Secrets and Shadows

By Mad Wolf

This book takes my personal experiences from childhood to the point of Living with PTSD for many years. I cannot speak for all Vietnam Veterans and only for myself. Coming from a middle class family and enjoying growing up till a war changed everything and created an atmosphere of resentment, bitterness and hopelessness for the future. As a Marine Corps drill instructor once said. Its our job to take kids straight out of high school whose biggest worry was getting a prom date and transforming them into cold blooded killers! War is an ugly business that leaves unseen permanent scars. Back then there was no outreach programs or grief counseling. The Marine Corps solutions was Get drunk and forget it or Saddle up and move on because it wont get better. Over 58,000 of my brothers in arms lost their lives in Vietnam and no-one can really say why. Then returning home to a country that scorned our service forcing us to keep deep secrets and live the rest of our lives in the shadows of other Veterans who welcomed home with open arms. Vietnam veterans were the only veterans in history scorned , ridiculed and condemned for serving their country . Now we are put on the broken tools of war shelf to gather dust and be forgotten in time. As I have stated before. Dont ask me to say the pledge of Allegiance because it wont happen. I already did that, enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps and served this nation in war. When I came home this Nation turned its back on me and all the others that served in the armpit of Asia as well. This country owes me NOTHING and I owe this country NOTHING. WE ARE EVEN!!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9781514436936

Mad Wolf

Mad Wolf was raised in North Denver Colorado, and enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corp at age 17 (1966-1970) Vietnam service 1968 to 1969. Now 66 years old I live mostly secluded and away from others with PTSD classified as 100% disabled due to the exposure to Agent Orange. Nothing else needs to be said because the book says it all. I’m just another one of Uncle Sam’s broken tools of war that has been placed on a shelf to gather dust and be forgotten in time.

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Copyright © 2015 by Mad Wolf.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Rev. date: 12/21/2015

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CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter One

Early Life

Chapter Two

Vietnam

Chapter Three

Civil Service and First Marriage

Chapter Four

The Curse Comes Out

Chapter Five

North Carolina

Final Chapter and Overview

Preface

This book is dedicated to the Vietnam veterans who served their country as honorably as any soldiers throughout history ever have during a tumultuous era and one of the worst times that can be remembered. The 1960s was an era of a missile crisis that brought us to the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and then Americans felt the pain of assassination of our president John F. Kennedy. After that tragic event in Dallas, Texas, Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ) became president, and things went downhill from there. The war in Vietnam was slowly building, and LBJ began escalating it as he began taking over the war. It seems as though every hundred years, we have a decade worse than others. In the 1860s, we had America’s worst war, pitting brother against brother and costing around 650,000 American lives to keep the union together, which ultimately freed the slaves as well. The 1960s brought us assassinations of great people, civil rights protests, Vietnam, antiwar protests, and riots.

I was one of about three million young men who fought in Vietnam because I believed in my country and what I believed was right, which is why I enlisted in the US Marine Corps at age seventeen in 1966. What I wasn’t prepared for was the double stress Vietnam veterans would suffer as no other veterans of any other war have suffered.

Stress number 1 was like all veterans returning from a war zone. The memories of the graphic horrors, waste of humanity, death, destruction, and human suffering. We all live with secrets or ghosts that are sometimes never heard and go to our grave with us. However, the veterans of other wars came home to a country that treated them with respect, dignity, and open arms. When the Vietnam veterans returned, it was totally different.

Stress number 2 was coming home to demonstrations, people degrading the veterans, condemning us, and looking down at us because it was a losing effort. Somehow, the veterans got the blame for what our government led us into. Even my own family didn’t want to talk about it, downplayed my service, damned the war, and shut me out. Everyone did not care about what happened to us over there and just wanted it to go away, hopefully, to be forgotten in time. Much of what many of us were witnesses to has remained a secret because no one cared to listen, and now we live among the shadows of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This book is about my battle with PTSD, so welcome to my world. It is a world I would not wish on anyone anywhere at any time and serves as a reminder for all to treat our veterans with the respect and dignity they deserve so that they don’t end up living with their secrets among the dark shadows.

Chapter One

Early Life

When I was born in 1949, Harry S. Truman was still president, and Korea was the next war in the future. In later years, I learned about President Truman and the hard decisions he had to make, such as the atom bombs. The decision was correct, and the use of these weapons brought an end to a horrible war. I always look back in history to learn what I can and statements made still hold true today, such as this one: It’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job … It’s a depression when you lose yours.

My growing up in Colorado was great. We were a middle-class white family. My father, a skilled union carpenter with only an eighth-grade education, and my mother, a homemaker, with one income, could actually support a family. Our house was a two-bedroom, one-bath, ranch-style home in Denver that my dad built onto, making a third bedroom and a family room, as well as enlarging the dining room that we needed, because I had three sisters and a brother and had good parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, with lots of family interaction. We were always going somewhere and doing something, especially during the summer months, when my grandfather on my father’s side took me fishing everywhere in the state, and when we were in the mountains, he would pull off to a secluded spot, hand me a blanket, then tell me to roll up to go to sleep on the ground. I loved the mountains and getting up in the early morning to listen to the animals moving around and breathing the clean, crisp air and drinking water from a clean, cold, unfiltered stream.

My grandmother had died at an early age, and he had retired from CFI Steel. It was sad when my grandmother died in Pueblo. She was a very religious person who went to church on Wednesdays and to Sunday school and church on Sundays. She never drank or smoked yet died of stomach cancer. The smelters in Pueblo contaminated the air. My grandparents on my mother’s side had a mountain cabin at Green Mountain Reservoir, and I spent a lot of time there as well. My grandfather had a boat and an old weapons carrier left over from WWII to pull it with that I named after the jeep on The Roy Rogers Show. Believe it or not, at twelve years old, my grandfather had me driving it and pulling the boat up a steep hill. My grandmother always kept her eyes closed till we reached the top. He taught me to drive the boat at age nine.

During the fall months, my father, grandfather, and I went hunting for deer. My grandfather was an avid hunter and was almost always successful when he hunted deer, elk, bear, antelope, and most anything you could eat. He and his brother, a noted attorney, had grown up in Delta, Colorado, near their best friend, who was from Manassa, named Jack Dempsey. During the winter months, either our relatives were coming over to see us, or we were going over to see them. We weren’t wealthy by any stretch of the imagination, but we were always happy as a family, and even playing cards or working jigsaw puzzles on a snowy day was fun. We always had good food, clean clothes, a warm bed, and a roof over our heads. I was an ornery kid that could find a way to get in trouble but had no worries.

Our family moved around a bit when I was small. From Denver to Pueblo back to Denver then to Arvada and finally back to Denver. My grandparents lived in Pueblo, along with my sweet great-aunt, who would remind you of Minnie Pearl. We would get up early on a Saturday morning and make the 120-mile trip to Pueblo and have breakfast with my aunt and my great-uncle. Then we would go over to my grandparents’ house. In the front yard was a huge fir tree that we watched grow and grow over the years. The street was still unpaved, and out back was a chicken coup. We always had fresh eggs. If we went down on a Friday night, my grandmother would wake my grandfather (he worked the graveyard shift at CFI), and he would walk my sister and me down to the creamery for ice cream.

When we lived in Pueblo, construction was slow, and my dad owned a doughnut shop for a while, and so I used to ride with him sometimes when he made deliveries. We would visit my aunt (Dad’s sister) and uncle. My uncle was a WWII veteran and had fought in Burma, bringing home all kinds of souvenirs that fascinated me. Every once in a while, my aunt Eva (Dad’s other sister) and my uncle (married to my father’s other sister), who built homes in Arvada, Colorado, would come down. My uncle was a heavy drinker and high roller that made huge amounts of money. Between the drinking, gambling in Vegas, and other bad habits, he died at an early age. I still remember all of us kids going for a ride in his new Cadillac convertible, yellow with wire wheels.

Growing up in the 1950s was a challenge, and what we learned in school was not always correct. North Denver was known as little Italy at the time because the city was pretty segregated. Globeville was mostly German; North Denver, Italian; West Denver, Mexican; East Denver, black; South Denver was upper-middle-class whites, and the rich lived in the suburbs. In North Denver, the Mexican community was growing, and the Italians were diminishing. Heated exchanges and fights broke out over the name of a park. The Mexicans wanted to rename Columbus Park as La Raza, and that didn’t sit well. That was when I found out that Columbus didn’t discover America but was, in fact, lost and thought he had landed somewhere in Asia. When he stepped off his boat in the West Indies, he asked what all those damn Indians were doing on his property. Columbus murdered and enslaved some of them, bringing diseases to the population they had never heard of. The racism wasn’t quite as bad out West or at least not like it existed in the South. Yet segregation did exist. Manual High School and East High were mostly black. West High was mostly Mexican. South High and Washington were the upper-middle-class whites. North High was a scrambled-up mix, as was Lincoln and Jefferson High Schools. The only schools that had any money were the parochial schools.

I still remember shows in black-and-white TV like The Life of Riley, Amos ’n Andy, Sky King, and more. The movies cost twenty-five cents, gasoline was twenty-nine cents a gallon, and a loaf of bread was a dime. We also had a quiet neighborhood with super nice neighbors to our right (he was a retired cop) then our other neighbors, one of which still made wine in her cellar. To our left lived a dogcatcher who used to drive around the neighbor’s dog that slept in the street. Across the street was my best friend’s family. At the end of the block lived another friend who was killed in Vietnam while I was there in the same regiment. During the summer months, I mowed the lawns for most of the neighbors to make money and shoveled snow off the walks in winter. My best neighbors lived across the street. I would mow the grass on Saturdays and then watch the baseball game and drink beer afterward. He would sometimes take me to minor league baseball games and the Lions Club. Both of them came to my football games and treated me like their own son. She later died in 1964 at an early age, and I was devastated. That was my first experience with death. She died of a heart attack and was found dead on the sofa. My mother told me not to grieve. We don’t mourn death; we celebrate their life.

Times were simpler during those years but were changing fast. John Kennedy nosed out Tricky Dick Nixon and became president. I was in the sixth grade. During the next three years, America came to the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union when President Kennedy blockaded Cuba and forced the Soviets to remove the missiles they had placed there. Civil rights were a huge issue, and the president had to send the National Guard to remove a stubborn governor of Alabama from the steps of the university to allow blacks to enroll there. In Selma, Alabama, the police rode horses over peaceful protesters. Then more military advisers were sent to a little Asian country known as Vietnam.

One terrible day, America was horrified. On November 22, 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. The murder was filmed and was played over and over all weekend. I never saw so many people crying in the streets and the sadness that existed. When his assassin was caught (Lee Harvey Oswald), Americans wanted blood. On Sunday, November 24, they got it when Jack Ruby shot the son of a bitch. Even my mother’s first word was good. Now LBJ (Lyndon Johnson) became president. The country buried JFK, and the war in Vietnam began heating up. LBJ did a lot of good regarding civil rights, but the stubborn racists in the country, like the KKK, wouldn’t let go.

In Colorado, we couldn’t understand why colored and white people couldn’t get along. Why were people still fighting a war that had ended nearly a hundred years ago? We read about church burnings and murders in the South and were appalled. It actually took until 1995 for Mississippi to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery. After an incident in the Gulf of Tonkin, where a ship (USS Maddox) was supposedly fired on by North Vietnamese PT boats, Johnson escalated the war, and in 1965, Operation Starlite began as the US Marines landed in Da Nang. All hell broke loose out there and at home.

I started high school in Denver in 1964 and did what most liked: athletics. I played football and joined the wrestling team but never really excelled, just had fun. I had my share of girlfriends, and that was a lot more fun exploring all the different parts. If I didn’t get to third base on the first date, there probably wasn’t going to be a second date. My mother once asked why I hadn’t brought any nice girls home, and I really didn’t want to tell her. I didn’t know any nice girls and didn’t want to. Nice girls were a bore, so I just told her I was too busy with other things and sports.

LBJ won the election by a landslide over Barry Goldwater, and a new age began. I learned to drive a 1957 Rambler station wagon (three on the tree) and was able to get around pretty well. I broke off a relationship with a girlfriend I had in Wheat Ridge, and on Saturday nights, my buddies and I would go drink beer and throw the empty cans on her front lawn. The two friends I had were a little older than me, but getting beer was no problem, and cigarettes were cheap. We partied for the most part for both the sophomore and junior years. High school, to me, was not a fun time like it was supposed to be. Instead, it was a bore, and I kept getting more restless. Although I still went fishing in the summer and hunting in the fall, I wanted more, and I wanted it faster. The faculty was really good, and some of the women teachers had a fine ass and big knockers. What can I say? I was a high school student. Sex was still considered taboo. There was no Internet, and books or magazines were off-limits. Girls my own age were okay, but the mature women were more fascinating. I never had the opportunity to get close to a teacher, but I sure wanted to.

While attending high school, I took a job at a local junior high school as a sweeper boy to make gas and beer money. Every morning, I would go to make sure all the rooms were ready and double-checked my work. About one hour worth. At the end of each school day, I went there and worked for three hours, sweeping out classrooms and hallways and cleaning windows, but I had money all the time. In the 1960s, twenty dollars a week was a lot to a high school kid. I went to the proms, but dancing was not my thing. The faster I could get out of there and up to lookout point with my date, the better. In my junior year, at age seventeen, even a lunch hour became a beer break. In the mornings, before school started, we had one guy stationed at a local bar a block and a half up the street across Federal Boulevard. Every morning, at eight o’clock sharp, a beer truck would roll in to make his delivery. When he would leave the truck to go inside the bar, our guy would snatch a case of cold beer and bring it to an abandoned house across the street from the school. We would have two or three cold beers and head to class. Every once in a while, the cops would come and run us out. The snitch teacher that