Dusty on PTSD

For me the most difficult part of being a woman Vietnam veteran with PTSD has been the unremitting sense of isolation. After returning from Vietnam and leaving the Army, I simply didn't encounter any other women who had been in Vietnam. I thought my feelings were unique. Trying to be just like everyone else seemed to be the culturally accepted and expected thing to do; it was the only way to re-enter society and try to have a life after Vietnam. It was the only way to escape the vilification that was being endured by my brother veterans.

Over the years I was afraid to contact other nurses I had known in Vietnam. In the first place, the sense of camaraderie we had felt hadn't been about dissecting our emotions with each other; it had been about working as a team, being able to count on each other absolutely. What if they rebuffed me and didn't want to talk? What if they were worse off than I? What if I was the only one who hadn't merely resumed her prewar life? Those conflicting but equally depressing possibilities made reaching out too risky. Male veterans either didn't recognize me as a real veteran or assumed they already knew what my war had been like. They were willing to joke about the nuoc mam, the jungle rot, and the Saigon tea, but they weren't willing to exhume the pain. I felt only partially connected to them: we shared the same esoteric vocabulary and arcane geography, but it seemed we didn't share the same emotional terrain. They knew how it felt to kill the enemy with a gun, but they didn't know how it felt to kill one of our own with a syringe or simply by running out of time. They knew how it felt to see a buddy maimed by a booby trap; they didn't know how it felt to look into the eyes above the mangled legs and tell that buddy he would never walk again. They had nightmares about being overrun; they didn't have nightmares of crying out, 'I'm wounded, too!' to male medics who never heard.

Likewise, society's silence about the war strangled me emotionally. I found that members of the Vietnam generation were expected to be either baby killers or war protesters. I had been neither. There was no niche in anybody's mental cupboard for whatever I was. Even when PTSD became the diagnosis of the month and Vietnam became a fit topic of conversation in polite circles, I was still invisible. Veterans were invariably referred to as 'he' or 'the men' or 'troops'--at one of the newly-opened Vet Centers, I was politely informed that women don't develop PTSD. If I wasn't a real veteran, then I couldn't possibly suffer any real consequences of the war.

The irony of my situation is that through my attempts to deal with PTSD I have, in fact, met some quality people who are willing to reach out to me in my pain; yet the PTSD compels me to keep them at a distance. Ever since Vietnam I've been wary of letting anyone get too close. I feel like a runner caught between bases--I want only to be safe, but I am expending all my energy getting nowhere, just trying to escape being tagged out. I can't ever get back where I started, much less make any forward progress. My dilemma is, I believe, common in Vietnam vets. I believe my ultimate healing from the trauma of the war will be found in reconnecting to the human family, but my trauma itself lies partly in the rejection I experienced, and causes me to flee all connection. I complain bitterly about the isolation, yet sometimes the only comfort I am able to tolerate is the silent companionship of my cats.

I often feel that there is no one out there like me, no one with whom I can experience what wordless, intuitive kind of sharing that to me connotes true intimacy and understanding. The war and its aftermath have left me stranded between the past and the present. The war diminished my possibilities for growth as a person. I sense that I have a lesser future than I would have had had I not gone. I don't even fully remember what kind of person I was before Vietnam. What kind of person am I now? Can I ever be a whole person again? The war took something important from me, but I can't even define it, much less begin to get it back

.©1994 by Dusty

From:  Health Links for Women Who Served in Vietnam