(2 of 11)
Dr. David Lopata, a slim, bearded VA psychologist, lets the men into a conference room. It is the afternoon group therapy outpatient session for veterans suffering from a disorder called "posttraumatic stress." Several patients light cigarettes. Lopata asks softly, "Okay, where do we begin today?" A stocky blond veteran opens up slowly: "I don't feel that I trust anybody ... Maybe it's just that they don't understand. I don't know, but look at us. None of us at this table has any real friends." "How do you talk about what happened over there?" another asks.
As the session develops emotional focus, the American public emerges as an enemy to be distrusted, or more subtly, as a parent who has withheld love and approval so long that the veteran can think only to writhe in frustration, or lash back.
"They don't want to bring themselves to look at it," storms a heavy, T shirted man with blotchy skin. "They're the losers, man! We're the winners!"
"How do you deal with people who say, 'War's over, dummy, why can't you forget?' How many times you heard that one, right?"
A quiet Mexican American puts his postwar experience succinctly: "Other people got invited to parties. I got invited to fights." Everyone laughs.
"Does your wife understand?" Dr. Lopata asks. "She says she does," the man replies, "but I don't think she does."
The Los Angeles cop embarks on a dark soliloquy: "If I don't have a piece [a gun], I feel naked. That's why I became a cop, I think, because I got to carry a piece. In Nam, killing was a job, you look at somebody like a piece of hamburger. I just feel like telling someone who's bothering me, 'You know, I could blow your ass away.' I walk away ... What the hell am I doing here? I don't think we lost. Am I weak? What did I do wrong? I did my job ... The concrete we laid, the jungle we cleared! What happened to the South Vietnamese who fought with us? ... A month ago, I was going to commit suicide. It's hard for me not to think of blowing people away. I'm afraid of going back to work. I'm afraid of life."
The men's thoughts drop irregularly into their common pool of hurt.
"One half of the country said, 'You lost it.' The other half says, 'You're a goddamned sucker for having gone there.' And then there's the guy in the corner bragging about how he went to Canada."
"Yeah, and how many politicians' sons did you see over there?"
The frustration of fighting the war comes back: "We couldn't shoot back. But they were allowed to blow us up all over the place. They train you to kill. Then they pull your teeth. They didn't let us do the job, and then on top of that, we come back and catch all the flak from people who thought we were beasts."