Night Ambush Team Member and Vietnam Vet Dave Hanson, Extended Interview

[Music] vietnam was the first war that was ever fought where the opposition didn't have uh different colored uniforms the opposition could be anything the it was the first war where there was no lines there was no battle lines and the thing that frustrated me most is to see 250 u.s soldiers dead trying to take a hill and and then what we did is we walked away from that hill and the vietcong simply went back to it and we had to go take it again that didn't make any sense to me my name is dave hansen that's h-a-n-s-o-n i'm a vietnam veteran i worked with knight ambush teams using ground radar in not only testing but teaching other other services to use a product as well i was united states air force i was born and raised here in madison i was the youngest of three brothers i graduated high school in 1964. my dream was to be an art teacher and uh i got an offer to uh for a scholarship to play football at concordia college up in moorhead they had a very good art program and i was really excited about that direction um my first two years went very well i played on the freshman team i also then uh played on the on the regular squad the second year uh the very last day of my sophomore year the professor of the art department came to me and said i'd like to give you a test turned out that i was red green colorblind he looked at me and he said i don't see how you can teach art in high school and be colorblind so that pretty much destroyed my entire world i didn't know what to do i didn't know what major to to pursue i came back to madison at the time of the past couple of years i was working for the local well driller just north of town i called him he was excited to get me back to work um the problem was that the year was 1966 and in late september i received my draft notice because i wasn't going back to college i lost my 4s status i did not want to go to vietnam my dad kept telling me to join the navy like your brothers i had two brothers in the navy at the time i didn't want to follow in their footsteps either so i joined the air force they really didn't know what to do with me being colorblind there was a lot of jobs that were not uh then meant for me to to be involved with but they looked at me and said geez you're 6'3 240 pounds would you consider maybe being becoming a military police and that sounded exciting to me after basic i went to police tech school i was stationed up in minot north dakota i was in missile security i kind of liked that because my job was to drive a four-wheel drive pickup around on country roads looking at missile security sites to make sure they were secure brought back memories of madison uh gopher hunting on the back roads uh pheasant hunting uh deer hunting and and all of that my boss came to me in uh and said that he had orders for vietnam and he was really excited and i couldn't understand the reasoning for it but he explained that he was going to be in charge of a program that was going to help develop test and train personnel on ground radar systems working with knight ambush teams at the time what would happen is the knight ambush team would go out they'd spread out behind some bush if they heard movement they'd fire upon the movement they would back up 50 yards and then reset about 99 of the shooting they were doing they found out that they found water buffalo laying dead or they found warthogs laying dead and and so they were exposing their position so someone started developing this radar system and he was going to be in charge of it and he needed an e4 or a buck sergeant in u.s air force terms to go with him and he said i want you he got me excited enough at the time to to go with him i should have thought about those three words night ambush team but that seemed to skip over i had to go to combat training and from there i flew to seattle that would have been early june 1960 they bust me down to fort lewis army camp there i boarded a plane with some i don't know 300 some gis they were army air force marines coast guard nobody knew each other we boarded the plane you picked the first seat you could and there were four seats in the middle of this plane and the only seats left open were somewhere in the middle there so i sat next to two guys that i didn't have a foggiest idea who they were tried to make some conversation but nobody seemed like they wanted to talk i think a lot of it nobody talked on that plane ride very much at all i think a lot of it was due to that everybody was scared and wondering what they're going to get into we eventually landed after 16 hours roughly flying landed in cameron bay late in the afternoon it was too late to get flights out into other areas of the country so they put all of us 300 and some on cots in a in a tin [Music] hanger type of place and i wasn't getting a lot of sleep three o'clock in the morning lights came on a loudspeaker came and said anybody with combat training stand up now so there was about 75-80 of us that stood up they gave us m16s and a bandana of clips and and they put us on a large deuce and a half truck and we were trucked out to the edge of cameron bay base and we were dropped off three feet apart and we were to drive this bushy area for vietcong that had been spotted going into that bush that night nah i'd never been so scared in my life but this was sort of like hunting pheasants in minnesota where were driving and or hunting deer and and the only problem was it was really thick uh over brush and you couldn't see two feet in front of you my m-16 was on automatic i was ready to fire my worry was if the vietcong got in front of me would i kill him before he killed me what about if one of the guys on my left or right got in front of me by accident would i be able to determine that and not kill them we made it through that there was no sighting of any vietcong we were bust back and i was just too nervous to sleep i don't think any of the other ones slept at all either they got up in the morning they fed us we we went to our specific areas to fly out to other areas of vietnam and there was about 20 some army air force that were on my plane it was a two-engine c-130 i guess that's four-engine c-130 landed in phuket air force base central highlands of vietnam there my name was called out and i was asked if i qualified in an m60 machine gun which i have and they put me on a as a door gunner on a helicopter that was going to run medical supplies out to an army base camp uh this was now about 11 o'clock in the morning and so the pilot said don't worry there's no charlie there's no vc out this time of day we're going to be safe he takes off we're 20 25 minutes into the flight i was so amazed at how beautiful the country was it was thick dense jungle mountain tops uh just beautiful scenery and all of a sudden i saw holes popping up in the fuselage and the pilot screamed over them over his microphone in my earset we've got incoming i'm going to roll and give you a better shot uh the uh i saw the the flashes coming from the dark jungle and i fired as much as i could and as hard as i could for many minutes we got by it uh he leveled off he starts screaming your first day in country you got six to eight kills i was too scared to even notice we landed in the army camp they unloaded everything we flew back with no issues the next two or three days was more in training for myself on understanding this ground radar system and basically what it was it was like a it was like a laptop computer and you would point it at someone moving and you could actually hear the sound of him moving and if they were running it would be faster and a dog would be different than a human and so we spent two or three days just doing this to people walking and running by the area that third night i was third man on a six-man knight ambush team we went out about and that was scary as well we went out about 1500 yards into the jungle we set up i thought the technology was phenomenal i mean we had throat mics we had ear plugs if any of the other five guys would hear something then i would get the hands there's movement at two o'clock which would be this direction so i would have to hold up this unit and then scan for the movement and then ah it's nothing but several uh water buffalo or it's nothing but uh they're they're really large or it's nothing but uh warthogs so we wouldn't fire um the problem with that was that we went four months without firing our guns that was a good part as well we went four months without firing our guns on wasteful uh positioning and that type of thing in the late fall of 69 there was a new radar developed that actually had a a a motion uh beam and it actually had a unit with a with a tv set kind of on it and it had a beam that walked back and forth just like a regular radar unit would and on that beam you could control the light so you could actually follow a movement out in left right you could estimate speed you could give you the same sound and that was an unbelievably marvelous unit one night i was scanning in one area and and the the key for a night ambush team when they came back was to take the butt end of their metal knife and hit the tower one time and that would be just like a bell going up this metal tower and about 4 30 we heard this bell go off and there was a marine that was on the unit that i was training at the time and so i yelled down here is that you and he said yeah and i said why didn't you tell us you were coming he said i forgot well we had six people that were following in in sequence coming in on the same path that these guys normally would come in and so i ordered a mortar strike uh that distance and the mortar pit wouldn't fire because it was actually firing over our over our tower and they wouldn't do that so the captain ordered a cobra gunship to come out excuse me and they flew within 10 feet of the top of the tower and he said i need coordinates and i need distance and so i gave him what the reason it was and he fired rockets and and they found four of the what i thought was six vietcong out there so this unit was absolutely phenomenal and uh but charlie got smarter uh over time if if the unit was going like this in a in a pretty large distance and and when it was going this way they couldn't see it but they could run 10 or 12 feet and then stop and then the radar would come by and would miss them because there was no movement going on and all of a sudden one night we had a canine unit below that was guarding the bottom of the tower the dog alerted and he was mad he was upset and i ran to the front of the tower where the one of the m-60s were was mounted and i saw a vietcong zapper as we called him get caught up on constantino wire and he set off a trip flare i immediately started firing and the problem is they were firing back and so it was glancing off the steel side of the roof and and ricocheting to the tin roof and and i laid that night i laid over 4 000 rounds of ammo at at them and we got enough help in there that every one of the zappers were killed so it got to be some really dangerous times there were all kinds of things that were happening but but that radar unit was absolutely phenomenal and we even had uh a senator that actually an 80 year old senator by the name of strom thurman actually crawled that 60-foot tower and crawled through the hole into the tower just to see that unit i was so impressed by that but he went home and he pulled funding on the unit and that was three weeks before i left country and i could not understand that with the success of that unit why would they pull funding but they did it was a political war and we really didn't understand that we were trying to do everything we could in country to make this a success and in fact we were successful we were winning the war the vietcong could not compete with our technology and our abilities yet it became a political war and everything sort of got sideswiped in my opinion uh we came home um we went back to cameron bay uh we had to stay there two days because charlie was rocketing the runway it was 110 115 degrees sweltering heat 95 percent humidity no showers they fed us and we stayed in this tin shed and it was so hot it was unbelievable we couldn't go anywhere because we had a number and if our number was 295 and they called zero to 300 and you weren't there you were given a new number the next time so everybody had to stay close the rocketing quit they moved the airplane out of the hangar it happened to be a korean airliner and uh and everybody boarded and we all greeked and stunk so bad it was unbelievable i felt so sorry for the stewardesses that were there we landed in japan to refuel everybody went out we we all gave 50 cents to several guys they went and bought some right guard and everybody was spraying their armpits with the right guard and i think now we did was smell like bad red curd we landed in back in fort lewis army camp we were debriefed they only had small buses like 25 at a time so we were given numbers as well and i happened to be in the first bus and [Music] we were bused up to to seattle ctac airport and we got our duffel bags out and we started walking into the terminal and we were surrounded by young people shouting and screaming and calling us names and spitting on us and i didn't i'm sorry i didn't expect that kind of hate i didn't understand it someone in the group yelled get to the uso and that's where we were supposed to shower we ran to the uso we got through the door there was a guard there the the protesters stopped and the showers weren't working so we had to get dressed and go to our individual flight areas and i asked for a window seat which they did i boarded and i sat down there was a there was a gentleman in a suit that sat in the aisle seat and when the doors closed he got up and moved and i thought gee i wonder what the deal on that is we landed in denver i caught a flight from denver to sioux falls south dakota again a lady came in i again asked for a window seat a lady came in and sat down when the doors were closed and locked she got up and moved we landed in sioux falls my my parents picked me up we got back to madison my dad said there's your high school reunion down at the supper club on highway 75 down here and i didn't go i didn't want to go i i just couldn't do it and i stayed around the house and i came down to the local pool hall here in town it's no longer here good old hank's pool hall and several of my friends were playing pool they all said hi not one comment was welcome home our things glad to see you're alive uh none of that it was what do you think of the vikings what do you think of the twins what do you think of the the madison mallards the local team at the time it just so you get along and i think most vietnam vets felt the same thing we shut up we didn't talk about it i went through my last two years of college graduated with a degree in marketing there was only three people in a class of 90 that knew i was a vietnam vet and they as well were vets and i don't know if we look different i don't know if we were older than everybody else i don't know what the deal was but we we became very very close friends i went to work i just attended a reunion just eight nine months ago where my boss was there and and i had the i had the honor of raising the flag at the twin stadium on national ptsd day and one of the secretaries happened to be there and she came running over and gave me a great big hug and she was at this meeting and she said yeah i just saw dave raising the flag at the twin stadium and then my boss looked at me and said i didn't even know you were in the military and that's how silent i think most of us were i went 40 years without an issue i did some screwy things i had i had three baseball bats behind doors in each in each area of the house i had a baseball bat under the bed i checked the doors and the windows every night two or three times to make sure that they were locked i understand later that that's part of the symptoms of ptsd but 40 years afterwards i had i was supposed to get a sleep study done and that's fine i went and they wired me all up all over my body and and i went to sleep and they woke me two hours later and said wow you have huge sleep apnea issues so we're going to put this mask on you and they adjusted the air pressure and laid me back down in the bed they turned the lights out and then left the room as soon as that door was closed the bed started shaking and i thought i was in a helicopter and the next thing i heard was a voice uh we're taking incoming i'm gonna roll and give you a better shot and what i saw was the flashes okay coming from the dark jungle i started screaming make him running in and what's wrong what's wrong and i said i was in the helicopter i don't know what was going on oh you weren't in a helicopter and they said just lay down again and i no i'm not going to do it and i started ripping off these wires and and i was just as scared as the day that happened and uh they didn't understand it they you know i just walked out and later i found that that's what uh uh that that was just a common occurrence by by combat vets and the [Music] and that was the the first of uh of four in the next oh three years i would be traveling for business and in a hotel in reno nevada i heard somebody running toward the bed and i woke up and i didn't see him and i and i didn't have any weapons and i turned the light on and i searched in the closets i searched everywhere i could i i was so upset i didn't know what to do i was scared i lifted the window up i was going to jump i was so scared except the window only opened about 8 or 10 inches in on vacation in in ireland uh three couples uh we rented a condo and a golf course in ireland and upstairs i heard running in the main floor of the of the room and i snuck down and i saw two zappers running across the floor and i grabbed the butcher knife and i searched everywhere i could in that condo couldn't find him i sat on the floor and i contemplated suicide again except i didn't want anybody to find me and have that big mess to clean up so i put the knife away and i went upstairs didn't tell anybody about it six and a half years ago so april of 2016 or 2014 i'm sorry we were in bed i had bought by that time a nine millimeter i had it positioned just under the the box spring and the mattress so that i could reach down and grab it and it and fire in seconds i was ready again that's part of the ptsd issues i heard somebody running on the floor and and i went to the stairwell two-story house and i saw two zappers running across the floor for some reason i didn't grab my nine millimeter and i'm glad i didn't know i went downstairs they went into the living room i ran into the kitchen i grabbed a butcher knife out of the door and i went the other way into the living room and i was i was i was going to find them and i remember shaking i searched everywhere in that house basement the garage under the cars i didn't see anything i sat on the kitchen floor and that was as close as i could get to suicide i was right there on the edge i happened to notice my wife's laptop computer on the counter i grabbed it and i typed in va suicide hotline and up came two options one was a text option one was a call-in option and i thought well i could do that right here and text in a person chad one comes up and said where are you and i typed in minneapolis he said how far are you from the va hospital i said about 40 minutes get there and i sat there for a second and i clicked off of the site and i don't know why i did that about 10 minutes later i clicked back on i to my amazement here comes the same guy again chad won and he said i thought i lost you i said you just about did and he said i called the va hospital in minneapolis the doctor is there he is called a psychologist she's going to be there within the hour so you get to the va and get there now i had never told my wife anything about this not ever and i snuck upstairs i had some clothes that i had ready for the next day i picked them up and i started sneaking out the doorway of the bedroom when she woke up and said what are you doing and i said i'm going to the va hospital and she said you're not driving i'm driving she drove me to the va we parked right in front of the area right by the door we walked in the doctor was there just as promised he gave me a full physical mice my blood pressure was skyrocketing i started to settle down some then he led me into a door to meet this psychologist i swear she was 14 and i thought to myself how is she going to help me she was really good her first question was do you want to do you want to have your wife in here while we talk or would you rather have her leave the room and i said i think it's about time she understands and she stayed the next day she got me into the head of psychiatry at the va hospital who assigned me a therapist and put me on a program called uh prolonged exposure therapy a six-week program and this therapist again was really really young but she was so good and she got me to like all that go through this program we had to tape our most frightening experiences some of which i've ran through here today and then we had to listen to them and we had to guide or gauge our anxiety levels really high 90 70 50 40 anything below 40 she thought would be somewhat normal most of that tape that i did i was crying so hard and blubbering i i couldn't listen to it i just couldn't do it and after that first week i told her that and her response was okay we'll just go to vietnam movies have you seen any i said no i'm not the first one was going to be good morning vietnam which is a pretty docile movie but there was one area there where a bomb goes off in a in a bar in in a small town and boy that got my anxiety levels about 70 or so and i had to watch it over and over and over and over again until my anxiety levels started coming down and i didn't think this was going to work but it did after five or six times whoa my anxiety levels were maybe in that 30 to 40 range and kind of normal i was so excited the second movie was platoon well that was a little more hairier there were a couple of instances where my anxiety levels were skyrocketed but they came down after five or six times of uh of watching it excuse me uh the third movie was apocalypse now that was a tough movie for me especially because there was a section in there that had door gunners and helicopters coming into a beach area and they were firing at all of the vc and the vc were firing back and the shelves were hitting the steel floor of the chopper and that just that just really got me it took me 15 16 times to watch that before my anxiety levels came down but they did i was so excited i thought i was done after the fourth week and she said no in the working with night ambush teams you become so attuned to the slightest sound and the snap of a twig and the rustling of leaves that shouldn't be there and movement between the between the trees and when we built a house in 91 we built it into kind of a wooded area at daytime had no issues but at night i couldn't go out of my house i just couldn't do it and she said to me that fifth week now you're going to walk into your woods and you're going to stand there for 30 minutes until your anxiety levels come down and i said i'm not so sure i can do that she said yeah you can so i went that next night i went to the corner of the garage i was 10 feet away from the wooded areas i couldn't go into the woods i just couldn't do it i walked back into the house after about 25-30 minutes of standing there my wife says how'd that go i said i couldn't do it the next night i went out there i stood by the corner of the garage again and i after 10 minutes finally muscled enough courage to go in to the woods and i stood there and i was my anxiety levels were screaming high and but i stood there and i noticed that i was 80 90 all of a sudden started coming down to 50 or 60 and well that helped my half hour was up i came back into the house the third night i went out and my anxiety levels weren't at that 80 90 range or 70 80 and they came down more quickly to 50 60. and the fourth night i started at 50 or 60 and came down to 30 and 40 and that felt so good i'm winning this war and the fourth night uh i didn't have any anxiety walking into the woods at all and after half an hour i came out the fifth night the same thing and i said well this is over now i've won this war i'm done and so i walked down just to make sure i was into different areas of the woods behind our house and i scared up a deer and i actually followed the deer and then i came up in the back side of the house and and went back into the house and i told i told the therapist this and she said wow you realize what it was and you still followed it i said i did she said phenomenal i said i'm done just no you're not i said what she said do you have any woods in your area that you're not so familiar with yeah we have an area about five six blocks away it's called purgatory creek and i don't go down there not because i never wanted to i've just never been down there she said take a flashlight to make sure you don't be stepping on anything in case you need it and so i went down there i walked into those woods i stood there in those woods with no issues at all second night the same thing the third night the same thing i didn't go back and that following week then i reported to our meeting and i told her about what was going on and then she looks at me and she said do you think you're done i said i think i am she said good you're done three weeks after that i was asked to be in a evaluation of programs by the va and there were six of us two of us were vietnam vets four of them were iraqi afghanistan vets and i was the only one of the six that got the help that i needed and this guy that was vietnam vet was screaming at me because why didn't they let me watch movies i had to listen to myself bawling on the tape so i realized that i wasn't the only one that was balling on that tape the amazing thing for me is it's now been six and a half years since my attempt my almost attempt last attempt at suicide and i've not had any flashbacks i've not had any attempts of suicide i walk in my woods at night with ease i don't have any bad dreams i don't have any nightmares and my wife is so thankful because i did get the help i needed so what i've been doing lately is i've been talking to veterans groups and and i did my own youtube uh under dave hanson vietnam talking about the this prolonged exposure treatment that i went through so i've been trying to get veterans to go to the va and do more of this and i told all of my friends that that wrote me in vietnam and as well as my folks don't buy all of the news that you're hearing because i would hear it from them oh it's so bad it must be a daily douluge of viet cong that are coming after you i think vietnam was like any war i think there were times of of just enormous fear and days and days and days of boredom and jokes and and playing stupid pranks on people uh we did that a lot we drank way too much we would go out at nine o'clock at night come back at four in the morning we'd turn in our weapons we'd go to our hooch um our our area was was off of the main base and so i would take a jeep and i would drive to the bx and buy 30 cases of beer because nobody had a a cooler or a refrigerator up on our unit except me so i'd buy them for a dime and sell them for a quarter and they said well geez it only cost you a dime on base and then go on base and buy buy your warm beer and drink it but if you're gonna want it cold you're gonna pay a quarter and and i bought it for a hundred dollars and i sold it for a hundred dollars the day i left and so there's there's a lot of normalcy as well but there's a lot of stuff that is unbelievable and we had a we had what they called mamasans uh our mamasan would be responsible for the six in our hooch and she would clean our uniforms wash our uniforms every night because they would be muddy our boots would be muddy she would clean them every night she would wake us up if we were sleeping too late sometimes she would grab my fatigue and say hansen's son you be very careful tonight major or no buku vc out you be very careful and she would have been her throat would have been slit if they ever knew that she was helping us at all we would have won the war if it wouldn't have been for the political battles that we were fighting here and and i understand that it was an unpopular war but the guys that went there even if they were drafted boy they fully believed in coming out of there alive they fully believed in what they were doing and yes we were probably seeing in the other side of the political battle there we had to believe that we could win that war so it was a tough situation beautiful country i don't want to go back um but it was a very unusual war that was the last war where we went on a plane as a single individual not as a group today they're going as groups so they come back as groups and they talk as groups i can't even find some of my best friends because they're not on facebook they're not on these groups i don't know how to find them i have found two of them and one died of cancer that was tied to age and orange and and so it's it's different today someone told me just this morning that and i forget the airport it was in but he said it was so exciting because i heard i heard applause in the airport and i looked around to see what was going on and here's a whole bunch of of army recruits that is going to be posted uh somewhere and uh a little girl walked up to one of the young men and he knelt down and she said to him would you give my daddy a present and he said what's that and she gave him a hug thinking that they were going to afghanistan and he wasn't but he said he would and so the difference in acceptance today of military people is much much much different than it was in our day the vietnam vets today are are more accepted than than we were 40 years ago or 30 years ago maybe even 20 years ago and people [Music] when they find out i'm a vietnam vet will come up and say thank you for your service and i don't respond other than thank you i don't respond to it but my thought process is where were you 50 years ago why weren't we welcome then why weren't we thanked for our service then and is it now more appropriate to say thank you for your service because the vietnam vet wasn't thanked or wasn't uh wasn't honored at all if i now belong i belong to the vietnam veterans association and i belong to the vfw and and uh the city uh asked the vfw to march in the july 4th parade that was the first time i'd ever been in a parade and i cried the whole way tough thing to have happen so now you'll have friends that are my age and they won't say anything to me even if they know i'm a vietnam vet and so i kind of wonder if maybe in the day that they were on the opposite side of the fence that i was and they just don't want to say anything and that's fine i don't care i'm lucky enough to come out come out of there alive i got eight stitches across my chin one of the outposts that that i manned before i before i started working with the radar was wood and i crawled up this wooden outpost it was 200 yards or so off base and it was a listening post as they called it and i was crawling up that and somebody had sawed the wooden four by fours and so when i got up and walked to the whole thing the whole thing collapsed and went forward and and i landed on my chin and got six seven stitches some across the bottom of my chin and i was lucky to get out of that in the fire fight that we did have with the m60 machine gun the night that i fired 4 000 rounds and the gun jammed the the thing that that i picked up off the floor was the was the shell casing that was stuck in the barrel and after it exploded it shattered and and i had my flashlight down there and i was trying to cover it up so i wouldn't show any light to anyone else and after it exploded my flashlight disintegrated and when i turned the m60 in they the guy of course it's still dark the guy looked at me and he said what did you do to your face and my whole face was burnt around where that flashlight was and my hands were burnt uh but i didn't see it until we got into the lighted area and one of the guys that came on in the day crew found this and they thought it would be interesting to go out and see if they could actually see the shell that should have gone out of the barrel of the gun and they found that as well and they gave that to me the next night and that was kind of interesting so i have a little momento of a of a time where i probably came as close to death as i could have come the i was i was really lucky the year that i was in vietnam um i only i didn't lose any any real close friends i got to be friends with a pilot whose uh plane nose dived into the mountains that was a sad deal but we weren't close friends i had a really a very close friend that that accidentally shut himself in the foot and he was evacked out and and it was only by pure accident that he came up on facebook and i recognized his name and say are you the same that used to be in phuket from this time to this time yes he was and he was the leader of the ambush team that that i was part of so i will never ever forget them the sad part of it is we were really good friends and he said i'm sorry i don't remember you and he said but you have to understand my memory is shot he said i couldn't handle when i got back he said i i healed well but i couldn't handle the life being back here in the states and i re-upped and went back to vietnam and he said i paid a horrendous price for that the second tourist it really did me in and i think he brought up something to me that day that i talked to him one of the things my boss taught told me that you went out and just did some really not dangerous things but things that were out of the realm like when i would do seminars i was in the groundwater industry and i worked for a manufacturer for several years and we would do seminars on well hydraulics and weld design and weld problems and those kinds of things and he was with me one time and he said well you're going to get ready for this you're going to get ready for the seminar and i said oh i'm going to do it off the cuff he said why are you doing that i to be honest with you i don't know except that's that's the excitement of it and the i think that that's what i missed coming home from vietnam i missed the excitement i missed the adrenaline push i missed all of that and so i was i was doing that i think as part of that excitement and i think that's why bobby hare went back on his second tour i think a lot of vietnam vets think the same thing i think a lot of today's vets think the same thing as well i think they come back and they miss the camaraderie they miss the excitement they mix the danger and i think that's why there's a lot of issues with with drinking and drugs and and doing really screwy things one of the things that i want to continue to do is to is to reach out to even today's veterans the vietnam vets of today are still committing suicide to the tune of 20 per day i think that is so sad asked the head of the psychology department at uh you know at the at the va why did it take 40 and 50 years for the vietnam vet to commit suicide and why is it that the younger vets are committing suicide so much earlier and he said why do you think and my only grasp of that was i think when we got home from vietnam we we bottled everything up and we didn't allow it out because nobody wanted to talk to us about it and it was not the thing to do uh in today's world it's much more accepting to talk about uh your feelings to talk about what happened to you to talk about the situations and why you have a an artificial leg or an artificial arm [Music] in in the days of vietnam that wouldn't have even been asked and and i don't know if it applies or not but i think that once a vietnam vet like myself got 40 years past that you're into the point of retirement and then i'm not traveling in business like i was i'm home more you have more time to think about it you have more time to to almost grieve you have more time to to think about stuff like that and i think it just comes up in today's veterans uh i'm i'm so happy to see them applauded coming into the airport uh terminals uh it's it's so refreshing to see but they have to deal with it probably much earlier than we did i'm not sure which is better when i talk to families i talk about the the some of the things to look for regarding ptsd and and i didn't even know it was called ptsd i mean my wife and i were at the minnesota county or state fair and i noticed a vietnam booth by the vietnam veterans association and he had a great big map of vietnam there and so i i asked my wife i said i'd like to go over and look at that and so we're there and i'm showing her on the map where i was and the guy comes over and he said are you a vietnam vet and i said i am and he said how many bats do you hide behind your door how many guns do you have under your pillow i said what are you talking about bats behind my door he said do you have a bat behind your door i got three of them i've got a an oak shovel handle underneath my bed yep that's ptsd never heard of it didn't even realize he said how many times you check your door before you go to bed i said at least each door twice yeah that's ptsd didn't even know it today's and the thing that a lot of people don't realize ptsd isn't new i mean going back to the roman empire the romans would bring back their warriors and they would they would put them in a beautiful setting with all of the food and everything that they needed and they gave them time to decompress and and we don't do that i had an uncle that worked here in madison worked with my dad at the barber shop in those days they didn't call it ptsd they call it shell shock he carried his best friend three miles back to the front line and he was already dead and he wouldn't talk about it so we've got to be doing things and we've got to be educating families at what to look for i mean things like things like having a gun and needing a gun things like locking the doors things like being nervous around fireworks don't catch me with my back to the door if i would still have issues here i couldn't sit in one of these chairs and have that back door behind because i couldn't control that area massive drinking massive drugs things that uh you become withdrawn uh there's so many symptoms to this and and we need to as a country start dealing with it better we need it as a as a uh as the army or whatever service you're in any combat that that comes home has to be dealt with and we're not doing that we're only treating it when it becomes an issue you know i went to the va because i was struggling with some things and i had to go through about a 30-minute test and and get my answers on a computer and it was analyzed by a psychologist and i walk into his office and he looks at me and he said i looked at your test and you don't have ptsd and and i think that and i've heard in fact a good friend of mine is a va advocate for for the veterans association he said you'll never get it the first time you have to go through it two and three and four times and he said how many times did you try to commit suicide i said well three and and i'm sorry four and and he said yeah and what did you have to do to get it yeah you almost had to kill yourself and get to the emergency room of the va to go in because he said the va is not always going to grant you this because now they got a they got to pay for your rehab and they have to do this for you and that for you and he said you'll never get it the first time after he told me i didn't have ptsd i walked down to my car and i got in the car and i sat in the car for a half an hour i was shaking so bad i couldn't drive and then once i got up the nerve to start the engine and drive out of the parking area and get on the freeway i got halfway home and i started shaking so bad i had to pull over and i found a restaurant i went in and had a cup of coffee and i had a big piece of cake took me that long to settle down then i was so shook up about it and we don't i don't know where i don't know where the problem is but we're not dealing with it very well and that's sad because any any veteran that has been in any combat situation can have ptsd and a suicide rate is way way way way too high we don't know what to do with it we're not giving them any help unless it's too late [Music] you

Channel: Postcards | Pioneer PBS

Views: 145,080

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Id: 66P318Nvr3U

Length: 56min 9sec (3369 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 13 2022