18 Jul PTSD vs. “PTSD”
I’ve told this story before, but I’m going to tell it again today because it’s relevant (and because it’s my newsletter, and I want to).
There’s a scene in the Robin Williams movie “Good Morning, Vietnam” where the local bar/hangout in Saigon, Jimmy Wah’s, is blown up by the Viet Cong – in the middle of the day, when the place is full. Countless Vietnamese civilians are hurt, and three U.S. servicemen are killed. It’s a pretty important scene in the movie, because that attack starts Williams’ character, Adrian Cronauer, down the road to despair and eventual reassignment out of Vietnam. You see, Cronauer’s Vietnamese buddy, Tuan, turns out to be a notorious VC operative named Phan Duc To. He planted the bomb at Wah’s and afterward, is hunted by U.S. Army intelligence.
I’m not sure if this was my ignorance or my prejudice or my age or what. But for a long time, I thought that this scene was pretty contrived. I did not know that the VC conducted operations like that, in which they were just as likely to kill or injure locals as they were to kill American soldiers. For whatever reason, I underestimated (overestimated?) the VC and assumed that the habit of pyrrhically sacrificing your own people to make a point started with the Islamists of the PLO and Hezbollah in Beirut.
As luck would have it, I learned, a few years later, that the movie was actually pretty accurate. Not that I know about Jimmy Wah’s or any other bar. I just know that things like that DID happen in Vietnam. In fact, it happened to someone I know – my late, great father-in-law, who volunteered to serve as an Army combat engineer.
At some point during his tour, he was barracked at a hotel in Saigon. I’ve seen pictures, and based on those pictures and other bits I’ve pieced together, I’d guess it was Metropole Hotel. Stars and Stripes told the story of the Metropole as follows, on December 6, 1965:
“It’s a funny feeling. You’re sound asleep and you wake up fighting for your life,” said Air Force TSgt. Franklin U. Davidson.
Davidson, 30, of Chipley, Fla., was one of the injured survivors of the attack on the Metropole Hotel here Saturday morning.
Davidson, treated for neck burns and cuts and released from the U.S. Navy Hospital across the street from the Metropole, was sleeping in his second-floor front room when the attack started.
He was awakened by automatic weapons fire, grabbed his weapon and was about three feet from his bed when the bomb exploded. “The whole window casing was blown in on my bed,” he said.
Davidson said he was conscious but dazed and lost his breath from dust and debris. He said he was carried to the hospital by SSgt. Gerald L. Trudeau, who lived in a room near Davidson’s.
Another survivor, Marine Lance Cpl. Edward T. Maguire said, “I want to go back up to Da Nang where I have a fighting chance. The hell with this hotel living.” Maguire, 27, of Farmington, Me., was not injured.
Eight Vietnamese, one American Marine, and one soldier from New Zealand were killed. Of the 175 people injured, 72 were Americans. Of course, that doesn’t include those who survived the attack but who nevertheless lived the rest of their lives unable to sleep peacefully because of the mental scars left by being awakened in the middle of the night covered in dust and rubble, unable to see through the fire and smoke.
After the bombing, my father-in-law finished his tour, returned home, passed his physical exam, and went back to work as a plumber. He got married, had kids (including, obviously, the lovely and talented Mrs. Soukup), and lived a normal life — except for one thing. He had recurring severe ear infections. His ears would get sore. His eardrums would burst. And sometimes, he’d even end up in the hospital because of the pain and the bleeding. No one could explain why he had problems with his ears. Whenever he had an issue, he’d get treated and go back life as usual. In about 1981, after several severe ear infections, a doctor at the VA said he wanted to swab his ear, deep into the inner ear-canal. What he found in there was a fungus. A fungus that is only found in nature in Southeast Asia. And since a midwestern plumber had little call to travel to Southeast Asia for business or pleasure, it was clear that he’d brought it back with him from Vietnam – 15 years earlier. The doctor was able to clear up the fungal infection, but the prognosis was not especially good: the damage done was substantial, and, in time, my father-in-law would lose his hearing entirely.
He’s been gone five years now, and I think about him a great deal, especially on the 4th of July. He wasn’t a big fan of the holiday, not because he wasn’t patriotic, but because he wasn’t a fan of things exploding loudly. His last handful of Independence Days were the only ones he enjoyed – ironically, because he could no longer hear the explosions.
Yesterday, my youngest son and I went to get haircuts. We went to our usual barber, Randall, who has been cutting what’s left of my hair for a decade or so. Randall is 38 years-old. He limps around the barbershop on his bad hip and he takes frequent vape/smoke breaks, a habit he developed when he couldn’t sleep after returning from Iraq.
Randall grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, and like a lot of kids who grow up there, he found order and stability in the Marine Corps. He was a munitions expert in Iraq, but according to him, what he did all day, every day was lead his men into villages to disarm the locals. Most of the locals were not a threat to them, of course, and they knew it. They also knew that once they disarmed them, those locals had no defense against the Islamists (ISIS, presumably) who would enter the villages shortly after the Americans left. In other words, the Marines knew that their job was important to the broader mission in Iraq but nevertheless resulted in countless innocent men, women, and children being slaughtered by fanatics.
No wonder Randall has trouble sleeping.
Earlier this week, for reasons still unknown to me, posters on social media (Twitter/X and Reddit, mostly) were discussing the horrors witnessed by American servicemen and women in Afghanistan, specifically the horrors associated with the systemic rape of young boys by Pashtun men. Several soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines recounted their tales and detailed how they are still haunted by what they saw and heard and, most notably, were ordered to ignore.
I will spare you a recounting of the stories I’ve written in the past about the Pashtun practice of “bacha bazi” (literally “boy play”) and the American forces’ complicity in restoring the practice after the fall of the Taliban. The whole episode is/was disgraceful, to say the least.
In any case, my father-in-law was finally treated for (and classified as disabled because of) his PTSD around 2010 – some 45 years after he left Vietnam. Randall has a small disability designation for his hip (and one for his hearing too; munitions, natch), but he has repeatedly been denied any sort of classification for his PTSD. God only knows what the veterans of Afghanistan have to endure and what treatment they’ve received or been denied.
And then….then…there is Scott MacFarlane, the Capitol Hill reporter for CBS News. MacFarlane happened to have been covering President Trump’s campaign last July when it made its stop in Butler, Pennsylvania. Recently, MacFarlane told the story of that fateful day to fellow journalist Chuck Todd:
Americans reeled in shock from the attempt on Trump’s life during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, but MacFarlane said he had personal trauma from the crowd’s immediate rage in response.
“For those of us there, it was such a horror because you saw an emerging America,” MacFarlane told Todd on his podcast. “And it wasn’t the shooting, Chuck. This was – I got diagnosed with PTSD within 48 hours. I got put on trauma leave, not because, I think, of the shooting, but because you saw it in the eyes, the reaction of the people.”
“They were coming for us,” he said….”If [Trump] didn’t jump up with his fist, they were going to come kill us!”
Words escape me – or at least words that I can use in a family publication such as this one. This guy thinks he suffered from PTSD – and he barely even waited to get “diagnosed” for the “P” part of PTSD to kick in. Moreover, he went on “trauma leave,” drawing a fat paycheck while “recuperating.” My half-deaf father-in-law drove three hours to Kansas City every Sunday night and three hours back every Friday night during the recession of the early 1980s, when there was no plumbing work to be done in Lincoln, NE. He trudged on with his life, like a normal grown-up, for more than four decades, while Scott MacFarlane went on “leave” two days after watching someone else get shot.
My American Greatness column tomorrow is about how the PBS/NPR defunding debate synopsizes the Ruling Class vs. Country Class clash quite nicely. Scott MacFarlane’s “trauma” does as well. I don’t know or care how Scott MacFarlane grew up or what his parents did or whatever. I’d imagine his upbringing was perfectly normal and uneventful, just like mine and just like most people’s. The difference between me (and most of you, I’d guess) and him is that I’d never usurp the pain and suffering of people like my father-in-law, my barber, and countless others, whereas he would – unashamedly. That’s what differentiates him from me and you. That’s what differentiates most of the ruling class from the country class.
Scott MacFarlane clearly doesn’t get it. None of them do. And they never will.
