Gulf War Renews Nightmares of Last Conflict’s Victims

About 10 years ago, an aide to then-Sen. Gary Hart of Colorado put me in touch with a Denver man named Bill McFarlane. The aide said McFarlane was a Vietnam vet suffering from something called post-traumatic stress disorder, a term then coming into vogue as a delayed-stress syndrome from the Vietnam War.

McFarlane had a host of psychological and emotional problems, and Hart’s aide suggested that my newspaper interview McFarlane as part of a story on the syndrome. I spent a lot of time with McFarlane, recognizing even as a layman that he had serious problems. The McFarlane story ended sadly many months later: He died after crashing his car doing about 80 m.p.h. in the Colorado high country--as much a Vietnam casualty as any battlefield soldier.

Luckily, many other Vietnam vets were helped out of the morass that McFarlane had been in, aided by a national network of storefront counseling centers that took into account the particular problems of Vietnam vets, such as their almost immediate re-entry from the war front into civilian life and the contempt many of them faced from fellow citizens at home.

The counseling centers were once envisioned as short-term answers to the emerging Vietnam delayed-stress syndrome, but many are still operating today, including one on Harbor Boulevard in Anaheim about a mile from Disneyland.

It’s a good thing, because some of the guys are back.

Not to stay, by any means, but back to expel some temporary demons reawakened by the Persian Gulf War.

“A lot of memories resurfaced, a lot of insecurity was coming back,” said Ronald Hart, a psychologist and director of the center. “It came as a result of what they were seeing on TV, with talk about combat, air strikes, seeing and thinking about what individuals were going through over there and identifying with what they went through.”

The center wasn’t really prepared for those reactions, but it got a couple of phone calls from vets when the war started a month ago, then a dozen or so by the second week. Some callers were tearful, some openly anxious, others more controlled. By the time the number of calls reached about 25, the center knew it had to do something.

On two consecutive Wednesdays this month, it set up informal group therapy sessions, with the vets talking about feelings they had hoped were buried.

The sessions began with joking and small talk but got serious before long.

“They talked about issues pertaining to death and dying,” Hart said, “the public reaction, the war itself and losing friends, knowing a person one minute and the next he’s dead, talking about very traumatic war scenes, where individuals were maimed.”

The sessions, held from 2 to 4 in the afternoon, were generally low key and not marked by outpourings of emotion. Many of the participants have blended quietly into Orange County life, in both blue-collar and white-collar jobs, but all had a bond, Hart said.

“They were saying, ‘Could I come in for a couple sessions? Then I think everything will be fine,’ ” Hart said. “I think many of them just had a fearfulness that their disorder may come back. On the phone, they were saying, ‘Gee, I think I need to come back. I’m really having problems. I don’t know if I can handle this.’ . . . They were surprised at their reactions, or they were saying they were uncomfortable but were nevertheless taken by surprise that they were having such strong reactions.”

Some in the impromptu therapy sessions hadn’t seen a counselor for several years, while others were of more recent vintage, Hart said.

The vets’ reactions to the Gulf War didn’t necessarily trouble him, Hart said.

Rather, he said, he was happy that they felt comfortable at the vet center and were psychologically sound enough to realize that they might benefit from some counseling re-upping.

For now, the sessions have been disbanded, Hart said. If the war intensifies and if the phones start ringing again, they can be reinstated.

I’m assuming the vets were glad they could, in a sense, “come home” to a Vietnam vet center and work on dealing with some old ghosts. Hart said it’s possible that they wouldn’t have felt as comfortable talking about such things with a conventional private therapist.

For those of us who won’t ever be able to understand what some Vietnam vets went through, we can only hope the echoes in their heads someday will be silenced once and for all.