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Category:
Self-Help
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN-10: 1453873236
Type: Non-Fiction
Pages: 138
Copyright: January 5,1987
ISBN-13: 9781453873236
Price: $9.95 (eBook)
This book offers solid answers and gives hope to veterans and their families. It reveals the way to peace on the subject of post-traumatic stress.
Although the Vietnam War officially ended in 1975, it still rages in the lives of thousands of veterans and their families. This book not only tells why so many Vietnam veterans suffer from flashbacks, depression, fits of rage, nightmares, emotional numbing, and broken relationships, but it offers solid answers and gives hope. It reveals the way to peace on the subject of post-traumatic stress.
With over a millon copies in print, "Nam Vet: Making Peace with Your Past" continues to be one of the most popular books for those who seek answers to a very unpopular time in American history.
Excerpt
CHAPTER 2
Living for DEROS
If you were demonic and powerful enough to want to make someone “crazy” following a war like Vietnam, what would be the worst set of social, economic, political, and psychological conditions you could create for the returnee?
First, you would send a young man fresh out of high school to an unpopular, controversial guerrilla war far away from home. [You would] expose him to intensely stressful events, some so horrible that it would be impossible to really talk about them later to anyone except fellow “survivors.” To ensure maximal stress, you would create a one-year tour of duty during which the combatant flies to and from the war singly, WITHOUT a cohesive, intact, and emotionally supportive unit with high morale.
You would also create the one-year rotation to instill a “survivor mentality” which would undercut the process of ideological commitment to winning the war and seeing it as a noble cause. Then at DEROS (Date of Expected Return from Overseas Service), you would rapidly remove the combatant and singly return him to his front porch without an opportunity to sort out the meaning of his experiences with his men in his unit. No homecoming welcome or victory parade.
Since you are demonic enough, you make sure that the veteran is stigmatized and portrayed to the public as a “drug-crazed, psychopathic killer.” By virtue of clever selection by the Selective Service System, the veteran would be unable to easily reenter the mainstream of society because he is under-educated and lacks marketable job skills.
…Finally, but not least, you would want him to FEEL isolated, stigmatized, unappreciated, and exploited for volunteering to serve his country.
Tragically, of course, this scenario is not fictitious; it was the homecoming for most Vietnam veterans.
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