Wartime Secrets Are a Burden That Lasts a Lifetime

George Garcia returned to California after two tours in Vietnam and checked into a hotel a couple of blocks from home rather than answer questions from his parents.

James Haggard, an infantryman, has yet to tell his family about having to sort through the severed body parts of fellow soldiers.

George Duggins waited 14 years to tell his wife he had even served in Vietnam.

War has always forced men to commit and witness terrible acts. The memory of pulling the trigger on another human can gnaw a soldier’s guts, or descend on the mind without warning.

These are the secrets that survivors carry, hidden from family and friends. Every war engenders the burden of secrets. It’s as much a part of battle as bullets and death. Even in the era of memoir and Jerry Springer, these remain locked away.

Unless you have a public life, like former U.S. Sen. Bob Kerrey.

Prompted by a New York Times magazine story, Kerrey has acknowledged that in Vietnam he led a combat mission in which 13 to 20 unarmed women, children and old men were killed. He was awarded the Bronze Star for the mission. For 32 years, he said, he has been haunted by the experience.

Vietnam veteran Larry Downing said every soldier understands. “It will stay with you forever until you die,” said the 57-year-old Port Hueneme man.

For most vets, the incidents that torment them were not atrocities. The secrets they harbor spring from routine wartime violence. For one Vietnam veteran, it was the pleading look of a young woman being kicked during an interrogation by a South Vietnamese soldier.

“Instinctively, I wanted to help her and I think she could sense that,” the San Diego man recalled. “But instead of stepping forward, I turned my back and walked away.”

During the Korean War, Eugene Carroll, a naval aviator flying an AD Skyraider, dropped more bombs than he could count. One time, in an effort to protect American troops who were under fire, Carroll dropped napalm on enemy soldiers in a trench.

“That’s an image I’ll never lose,” Carroll recalled, “human beings jumping out, burning.” It’s also an incident he has never mentioned to relatives.

“It isn’t something you want to bring up in a family circle or at the dinner table,” said Carroll, who retired as a rear admiral after 37 years of service.

Carroll’s silence is not uncommon, according to experts.

“It’s a generic part of all combat, that there are things we do, see or feel that we tuck away in a secret spot for years and years,” said therapist Robert Key, director of the Anaheim Veteran Center and a Vietnam veteran. “Some of us hope it’s secret forever. But often the stuff bubbles to the surface later in life.”

Key said veterans often describe a life-changing combat experience as though looking at a photograph. The moment is frozen in their mind, he said, and the veteran tends to view it from the same perspective over and over.

Key said he tells his patients, “If what you want to do is burn the photograph, it’s not going to happen. But we can help you reframe the photo so it’s easier to look at.”

Talking about these secrets, Key said, and attempting to see them from different angles, helps shrink an individual’s pain and isolation.

Key and others point out that soldiers in Vietnam were younger and better educated than those in earlier wars. During World War II, for instance, the average soldier was 26 with a ninth-grade education. In Vietnam, soldiers were 19, on average, and had 11th-grade educations.

“Things occurred in World War II and Korea that were not that much different than Vietnam, but the soldiers’ ability to handle them was different,” said Key. “Educationally, we were further along, but emotionally we were younger in Vietnam.”

Still, some Vietnam vets bristle at the idea of regrets. North Vietnamese soldiers, said retired Navy Chief Petty Officer Jack Shockley, gave as good as they got.

“When you start shooting you don’t look at who is shooting at you. You are knocking everybody down,” said Shockley, 71, of Port Hueneme. “It’s all so one-sided. “Remember what our guys went through.”

Other experts said Vietnam was a lonelier war for soldiers. During World War II, local men often enlisted together, trained, shipped out, fought and returned home together, said Dr. Chris Reist, chief of mental health at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Long Beach. In Vietnam, young men were drafted from different communities, trained in boot camps and dispatched to fight in units that were frequently being re-formed.

“Vietnam was a much more solitary experience, as opposed to World War II, which was more of a group experience,” Reist said.

And unlike other veterans, who believed strongly in the cause of their fight, many Vietnam vets returned home questioning the purpose of their acts. And they often struggled alone with their memories.

George Garcia came home to Chino at the end of 2 1/2 tours in Vietnam, checked into a hotel and mulled over all he’d been through.

“I didn’t shower, I didn’t do anything, I just thought,” said Garcia, a former “tunnel rat,” a soldier who used underground tunnels to conduct raids.

When he finally went home, he told his parents nothing about Vietnam. Garcia, who received two Purple Hearts, married his high school sweetheart and never discussed the war.

Garcia only began talking about Vietnam six years after his return, when his wife accused him of being unfaithful while he was overseas. Garcia said the more he spoke, the more it seemed that his wife feared him.

The following year, Garcia suffered a nervous breakdown. He said he bought an AK-47 rifle and two hand grenades, then tried to persuade his mother to shoot him. The police took him to a VA hospital, where he stayed a year. Once there, he was finally able to discuss his war experience.

“It was like a steam cooker,” Garcia said of the emotional tension that built up inside him over the years.

Garcia, 51, now counsels disabled veterans in East Los Angeles.

Therapist Key said wartime secrets may have been harder for Vietnam veterans because it was such an unpopular war. They found little sympathy or approval when they returned.

George Duggins, for instance, waited 14 years to tell his wife he had served.

“Americans don’t like losers, and Vietnam veterans were seen as losers,” said Duggins, now the national president of the Vietnam Veterans of America. “You just stayed to yourself.”

The Norfolk, Va., resident kept his service in military intelligence a secret until, driving home from work one night, he heard a radio announcement for a local veterans meeting.

That evening, he found himself in a room with men who understood his quirks--like why he hated walking in the rain. He had his fill after two tours of duty in wet jungle.

After the meeting, he finally told his wife about his service.

Even though three decades have passed since James Haggard returned from Vietnam, Haggard said he cannot easily share his experiences in a rescue unit, retrieving the dead.

“I don’t talk about it; it is a burden that I carry upon myself,” said the 56-year-old Lancaster man, who was an infantryman for three years, beginning in 1966. “This is not something that I can share, like when you get a promotion or a pay raise. What happened there, you don’t want to share that.”

Haggard’s family knows he is an honorably discharged Army veteran, but they don’t know much more.

“If I expose my family to what happened, it would be a burden they carry, and I have no right to do that to them,” said Haggard, a veterans representative with the state Employment Development Department’s office in Canoga Park. “They see my awards and my certificates and that’s the extent of it.”

Haggard said his secrets make him feel alienated, as if he is “standing off somewhere by myself.”

“I know that I have changed since I had this experience. It has affected my sociability, my relationships with others,” he added. “Sometimes, you put on a mask not to let people know what’s going on in your inner self.”

Haggard is philosophical about his secrets.

“Everyone has their own burdens,” he said. “Everyone has their own happenings. Everyone carries their own cross.”

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Times staff writers Karima Haynes, H.G. Reza and Timothy Hughes contributed to this story.