TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/021191/0211360.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 9.8 KB | 199 lines

                »O                                                            BEHAVIOR, Page 76

Lost in America


For Vietnam vets hunkered down in the jungles of Hawaii, the war
never came to an end

By PAUL A. WITTEMAN/CAPTAIN COOK


    Outside, the rain is beating a relentless riff that is
familiar to anyone who has lived through a monsoon in Southeast
Asia. Inside the Army-issue tent in a clearing at the jungle's
edge, Nash A. Miller, a onetime helicopter door gunner and crew
chief, is changing into a dry pair of camouflage fatigues. As
his two watchdogs prowl silently, Miller, nicknamed "Nam" (his
initials), recounts his tale with a small, innocent smile. It
begins at a firebase in the badlands west of Kontum, near the
Vietnam-Cambodia border, in the summer of 1970.

    As Miller's gunship, a ponderous Huey "hog," was taking on
a fresh load of rockets and grenades, a Soviet-made 122-mm
shell exploded several yards away in a lethal burst of metal.
Fragments shredded his pants, embedding themselves in his legs.
One shard burned its way into his throat. After the field
surgeon in Pleiku extracted a chunk close to his jugular vein,
an opening the size of a quarter remained in his neck. "I was
fascinated by the hole," he says, rubbing the scar. "When I
looked in the mirror, I could see my Adam's apple."

    Two decades later, Miller is still on intimate terms with
the war. "For years, I've slept with my left hand on my Bible
and my right hand on my .45," he says. But the particular piece
of tropical rain forest that Miller inhabits is a long way from
the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Miller's base camp hunkers down on some
hardscrabble red dirt several miles outside the village of
Pahoa on the Big Island of Hawaii. In touch and smell, as well
as sight, it is the closest to Vietnam that one can get within
the U.S. "I will never live anywhere else," Miller declares.
"The jungle is my home."

    Today, as Americans once again hear reports of U.S. soldiers
taken prisoner of war or missing in action, many are reminded
that not everyone lost in the last big conflict has been
accounted for. The government of Vietnam last month continued
to return the remains of U.S. fightingmen who lost their lives
there. Lobbyists go on pressing for the location of other MIAs
(surprisingly, many Americans still  believe there are U.S.
soldiers being held captive somewhere in the jungles of
Indochina). Much less attention has focused on another group
of "lost" warriors: those combat veterans who, like Miller,
disappeared into the jungle after they got home.

    Most of the "bush vets," as they've come to be known, prefer
it that way, having chosen to shun virtually all human contact.
Many returned home only fleetingly before retreating into
tropical solitude. "My family thinks I'm an MIA in the U.S.A.,"
says Glenn Hayne, 44, who made it back to Oakland in February
1968, after a tour full of fire fights and body bags with the
Tenth Cavalry, only to drift to Mexico and then Hawaii. He
supported himself by growing the powerful local variety of
marijuana known as pakalolo but, after a recent crackdown by
drug agents, has switched to fishing. Patrick Barnett (not his
real name), on the other hand, who is originally from
Honolulu, lived for years under trees and bushes in the Waipio
Valley, subsisting primarily on breadfruit, mangoes and
bananas. "My first 14 years on this island were spent in
hiding," says Barnett, who is stooped, almost toothless and
looks decades older than his 41 years.

    By some estimates, there are several hundred Vietnam
veterans living on the mountainous and sparsely settled Big
Island, as well as clusters in such diverse places as the
Pacific Northwest and the backwoods of Maine. An accurate count
is tough to come by. "You don't have to move very far upslope
to get out of sight," says Stephen Staten, a psychiatrist who
began counseling bush vets at a Veterans Administration clinic
in Kona 16 months ago. No one is looking too closely either,
since some of the bush vets are armed, unpredictable and have
set booby traps around their camps. "There are veterans in the
bush who are beyond help," says Michael Cowan, who in 1987
helped found V.F.W. Post 3874 in Kona. "I hate to say this, but
the authorities need to go in, drop nets over them, confiscate
their weapons and put them in straitjackets."

    Cowan, a Silver- and multiple Bronze-Star winner who guided
artillery and air strikes in Vietnam, ought to know. He
self-destructed when he went home to Oklahoma. His marriage
failed, he was dismissed from the Army, and he spent four years
in a mental hospital after being arrested for his role in a
shooting incident. In 1983 he hit the beach in Hawaii, a burned
out case who washed windows for beers and scrounged in
dumpsters for food. In 1985, 12 years after his last combat
action, Cowan was given a medical explanation for his troubles:
post-traumatic stress disorder.

    PTSD is the modern term for what used to be called battle
fatigue or shell shock. A congressional study in 1988 found
that about 479,000 of the nation's 3.5 million or so Vietnam
vets are afflicted with serious cases; an additional 350,000
display more moderate symptoms. PTSD is a state of extreme
arousal caused by the virtual nonstop release of adrenaline and
other similar substances into the bloodstream. When cars
backfire, PTSD patients generally hit the dirt. The sound of
helicopter rotor blades causes some to conceal themselves in
trees. A baby's cry can invoke instant rage. Put in nonclinical
terms, says psychiatrist Staten, the symptoms of PTSD are "like
experiencing one's most threatening nightmares." A recent
medical study found that the adrenaline levels of PTSD
sufferers remain higher during hospital treatment than those
of manic-depressives and paranoid schizophrenics.

    In Vietnam, PTSD was often caused by the prolonged stress
of trying to survive an ambush or a fire fight. Bill Ralph
developed his case riding shotgun on fuel trucks engaged in
night resupply missions. For seven of the 18 years he has lived
in Hawaii, Ralph occupied an 8-ft. by 12-ft. hilltop shack. If
a stranger approached, Ralph would slip into the jungle, his
knife at the ready. "I didn't even know I was sick," he says.
"I just thought I was a little different."

    At the Kona clinic, Staten has been working to coax Ralph
and a handful of others out of desperate isolation. Some of the
men have formed a self-help group. At meetings of the new
Hawaii Veterans Association, in the town of Captain Cook, they
begin to make peace with the demons that haunt them, by
discovering that others are haunted as well.

    They also nurture communal outrage at the bureaucracy of the
Veterans Administration, their latter-day Viet Cong, for making
benefits difficult to obtain. Adrian Yurong, 45, who served
about a year and a half with the 25th Infantry Division near
the Viet Cong stronghold of Cu Chi, has been denied benefits
because his job description shows he was a radar operator.
Yurong, now known simply as Nano, was pressed into service, he
says, as an infantryman throughout his tour. The VA grants that
he has PTSD but says he must have contracted it elsewhere. Such
arguments enrage V.F.W. activist Cowan. "When you first go to
the VA, you are denied benefits. Fifty percent of the vets
don't go back. The second time you are denied, you lose another
25%," he says. "You must be willing to put up with total
bullshit to get help," says Cowan, who fears that his own
disability payments may be threatened by his activism.

    Samuel A. Tiano, director of the regional VA office in
Honolulu until a recent transfer, says dismissingly of the bush
vets, "Some of these people would live this way if they had not
been to Vietnam. We have some who are always wanting this and
wanting that." But such service requests, says Tiano's boss,
Edward Derwinski, the Secretary of Veterans' Affairs, are
exactly what the veterans should be making. Says he: "The
customer is always right." Derwinski, whose department has been
embarrassed by recent reports of negligence at VA hospitals,
concedes that his bureaucracy has not always acted
compassionately. "We have had a communications gap with Vietnam
veterans. It is not a perfect situation."

    Staten is trying to rectify that. In the process of helping
the bush vets, he has learned that theirs is a well-traveled
path. When Roman Legionnaires returned from war, they were
encouraged to settle in rural areas where they could decompress
quietly. Japanese literature tells of samurai retiring to tend
the "perfect garden." For many of these men, the island of
Hawaii is that perfect garden, or as Staten calls it, the
"gentle jungle." Says Cowan: "It is like a sanctuary. I trust
my emotions and feelings here."

    Some bush vets have been drawn to the jungle, subconsciously
seeking what therapists call "belated mastery." They want
control over an environment that once terrified them. Says
former Green Beret Lee Burkins, who has lived in Hawaii for 11
years: "I didn't plan to go back to the jungle to taste my
fears. I wanted to achieve inner peace. But I kept looking for
a foot, a pair of eyes or a gun muzzle. I had to tell myself
not to worry about that anymore."

    Not surprisingly, these veterans have strong feelings about
the potential human consequences of America's latest war. After
decades of suffering, they have a message for the future
veterans of Operation Desert Storm. "There are occupational
hazards in fighting a war," says Burkins. "They are costly."
Cowan adds a sobering caveat: "If a nation is going to suit up
its young men and send them to war, it should be prepared to
take care of them afterward." In the case of Hawaii's bush
vets, that care has been long overdue.