A Voice Long Waiting to Speak

I grew up full of energy, but lacking the kind of spiritual compass that might have kept me on a straighter road. Coming of age in the late 1960s — when everything seemed to be up for protest, including the Vietnam War — left me wrapped in a kind of moral fog that clung to me through much of my working years and even into retirement.

I could sense a light out there somewhere — distant and dim — but I couldn’t figure out what it was. My career path meandered. Sometimes I succeeded. Other times I hit dead ends. Depression would set in and hang around longer than I knew how to handle. I kept moving, kept working, kept looking. I just didn’t know what I was looking for.

Just as I approached retirement, things went sideways in a hurry. From the outside, life looked good. My job was steady. My kids were grown and doing well. My wife and I were living in a fifth-wheel trailer on the California coast. But inside, I was falling apart in ways I couldn’t explain and wasn’t willing to admit.

I walked away from my job and moved back to Oregon — no clear plan, no medical insurance, no real idea what came next. The fog had gotten so thick I couldn’t see far enough ahead to navigate. I just moved, and hoped something would become clear.

I found myself at the VA, and one of the reps urged me to be checked for PTSD. That conversation was the first honest step I had taken in a long time. It led me to the Vet Center — an organization founded by Vietnam veterans to help combat veterans and survivors of sexual trauma. A place built by people who had been where I was.

And that’s where two people entered my story who I can only describe as angels.

One was a Vietnam veteran turned Red Cross sociologist. The other, a wise and seasoned psychologist who had spent years working with veterans from World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. It took them months — patient, steady, unhurried months — but they helped me finally understand: I had been living with PTSD for decades. Not for a few rough years. For most of my adult life.

Over the next ten years, I sat in group therapy with men who had walked a similar road. All Vietnam veterans. Most of us had built long careers. We looked like we had it together. But behind the curtain, we were wrecked — and we knew it.

We shared something beyond a burden. We shared a purpose. We wanted to reach younger veterans — help them find peace before they reached the kind of collapse that had nearly taken each of us. We talked for hours across the years, wrestling with how to help them see what we couldn’t see until it was almost too late.

But there was always that wall: denial. Young veterans, like us, didn’t want to admit they were struggling. Not until the pain knocked the wind out of them. That wall is still standing for a lot of men and women who need help right now.