Postwar Wounds

It was a quiet Sunday morning in early August when Viet Nam Veteran John Gabron, 22, went on his last patrol. Wearing an Army helmet liner and field jacket and carrying a telescopic rifle, he climbed a sagebrush-covered hill in Los Angeles' Griffith Park. When two park rangers approached in a pickup truck, Gabron captured them at rifle point. As one of the rangers told it later, Gabron explained that "he had lived by the gun and wanted to die by the gun."

He did not, and fortunately, neither did his captives. After a long siege, Gabron surrendered to police. Psychiatrists have declared him sane and fit to stand trial, and this week he will be arraigned in a Los Angeles municipal court.

The young vet's case is tragic but not unique. Says Dr. Leonard Neff, chief of psychiatry at the Veterans Administration Psychiatric Center in Brentwood, Calif.: "There are thousands of John Gabrons in this country, struggling to get their combat experience behind them, but unable. Their potential for violence is of great concern to them, and should be of even greater concern to the whole nation."

Two years after the U.S. withdrawal from Viet Nam, the personal strains of the war are still firmly etched in a number of shocking statistics. Of the 2.4 million Vietvets who served in Southeast Asia between 1961 and 1973, some 55,000 are presently receiving Government compensation for psychiatric disorders. Dr. Cherry Cedarleaf, former senior staff psychiatrist at the VA hospital in Minneapolis, has estimated that 50% of the returnees need some professional help in adjusting to civilian life. About 25% of the 800,000 veterans who have sought admission to VA hospitals or have been sent there by authorities have attempted suicide. As many as 26% of the veterans who served in Viet Nam have experimented with heroin and other drugs. So broad are the problems of this troubled minority of the Vietvets that VA authorities have given a blanket name to them: post-Viet Nam psychiatric syndrome (PVNPS).

The symptoms, explains Psychiatrist Cyril Barnert of Los Angeles, occur on two levels. In milder cases--the great majority--the vet feels constantly depressed and unable to get involved in ordinary life. Looking like the classic student dropout, he hangs listlessly around street corners, sometimes in a marijuana haze, or drifts from one low-level job to another. Sometimes he plays at war; in Los Angeles vets often gather at the burned-out remains of an amusement park at Venice pier to stage mock battles, often using shields fashioned from turtle shells. In severe cases, a vet may brood for days and then begin to experience violent "flashbacks" to his war experiences. One vet in Casper, Wyo., who had accidentally napalmed a Vietnamese orphanage, still reconstructs in his head the writhing bodies of screaming children. In Flint, Mich., an Army vet was so devastated by his Viet Nam experience that he spent his days doing little more than cleaning his rifle and rocking on his front porch.

Sometimes the vets act out their wartime terrors on family, friends or even strangers. One California vet, Max Inglett, 27, suffered frequent nightmares and once woke up to find himself choking his wife. Loud noises like the sound of a jet plane would cause him to lose his memory temporarily. Eventually he went berserk, set out on amnesiac wanderings in the mountains, and got himself shot trying to rob a store. The bullet left him paralyzed from the waist down.

The veteran who tends toward violence or withdraws into feelings of estrangement has appeared after each of the U.S.'s wars. Before Viet Nam, such cases were usually described as shell shock or battle fatigue. Many experts argue that PVNPS is more virulent because of the indifferent reception accorded to Vietvets as compared with the enthusiasm that greeted returnees from World War II and even Korea. Says Los Angeles-based VA Psychiatrist W. Hamlin Emory: "People have mixed feelings about what we did over there. Citizens who were unable to accept responsibility and guilt for the unpopular Viet Nam War have projected their guilt onto the Viet Nam vet." Sensing this, one vet felt that every prospective employer looked at him as a "murderer or monster." Says VA Social Worker Shad Meshad: "The Vietvet is angry. He wants society to bleed as much as he has."

Actually, the Viet Nam G.I. went off to war in seemingly stronger psychiatric shape than his brothers in other wars. Compared with them, today's vets were better educated (85% had completed high school, as against 45% in World War II and 62% in Korea) and more stringently screened for emotional problems before they even donned a uniform. In the field, the Viet Nam G.I. proved to be remarkably durable. One study by Dr. Peter Bourne of Atlanta, who served as a psychiatrist in Southeast Asia, cited an incidence of twelve psychiatric breakdowns per 1,000 men during service in Viet Nam, compared with 37 per 1,000 in Korea and 101 per 1,000 in some combat areas during World War II. It was after they were brought back home that a small but worrisome minority began to have their breakdowns, showing signs of the post-Viet Nam syndrome.

Many experts agree with Yale Psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton, author of Home from the War, that "there is something special about Viet Nam veterans," quite apart from those who are obviously troubled. They are loners, rarely banding together with others at American Legion or Veterans of Foreign Wars gatherings. According to the most recent Harris Poll, in 1971, 18% of Viet Nam veterans had joined a major veterans' organization, compared with an average of 43% after earlier wars. Staff members at the VA facilities at Brentwood have learned that the truly antisocial vets rarely come to them for treatment; they must seek the vets out in local bars, welfare offices and Skid Row slums. Sometimes they get there in time to offer help; in other cases, like John Gabron's, it is just too late.

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