam veterans seeking solace.

“Guys fall on all sides of the fence on this issue,” Louis Valente, supervisor of a Washington, D.C., veterans center, said. “There’s a lot of searching of souls right now as to where they stand.”

What makes the Gulf War even more difficult for some Vietnam veterans is that it has come just as America seemed to be healing the wounds of Vietnam. However belatedly, Vietnam veterans have been recognized, and many of them felt they had finally begun to put the trauma of the past behind them.

Now, however, some of the submerged emotions that had haunted them since the Vietnam era have resurfaced.

Minutes after the American offensive began, men began coming into the Veterans Administration center in Cheyenne, Wyo. About 25 of them ended up staying all night there, watching television and sharing with counselors their painful memories of Vietnam.

“They didn’t want to be alone when the shooting started,” Alfonso Batres, western regional manager for the V.A. program, said. “They needed to be with other veterans.”

Since the current war began, 30 veterans never treated before have come to the East Los Angeles Veterans Center, and 50 others who had sought treatment in the past returned because they were again plagued by Vietnam memories. At the San Diego center, the number of clients doubled.

“For some of these vets, this is the first time they’ve asked for help since they’ve returned from Vietnam,” said Batres, a psychologist and disabled Vietnam veteran. “They’ve tried to put Vietnam behind them, but the amount and intensity of media coverage has brought back a lot of familiar images--the troops in the field, bombing raids, protests. It’s forced them to relive part of Vietnam again.”

Their problems vary widely: Some report dreaming about the Vietnam War for the first time in years. Others say that war-related thoughts are intruding into their daily lives. Many have renewed feelings of anger, resentment or guilt.

Some of these veterans suffer from post-traumatic-stress disorder, a prolonged emotional reaction to trauma that authorities estimate afflicts 479,000 of the 3.1 million Americans who served in Vietnam. The symptoms include recurrent flashbacks of the traumatic events, in nightmares or daydreams, and feelings of alienation, rage, shame and depression. Sufferers often seek to dampen their anguish by using drugs or alcohol.

Stanley Grzegorzewski, 44, of Hamburg, N.J., a sergeant with the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam, is hospitalized because of this combat fatigue syndrome. Intense, bearded, with thick black hair covered by a bandanna, he says he is consumed by anger over government deception--in both wars.

Since the Persian Gulf skirmish started, Grzegorzewski has a recurring nightmare: “I’m being chased around by these terrorists. I’m running around with an M-16 and no ammo. It’s really frightening.”

At the same time, there are signs that the Gulf War may be prompting some Vietnam vets to take new pride in their own performance and to dispel some myths. In a Wall Street Journal opinion-page article, Richard K. Kolb, an airborne soldier in Vietnam and now editor of the Veterans of Foreign Wars magazine, wrote that, contrary to some impressions, the facts show that U.S. troops in Vietnam were not mostly conscripts, were not disproportionately nonwhite, were not drawn mainly from the poor, were not poorly educated, did not disgrace themselves during their service, did not crack up when they returned home and are not ashamed of what they did.

“According to an April, 1990, Gallup Poll,” he wrote, “87% of the nation holds Vietnam veterans in high esteem. The question is, when will the country’s opinion-makers do the same?”

Still, whatever their feelings about their own service, for many Vietnam vets the biggest fear conjured up by the Persian Gulf crisis is the prospect of a ground war, which analysts say could be protracted and costly in casualties.

“Some people can get very complacent about this war,” said Michael Blecker, director of Swords to Plowshares, a Vietnam veterans’ group in San Francisco. “But the vets are very anxious and depressed because they know the pain and suffering that is to come--we’ve lived it.”

To many of those opposed to the Gulf War, the pain is already excruciating. Robert Muller, a former Marine Corps officer and paraplegic, started Vietnam Veterans of America Inc. a decade after his spinal cord was damaged by a Viet Cong bullet. He calls the war against Iraq “my Vietnam nightmare come to life.”

“We are heading into a bloodbath,” Muller said, his words tumbling out in a torrent. “We are going down the road again to lies, misrepresentations--to a disaster which is going to kill thousands of Americans (and) tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Iraqis and Kuwaitis. And it will ultimately be for nothing.”

Muller, 45, now heads the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation. Vietnam Veterans of America Inc., which represents 47,000 vets, has not taken a position on the current war.

By all indications, many Vietnam veterans share Muller’s view. Membership in established veterans’ peace groups has grown significantly since the gulf crisis began last Aug. 2, and smaller, grass-roots peace groups have sprung up nationwide. In the past week alone Veterans for Peace got more than 300 new members, and Jerry Genesio, the group’s executive director, said that 12 new local chapters have been formed in the past few months.

Many other veterans reject Muller’s analogy to Vietnam. Some praise America’s forceful military response as proof that the government learned in Southeast Asia that it cannot be hamstrung by political considerations in a war that it intends to win.

They also point to other differences: In the Gulf War the United States is opposing a well-armed, expansionist tyrant who is seeking to obtain nuclear weapons, not interceding in a civil war, as it was in Vietnam. This time, much of the world is united behind the U.S.-led coalition; America is not going it alone. And the the United States has clear interests in the Mideast.

Roger Kelly, 46, a Bellflower, Calif., real estate agent who served on the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk during the Vietnam War, lost so many friends and comrades that he was left racked with guilt--because he survived and they did not. He said he is untroubled by guilt feelings about the war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

“What’s happening now is frightening,” he said, “but I don’t feel it’s the same situation as in Vietnam. We’re dealing with a situation over there that, if we don’t deal with it now, we’ve got real problems.”

For some veterans, merely supporting the war as civilians is not enough; they have re-enlisted. Others, unable to return to combat because they are disabled or too old, have expressed a desire to do so. Their reasons range from patriotic fervor to a yearning to relive the most intense experience of their life, however nightmarish it may have been at times.

“In watching the (war) coverage, some veterans feel very much that old rush of adrenaline, and they’d like to be part of the action,” said Valente, the psychiatric social worker who runs the Washington center for veterans.

Sgt. Gabriel Choriego, station commander at the Army recruiting center in downtown Los Angeles, said that about a dozen Vietnam veterans stopped by in the last week and offered to re-enlist. Most were too old; a few were rejected because they had criminal records.

“The vets we’ve talked to want to go because this war is for a different cause than Vietnam,” Choriego said. “And, the fact that it’s well supported by the people and the government has motivated them.”

Despite the new attention that veteran Kukuk of Huntington Beach has given to his old emotional wounds, he said he and others offered to re-enlist. He was told that at 44, he is too old.

“You have to understand, we were in Vietnam for a year or 13 months. For myself, I felt I didn’t finish the job. A lot of us feel the same way. When we left, the war was still going on. Buddies were still there, people were still dying.

“There’s a sense of incompletion.”

The division among Vietnam vets nationwide was reflected in the congressional vote authorizing President Bush to use force to expel Iraq from Kuwait. Of the 21 former combat veterans serving in Congress, 16 voted to back Bush; five of them supported continued reliance on sanctions.

All 15 Republicans lined up with the President; the six Democrats were split evenly. Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.), a Medal of Honor winner who lost a leg in Vietnam, and freshman Rep. Pete Peterson (D-Fla.), an Air Force pilot who was a prisoner of war for seven years, were among those who opposed the war resolution.

Rep. Duncan L. Hunter (R-Coronado) an Army platoon leader in Vietnam who still regards that war as “a noble cause,” said: “The real tragedy of Vietnam would have been if we had allowed our foreign policy to be paralyzed by it for 30 years.”

One major contrast between the today’s anti-war demonstrations and those of the 1960s and early 1970s is that this time, both the veterans and the public at large are insisting that peace activists blame government policy, not those who carry it out on the battlefield.

All of the Vietnam vets--hawks and doves, former grunts and officers--seem to agree on this one point: No matter how the Gulf War turns out, returning U.S. troops should be treated better at home than those who fought in Vietnam.

“We were just spit out into society after our tours were over,” Blecker, director of the San Francisco veterans group, said bitterly. “All the vets want to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

Because there were few counseling programs available to them, many returning from Vietnam combat never received the help they needed, the Veterans Administration’s Batres said. Some developed severe psychological problems that began to crop up only years later.

As a result, the Vietnam veterans are pushing hard to make sure the country is prepared to help the troops now in the Persian Gulf when they return--with counseling as well as with a warm welcome.

“We Vietnam vets have a responsibility to see that the gulf veterans get some help right away,” Denver Mills, head of the Santa Barbara Veterans Center, said. “If we can counsel and heal them in the beginning, a lot of problems Vietnam vets had later on can be avoided.”

Vet Center therapists and some Vietnam Veterans of America chapters are already counseling the families of those serving in the gulf conflict, to help them understand the problems combat veterans may have on returning home. In East Los Angeles, the Vet Center has established “Yellow Ribbon Support Groups” for family members and is working with another group to provide counseling to Spanish-speaking families with relatives in Saudi Arabia.

The Vet Centers also will work at Veterans Administration hospitals to make sure that troops returning from the gulf get the help they need and are treated with understanding and dignity. Since the veterans counselors’ expertise is in psychological problems that show up only years after combat, the Department of Defense recently held training sessions for these counselors on “acute psychological trauma” so that they are also prepared to aid veterans who need help immediately upon returning.

Even the homecoming--already so much anticipated among Vietnam veterans, long before this war approaches a conclusion--may present its own emotional challenge, counselors say.

Linda Wilson, supervisor of the Springfield, Va., veterans community center, cautioned that even under the best of circumstances, Vietnam veterans--who saw their fathers hailed as heroes after World War II and came home themselves to a defeated and divided America--may feel a certain ambivalence as they join parades for troops returning from the gulf.

If the troops coming back are welcomed home warmly, it may reinforce the resentment of some who served in Vietnam, a sense that “they fought a good war, we fought a bad war.” But if these newest veterans return home without the expected parades, Wilson said, “there will be a lot more pain for Vietnam vets--they will feel that pain all over again for the Persian Gulf vets.”

Whatever the outcome in the deserts of the Mideast, Robert Mills, 42, a short, bearded former Marine from Lebanon, Pa., says he hopes America has learned an important lesson from his bitter experience.

“Don’t blame the troops for following orders,” he said as he scanned the Vietnam Memorial for names he recognizes.