Odysseus in America by Jonathan Shay Read Free Book Online

times, I shall use it as a metaphor for a criminal career. 8 For obvious reasons, the veterans I work with do not tell me crimes they have committed for which they were nevercaught and punished. I wouldn’t want to know. It would both impair my personal safety to know these things, as well as lower the level of safety felt by the veterans in the treatment program. One veteran, asked if he had ever “done time,” replied without a flicker of emotion, “Not under this name.” A significant number of the men I have worked with have been incarcerated, which is not statistically unusual. According to the massive, congressionally mandated
National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study,
11.6 percent of Vietnam-theater veterans who still met criteria for PTSD in the mid-1980s when the interviews were done disclosed to the interviewer that they had been convicted of a felony. 9
    Active criminals live in a world that surrounds them with dangers, but even more so does
prison.
Combat veterans who are unable to leave combat mode are in a sense perfectly adapted to these hideous conditions. “They’re fine there. They know
exactly
where they stand,” says Navy veteran Wiry (a pseudonym), one of my patients who has been incarcerated repeatedly. He continues, “I sleep better there than I do here. You hear that door [to solitary confinement] close on you and you know you can’t hurt anyone and nobody can get at you.”
    Veteran Wiry served twenty-two months in the United States Navy on assault support patrol boats (ASPBs), in the Mobile Riverine Force in the Mekong Delta. During this service his boat, including four sailors and the bosun’s mate captain, received the Presidential Unit Citation. This unit citation is considered equal to the Distinguished Service Cross (second only to the Medal of Honor) for individuals. 10 He was also individually honored with the Bronze Star Medal, with V device for valor, and a cluster, denoting a second separate honor of the Bronze Star. He received one Purple Heart for combat: wounds.
    Wiry was born in a Boston Irish neighborhood to Roman Catholic parents. He joined the Navy out of his senior year in 1965 and completed his high school education in the Navy. The oldest of many siblings, he was the first person in his family to enter military service.
    Initially Wiry was trained as a cook and served in this capacity during the unopposed Marine landing at Da Nang in 1965, but after his return, he volunteered for the newly forming Mobile Riverine Force to fight in the Mekong River Delta.
    Training for this force was
very
rigorous. The men trained as five-man crews, where everyone was cross-trained in all the weapons and everyone else’s specialties: in radio, in engine mechanics, in language and interrogation, in the tasks of the medic, and as steersmen. All were trained in counterinsurgency warfare, psychological warfare, hand-to-hand combat,and in the art of making and disarming booby traps. The climax of the training was the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape course (SERE) during which the trainees were persuaded that they never wanted to be taken alive, by being starved, beaten, subjected to mock executions with a gun in the mouth, kept naked in cold rain, being held upside down in a barrel of water. The training was also effective instruction in methods of torture—this is how you do it.
    Wiry’s specialty was weapons and explosives. After training, the five-man crews were introduced to their fifty-foot assault support patrol boats designed for river warfare, specifically to remain afloat after the most violent mine explosion. As Wiry recalls it, the boats were heavily armed with twin.50-caliber machine guns in the bow, a swivel-mounted M-60 in the driver’s position, and a 20mm belt-fed cannon on the roof with an automatic grenade launcher. In the stern, the boat carried a.30-caliber machine gun and a belt-fed, hand-cranked 40mm grenade