Flashing Back: Choosing to Live with or Die from Ptsd

By Alan C. Thomas

My memoir answers the question: How do I heal from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)? The book reveals how PTSD affects a person and their family. I reveal the PTSD experience and the cost of combat to Hospital Corpsmen, Medics, Nurses, and Doctors. The cost is enormous and often spans decades. For some people, war and other traumatic events in our lives do not have an ending but rather continue as post trauma. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder can be a never ending nightmare if the sufferer does not know what I reveal about healing in my book.

Visit my website at http://www.alan-c-thomas-published-author.ws and watch my videotaped book interview on the Mutual of Omaha Insurance Company website: http://ahamoment.com/moments/1987.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Abbott Press
• Release date: Aug 25, 2012
• ISBN: 9781458205506

Alan C. Thomas

Alan C. Thomas, HMCM/USN, Ret. was a US Navy Hospital Corpsman, who served on active duty from 1967 – 1970. Following his Honorable Discharge from the USN and completion of a Bachelor of Science degree, he enjoyed careers in the medical and environmental professions. He is a Life Member of the Disabled American Veterans.

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Copyright © 2012 Alan C. Thomas, HMCM,USN, Ret.

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ISBN: 978-1-4582-0550-6 (e)

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Contents

Prologue

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

This book is dedicated to the men and women, who survive war but often do not survive the trauma of war. Enduring the trauma with their comrades, during military service on and off the battlefield, Americans have fought, fight, and will fight for our freedom. When the fighting ends the trauma does not. Thousands of Americans live with the painful experience of combat for the remainder of their lives. In the aftermath of war they are all too often left by a grateful nation to live or die alone with their service connected Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Sunrise

Sunrise took place in that Vietnam place.

The mission happened at a fast pace.

While it was a failure, the squad was not in disgrace.

The true story will replace.

vietnammap1.jpg

Prologue

This is a story told by Rob Thomas, who served in the U.S. Navy, as a 21 year old Hospital Corpsman on a failed rescue mission to free two POWs, during the Vietnam War. Thomas tells his story, as he lived it, beginning in 1964 when he was a 16 year old with zits, whose life would be forever changed by the war in Southeast Asia. He tells of the years before, during, and after his tour of duty, as HN Thomas assigned to a failed mission to rescue POWs codenamed Sunrise. He speaks of leaked information about the unacknowledged mission undertaken by the US Navy and Marine Corps, during the Vietnam War. Top secret Studies and Observation Group (SOG) mission codename Sunrise was an attempt to free our POWs, who were held hostage in a camp located within the Province of Quang Tri, Vietnam on February 23, 1970. Codenamed clandestine operations, such as Sunrise were not a new concept and Sunrise was just another codename for this war. After the failure of Sunrise, also known as Operation Sunrise 1970, it was easily denied by the Navy or as some would say covered up, buried, or hidden from the public and the press for more than thirty years.

Rob says, All of us involved knew that in the event of failure, Sunrise would never see the light of day, at least not until we are all dead and buried. Everyone knows that keeping secret the identity of black operations conducted by our government in the name of freedom is an accepted fact today, as it was in 1970, for Black ops missions are always being planned or carried out by the United States Army, Air Force, Coast Guard, Navy, and Marine Corps. It has been said that Nothing is secret if two people know about the Secret something and therefore, that secret something has a way of being found out. The idea that the secret of Sunrise would be revealed to us all by a little known sole survivor of that mission is enough to boggle the imagination and so it is a most curious unveiling of the truth.

The LBJ Presidential Library website mentions Operation Sunrise activities between 1962 and 1970; however, the only declassified Operation Sunrise took place in 1962. Operation Sunrise 1962 had the purpose of relocating villagers and their hamlets within Vietnam and this operation is referenced in various books and on various websites. To date, Operation Sunrise 1970 remains unacknowledged by the Department of the Navy.

There is an unwritten policy:

WHEN IN DOUBT, DENY, DENY, DENY

Chapter I

The Summer of ’64…Surfer Girl

For my friends and me, the event that would change our lives forever, which came to be known as The Gulf of Tonkin Incident took place with only a passing glance at the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. My father and I were watching the news; while he sipped on his three olive Martini or lighter fluid, as I called it.

We 16 year olds were involved with more important matters, zits and girls. Zits do not need explanation other than to say that teenagers have zits and certainly how many zits and how big your zits are factored into the pursuit of sex with any willing female. To be totally honest, by my seventeenth birthday, my pursuit of the sex act was limited to thinking a lot about having sex with any willing female.

I’ll never forget that summer of ’64, when my Dad was 43 and sang in Saint Paul’s church choir. Mr. Glascock was also a member of the Choir and a Junior High School math teacher. Needless to say the man’s name was the subject of much talk between the guys at school. I am sure that in the seemingly more innocent years, most young men would have thought that his name was a hoot and his wife, Mrs. Glascock took a lot of verbal abuse from the guys in my 11th grade Civics class, where she was a substitute teacher. Anyway, apparently my father looked very young to Mr. Glascock, as one Sunday morning after church, he and my Dad were talking in the parking lot when my 18 year old sister and I approached them.

A look of something close to disbelief came over Mr. Glascock’s face, as my father said Lindy and Rob, I want you two to meet Mr. Glascock, as he gestured our way, adding that these are my kids. As I was the teenager who laughed out loud when my friend, Dave Huey, started to make fun of the Glascock name, I’m glad that the Glascock’s and my parents’ never socialized outside of the church. The Glascock’s were in their 20’s and my father and mother were in their early 40’s.

Anyway, I digress, The Joy of Sex had not been written, at least in print anyway and porn videos or videos in general had not been invented yet, so if you were lucky enough to see a porn flick, as we called pornography movies, it was more often than not shown behind closed doors in a seedy theater with sticky floors or in a friend’s basement as a bootleg 16 mm print that could be shown on a home movie projector. At that point in my young life, I had not been introduced to either venue. In that more innocent time for me, pornography was a form of entertainment for sale on The Block located in the downtown Baltimore striptease bar and theatre district.

The goings on of downtown anywhere was unseen but talked about a lot by my friends and me, who lived in the out of touch tobacco growing countryside of southern Maryland. Certainly my experience was not unlike the majority of any gathering of young men. My sexual thoughts, born in an occasional opportunity to see the wind catch a girl’s dress and blow it above her thighs, revealing a pair of panties and on a rare occasion no panties. Needless to say, the moment remains imprinted in my memory, as if it happened yesterday. The surprise of seeing what every girl hid under her skirt was far more exhilarating to me than seeing a girl wearing a bikini at the beach. The memory of that first glimpse between the legs of the 16 year old girl sitting behind me in English class stays with you. Surely, most boys know how to drop a pencil and pick it up in a way that allows them to see a pair of panties under the skirt worn by the girl sitting behind you in high school. Just thinking about that time that I dropped my pencil to look up Cheryl’s dress still seems to fill every cell in my body with a rush of adrenalin. I guess my libido is intact. As a 16 year old male, who felt and acted much of the time like I was hormones on two legs; there was no way I could begin to describe that feeling to my buddies; although I certainly tried to embellish the tale. Especially on the day after Laura let my hand explore the top of her nylons and on a rare occasion even beyond. Hour’s awake thinking about sex will lead to hours asleep thinking about sex and so it goes.

Later in life, I would find that day and night dreaming about having sex was far less complicated than having sex when you and your spouse are not interested in the act at the same time. At sixteen, my thoughts about a Roll in the hay would soon include thoughts of Laura, the girl next door, the girl down the street, the girl sitting next to me in math class, and of course the Playmate of the Month pictured in the Playboy magazine, that I managed to keep hidden in my closet. Needless to say, my imagined images of all those girls in my head most of the time meant that something had to give and it did, usually somewhere around 4 AM in the form of a wet dream.

It has been said that adolescence is a disease that you grow out of and so it was for David Huey, Vic Vance, and me. Later in my bed at the age of forty–eight, a wet dream had nothing to do with my sexuality but rather perspiring, as I restlessly slipped in and out of a reoccurring nightmare that would change my life forever. By fifty the wet dreams of my youth had been replaced with wet nightmares. Nightmares about Vietnam and the firefight for the POWs held in Quang Tri Province, South Vietnam. Nightmares about people ripped apart in the crossfire of blazing machine guns, red nightmares, blood red and surreal nightmares. Perspiration pouring out of every pore in my body, as in a restless sleep; I relived again and again the horrors of four nights and three days in Quang Tri. These post Vietnam War wet dreams were way beyond my wildest imagination in 1964. I recall my parents taking Lindy and I to see the 1953*** classic The House of Wax, which starred the actor Vincent Price. Not even my memories, as an 8 year old, of his horrific makeup, filmed in 3–D Technicolor would begin to match my Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Red dream.

With sweat beginning to bead up on my forehead, I knew that the war in that far away place called the Republic of Vietnam would begin to feel more real to me and my friends. Soon the war would be more important than even our sexuality. Later in 1965 I sat with my Dad in front of our black and white Zenith 27" TV and watched the unfolding story of an alleged pair of attacks by naval forces of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam against two American destroyers, the USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joy. According to Mr. Cronkite, the attacks occurred on the 2nd and 4th of August in the Gulf of Tonkin.

Mr. Cronkite went on to say that this century’s Vietnam conflict began in 1961, when the Hanoi, North Vietnam–backed National Liberation Front took up armed struggle against the American–backed regime of President Diem. The U.S. also began providing direct support to the South Vietnamese in the form of military and financial aid and military advisors, the number of which grew from 600 in 1961 to 16,000 by the end of John F. Kennedy’s presidency in 1963.

Chapter II

The Summer of ’65…I Get Around

1965 was a foreboding year to graduate from high school in the USA. I was 17 years old and graduated with my friends, not because I was prepared to graduate but rather, because I had earned enough credits to graduate with an Academic Diploma; no matter that I had failed to pass Physics and Trigonometry in my senior year. Both of these classes were taught by retired Marine Corps Colonel John Gibbs, whose history, although I didn’t know it at the time, was very much like my Dad’s and that was a problem. My father, Robert A. Thomas, Jr. Bob, as he has always been known to his family and friends was a Staff Sergeant, in the Marine Corps for six years, during the years leading up to World War II and until his Honorable Discharge in 1942, as a result of injuries he sustained on the island of Guadalcanal in the South Pacific.

One night, I stopped my Dad in the hallway of our home, as he passed my room, where I was sitting up in bed. I said, Hey Dad, which caused him to walk back to my doorway where he stood and asked me what I wanted. Again, I blurted out the words "Hey Dad, my friend Dave Huey has been telling me about his father’s experiences in the war. Dave, told me that his Dad was in the Marines like you and Uncle Ty. My Dad replied that he had a conversation with Mr. Huey at the VFW Hall several years ago and they talked about their experiences, during the war.

Mr. Huey said, "He was a Corporal at the time he participated in the invasion of Guadalcanal with thousands of other Marines. They hit the beaches running toward the Japanese, who were dug in on the island.

Dad said that he arrived on Guadalcanal nearly a year after the Japanese Army surrendered the island to American forces. Unfortunately, the Jap Zeros didn’t stop dropping bombs on various marine and army positions, including Henderson Field, which the 1st Marine Division occupied and my father was stationed. Anyway, Dad said, "He and his fellow MAG-14 Marines dug foxholes and felled coconut trees to harvest the logs that they used to cover their foxholes, in the event of an air attack. Dad sat at the foot of my bed and related how a squadron of Jap Zero’s made a bombing run over Henderson Field, where he was encamped. The air raid siren was cranked by one marine; while the others including Dad dove under the coconut logs and into their foxholes.

I remember about how proud I felt to learn from my Dad about how he used his body as a human shield in an attempt to protect a fellow marine from being struck by a falling log, during the bombardment. That marine, who served with my father, had dropped out of high school upon learning that the Japanese had bombed our fleet anchored in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. He was only 17 years old, so his father would have been required to co-sign his son’s enlistment contract with the Marine Corps.

My Dad said that he could not remember that marine’s name but he knew that he was fresh out of Boot Camp on Parris Island when my Dad met him. That young U.S. Marine, who my Dad sheltered from harm, was huddled under a loosened log and against the earthen wall of the dugout, as he tearfully called out for his Momma. Dad said, It was only by the grace of God that the two of us were not crushed under that log, which fell into the foxhole in a way that it rested at a 45 degree angle without touching them. Dad continued by telling me his story of learning that his Aviation Metalsmith welding equipment aboard the SS Lurline had been confiscated by an Army General two days before Dad waded ashore through the water. The Army left him with only a typewriter and two sea bags, so Major Wirick, who was the MAG-14 Commander, was really pissed off at the Army. He had been promised wing sections for three Dauntless Dive Bombers and various parts for 10 other aircraft. All of this was said to be aboard a liberty ship with half of the command. Wirick knew that VMSB-141 Repair and Salvage Squadron wasn’t equipped to repair the aging and damaged Dauntless Dive Bombers setting under camouflage netting on the tarmac next to the air strip. Shortly after reporting in, my Dad awoke one morning to find his tent mate dead having had his throat cut in the middle of the night. As there was little he could do with repairing aircraft, he joined Marines ordered by Major Wirick to Find the Japs, who did this and bring them to me.

Dad said, They located and captured three Japanese soldiers after a fierce firefight that cost their Lieutenant his life. These Japs had been encamped in the hills above the airfield, so they were suspected of killing the marine in his sleep. After considerable encouragement, by the Sergeant, one of the Japs admitted to the killing. The Sergeant, who had assumed command after the Lieutenant’s death told the group that I am not taking any prisoners back. He ordered my Dad and the other Marines to dig a pit and build a fire in it. After the fire burned for nearly an hour, the Sergeant took hold of the Japanese, who were bound hand and foot, and threw them, one by one into the fire and burning embers. The men were burned alive, as the Sergeant ordered his men to Let those son-of-a-bitch’n Japs burn to hell…They don’t deserve to be put out of their misery. When Dad and his squad returned to the airfield with their dead Lieutenant on a makeshift stretcher, the Sergeant was debriefed behind closed doors by Major Wirick and nothing further was said about that mission. It was rumored that the Major was infuriated with the Sergeant saying that You were under orders to take care of any prisoners not take care of them, you idiot!

I was horrified to hear Dad’s story but after watching our POWs executed by the North Vietnamese Army (NVA), during my tour of duty in The Nam, I am inclined to say that Shit happens and there is always a price to be paid. Looking back at that time, clearly my Dad had been harboring his World War II experiences and chose to keep his terrible secrets, until that night, as he sat on my bed. Today, I understand that harboring pain inside oneself can lead to addictions and my Dad was no exception.

Mr. Huey was known to drink like a fish at VFW parties, family gatherings, and whenever but somehow he managed to hold down a good paying job at Cassidy Honda, where he worked as a new car Salesman. Dave’s Dad was a tall good looking man, who always seemed to have a sun tan. Years later, Dave told me that his