"The Making and Un-making of a Marine"

CINDY SHEEHAN IS NOT THE ONLY ONE FOLDING

I am a mental health counselor at Four Winds Hospital in Katonah, NY . I am also a Vietnam vet. The other day someone handed me an article out of The Journal News titled Families: Inadequate care foster suicide among Iraq vets. The article reported on Marine Major John Ruocco who committed suicide after being back from Iraq for thee months.

When I got home from my work as, I found an article from the New York Times mailed to me by a friend. Titled Fighting the Terror Of Battles that Rage In Soldiers' Heads, it is about specialist Alex Lotero who came home from Iraq with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and was not given the proper treatment by the VA and subsequently committed suicide.

Putting it aside to ponder later, I went on line to check my email and found an article forwarded to me out of the Salt Lake Tribune titled "I lost my son to a war I oppose." After reading this article I wiped my eyes and opened up the next email and found that another friend had sent me a piece from the New York Times titled Sheehan Quits, Saying, 'It's Up to You Now.'

And right there and then I quit. I found myself walking into the back yard and sitting by the small pond. It was all too much, too quick for me to digest. I was flooded with emotion, the pain coming to the surfaces of my life was more then I could handle and I had to step back like Cindy Sheehan. Sometimes Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan become blended for me.

I have just published a book titled The Making and Unmaking of a Marine (Millrock Writers Collective). I'd been working on that book for the last fifteen years, trying to understand how I had been made into a Marine and how I could undo that job. To me Cindy Sheehan's face was the face of every Afghani and Iraqi American soldier's mom, and my own face in the mirror that of every frightened returning soldiers.

What frightens me today is not just the war itself, but that I feel we are headed into the long and painful coming home phase. The multiple tours of duty and the absence of secure places "behind the lines" has multiplied personal and family catastrophe for our warriors. The traumas experienced by returning soldiers are already manifesting themselves at an alarming rate in self destructive ways. Yet it seems as if my fellow Americans are more worried about terrorist attacks than about their rage-filled returning soldiers turning their fury on themselves; or numbing that rage with drugs or alcohol; or watching it spill it out as domestic violence.

I don't know what to do. I truly fear the fallout of today's wars as I sit out by my backyard pond trying to stuff my own war history back into the bag I so tightly had it stuffed into.

Larry Winters USMC 1967 -1970 Vietnam 1969-1970

 14 Millrock Road
New Paltz, NY 12561