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just made him uncomfortable. My hair was always “medic long” and it is<br />
fair to say that I may have perfected my passive aggressive act at this time.<br />
20<br />
This experience is nothing compared to that of my friends who<br />
never made it back, or even the ones who did—coming home to a one stop<br />
light town on the Eastern Shore where some junior exec from the local bank<br />
asked, “Did you kill anyone?” Of my small High School class of 1968 there<br />
are a great number of empty seats at the reunion beside the clip-on ties and<br />
bad suits.<br />
Being a POG [ed—Personnel Other than Grunt—anything other<br />
than infantry], garrison trooper, etc., has made me feel unable to talk about<br />
any part I played during my time in service. I dealt with burn victims and<br />
pieces of walking & hobbled human beings, all of whom gave me a love<br />
of life I would not have expected. My duty at Forest Glen was with the<br />
insane and PTSD victims. The Army I knew just would not deal with it<br />
except through a scripted military channels, yet there was my unit and<br />
I felt that here, stateside we were still trying to leave no man behind.<br />
Several members of my boot camp company passed through with manic<br />
depressive disorder, schizophrenia and depression. As I mentioned earlier,<br />
suicides happened.<br />
I know how angry I was with my country for years afterward, but<br />
I knew inside I may not have survived some other things life threw at me<br />
without having done that.<br />
As to my own experience with hopelessness years later; I held a gun<br />
to the roof of my mouth in Ocean City, Md. I was struggling to survive<br />
my bankruptcy. I bought a ’53 Chevy pickup from a friend and traveled<br />
to Ocean City on illegal tags and $20 to do a four-month contract with an<br />
exterior finishing company out of Baltimore. I lived in the truck by the grace<br />
of another vet, a security guard, refusing to stay with my uncle because by<br />
this time my poverty and debt seemed to cause anyone standing next to me<br />
trouble. To me it seemed most believed I deserved the shit because well,<br />
I was vulnerable. After two weeks I had earned $2200, enough to rent
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