In the next few weeks 19 aging warriors from New Jersey will descend on a place that for each of us has been an impossible journey to make. Many of us have tried and failed, many times since it opened. We as a group have been discussing this trip and our collective inability to complete it, one on one and as a group for many years now. We didn’t serve our time together in Viet Nam, each served different or overlapping periods from 1965 through 1971, different branches of service, different units, different areas of operations, different duties. What we share, all faced combat, all killed the enemy in combat, all of us were wounded and all of us ended up in the same PTSD group at the VA.
We have been together meeting twice a month for a number of years now. We have for the most part, like it or not, to some extent become a Unit. Together we mastered our fear of the supermarket, when we meet in the parking lot and walk together to our group session room, we only occasionally, instinctively form a staggered column. At the family picnic last summer we almost resisted the urge to form a line and push west from the parking lot to the edge of the tree line. For most of us not taking the mind altering drugs that the VA offers, are still visited by Nam nightly, but then we don’t fall asleep at the dinner table. We all suffer from a lack of sleep and find it impossible to resist performing the nightly security check. All are still hyper vigilant, still on patrol. None of us are proud of our “zero to rage in one second or less” reputations, if we could control it we would, our mothers taught us better than that.
I’m hoping I can make it this time. My late wife tried several times, but I just couldn’t do it. If I only read the names of the people that I actually knew, it was just to many. Our group of 19 has done the research of our friends, thanks to google we know all the dates and panels, collectively we will read the names of our fallen friends, 137 strong, forever young, brave men. I hope I can do it.
