(light music) - [Narrator] On this episode of "Postcards."

- I ran into the kitchen.

I grabbed the butcher knife and I went the other way into the living room.

I was gonna find him.

I searched everywhere in that house, basement, the garage, under the cars.

I didn't see anything.

I sat on the kitchen floor.

And that was as close as I could get to suicide.

I was right there on the edge.

(light music) - [Narrator] "Postcards" is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

Additional support provided by Margaret A. Cargilll Philanthropies, Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen on behalf of Shalom Hill Farms, a retreat and conference center in a Prairie setting near Windom, Minnesota, on the web@shalomhillfarm.org, Alexandria, Minnesota a year round destination with hundreds of lakes, trails and attractions for memorable vacations and events.

More information at explorealex.com.

The Lake Region Arts Council's Arts Calendar, an Arts and Cultural Heritage funded digital calendar showcasing upcoming art events and opportunities for artists in West Central, Minnesota on the web at lrac4calendar.org.

Playing today's new music plus your favorite hits, 96.7 KRAM, online at 967kram.com.

(tense music) (light guitar music) - I was born and raised here in Madison.

My dream was to be an art teacher.

And I got an offer for a scholarship to play football at Concordia College, up in Moorhead.

They had a very good art program.

The very last day of my sophomore year, the professor of the art department came to me and said, "I'd like to give you a test."

Turned out that I was red green colorblind.

He looked at me and he said, "I don't see how you can teach art in high school and be colorblind."

So that pretty much destroyed my entire world.

- I didn't know what to do.

I didn't know what major to pursue.

The problem was that the year was 1966.

And in late September, I received my draft notice.

I did not want to go to Vietnam.

My dad kept telling me to "Join the Navy like your brothers."

I didn't want to follow in their footsteps either.

So I joined the Air Force.

(upbeat acoustic music) After basic, I went to police tech school.

I was stationed up in Minot North Dakota.

I was in missile security.

I kind of liked that because my job was to drive a four wheel drive pickup around on country roads.

Brought back memories of Madison, gopher hunting on the back roads, pheasant hunting, deer hunting, and all of that.

My boss came to me and said that he had orders for Vietnam.

And he was really excited.

And I couldn't understand the reasoning for it but he explained that he was gonna be in charge of a program that was going to help develop, test and train personnel on ground radar systems working with night ambush teams, and he needed an E4 or a buck sergeant in US Air Force terms to go with him.

And he said, "I want you."

He got me excited enough at the time to go with him.

I should've thought about those three words night ambush team, but that seemed to skip over.

They bussed me down to Fort Lewis Army Camp.

There I boarded a plane with 300-some GIs.

They were Army, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard.

Nobody knew each other.

I sat next to two guys that I had didn't have the foggiest idea who they were.

Tried to make some conversation but nobody seemed like they wanted to talk.

After 16 hours roughly flying landed in Cameron Bay late in the afternoon.

It was too late to get flights out into other areas of the country.

So they put all of us 300 and some on cots in a hangar type of place.

Three o'clock in the morning, the lights came on, a loud speaker came and said "Anybody with combat training stand up now."

So there was about 75-80 of us that stood up.

We were trucked out to the edge of Cameron Bay Base, and we were dropped off three feet apart.

And we to drive this bushy area for Viet Cong that had been spotted going into that bush that night.

Yeah, I'd never been so scared in my life.

My M16 was on automatic.

I was ready to fire.

My worry was if the Viet Cong got in front of me, would I kill him before he killed me?

What about if one of the guys on my left or right got in front of me by accident?

Would I be able to determine that and not kill them?

There was no sighting of any Viet Cong.

We were bussed back.

I was just too nervous to sleep.

I don't think any of the other ones slept at all either.

Got up in the morning.

They fed us.

We went to our specific areas to fly out to other areas of Vietnam.

Landed in Phu Cat Air Force Base, Central Highlands of Vietnam.

There my name was called out and I was asked if I qualified in a M60 machine gun, which I have.

And they put me on as a door gunner on a helicopter that was going to run medical supplies out to an army base camp.

This was now about 11 o'clock in the morning.

The pilot said "Don't worry, there's no, charlie, there's no VC out this time of day, we're gonna be safe."

He takes off.

We're 20, 25 minutes into the flight.

I was so amazed at how beautiful the country was.

It was thick, dense, jungle mountaintops, just beautiful scenery.

And all of a sudden I saw holes popping up in the fuselage and the pilot screamed over his microphone in my ear, said, "We've got incoming.

I'm gonna roll and give you a better shot."

(machine gun firing) I saw the flashes coming from the dark jungle and I fired as much as I could and as hard as I could, for many minutes.

We got by it.

He leveled off.

He starts screaming "Your first day in country, you got six to eight kills."

I was too scared to even notice.

The next two or three days was more in training for myself on understanding this ground radar system.

At the time, what would happen is a night ambush team would go out, they'd spread out behind some bush.

If they heard movement they'd fire upon the movement they would back up 50 yards and then reset.

About 99% of the shooting they were doing, they found water buffalo laying dead or wart hogs.

So they were exposing their position.

Someone started developing this radar system.

You would point it at someone moving and you could actually hear the sound of him moving.

If any of the other five guys would hear something, then I would get the hance, there's movement at two o'clock which would be this direction.

So I would have to hold up this unit and then scan for the movement.

And then, ah, it's nothing but warthogs.

So we wouldn't fire.

In the late fall of '69, there was a new radar developed and it had a beam that walked back and forth just like a regular radar unit would.

And on that beam, you could control the light.

So you could actually follow a movement out in left, right, you could estimate speed.

And that was an unbelievably marvelous unit.

The key for a night ambush team when they came back was to take the butt end of their metal knife and hit the tower one time.

And that would be just like a bell going up to this metal tower.

And about 4:30, we heard this bell go off and there was a marine that was on the unit that I was training at the time.

And so I yelled down "Hare, is that you?"

And he said, "Yeah."

And I said, "Why didn't you tell us you were coming?"

He said, "I forgot."

Well, we had six people that were following in sequence coming in on the same path that these guys normally would come in.

And so I ordered a mortar strike that distance, and the mortar pit wouldn't fire because it was actually over our tower and they wouldn't do that.

So the captain ordered a cobra gunship to come out.

And he said, "I need coordinates and I need distance."

And so I gave him what the reason it was and he fired rockets.

They found four of, what I thought was six Viet Cong out there.

But charlie got smarter over time.

If the unit was going like this in a pretty large distance.

And when it was going this way, they couldn't see it but they could run 10 or 12 feet and then stop.

And then the radar would come by and it would miss them because there was no movement going on.

We had a canine unit below that was guarding the bottom of the tower.

All of a sudden one night, the dog alerted and he was mad.

He was upset.

And I ran to the front of the tower where one of the M60s was mounted.

And I saw Viet Cong zapper as we called them get caught up on Constantino wire.

And he set off a trip flare.

I immediately started firing.

And the problem is they were firing back.

And so it was glancing off the steel side of the roof and ricocheting to the tin roof.

That night, I laid over 4,000 rounds of ammo at them.

And we got enough help in there that every one of the zappers were killed.

There were all kinds of things that were happening.

We even had a a senator by the name of Strom Thurman actually crawl that 60 foot tower and crawl through the hole into the tower, just to see that unit.

I was so impressed by that.

But he went home and he pulled funding on the unit.

That was three weeks before I left country.

And I could not understand that.

With the success of that unit, why would they pull funding?

But they did.

It was a political war.

And we really didn't understand that.

We were trying to do everything we could in country to make this a success.

And in fact, we were successful.

We were winning the war.

The Viet Cong could not compete with our technology and our abilities.

Yet it became a political war and everything sort of got sideswiped in my opinion.

We came home to Seattle Sea-Tac Airport and we got our duffel bags out.

And we started walking into the terminal, and we were surrounded by young people, shouting and screaming and calling us names and spitting on us.

I'm sorry.

I didn't expect that kind of hate.

We landed in Sioux Falls.

My parents picked me up.

We got back to Madison.

I came down to the local pool hall here in town.

It's no longer here, Good Old Hank's Pool Hall.

Several of my friends were playing pool, they all said, "Hi."

Not one comment was, welcome home.

How are things?

Glad to see you're alive.

None of that.

It was "What do you think of the Vikings?

What do you think of The Twins?

What do you think of the Madison Mallards," the local team at the time.

So you get alone.

And I think most Vietnam vets felt the same thing.

We shut up.

We didn't talk about it.

I went through my last two years of college, graduated with a degree in marketing.

There was only three people in a class of 90 that knew I was a Vietnam vet.

And they as well, were vets.

I went 40 years without an issue.

I did some screwy things.

I had three baseball bats behind doors in each in each area of the house.

I had a baseball bat under the bed.

I checked the doors and the windows every night two or three times to make sure that they were locked.

I understand later that that's part of the symptoms of PTSD.

I was supposed to get a sleep study done, and that's fine.

I went and they wired me all up all over my body.

And I went to sleep and they woke me two hours later and said, "Wow you have huge sleep apnea issues.

So we're gonna put this mask on you."

And they adjusted the air pressure.

And as soon as that door was closed the bed started shaking.

And I thought I was in a helicopter.

And the next thing I heard was a voice "We're taking incoming.

I'm gonna roll and give you a better shot."

And what I saw was the fascists coming from the dark jungle.

I started screaming.

And they came running in, "What's wrong, what's wrong?"

And I said, "I was in a helicopter."

I don't know what was going on."

"Oh, you weren't in a helicopter."

And they said, "Just lay down again."

"No, I'm not gonna do it."

And I started ripping off these wires.

I was just as scared as the day that happened.

Six and a half years ago, we were in bed.

I had bought by that time a nine millimeter.

I had it positioned just under the box spring and the mattress so that I could reach down and grab it, cock it, and fire in seconds, I was ready.

I heard somebody running on the floor.

And I went to the stairwell, two story house, and I saw two zappers running across the floor.

For some reason I didn't grab my nine millimeter.

And I'm glad I didn't now.

I went downstairs.

They went into the living room.

I ran into the kitchen.

I grabbed the butcher knife.

And I went the other way into the living room.

I was gonna find 'em.

I remember shaking.

I searched everywhere in that house, basement, the garage, under the cars.

I didn't see anything.

I sat on the kitchen floor and that was as close as I could get to suicide, I was right there on the edge.

I happened to notice my wife's laptop computer on the counter.

I grabbed it and I typed in VA Suicide Hotline.

And up came two options.

One was a text option.

One was a call-in option.

And I thought, well, I could do that right here and text in.

A person, Chad one comes up and said, "Where are you?"

I typed in "Minneapolis."

He's "How far are you from the VA Hospital?"

I said "About 40 minutes."

"Get there."

And I sat there for a second and I clicked off of the site.

And I don't know why I did that.

About 10 minutes later, I clicked back on.

To my amazement here comes the same guy again, Chad One.

And he said, "I thought I lost you."

And I said, "You just about did."

I had never told my wife anything about this, not ever.

And I snuck upstairs.

I had some clothes that I had ready for the next day.

I picked them up and I started sneaking out the doorway of the bedroom.

When she woke up and said, "What are you doing?"

I said, "I'm going to the VA Hospital."

And she said, "You're not driving.

I'm driving."

She drove me to the VA. We parked right in front of the area right by the door we walked in, and the doctor was there.

Then he led me into a door to meet this psychologist.

I swear she was 14.

And I thought to myself, how is she going to help me?

She was really good.

Her first question was, "Do you want to have your wife in here while we talk?

Or would you rather have her leave the room?"

And I said, "I think it's about time she understands."

And she stayed.

The next day, she got me into the head of psychiatry at the VA Hospital who assigned me a therapist and put me on a program called prolonged exposure therapy.

We had to tape our most frightening experiences, some of which I've ran through here today.

And then we had to listen to them, and we had to gauge our anxiety levels really high, 90, 70, 50, 40.

Anything below 40 she thought would be somewhat normal.

Most of that tape that I did, I was crying so hard and blubbering, I couldn't listen to it.

I just couldn't do it.

And after that first week, I told her that.

And her response was "Okay, we'll just go to Vietnam movies.

Have you seen any?"

I said, "No, I have not."

I had to watch it over and over and over and over again until my anxiety levels started coming down.

And I didn't think this was going to work, but it did.

I was so excited, and I thought I was done after the fourth week.

And she said, "No."

In the working with night ambush teams you become so attuned to the slightest sound in the snap of a twig and the rustling of leaves that shouldn't be there.

And when we built a house in '91, we built it into kind of a wooded area.

At daytime had no issues.

But at night I couldn't go out of my house.

I just couldn't do it.

And she said to me that fifth week, "Now you're gonna walk into your woods and you're gonna stand there for 30 minutes until your anxiety levels come down."

And I said, "I'm not so sure I can do that."

She said, "Yeah, you can."

That next night I went to the corner of the garage.

I was 10 feet away from the wooded areas.

I couldn't go into the woods.

I just couldn't do it.

I walked back into the house after about 25, 30 minutes of standing there.

The next night I went out there, I stood by the corner of the garage again, and I, after 10 minutes finally muscled enough courage to go into the woods.

And I stood there and my anxiety levels were screaming high.

But I stood there and I noticed that I was 80, 90.

All of a sudden started coming down to 50 or 60.

And well, that helped my half hour was up.

I came back into the house.

The third night I went out and my anxiety levels weren't at that 80, 90 range, they were 70, 80.

And they came down more quickly to 50, 60.

And the fourth night I started at 50 or 60 and it came down to 30 and 40 and that felt so good.

I'm winning this war.

I told the therapist, I said, "I'm done."

She said, "No, you're not."

I said "What?"

She said, "Do you have any woods in your area that you're not so familiar with?"

"Yeah.

We have an area about five, six blocks away.

It's called Purgatory Creek."

I went down there.

I walked into those woods.

I stood there in those woods with no issues at all.

That following week then I reported to our meeting and I told her about what was going on.

And then she looks at me and she said "Do you think you're done?"

I said, "I think I am."

She said, "Good.

You're done."

I was asked to be in an evaluation of programs by the VA. And there were six of us.

Two of us were Vietnam vets.

Four of them were Iraqi, Afghanistan vets.

And I was the only one of the six that got the help that I needed.

And this guy that was a Vietnam vet was screaming at me because "Why didn't they let me watch movies?

I had to listen to myself, bawling on the tape."

One of the things that I want to continue to do is to reach out to even today's veterans.

The Vietnam vets of today are still committing suicide to the tune of 20 per day.

I think that is so sad.

I asked the head of the psychology department at the VA. "Why did it take 40 and 50 years for the Vietnam vet to commit suicide?

And why is it that the younger vets are committing suicide so much earlier?"

And he said, "Why do you think?"

And my only grasp of that was I think when we got home from Vietnam, we bottled everything up and we didn't allow it out because nobody wanted to talk to us about it.

In today's world it's much more accepting to talk about your feelings, to talk about what happened to you, to talk about the situations, and why you have an artificial leg or an artificial arm.

In the days of Vietnam, that wouldn't have even been asked.

I think that once the Vietnam vet like myself got 40 years past that, you're into the point of retirement and then I'm not traveling in business like I was, I'm home more.

You have more time to think about it.

You'll have more time to almost grieve.

(applauding) - Welcome back.

- And today's veterans, I'm so happy to see them applauded coming into the airport terminals.

It's so refreshing to see but they have to deal with it probably much earlier than we did.

I'm not sure which is better.

And I didn't even know it was called PTSD.

So we've gotta be doing things and we gotta be educating families at what to look for.

Things like having a gun, needing a gun, locking the doors, being nervous around fireworks.

Don't catch me with my back to the door.

If I would still have issues here, I couldn't sit in one of these chairs and have that back door behind because I couldn't control that area.

I don't know where the problem is, but we're not dealing with it very well.

And that's sad because any veteran that has been in any combat situation can have PTSD.

And the suicide rate is way, way, way, way too high.

The amazing thing for me is it's now been six and a half years since my almost last attempt at suicide.

And I've not had any flashbacks.

I've not had any attempts at suicide.

I walk in my woods at night with ease.

I don't have any bad dreams.

I don't have any nightmares.

And my wife is so thankful because I did get the help I needed.

(light music) - [Narrator] "Postcards" is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

Additional support provided by Margaret A Cargill Philanthropies, Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen on behalf of Shalom Hill Farms a retreat and conference center in a prairie setting near Windom, Minnesota, on the web@shalomhillfarm.org.

Alexandria, Minnesota, a year round destination with hundreds of lakes, trails and attractions for memorable vacations and events.

More information@explorealex.com, the Lake Region Arts Council's Arts Calendar an Arts and Cultural Heritage funded digital calendar showcasing upcoming art events and opportunities for artists in West Central, Minnesota on the web at lrac4calendar.org.

Playing today's new music plus your favorite hits, 96.7 KRAM, online at 967Kram.com.

(light music)