Evoking memories of Vietnam

Sun, May. 23, 2004

By Patrick May
Mercury News

Nearly 40 years after he fought in Vietnam, Stan Glosson is trying to come home.

But today's war keeps pulling him back.

It's there in the corner television set he's afraid to turn on. It's on the liberal talk-radio he listens to alone each night. It's inside his pill bottles, with prescriptions to calm a veteran trying to let go of the past.

Iraq is not Vietnam. But inside Glosson's head, they bleed together. This week's Pentagon spin may as well be the inflated body counts from decades past. Still tormented at 60, estranged from his wife, and walking a tightrope recovery from heroin addiction picked up in Vietnam, the former Navy SEAL keeps mixing up the two wars:

WMD and Agent Orange. Abu Ghurayb and My Lai. Pat Tillman and . . . Stan Glosson.

``All these innocent young guys,'' he says. ``My war ended 30 years ago. But every time I hear those stories, it puts me in a tailspin.''

Most of the 2.6 million Vietnam veterans regained an even keel. Most are proud to have served and would do so again. Yet for those wrestling with battlefield memories and traumatic homecomings, the gathering horror in Iraq is a constant companion.

For Glosson, trying to stay on track in a residential treatment program on Treasure Island, recovery has become a life-or-death struggle: To stay free of drugs and the streets that nearly killed him, he must come to grips with Vietnam.

Yet in trying to put one war to rest while another churns out more troubled veterans, the temptation to give up is huge.

``If I think about the past too much,'' he says, ``it'll just end badly.''

Glosson finds little comfort in remembering. His childhood in Texas was seared by racism. Doing covert work in Vietnam, a teenager's anger at the world found full flower in a soldier's battlefield excess. ``I was always scared,'' he says. ``So I started using heroin; it numbed out a lot of stuff and gave me more nerve. It made it easy to kill people.''

After combat, decades of addiction and wasted years locked behind bars, much of Glosson's bitterness came to focus on the government that sent him into battle and is now sending others in as well.

``I was listening to callers on the radio the other night talk about the government still lying to us after all these years,'' Glosson says, mostly homebound lately on crutches after recent foot surgery. ``I got afraid and started thinking, if I could walk, I might go looking for drugs again.''

Glosson knows what's waiting when those soldiers in Iraq come home. He worries that once again, help will arrive too late.

``There's nothing I can tell these young soldiers; they believe in their government, just like I did. I've got to let this stuff go and move on. I keep struggling, one day at a time. But my war keeps coming back.''

`With dark souls'

They say combat changes you, that wounds fester long after leaving the battlefield. ``It's not normal for man to kill man,'' says Rick Little, who works with a program for homeless veterans in Los Angeles. ``Yet we take away all the norms, tell them to kill, then expect them to come back and live like `Leave It to Beaver.' They might appear normal on the surface, but I have a lot of friends with dark souls.''

Bill Green, an Army infantryman wounded twice in Vietnam, knows darkness. ``You see human life taken and it works on you,'' says the Alamo resident who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, which affects more than 30 percent of the men who served in Vietnam. ``Killing is extremely easy; the slightest movement of your index finger, and life stops. Living with it is a different subject.''

Vets talk about ``putting it in a box,'' or ``isolating,'' to keep the bad stuff at bay. Some walk the perimeter of the house at night. At restaurants, they take the seat against the wall.

Guys who work with troubled vets know the pitch of descent -- overdue mortgages, pink slips, three-day drunks -- and they're bracing for the next wave of soldiers. ``You can't feel good about seeing someone killed,'' says psychologist Sean Benedict of Vietnam Veterans of California. ``So they come home, and they're left to struggle with this alone.''

John Keaveney runs a substance-abuse program in Los Angeles, where 27,000 veterans live on the streets. Through flashbacks, today's fighting hurled him back to his own combat days.

``After 9/11, I had to put myself back into treatment,'' he says. ``It's been devastating. These men are coming back wounded and missing limbs, and some of them are thinking, `What happens the first time I take my clothes off in front of a woman?' and `Will I ever be loved again?' ''

They will be here soon. Linda Boone, head of the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans, says 10 percent of soldiers discharged from Iraq have sought assistance from the Department of Veterans Affairs. She's lobbying for more ``heavy-duty counseling up front, because problems often don't show up for quite a while.''

One report shows more than 600 soldiers have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder since the war started; the suicide rate is higher than in past wars; and experts say as many as 20 percent of combat soldiers may need psychological help. The military is scrambling, offering counseling even before the troops come home.

The warm welcome back home, though, could be fleeting.

``We talk about heroes at first, but we forget them once they get home,'' says Barbara Brown, part of an outreach program in Sacramento. ``We'll be dealing with Iraq vets for years; there just isn't enough help out there for them.''

Just as many Vietnam soldiers felt their war lacked the ``moral context'' of World War II, America's current foreign policy could haunt soldiers about to return to a conflicted nation. Peter Cameron of Vietnam Veterans of California says that ambivalence carries a high price.

``The warrior has a role, vis-à-vis the community,'' he says. ``We raise the flag and pat them on the back, rather than truly accept that it's sometimes necessary to train and send people to kill, and that we're all equally responsible for those actions.''

For some, like Glosson, the road home from battle will be treacherous. Rick Dibble, who runs a housing program for veterans, says ``being constantly on guard for eight months does damage to your system. Once homelessness and addiction set in, it's hard to break out of that cycle.''

`This is the only way'

For Glosson, the bitterness was spawned in Texas, fired up in Vietnam, then left to smolder in prison cells from Texas to California. Along the way, he gave up on God. He distrusted authority. He told no one about Vietnam, not even Nosisi Mbuli, a political refugee from South Africa he married in 1994. After she caught him shooting up in their East Oakland home, Mbuli asked Glosson to leave.

``I still did love him,'' says Mbuli, now 45 and on dialysis, hoping for a kidney transplant. ``But his drug use was draining me.''

Losing Mbuli and his stepson, Vuyo, hit Glosson hard. Back on the streets, alone and scavenging for food, he was arrested again for drugs. This time, a sympathetic judge hooked him up with the VA.

``For the first time,'' he says, ``I talked with others about the war. I was scared of the government psychiatrists, but they told me, `This is the only way to get better. You've got to put it out there.' ''

These days, both deliverance and danger lie at arm's length.

Treatment comes in a dizzying stream -- group therapy, life-skills classes, 12-step meetings, each a stitch holding his life in the balance. The sessions on post-traumatic stress disorder can be rough, with vets who talk of defoliants raining from the sky, or the latest suicide bombing in Al-Fallujah.

There are anger-management classes, and counselors who try to pick-ax their way into Glosson's shuttered heart: remorse, sorrow, even joy -- all places he's not ready to visit. As his friend and fellow Vietnam vet Mike Kearney put it, ``You'd see kids killed, so you'd become emotionally dead if you wanted to survive.''

Sometimes, alone in his apartment, Glosson lets a little hope seep through. When his foot heals, he says he'll adopt Vuyo, the teenager Glosson calls ``my heart.'' If he gets retroactive disability pay from the government, he says he'll split it with Mbuli. She, too, is encouraged by Glosson's recovery, though hesitant about seeing a marriage counselor as her husband once suggested.

Still, she says, ``he's making some peace with himself for the first time in his life.''

And as his anger subsides, the hardened old soldier bobs and weaves his way back home, through that war, and this war, and all the smoke and mirrors in between.

Contact Patrick May at pmay@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5689.