Pete was subsequently taken into private session and “flooded” by one of the program’s clinical psychologists. “This guy sat me down and told me that he wanted me to relax. ‘Now, Pete, what I want you to recall is that incident you mentioned [in the focus group].’”

Pete’s CAP unit had been part of Operation Zippo, in which US troops were ordered to burn villages and force-march the inhabitants to refugee camps in Da Nang. On the banks of a raging river, during a mass-evacuation, pregnant women were miscarrying, wailing, frightened to death, so a human chain of Marines was formed to expedite the crossing. Some of them, according to Pete, had been “in country too long, seen too much death, gotten too numb.” They apparently found sport in holding small children underwater beneath their boots, then watching the corpses float down river, away from sight of their CO. Women were molested in mid-stream, and no baby ever made it across, even though Pete says he helped deliver one on the riverbank.

“So the psychologist tells me, ‘Okay, Pete, you know—and I know—that you were the one drowning them.’ And I thought, oh, my God! He must know something I didn’t. He told me to feel those hands scratching at my legs.” Pete chokes and turns away so I won’t see the tears in his eyes. “Well, Christ, I was out of it, bumping into walls, crying, and he says to me, ‘Now, we have to end off here. You come back and see me on Tuesday’—it was Friday afternoon —’and I want you to stay with that feeling. It’s important that you stay with it.’” Pete shakes his head in disbelief. “This dogshit shrink actually convinced me that I had drowned children. That, I know I didn’t do.”

“What I’m really trying to do is to help the patient, for the very first time, to get some insight into how they think,” Gusman claimed. “And we want to dispel the myth that everybody is a steely-eyed killer.”

“I learned soon enough that you can’t really get into anything because you only have an hour,” Gary told me. “You’re in the middle of stuff and the therapist would say, ‘Hey man, hold that thought, I’ll see you next Monday.’ So I just ended up saying, ‘Look, I’m really sorry, but I haven’t got years and years to spend here doing this.’”

“Staying with the feeling” and the “fifty-minute hour”—around which so many therapists construct their practice—is of scant therapeutic value for most veterans suffering from PTSD. Once revivified in a session, the horrors of war can’t wait until the following week to be addressed. These guys have been staying with the feeling for years—and that, precisely, is their problem.