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I am a firm believer that no one dies until it is time for them to die, the only question is how and when they die. Looking back I was carried through the war which took place in Vietnam. I did not know it at the time but now I do; spirit was with me even when surrounded by war and death on a large scale.
My ptsd when I got back to the U.S. was mainly survivors guilt; this is the most common issue that people in war have to recover from, and I would ask myself over and over; why did I live when 58,000 other soldiers were killed, and about 2-million Vietnamese were also killed. I was very angry and confused about how to think about that war and my participation in it.
I put myself in lots of therapy, even before there was any such recognition of ptsd. That war woke me up and turned me towards spirituality. I lost my eyesight in Vietnam and was totally blind for about 5-years. More than a dozen surgeries later I regained my eyesight. Losing my eyesight was just something else I had to recover from.
Recovery is long and painful and there were very few people who understood what war veterans had gone thru. Before the ptsd label was established psychologists and psychiatrists did not believe war effected people emotionally and mentally. They often thought that person’s problems stemmed from their childhood. Their relationship with their mother and father.
Yes, it was once called shell shock, then battle fatigue, and now it is called combat-related ptsd, and ptsd is now generalized to include people who had not been in a military war. Remember General George S. Patton slapped a soldier who was suffering from battle fatigue, and he called that soldier “a coward.” There was no treatment back then for war related emotional issues; we were just told to “act like a man,” stuff your pain, and my friends used to tell me “you just need to get stoned,” or high on drugs.
Today we recognize how being exposed to trauma can impact a person but it was not always that way. Tens of thousands of war veterans have taken their own life because they were unable to recover from the effects of war.
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