by Charles Ray

Created on: March 19, 2009

As a teenager I understood that war had an emotional impact on people. My step-father had served in the Army in WWII, in the Pacific island hopping campaign and had seen horrible hand-to-hand combat. My older brother was a survivor of the Pusan Perimeter in the Korean War. In those days, the emotional trauma that combat veterans experienced was called 'shell shock Prior to the first of my two tours of duty in Vietnam, I knew that it could happen, but was under the mistaken impression that only those people who experienced actual, sustained combat were prone. Years later, I was to discover just how wrong I was.

I served in Vietnam during two periods of heightened activity (1968-69 and 1972-73), marked by increased Viet Cong and North Vietnamese activity as they jockeyed for advantageous positions, and by bombings and attacks that today would be termed terrorist incidents. While I was not in a front-line combat unit, I was involved in or close to several incidents that were to come back later to haunt me. One was the rocketing of Tan Son Nhut Air Base in the winter of 1972. I worked in a building near the runway which was hit by one of the rockets, killing one of our guys, and putting a large hole in the wall right behind where I would have been sitting had I not been in the outer office dealing with a disciplinary problem when the attack started. Coming that close to being blown away was only mildly shocking at first, but I thought I got over it.

The symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) were dogging me long before I recognized them. They first started about three years after the end of my first tour in Vietnam. At the time, I was in South Korea, and working with the Korean military. I can't recall at what point exactly the symptoms manifested themselves, but over time, they accumulated to the point where I began to notice them. They were probably triggered by the tense political and security situation that existed in Korea at that time. The symptoms that I felt were:

- difficulty getting to sleep at night.

- occasional outbursts of anger or sadness

- feelings of nervousness and being easily startled

- having recurrent nightmares

What hit me really hard was being in a movie and suddenly finding myself sitting in the darkened theater crying. It was a war movie, and when one of the characters was killed, I was suddenly overwhelmed with saddness, and couldn't stop myself from weeping. I had never cried in public before and was so taken aback, I sneaked

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