Some Kind Of An Emotional Breakdown

At 10:00 hours on October 20, 1970 I had some kind of a nervous breakdown. It was an emotional breakdown of some kind. I do not know the exact psychiatric term for it. Numerous times, the VA has dismissed what I say about what happened on that day, because if it isn’t diagnosed in their official terminology, than they don’t have to recognize it as real mental health event. They refuse, by they I mean many VA employees over the years, they refuse to make a psychiatric determination on what happened to me that on awful day.

On that day in October, the First Sergeant woke me up in my bunk at approximately 09:30 hours. I should have been at work by then, and he ordered me to get up and report to his office. He was pissed off at me for the problems caused by my acquired sleep disorder; and I was becoming more and more pissed off everyday, as I struggled to understand how in the hell I had gotten into such a lousy situation as that 30th Arty photographer’s job was.

In the First Sergeant’s office he asked me what my problem was that he had to go wake me up after I should have been at work.

I more or less said, I requested a transfer out of the brigade, you said that I was too valuable, so you won’t transfer me. I can’t order equipment or supplies. I don't have what I need to do my photography assignments. Now I can’t get to sleep, then I can’t wake up. Just let me transfer out.

The First Sergeant told me to move out of my semi-private two man room in the barracks and move down the hall into the twenty man squad bay. "Maybe when the lights there go on in the morning and all those other guys get up for work then you will too," he said.

On my way down the stairs to the First Sergeant’s office on that October 20th morning, I had become determined to fight for my rights and not leave the First Sergeant’s office without an agreement to allow me to transfer out of the brigade. Instead, I gave in, tossed my self respect into the small, olive-drab green trash can sitting down there beside of his desk, walked back up stairs to my room, and on the way had a nervous breakdown of some kind. It was brain battering, gut grinding and soul crushing. It culminated with me punching my fist through a barracks window. It was the most humiliating, devastating and embarrassing thing that ever happened to me.

I still haven’t completely recovered from that trauma. Something snapped inside of me that day — some circuit breakers went off, and they have never been reset. I have pleaded, begged, threatened and calmly explained to many employees of the Veterans Administration that I need help resetting those circuit breakers, but none of them have ever believed my 30th Arty Bgde story.

I think about these things everyday. Sometimes at night I rehash the individual parts of this story over and over again. They are on my mind first thing on some mornings. I think through the details of them during daily activities. I don’t see or hear parts of TV shows and movies at times when these memories overwhelm me. I think about how to get these truths acknowledged by the Veterans Administration.

My sleep patterns are still horrible, sheer horror at times and debilitating. I sometimes wake up in a cold sweat, and I have to change my frigid, dripping wet undershirt. I hate living like this. It is humiliating.

I had disturbing dreams about Okinawa for over twenty years after I was discharged from the Army. Over and over again I dreamed that I was trying to get back to the 30th Arty Brigade to finish doing something. I love doing photography, and I just wanted to do my job, but ran out of supplies and couldn't.

At any time during my assignment as a photographer for the 30th Arty Bgde, I could have taken the chance of writing my Congressman about the situation.

You must know very damned well that ‘whistle blowers’ are often retaliated against by the individuals or entities whom they had ‘blown the whistle on’. Had I ‘blown the whistle’, and consequently screwed with the careers of the lifer soldiers who were responsible for having that photo lab in the decontamination chamber, and then finagling the paperwork to scam the Army into sending them a real photographer to be their personal property - all soldiers are government property - those lifers would have done all that they could to retaliate against me and try to send me to the worst duty station possible; that probably meant getting me sent so far up into the jungles of Vietnam that I’d never get back home again.

At this point in my story, I will again receive the usual feedback, from some people, who will say that my assignment to the 30th Arty Bgde was better than being sent to Vietnam and getting wounded or killed or captured by the enemy and held as a Prisoner of War. Yep, that’s probably true, but it does not make what happened to me in the 30th Arty any more right, or less devastating. I took the chance of being sent to ‘Nam when I enlisted, same as everyone else. If the cards would have played out that way, and I had survived fighting in that war, I might be much more proud of my military service today.