D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
June 2010
Ghosts of the Past
Reflections on trauma, from Vietnam to hiking Apacheria.
By Jerry Eagan
It was on a road trip when I was a student at Indiana University, in 1973, that I first viewed the movie Jeremiah Johnson, at the small, exclusive theater of the swanky Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs. At the time, I didn't know I had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from Vietnam, much less PTSD from emotional, physical, sexual and spiritual abuse from my mother. I'd first seen the West hitching from Indiana to San Francisco, a week or two after Woodstock, in 1969. Looking out the windows of cars, trucks and buses, I'd felt something go tilt inside at the vast emptiness "out there." That "tilt" angled even more during the trip back west in 1973. It was at the end of that film that a few lines of dialog altered my life forever. As a consequence, I determined to become a modern pioneer headed West, where I could live among the mountains.
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The author on the day he leff for Vietnam in 1966. |
Flash forward to April 2002, when I began work at the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument. I'd gotten sober and clean in 1982, and much water had flowed beneath a variety of metaphorical bridges by then. Unable to find work as a certified alcohol and drug counselor, I had a back-up job as a $19 a day volunteer at the Cliff Dwellings. Disability from Vietnam and my Civil Service retirement annuity allowed me to work only four days a week. One, sometimes two days, I hiked with a simpatico guy named Bob Bissett. I also hiked alone. Only introverts would understand that for some experiences, solitude and solitariness deepen spiritual experiences as the sublime beauty of being alone in this country.
Faster forward to Dec. 21, 2009, when I found myself at Providence Cone, a stand-alone mountain 25 miles east of Deming, searching for a particular example of remarkable petroglyph art. Before leaving, though, I'd had a "premonition" that something was not quite right. I'd honored that gut feeling by emailing precise instructions on how to find me to my friend Dennis Jennings; I'd hoped he'd read them and meet me. Honoring that "directions" premonition was only one such feeling I'd honored recently.
Solitary hikers had better honor those premonitions, if they want to live and hike again. An overarching premonition had built up over all of 2009 that I needed to hike with someone, and I had done so more often. It just didn't happen that day. My "Hiking Apacheria" article, "Slip Sliddin' Away" (February 2010), outlined my fall, injury and rescue. But it's important to share the trauma of the rest of the story, the trauma, still unfolding today.
Phase two of my trauma process began when I was left alone at the admissions desk of the Deming hospital. Anticipating, I gave the clerk my Blue Cross/Blue Shield ID card, for I'm fortunate enough to have good health insurance. I've been through this drill a number of times in my life. That done, I rolled the wheelchair I'd been put in to a waiting room. My mind clicked into "the admissions trip" stoicism one learns entering hospitals: A familiar psychic numbing crept into my mind, and I pulled back into silent waiting. Stay quiet, watch and learn, was the thought. Other than asking for a small cup of water, I sat there and watched the other people who'd been brought by someone there.
Within a few minutes, I was wheeled into the ER. The place was crowded and busy. A couple of aides helped me mount a gurney, and I laid back, wondering when my wife and Dennis might show up. It was totally dark by then, and they'd had to search for my truck in near darkness. I restrained any hopeful impulses I might have for them joining me. I was 19 when I got so badly wounded in Vietnam. I spent a year in Army hospitals, and had developed a fierce "anti-dependency" on having friends or relatives be by my side. It was a lonely experience, but it was what it was. All the PTSD work I'd done for 20 years, though, allowed me to experience some limited hope that they'd show up, so I wouldn't do this alone.
After I'd reached my truck, I'd reinforced the splint I'd fashioned out of one of my knee pads, and duct tape with a disabled veteran's license plate, which I kept under the driver's seat of my truck. I'd used the last of the duct tape on that "improvement."
"That's far out, man! You really set your ankle yourself, huh?" an assistant asked me.
"Actually, I reset it three times, before I got back to my truck."
"Holy crap! That's far out, man!"
The on-call doctor, Dr. Bassam Al Homsi, quickly clarified that this was more than a sprain. As I lay on the gurney, the broken ankle was at right angles to my right leg. I will never forget looking at my right arm the day I was shot in Vietnam. It, too, had been twisted nearly off by the Chinese SKS 7.62 semi-automatic rifle the VC had used on me that day, November 3, 1966.
Dr. Homsi assured me, unfortunately, that the break was bad enough to require surgery. I braced myself as a nurse used a stethoscope and some other device to determine if there was a pulse in my leg's nerves and blood vessels. I was relieved when the nurse gave a thumbs-up. "Houston, we have a pulse," she said, gauging the look on my face as "worried."
Having nearly lost my right arm in Vietnam, I was deeply relieved that I'd keep my right foot. In that former trauma, I'd told God: If the arm has to come off, so be it. Please, let me live, even if I lose my right arm.
Dr. Homsi said he'd alerted the on-call orthopedist, Dr. Valentin Antosci, that he believed I should be admitted and surgery undertaken the next morning.
By now, Dorothy and Dennis had arrived. Dennis observed the injury, as I'd expect someone trained as an emergency first responder would.
"Uuuuh. That's ugly," he said.
"You're the third person to say that," I replied.
"Sorry," he said.
"No problem." Actually, it was pretty ugly!
Dorothy and Dennis also appreciated the improvised splint I'd made of my disabled veteran license plate. The flat, thin aluminum license plate is firm, but not so rigid as to be impossible to bend. I'm convinced that if I'd had two license plates and more duct tape, I could have walked off the ridge and driven myself to the hospital. There it is again: Take care of yourself if you want to survive.
Dennis left, but Dorothy accompanied me to my room. It was comforting to have her there. Dorothy is wife number three. Put any 10 Vietnam vets in a room, and I'd wager we'd total 30 marriages. How many kids? How many wives? If you only knew the crazy crap I'd put wives number one and number two through, as a guy who for decades would have never thought, much less claimed, he had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from Vietnam. Now, I was able to relax, and embrace: no more flying solo.
Men (and now, most likely, women) call for their mothers or fathers for a reason, when dying on a battlefield. There's no lonelier experience than to die among strangers, or even friends, 10,000 miles from home, and know you'll never going to see loved ones again. My survival mechanisms developed in those Army hospitals had been to isolate and insulate against giving in to bouts of depression, crushing loneliness and homesickness that sometimes I felt was impossible to live through.
It was threatening to snow, so I told Dorothy to head back to Silver City. I accepted that for the next few days, I'd be in Deming, not Silver City. It felt awkward, but I've done enough trauma work that I was able to deal with my anxiety.
The heart-thumping experience of crawling onto a frigid operating table is always a shock. This was my fifth surgery since I went into the Army in 1965. Now, sober and clean for years, I monitored all drugs offered me, before and after the surgery. Each discussion on medication was made in context with, "I'm a recovering drug addict" — and one who'd loved Demerol. ("Right up there," I'd often said, "with sex.") We who are "in recovery" must take an active part in our treatment, lest we relapse. For most people, this isn't a problem. My experience has been that doctors and nurses often don't wish to see patients suffer needlessly, so their intentions to offer powerful pain killers are good. Until the decision was made to admit me to the hospital, I'd taken a total of 4,200 milligrams of Motrin, and told them that I'd like an injection of Tauradal, a non-narcotic pain killer.
The first night after the operation, however, I asked for two shots of morphine. I hate morphine. For the first seven days after I was so badly wounded in Vietnam, morphine gave me horrific nightmares, as though I was trapped in an ugly, cotton-candy spider web. This time, though, I found it necessary. After that, Tauradol and Motrin.
Going back to that first anesthesia I'd received that first night of my first surgery in Vietnam, I'd experienced an inability to urinate; the muscles somehow locked up as a reaction to anesthesia, general or spinal. Now, this time, the abdominal muscles hadn't worked, and once more, out came the horrid catheter. The pain of an injury or wound has never been as uncomfortable as being catheterized.
Sometime in the wee hours of the morning of Dec. 23, I asked for a wheelchair, so I could prowl the halls, working those muscles needed to get my bladder working. I ran around several more times in the wheelchair, and began urinating on my own, around noon. I told the docs I wanted to go home, and that there was no need to stay. Christmas was two days away. By 5 p.m., a guy had come over and tricked me out with a walker. Dorothy came and got me by 7:30 p.m.
Our kitty cat, Zashi, knew within a few minutes of my return hat something was different. Over the weeks since, Zashi and I have bonded at a deeper level, and the comfort a cat has always given me — warm, furry, soft, gentle creatures — has certainly furthered my recovery.
That first night home, I decided that while I got acclimated to the walker, and having to drag it down and up the stairs to our lower sleeping level, I'd sleep on the futon in the living room. All went well until the nightmares came.
One was of a scene where my Vietnam veteran friend, Eddie Rodriguez, and I were on bluffs two or three hundred feet above the Middle Fork of the Gila. The view was daunting, both in real life and in the dream. I've come far in modifying my fear of heights since arriving here. It's impossible to avoid heights hiking Apacheria. If you saw where Eddie and I had ventured down from, along the Middle Fork of the Gila, you'd have nightmares, too. In the nightmare, Eddie had already gone over a ledge of some kind, and was standing with his back to the cliff. He seemed rigid with fear, and as I went over the side, my feet touched a ledge no more than five or six inches wide. Looking down at the sheer drop of several hundred feet, I froze when I realized I'd managed to place my feet directly on the last of that tiny ledge. Had I come over the lip of the cliff, and dropped a mere two inches more to the right, I would have had nothing but empty space beneath me. A plunge to the bottom would have been the end.
In another nightmare, I was back in the first aid station after getting shot in Vietnam. A line of dead GIs lay outside the hospital tent, only their boots showing from under ponchos placed over them. Lots of different people talking, dressing my wounds, several guys screaming farther down a line of stretchers on frames that held them about five feet off the floor. A priest, suggesting I let him give me the Last Rites. I woke up moaning, and I knew that I had to move downstairs, to sleep in our bedroom, where I felt safer. The upstairs was too open, to indefensible for me to be there without a bayonet or gun. I knew more nightmares would come, and if I wanted to get any sleep I'd either have to move or bring the bayonets — kept under a series of beds for over 20 years — in from the garage.
For those who don't "get" the Post part of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, I share that four years ago, viewing the first few minutes of the film Babel, I had one of my worst traumatic incidents since Vietnam. Not having a clue what the film would be about, we watched the first 10 minutes of various story lines of various characters in the ensemble cast being woven before us.
Two of the central characters, played by Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, travel through Morocco on a trip clearly designed to "save the marriage." Unbeknownst to them, two of the film's other characters, two boys who have acquired a rifle, are randomly shooting; then the one who is an expert marksman takes aim at a tourist bus below. That natural-born killer fires a round that strikes Cate Blanchett in the clavicle. Blood gushes all over her, Brad Pitt and the bus seat.
In the Real West Cinema, I'd suddenly felt myself swoon as I sat in my theater seat. When I got shot in Vietnam, my right arm was twisted back over my shoulder in a completely unnatural way, not unlike the way my ankle was turned a complete 90-degree angle from my leg in the fall. When I got shot, the medic who crawled to me under fire and another guy who made his way up to me, also under fire, said sternly, "Don't pass out! Stay with us, dude! Don't pass out! Stay with us! We're not going to let you go into shock, man! You're not going to die on us from shock!" They were fixated on such a possibility, because another soldier had died of shock a few months earlier from a wound that was not life-threatening.
And so the relived trauma of that gunshot wound event, mixed up with the sight of so much blood gushing from Blanchett's shoulder, was apparently enough that I passed out, right there in the Real West Cinema. The entire thing had happened in less than five minutes: from feeling nauseous to swooning, to Dorothy getting me a bottle of cold water, to a man seated behind us lifting me up and plopping me down in the theater aisle.
I'll never know the names of the six guys from another rifle platoon who came and carried me a mile or more, through hot, steaming jungle, to a landing zone where a chopper landed, to evacuate me that November day in 1966. I forgot to ask the guy behind me in the Real West Cinema his name, but I did manage to thank him for his help, as I thanked those six nameless men as they swung me onto that "dust off" evacuation chopper. In the movie theater, Richard Earn?heart, of Silver City, apparently called 911, and EMTs arrived at within minutes. No, I wasn't having a heart attack, I told Dorothy and the man who'd helped me out of my seat, onto the floor. I unbuttoned my shirt and poured a bit of water on my face. That gave me some relief, but the oxygen the EMTs gave me brought me around best.
No one seemed to fully grasp, when I said, half a dozen times, that I was experiencing my worst PTSD event since Vietnam. And that the director and actors of Babel had gotten the "blood part" right. "That's how much I bled, in Vietnam," I clarified more than once, there on the floor of the Real West. I suspect few believed me, but the shock of seeing this film shooting and bloody mess had triggered my most painful post-Vietnam experience.
It was only a few days after the Babel incident, while hiking and meditating alone, out there, probably in the Burros, that I got it: It was as if God had allowed me, during the fllm, to pass out, finally, as I relived that bloody scene in Vietnam, when I'd been warned NOT to pass out. Imagine the control one has to exert to overcome a physiological sensation to pass out at the sight of one's own blood. Passing out isn't normally fatal. But in combat and accidents, someone needs to intervene who understands that death can come from the shock over blood loss alone.
Imagine! Forty years after the event, I passed out, seeing all that blood. It was if, I realized, God said: You didn't pass out then, Jerry, when you lived through that trauma and horrible injury. But you can pass out now. Let it all go, Jerry. It's time; you're safe now. You've done a lot of work on the Vietnam traumas.
I didn't even know I had PTSD until 1989 or 1990. But back there in Colorado Springs, in 1973, when I first saw Jeremiah Johnson, I knew then that something had changed in me over in Vietnam. I'd realized that Jeremiah Johnson and I had an experience we shared. From that night forward, I longed deeply for a chance to walk alone, in those mountains, among crags and peaks, canyons and mesas.
I wasn't sure why I felt that need, at the time. Wikipedia suggests that it wasn't until the 1980s that the term "PTSD" entered the lexicon. It was nearly a decade later when I realized that I had it myself: I had PTSD tracks laid down as early as one year old, and various layers had been formed well before I graduated from high school. My first PTSD "award" of veteran's disability was made in 1999. Before that, my disability had been related to gunshot wound and malaria. In fact, it wasn't until 2005, after arriving here, that my PTSD disability was adjusted upwards for psychological damage.
These things are connected. And for that, I return to Jeremiah Johnson as the opening thread into this part of my life.
In the film, Jeremiah has endured a multiyear feud with Crow Indians. He has killed many of them and they have tried, repeatedly but unsuccessfully, to kill him. One day, high in the Rockies, he meets up with his old mentor, Bear Claws Chris Lapp. Both men know what Jeremiah has been through, and where he's come from. Both know that Jeremiah has retreated to the highest places as a last-ditch attempt to live his life without more killing. Jeremiah went into the mountains to retreat to places isolated and insulated from war, and people who knew nothing about what war does to men. His imagination was sparked by the notion of becoming a Mountain Man. Solitary, brave, incredible explorers, Mountain Men often nursed their wounds in silence and stillness.
It was this conversation in the film that sparked my mind to go to the mountains. It was this conversation that caused my head to tilt, and my head has never been the same again. I am not invincible, and I am less inclined to hike alone, but there will be days, times, periods, when I will hike alone, because I have to hike alone.
In the scene, Bear Claws approaches Jeremiah, who is cooking rabbit on a spit. "What's on the spit?" Bear Claws asks.
"Grown particular?" Jeremiah answers.
"Not about feeding. Just the company I keep. Thank you kindly," Bear Claws says as he accepts a hind quarter.
"You cook good rabbit, pilgrim."
After another brief exchange, Jeremiah asks, "Would you happen to know what month of the year it is?"
"No, I truly wouldn't," Bear Claws says. "I'm sorry, pilgrim." Bear Claws shows deep sensitivity to this other quiet man's question. They are, in fact, so high, so alone, that time is irrelevant.
They speculate. "March maybe."
"Maybe April."
"I don't believe April."
"Winter's a long time going?"
"Stays long this high."
"March is a green, muddy month down below."
"Some folks like it."
"Farmers mostly."
"You have done well to keep so much hair when so many are after it."
"I hope you will fare well."
"And some folks say," the movie ends, "that he's still up there."
Jerry Eagan, who lives in Silver City, is working on a compilation of his "Hiking Apacheria" articles for a book. He asks those interested to visit his website, www.hikingapacheria.com, and post comments on his blog, hikingapacheria.blogspot.com