Posted on 01/26/2019 7:26:45 PM PST by Mechanicos
You are 100% dead on target. I served with a few men who 4-7 plus years in combat in real Infantry/SF Vietnam, Laos plus two had a CIB with star from the Korean War, too. Many of the older SF NCO’s were with the 187th RCT in Korea plus one other unit. I can state one recon team leader who had 4 plus years of cross border OPS with us and finally was KIA on the COSVN raid of 24 April 69 with a Hatchet Force company with us was so burned out-he should have been sent home. Then certain men, like SGM Billy Waugh, defy all odds and even hunted Osama Bun Laden. I do not know the answer. I can state I preferred combat OPS with my Rhade Montagnards to 200 or so incoming 82mm mortar and 122mm mm rockets hitting our command bunker/TOC at our launch site and trying to blow up the bunker. It was like Sir Charles (VC) had every square foot of Duc Co A camp zeroed in. Hell, the A team got beer our 20th SOS “Green Hornets” flew in from Ban Me Thout East.
The VC put one round into the team house and blew their beer up plus refrig. I hated going to the crapper there. One round blew up a Quonset hut killing six of my yards. The place was paced off for certain. Almost daily incoming
from 1530- 0500 can make one anxious.
The war stories will not help anyone. I fly fished on trout streams/rivers where I was alone with God in the early AM. From the Green River in Wyoming to you name it. That helped. Get a hobby.
God Bless You.
It sounds as if you’ve been exposed to some horrors. Maybe this, and watching similar horrors in film will desensitize. Though I don’t believe for a minute that watching a movie is equal to your real experiences. And I have been paragliding which has the real risk of death. But again, I didn’t believe I would die! If I had been in true fear for my life, I wouldn’t have run towards that cliff! It was my choice. I wasn’t pushed off the cliff without a glider. That would have transformed the thrill into terror. They are no longer the same experience.
I actually don't dwell on it, or have bad dreams anymore, especially now that I have been away from it for several year. My problems were cumulative in nature which is probably not the mechanism that causes most people to have symptoms of PTSD. I just got to the point where I didn't want to deal with more ugly traumatic events, loud noises, running around on top of or inside of burning buildings, being hot and uncomfortable, not getting sleep, not to mention tortuous drills and dealing with both disagreeable subordinates and affirmative action supervisors. I started dreading going to work.
I did have some bizarre experiences that I was sometimes very lucky to walk away from. Rather than remembering them as horrifying; they now just remind me of how lucky everyone of us are to be alive every day. Some of them now just make me laugh, like the naked psycho who tried to shoot me with a handgun at close range, but he had loaded the bullets into the magazine backwards. Or the lady who tried to kill herself by nearly sawing her feat off with a steak knife because she was paralyzed from running her car into a tree in a previous attempt. She was talking to us in a perfectly normal tone of voice and calmly asked only that we clean up the huge coagulated pool of blood she left on the carpet because she didn't want to upset her mother. Which I did. I have so many weird stories that you literally could not make up.
I really do miss hang gliding. I have paraglided on a couple of occasions, but they way you are constantly swinging around makes me airsick. They are convenient because they are so light and you can easily carry them to the top of hill. And also since their glide ration is so steep and they fly so slow you can land in tight areas.
In a hang glider you can swoop and fly much faster and they feel much smoother and more controlled. The experience feels much more bird like. There was a strange progression in hang gliding. I have an early Rogallo wing with a swing set type seat and they are very easy to land because the speeds were almost as low as a paraglider. But then we progressed to double surface high performance wings with streamlined prone harnesses.
These high performance wings had nearly a 10 to 1 glide ration in many cases, but high stall and landing speeds. They were a dream in the air but there were many landing mishaps and injuries. If you flair to early you can literally end up 40 or 50 feet in the air and come back down pretty hard. The hang gliders these days are still double surface but they have flexible battens made of composite materials that alter the chord of the airfoil depending on how fast you are flying which gives good performance at higher speeds but also lower stall speeds. They are quite incredible actually and considerably safer to land.
“The U.S. Marine Corps veteran kept a loaded gun on the bed beside him.”
I should probably shut up, but I really want to know.
Doesn’t everybody keep one within reach when they sleep?
“Anything is better than handing out drugs like candy.”
I don’t believe pain is better than receiving appropriate and effective treatment.
That is something the VA does not, at present, provide.
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