My Tour In Hell: A Marine's Battle with Combat Trauma
208
My Tour In Hell: A Marine's Battle with Combat Trauma
208Paperback
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Overview
David's journey from naive civilian to battle-hardened combat veteran shows us all how fragile our humanity really is. In addition to killing the enemy on the field of battle, he was witness to countless cruelties including murder both cold-blooded and casual, cowardice under fire, and a callous disregard for life beyond most people's imagination. With each new insult, he lost a little bit of his soul, clinging to his Bible as his only solace while equally certain of his own imminent demise.
Upon returning to civilian life after a two year enlistment, he found himself with nightmares during sleep, intrusive thoughts while awake, a hypervigilant stance combined with an exaggerated startle reaction, and a seeming inability to control basic emotions like anger and sadness.
The price he paid for what would only be diagnosed decades later as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder was broken marriages and relationships, inability to hold down jobs leading to bankruptcy, alcohol abuse, and having to hide the service he willingly gave to his own country.
In 1989, David eventually recovered through a simple but powerful technique known as Traumatic Incident Reduction (TIR) and is now symptom-free. Not just for veterans, TIR has since been successfully applied to crime and motor vehicle accident victims, domestic violence survivors, and even children. His story shows what is possible for anyone who has suffered traumatic stress and that hope, healing, and recovery can be theirs too.
What People Are Saying About My Tour In Hell
"His autobiographical work is a must read for veterans who remain stuck between two worlds. Healing is not forgetting; healing is making sense of the past in order to live life in the present with a restored hope for the future. Powell articulates this process very well and has given a tremendous gift to the combat veteran community of any generation."
- Father Philip G. Salois, M.S., National Chaplain, Vietnam Veterans of America
"The connection of David's problems in his current life and his Viet Nam experiences is one of the clearest descriptions of how trauma affects our lives I have ever read. My Tour in Hell is a tribute to David's unwillingness to give up on himself in the face of great unhappiness."
-Laura W. Groshong, LICSW (Seattle, WA)
"Years in combat zones, group psychotherapy with combat vets diagnosed with PTSD and TIR training qualifies me to recommend this book. Those in the helping professions will learn how the negative emotional 'charge' of trauma can be partially or totally eliminated through the adept facilitation of Traumatic Incident Reduction."
-Sister Kateri Koverman, LISW, ICDC
"Powell presents a brutally honest and riveting account of one man's descent into the dehumanizing realities of war. However, the journey is worth it to relive his dramatic ascension and redemption from the abyss through the life changing, powerful, and therapeutic techniques of Traumatic Incident Reduction."
- Rev. James W. Clifton, LCSW, PhD
More Than A Memoir, My Tour In Hell includes
Learn more at www.MyTourInHell.com
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781932690231 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Modern History Press |
| Publication date: | 01/17/2007 |
| Series: | Reflections of History , #1 |
| Pages: | 208 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.44(d) |
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Welcome to Hell
Combat is a living hell that can induce profound traumatic stress in veterans. In my opinion, I had more than my share of traumatic experiences. I served in the Marine Corps with Delta Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, of the 1st Marine Division at Chu Lai and Da Nang. Come along with me and I'll tell you some of what I saw and did in 1966 and 1967 in Viet Nam.
I'll also tell you how my life was impacted in very negative ways and how I found help some two decades later.
I was in Chu Lai, South Vietnam, on November 7th, 1966, which was about one month after arriving in country. Ironically, exactly a year from that day I'd leave that hellhole and return to the United States, the country I was proud to serve and protect.
My MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) was 0351, or anti-tank assault man. My primary weapon was the M20 3.5 inch Rocket Launcher. I'd been in country with Delta Company for two weeks but I only knew the last name of my team leader, Jones.
Jones had been in Vietnam five months before me. He was a quiet, down-to-earth black guy. He was a bit taller than me, and he spoke low and softly, like he didn't want anyone to notice him. Jones was concerned about Jones getting home in one piece, and alive. We all had that same goal.
I'd met five other men who lived in the tent I then called home, but I'd forgotten their names at that point.
I was going on my first company-sized search-and-destroy mission that day. I'd be in the countryside for the next seven days. I was edgy and afraid of the unknown I was going to know intimately.
I wore my boot camp issued boots, trousers, and shirt. My helmet, flak jacket, rifle, bayonet knife, and backpack were field-worn. I had picked up the older gear as I traveled from the Chu Lai airbase to Delta. I trembled slightly, and my stomach was churning.
When we went out on that size of an operation, we were going well out of our usual area of responsibility into unfamiliar territory. We went where we suspected the VC were building up their strength and preparing to attack us.
We had a Tactical Area of Operational Responsibility (TAOR) we routinely protected. In the center of the TAOR was Hill 41 where we stayed, slept, and stood watch. We sent out patrols within our TAOR, and that kept our base relatively safe.
Patrols I participated in were typically comprised of the following: three Riflemen up front, the first of whom was designated "Point man." The designated Patrol Leader followed next, then a Radioman, Corpsman, Machine gunner, his A-Gunner (assistant gunner), Rocket team, and three Riflemen to the rear.
When we ventured outside the TAOR, we went where the VC had their pleasure. They knew they wouldn't be bothered every day, so they took their time and set up sophisticated booby traps, planned and rehearsed ambushes, built bunkers, tunnels, and the like.
This particular combat operation got underway at exactly 3 am on November 7, 1966. It was a dark morning, no moonlight to see by, and it was raining. We moved out in a single column and headed toward the Phu Long River. A raised road, called a causeway, gave us access to the Villes on the other side of the river (Ville is a French word literally meaning "village"). About an hour into the march, our column snaked over a waist-high fence.
Right at that very moment I had diarrhea. Nerves, I guess, but I thought I could hold myself together 'til we stopped for a break. No such luck! When I straddled the fence I couldn't hold back my urges. Yep! Right down both legs. Until a break came, around 4:30 am, I sloshed along with my pants full of my own feces chapping my thighs. When westopped, I dropped my pants, cut off my skivvies with my bayonet knife, and threw my polluted shorts in a nearby bush. That made Jones laugh! I quickly added embarrassment on top of my barely concealed nervousness.
We started marching again after a ten-minute break and a cup of coffee. I made the coffee from a C-ration packet and some water from my canteen. Dawn came a couple hours later, about 6 am. The rain had stopped and I could finally see further ahead than Jones' back, clear up the whole column. The last of the company had just finished crossing the river.
I walked along, following Jones, not thinking about anything other than keeping up with the pace of our march with my forty-pound pack on my back.
Suddenly, I was startled back into reality.
We were under attack! The VC (Viet Cong) fired their rifles at us, strafing the whole column. They'd hidden in the brush off to the left of us, and they struck at the midpoint of our column.
I froze! The sound of bullets that came in my direction turned me to stone. My naive twenty-five year old soul heard the air around my head pierced with the flights of bullets that raced by me, followed immediately by the sound of "firecrackers".
I stood still where I was, as rigid as a turkey peering above a fallen tree trunk trying to see the source of the call "gobble, gobble", cackled by hunters who would have had me for dinner. I tasted chalk in my mouth, smelled the jungle plant life I was standing in, felt the cold air blow between my still-wet thighs, and saw nothing around me, though my eyes were wide open and my eyelids refused to blink.
I trembled, ever so slightly, from head to toe. The forty pounds of rockets, C-rations, and other gear in my pack bent me over somewhat. I stood there in a crouch. The enemy fire continued, and I continued standing in place, unable to think or move. My war had begun, and my life as I had known it, ended.
Luckily, a squad member behind me kicked me in my right calf muscle and knocked me back into real life. I dived onto the ground.
"Don't just stand there, you idiot!"
It scared me to think that I'd choked under fire. I was scared, embarrassed, and felt totally alone. This was the first of several other episodes that made me fear and loathe open spaces.
Men, somewhere up the column, returned fire. Then, as quickly as the attack started, it ended. The column moved about three meters to the left, off the trail we were following, and into the trees and undergrowth running alongside it. We resumed heading forward and continued marching another hour or so.
Moving through the bushes and between trees was slow and difficult. When the trees were close together, I had to take off my pack and rocket rounds, turn sideways, and force myself between them, tug my gear through, and then put my stuff back on. I hated having to slow down like that, and even stop sometimes. I kept flashing back to the time I'd been terrified under fire. I felt like a prime target each time I slowed down.
At first, as I struggled to walk through the matted undergrowth, I kicked my feet free when they snagged. Jones noticed what I was doing and punched me in my left shoulder.
"You could set off a booby trap doing that! Stop it! From now on, back your foot out and step over the stuff."
Barely half an hour later, his field smarts proved him right. I heard a muffled explosion somewhere up the column and we came to another stop. Word came down the column, telling us to take cover in place and watch our flanks. A man far ahead of us had detonated a hand-grenade booby trap. A VC was captured nearby the explosion site. Men brought the captive to the rear and into an open field to the left of me.
He was a little squirt, who wore white pajamas, turned filthy, and had short, black hair. He sat in a low squat. All the Vietnamese I saw squatted the same way, resting their butts on their heels, leaning their chests against their overstretched upper thighs.
A fellow Marine stood about three meters in front of the captive, guarding him with a .45 caliber pistol aimed right at his head. The guard was a Staff Sergeant I didn't recognize. He was about five-eleven, over a hundred-eighty pounds, I would've guessed, and his clothing and gear looked new. I got the impression that he was a cocky dude by the way he swaggered around the prisoner.
As I stared at the two of them, I heard another explosion from not very far up the column, and profanities being shouted from that direction. I heard a blood-chilling wail. It was loud, starting out like a throaty groan, and raised in scale and volume to a scream, like a baby being scalded by boiling water. Crying and sobbing followed it. After a few minutes, all was quiet.
I looked back at the VC and saw him laugh quietly to himself.
"Think something's funny?" The guard yelled at the captive, quickly raising his arm, then shot him at point blank range in the forehead with his .45 caliber pistol. He lingered there for a moment as if to torment the captive.
That was my first slow motion picture experience. By that I mean my world seemed to move forward, frame-by-frame, in my mind'seye, clearly showing me all the details of what I was seeing. That time I saw the bullet enter the captive's forehead, then exit the back of his skull, and the kicked up mud as the bullet hit the ground behind him.
Blood gushed out the front of his head, more out of the back of his head, with some skull fragments. The VC silently slumped to the ground, landed on his left side and remained there, motionless. The guard and another man slung his body into a nearby hedge. My life shifted back into present time and theslow motion recording ended. I was in Vietnam, trying to save my life and my mind.
I'd just witnessed my first murder, in cold blood! I was shocked and disgusted. That was the first time I'd watched men act so mercilessly, with no remorse, inflicting pain, suffering and death on the people I thought I was here to save from Communist oppression. Unfortunately, it wouldn't be the last time I saw such things. It was, however, a memory I never wanted, and lived with since that day.
Almost immediately, a Captain approached the guard.
"What happened here?"
"Sir! He tried to escape!"
The Captain turned away, obviously disgusted, and muttered, "Carry on". He hadn't even asked where the body was, let alone attempted to verify the Sergeant's claim.
The Officer in charge of our operation called for a Medevac. A Medivac is an abbreviation for 'Medical Evacuation'. Someone radios headquarters and asks for a helicopter to come and pick up our wounded and/or dead men. A chopper would come in and airlift the victim(s) back to the rear for emergency treatment. On that occasion, both wounded men were helped into a "Huey" UH-1 chopper.
We waited there another 15 minutes for the Medevac. As the chopper took off, we began marching again. I walked maybe another hundred meters and discovered a hideously grotesque scene. At first it appeared to be a backpack lying on its side near a tree.
I leaned over to look at it. It was a combat boot, not a pack, and it had a human's foot inside it, with the lower part of a leg protruding out. The wail I heard must have come from here, I figured.
I saw the shinbone, white and splintered, sticking out of the boot. About half an inch above that was bloody, burned flesh.
So this is what a grenade can do to people, I thought.
I gagged and shook; I was so sickened at the sight. The coffee I'd drank while we were on our break, along with some stomach bile, made its way back into my throat. I re-swallowed it. I imagined myself suffering a terrible wound such as that and felt deeply sorry for the poor man who was now disabled, and sorry for myself because that could happen to me, too.
As I looked around the area, I could see that this was indeed where one of the Medivac'ed men had been wounded. I left his boot in the hedge. I shut my mouth tight and continued marching. I was afraid that if I pointed it out to anyone else, I'd be stuck carrying it until we stopped again.
After a full day's march, dusk finally came and we halted for the night. Jones and I traded turns sleeping and standing watch until the next morning. We followed that routine every night we were on an operation. Jones always took the first watch and I took the second one. That way he made certain he would have an uninterrupted night's sleep. I deeply resented him for that.
Oh, I remember, "Watch!"
When we were back on our hill, "Watch" was slightly different. It lasted three hours at a time, and rotated every evening. That meant I wouldn't always stand watch from 8 to 11 pm. I would stand from 5 to 8 pm the first night, then the next night 8 to 11 pm, and so on throughout the night. I stood watch alone.
I went out to our bunker, near our tent/home and sat there as I stared into the darkness, and fought to stay awake. I looked at my wristwatch every few minutes until the three hours were up.
One particularly starless night I mused about my living quarters. This is my home, huh?
My home sat on the side of a hill. The view of the countryside was unobstructed. There were rice paddies all over the valley floor, with rows of trees that marked their boundaries. Where there weren't trees, there were earthen dams. It looked like a "checkerboard" with all of the squares green and wet.
What land wasn't used for rice paddies was thick jungle foliage and elephant grass that grew as high as seven or eight feet. A large river, called the Phu Long, cut straight through the valley to the left of the company hill.
Home was nothing more than a faded green, canvas tent. It held six men, their cots, and provided a hallway that ran from the front door to the back. Three ten-foot posts held up the roof that sloped down on either side. Four six-foot poles, one in each corner, formed the walls. Canvas flaps were called the front and back doors. Sandbags, which we hoped would protect us against enemy fire, were stacked up about four feet high around the tent. The floor was made up of wooden shipping pallets to keep everything above the mud when it rained. That was home.
I thought about my Pasadena, California home, some 7,827 miles from Chu Lai, though it might as well have been a million or two. My heart and sanity are there, but I'm not home. Oh, how I miss being a happy man whose mind isn't stained with the ugly truth that I could very well die out here in this godforsaken land. I'm supposed to fight a life-or-death struggle here just preserve it for the benefit of the South Vietnamese. I'd give anything to be back home right now.
I fought back against grief to visualize it as exactly as I could. It was small, but no smaller than the other nineteen houses on either side of the street. It was about eleven hundred square feet, overall. The attached garage was to the left of the front door, as you faced the house from the street. There was a multi-paned window, about four-by-six feet, to the right of the front door.
It had a stucco exterior. The inside walls were painted eggshell white. The floors were carpeted, wall-to-wall. The kitchen and bathroom had white linoleum floors. There was one bathroom with a tub and shower setup and a one-person sink with a mirrored medicine cabinet above it. The larger one of the two bedrooms was my wife's, and mine and the other was designated as the guest room. That was myreal home.
The worst watch for me was always the last one, which started at 5 am. It was supposed to last three hours, but I never figured out when it really ended. Those days became one long session of watching for the VC. My vigil never ended, it would seem.
When watch was over, I returned to the tent. I lightly touched the outstretched foot of the man who followed my watch. He often woke with a start. We said nothing to one another. He went out the back door to the bunker. I crawled into my cot and went back to sleep. Even if the base was not home, it was better than where I was, out on patrol.
On the second day of the operation, November 8, 1966, in mid-afternoon, the front of the column came under heavy enemy fire. The command "Rockets!" came down the column.
Whenever we came under fire, everybody got down as low to the ground as possible. But, in order to respond to the order "Rockets," the team had to get up and run to the point of attack. In this case, Jones and I ran up the line. The Rocket Gunner carried the rocket launcher. The A-Gunner carried additional rockets for the launcher.
Jones and I quickly trotted to the front of the line, where we were taking enemy rifle fire. Ahead of us, lying prone on the ground, were three men, frantically pointing at a cluster of trees about a hundred meters in front of their position.
"See them trees they're pointing at, Powell?"
"Yeah, Jones, I see them."
"You take the launcher. There's a WP [White Phosphorous] round in the launcher. Shoot it right where I'm pointing. If it hits close enough, it'll burn 'em. Anyways, there'll be enough smoke so Arty can call in a fire mission." ('Arty' is short for Artillery)
"I know what'll happen, man. Don't treat me like I'm stupid. Just tap my helmet when the rocket's armed!"
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "My Tour In Hell"
by .
Copyright © 2007 David W. Powell.
Excerpted by permission of Loving Healing Press, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Photos, Maps, and Illustrations,
Acknowledgments,
Foreword by Tom Joyce,
Preface,
Chapter 1 — Welcome to Hell,
Chapter 2 — Operation Rio Blanco,
Chapter 3 — The New Guy,
Chapter 4 — The Sixth Commandment,
Chapter 5 — These are My Demons,
Chapter 6 — R&R Honolulu and a Look Back,
Chapter 7 — An Office in Hell,
Chapter 8 — Back in the USA,
Chapter 9 — Return to Civilian Life,
Chapter 10 — Post Traumatic Stress Disorder,
Chapter 11 — Traumatic Incident Reduction (TIR),
Chapter 12 — Recovery,
About the Author,
Appendix A — Study Guide,
Suggested Reading,
Appendix B — FAQ from the National center for PTSD,
Appendix C — Vietnam/Military Glossary,
Index,