It's nearly impossible to return home from war normal, Bob Kerrey said Monday during an impassioned speech for an Omaha charity helping veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Too many Americans expect veterans to deploy, come home and then take off their uniforms and resume their old lives, the ex-U.S. senator, Vietnam War veteran and Medal of Honor recipient told an Omaha crowd.
But many veterans are haunted by a memory “that does not leave them when they sleep,” Kerrey said.
Those memories can “take the joy out of life … make pleasure impossible,” he said.
Kerrey argued Monday that non-profit programs such as At Ease — a 16-month-old effort to provide PTSD treatment to Omaha-area veterans and their families — have the best chance to bring struggling service members back into civilian society.
“This is a situation where we have to solve it, we have to provide help,” Kerrey said of post-traumatic stress disorder before his speech. “It's working.”
Kerrey is no stranger to the psychological pain of war.
In March 1969, he lost his right leg below the knee during an assault on an island of Nha Trang.
He spent most of the next year inside military hospitals. He suffered from nightmares during which he saw the faces of Vietnamese women and children killed during his squadron's raid on the village of Thanh Phong. He contemplated suicide.
“I heard the voices crying out to me. When I tried to put them out of my mind, all I could see behind my closed eyes was a solid wall of blood,” he wrote in his 2002 autobiography.
Later in that book, Kerrey wrote: “I would become short of breath and feel that death was a better option than living.”
On Monday, Kerrey said he wasn't sure how he pulled out of his post-deployment malaise, eventually beginning a political career that saw him become Nebraska's governor and then a two-term U.S. senator.
He credited volunteers who stopped by his bed at the Philadelphia Naval Hospital, squeezed his hand, wished him well. He credited family and friends who blanketed him with affection when he returned to Lincoln.
Oddly, he thinks the transition to civilian life might have been easier because he spent so much time in the military hospital, with other wounded soldiers, instead of isolated.
Things were even tougher for other Vietnam-era vets he knew, Kerrey thinks.
“The dirty little secret in my day was 50 percent of us were walking around drunk,” he said. “Human beings need pleasure … and alcohol appears to help.”
But in reality, it sends you farther down a destructive path, he said.
Veterans of the Afghan and Iraq Wars face even tougher circumstances, Kerrey said: Three and four deployments into a war zone; improvised explosive devices and other weapons that endanger even service members far from the front lines.
But today's veterans do have at least one advantage: Most people now understand that post-traumatic stress disorder is a real condition, not a sign of weakness, as many viewed it a generation ago.
“Twenty-five years ago, somebody who had PTSD, a George Patton-type would slap them and tell them to get back into combat,” Kerrey said.
At Ease has now enrolled 100 veterans and family members in its treatment program, which is run out of a small office near Offutt Air Force Base.
Lutheran Family Services houses the program and runs its day-to-day operations.
Scott Anderson, a local advertising executive and the founder of At Ease USA, has spearheaded a series of fundraising drives. This year, those private donations have pushed the treatment program's annual budget to $250,000.
“At Ease is a supplement, a really tiny supplement, to what the VA is,” Anderson said Monday, heaping praise on the VA Medical Center in Omaha for the work it's doing to combat PTSD.
The At Ease founder said he hopes to raise more money, build the PTSD treatment program and hire more therapists in 2011.
That effort has the full support of Kerrey, who believes that such programs are vitally important and a symbol of how much humans care about one another.
“We care about the suffering of others,” Kerrey said before his speech. “We want to try to do whatever we can to relieve it.”
Contact the writer:
402-444-1064, matthew.hansen@owh.com
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