In May of 1970 we were sent into Cambodia to seek and destroy the enemy that was using Cambodia as a warehouse for arms and safe refuge. We quickly set up operations in Tay Ninh, a Vietnamese town on the Cambodian border. I was sent to set up a makeshift Avionics shop and to do whatever was needed. Pilots and crews were flying around the clock. The medical people were grounding pilots and crews for spending too much time in the air, and we were losing huge numbers of men and aircraft to heavy ground fire. There came a day when the CO asked for volunteers from the maintenance group to fly as door gunners. The only requirement was you needed to know how to handle an M-60 machine gun. I decided to volunteer, as long as I could keep my day job (I didn’t want a MOS change). I received one day of pilot training from a guy named Larry. Other procedural things, like hanging from a MacGuire Rig, were learned quickly, and before I knew it I was helping to insert and extract personnel from the jungles of Cambodia as a Huey machine gunner.
I don’t know how many helicopter missions I flew during my tour, or how many firefights I was in on the ground. They all seemed to take on a sameness after a while: get shot at, shoot back, kill the enemy, watch your buddies get shot-up, watch them die a gruesome death, sometimes hold them in your arms while the life ebbed out of them, knowing there was nothing you could do about it. One day one of my buddies was shot to pieces while he was standing right beside me. The agony that followed while I helplessly watched him die, and the guilt I felt at not being able to save him, have dogged me to this day. Of the many flashbacks I endured over the years that followed Vietnam, this one haunted me the most.
We lived with the constant fear of incoming rockets or mortars. It was something you had no influence over. You couldn’t control when, where or what they would hit, and you couldn’t control whether you’d be anywhere near a bunker when the firing started. There was simply nothing you could do to protect yourself from “incoming.” The fear was so intense it was often paralyzing. Often there was no bunker in site when the shelling began, and all you could do was hit the ground and pray “this one” doesn’t have your name on it.
After I came home I had a feeling down deep inside that something was very wrong with me. I couldn’t explain it to anyone or even to myself. I would see a car accident and start to cry uncontrollably. A friend or relative would die and I would be out of sorts for months on end, as if I never learned how to mourn. I seemed to be hyper-sensitive, yet I was always looking for a fight. It didn’t matter with whom, or how big the other guy was. My drinking became excessive. I couldn’t sleep for more than an hour a night without getting tanked. Because of it, I lost my wife. She left me and took our daughter with her. At first I thought, “How could she leave me after all we’ve been through?” But today, I see just how smart she was and just how screwed up I had become. God Bless You, Georgia.
As the years went on, I was able to lock-in a good career in sales and sales management with different Fortune 500 companies. The last of these assignments was with a large telecom company where I was the Director of Sales for the Mid-Atlantic Region. Because of my work habits, I spent less and less time with family and friends. Over the years there have been very few people who ever got close to me. I could never trust anybody enough.
I still couldn’t sleep. I always felt detached and estranged around other people and preferred to be alone. I even lived in a basement apartment for thirteen years, because it was underground and it had the feeling of safety like the bunker near my hooch in Nam. These feelings and symptoms became severe enough, and lasted long enough, to significantly impair my daily life. Depression, substance abuse and problems with memory and cognition became the norm. After a while, I had no ability to function in social or family life, and occupational instability set in.
I got clean and sober and quit smoking by sheer willpower, but my mental health remained lousy, and eventually my physical health failed. In November of 2003 I was admitted to the hospital with a pulmonary embolism, and then just six months later I had a major heart attack. I was completely disabled and couldn’t work. I was a wreck.
At the Veterans Hospital I found some help, but more important I found a whole hospital full of guys just like me. We were all diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. I asked the doctors, “How do we treat this thing? How does one live with it? What do we do?” Basically, I was told they were going to try several different types of medication that might help until they found one that would work for me. In addition, I was assigned to a group for therapy.
At the height of my treatment at the VA hospital I was taking upwards of 40 pills per day. I was taking pills to get up in the morning. Then by afternoon if I felt I wasn’t functioning I could take pills to pep up even further. But of course, by nightfall I had to take pills in order to come back down. Then if I couldn’t sleep, I had pills for that. Too many pills during the day made my stomach upset, so I had pills to solve that. I had pills for heart, blood pressure, cholesterol, blood thinning, anxiety, pain and water retention. I had more pills than the average size pharmacy in a small third world country. And I had a small cadre of medical experts at the VA willing to give me even more.
Despite “better living through modern chemistry,” my PTSD symptoms didn’t abate; I was extremely depressed, physically ill and still disabled. I couldn’t work. At about that time, I was watching TV one night and saw a Fox5 News feature on the work of Dr. Rick Levy, a clinical psychologist who specializes in mind-body medicine. His patients were getting better from heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes and other problems that conventional medicine has few solutions for. The idea that you can use the power of your own mind to heal yourself made sense to me. I called his office the next day to set up an appointment.
When Bill arrived in my office, I assured him that mind-body medicine would help him. For any illness, up to 40 percent of your solution can come from conventional means like surgery, pharmaceuticals or physical therapy, but up to 60 percent of your solution can come from your mind. Bill had received a great deal of conventional health care, and good conventional care is absolutely critical—but if you use mind-body medicine in addition, you can enjoy a 150 percent increase in healing effect. Good mind-body methods don’t just make you feel better, they change your biochemistry, eliminate the effects of negative environmental influences, shift unhealthy behavior, and can even counter a hereditary predisposition to illness. They make the crucial difference between life and death, a full or partial recovery, joy and despair.
Using psychotherapy and clinical hypnosis, I helped Bill dismantle the chronic stress-response syndrome that had been fueling his emotional and physical ill health. He began to sleep at night, felt happier, substantially reduced his reliance on medication, and made huge gains in strength and stamina.
The rest of our work involved helping Bill to discover the Story Behind the Story. Everyone is living out a unique, epic journey in self-discovery—The Story Behind The Story. To heal yourself, you have to discern what your life has been trying to teach you, discover your native talents and your most noble aspirations, and live them out, free of pain or confusion from the past. That is the purpose of life itself. Living outside your story, by repressing your experience or misunderstanding it, or failing to pursue your highest dreams, is the root cause of suffering. For Bill’s entire adult life he’d been fighting the war in Vietnam. He was never able to discover who he really was, fully explore his innate gifts and talents, or develop a vision for how he wanted to live his life.
We used clinically guided meditation to help Bill attain deep levels of self-awareness, where he found the peace and joy that had so long eluded him. He began to meditate regularly, pursued the relationship with God that he’d aspired to, and found a religious community where he belonged. He found his story behind the story and began to live it out authentically—his personal quest was to move away from being a warrior into being a deeply spiritual man. With progress on this part of his journey, Bill’s heart and lungs im
proved to the point where he was asymptomatic of pulmonary problems or heart disease. He conquered what remained of his depression and anxiety, and came into joy. He realized that he had the power to map out his future and make it happen.
Now 60, Bill is down to just three pills a day and is free of the symptoms of PTSD, heart disease and pulmonary problems. He sleeps through the night, has regained his stamina, is pain free, has a vibrant social life and has re-united with his daughter and grandchildren. He is still a hero, but these days he campaigns for justice armed only with compassion, as an advocate for veterans and their families.
19
AGAINST ALL ODDS
The Story of Marine Corps Corporal Joshua Hoffman
“He kept asking, ‘What happened to me?’ and no one wanted to tell him, so finally I said, ‘Right now you’re paralyzed. It sucks, but you’re home and you’re alive.’ I tried to lighten it up a little. I said, ‘Josh, I realize you really wanted to come home, but did you seriously have to take it this far? Don’t you think this was a little extreme?’ Josh laughed.”
Joshua Hoffman figured joining the Marines would be a good way to get the money to eventually go to aviation school. At the time he was attending Western Michigan University, but he dropped out to enlist. He had a couple of exotic assignments: Djibouti on the horn of Africa, and South America, and then came back home to Kentwood, Michigan and joined the reserves as part of the Grand Rapids-based Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 24th Marine Regiment. His father, Jim, a career Army NCO who had just returned from a deployment in Iraq at the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, was living in Texas with his stepmother. But his mother, Hazel, lived near Kentwood with her son, Michael, and so did Josh’s younger brother, Jacob.
Even though it had been years since he’d lived in Michgan, Josh wasn’t worried about making friends. He’d had to start from scratch in Juneau, Alaska and then Newport News, Virginia after he started living with his father when he was twelve. Moreover he’d met Heather in that fall of 2004 and she was the strongest argument of all that he’d made the right decision to settle down in Kentwood. As far as being called up, which was something his dad worried about all the time, he was in the reserves for chrissakes. But it turned out his dad’s apprehensions were correct.
By October 2006 he was in Iraq’s Anbar province attached to the battalion’s Weapons Company in Fallujah. On January 6, his patrol of the city’s narrow alleyways was going as usual when a man carrying a rocket propelled grenade appeared out of nowhere and then ran off. SOP required that Josh and his teammates chase him down. Josh was point man for the group, an assignment he carried out on a regular basis. No one saw the sniper. When the shot rang out the men took cover and then, a few seconds later, checked to see if everyone was okay. They saw Josh lying face down in the dirt. A Corpsman, disobeying orders to wait for smoke to camouflage his movements, rushed out into the street, knelt down and turned his buddy over. Josh was able to open his eyes and speak but he couldn’t squeeze the Corpsman’s hand. The bullet had entered the front left side of his neck and exited out his right shoulder, severing his spinal cord. The Corpsman kept his finger in the bullet hole to stop the bleeding until the medics came. The Corpsman would later tell Heather it was the longest ten minutes of his life.
Heather:
“When I first met Josh he was twenty-two and I was seventeen and I just knew he was the one. For me it really was love at first sight. I wasn’t going to be eighteen for five more days, and I was afraid he would consider me too young for him. It took a couple weeks after my birthday for me to really win him over.” But it quickly became apparent that they shared the same sense of humor and keen appreciation of small town life in western Michigan. She had short brown hair, a beautiful smile and infinite “can do” enthusiasm. “They called him ‘The Ox’ at the landscaping company where he worked. He was like a human forklift. One time he pulled up a ten-foot-tall tree weighing 300 pounds and planted it exactly where his boss wanted it in a client’s yard. He didn’t even break a sweat.” Heather and Josh hit it off. They dated for a few months and then moved in together in an apartment complex in Kentwood, and for the next two years life was sweet. “He used to take me out three times a week on ‘dates’ even though we were living together.”
Jim:
“From the time Joshua was three until he was twelve, I didn’t exist for him. He thought I was dead. But he got my social security number from his mother, and he found me. Once I got custody of my boys they lived with me pretty much full time. I remember our first Christmas together I was stationed in Alaska, and I must have bought $15,000 worth of toys for them to make up for all those Christmases we’d lost. We had a big long living room and it was a third filled up with presents. It took us three hours to open them all. At the end there were three boxes left: one for Josh, one for Jacob and one for me. So we all opened them together and there was a helmet in each one. Josh was groaning, ‘Ah Dad, does that mean we have to go skiing?’ because he didn’t like learning how to ski, and I said, ‘No, these go with something out in the garage.’ So I took them out to the garage and there were three four-wheelers, one for each of us. You should have seen the look on their faces.” While Jim was stationed in Newport News, Josh developed into an all star high school wrestler. “I went to all his wrestling meets. He made it to the high school state championship; I took him camping and hiking on the weekends. We were so close. We were making plans to go to Disney World after he got back from Iraq, but you know everything went out the window.”
Josh:
Josh was flown to Balad for three days of emergency care, then Germany’s Landstuhl Medical Center for a week to stabilize, and then finally to Bethesda Navy Medical Center. When surgeons operated they discovered that the few membranes connecting the two sections of spinal cord were not enough to regenerate, so they cut them. Josh was paralyzed from the chest down. Permanently.
Heather:
“I was driving home from work when I got a call on my cell phone from Josh’s sister-in-law. She said, ‘Call me when you get home.’ And I said, ‘What’s going on?’ ‘I can’t tell you.’ ‘I’m pulling over. Okay, what’s going on?’ ‘Josh was shot in the neck and he’s in critical condition.’ I was so confused. I called my parents, and they already knew. Everyone knew but me. No one wanted to tell me.” Heather and her father flew up to Washington, DC so she could be at Bethesda Navy Medical before Josh arrived. When she got there she came up against hospital protocol. “I could hardly wait to see him. I was terrified, excited and exhausted beyond belief. Josh was there but the hospital staff wouldn’t let me see him because I wasn’t a member of the family. I tried to explain but they said absolutely not. I was beside myself.” Once Hazel and Jacob arrived at the hospital Hazel told the staff that Heather should be allowed in Josh’s room.
At first Josh seemed paralyzed, but shortly thereafter a doctor asked if he could move, and he grabbed Hazel’s hand and squeezed it with his thumb and first finger. “He said ‘Whoa’ and I nearly passed out when the doctor asked him to squeeze again and he did. He could raise and flex his right arm, and even curl his toes. He kept asking, ‘What happened to me?’ and no one wanted to tell him, so finally I said, ‘Right now you’re paralyzed. It sucks, but you’re home and you’re alive.’ I tried to lighten it up a little. I said ‘Josh, I realize you really wanted to come home, but did you seriously have to take it this far? Don’t you think this was a little extreme?’ Josh laughed.”
Jim:
“It was terrible when I got the call. It was around 2 p.m. on the 6th. I was shopping with the wife in the PX when my cell phone rang. Josh had put me down as his point of contact. At first I couldn’t catch my breath. I had to get both of us out of the store before I could tell my wife Carmen, because I knew she’d become hysterical.” An ice storm in Texas would delay Jim’s plane to Washington for a day and a half after the rest of the family had arrived. Jim had met Heather before on a six-day trip his son and Heather had made to San
Antonio, and he had spoken to her on the phone a couple of times, but when they met at the hospital Jim drew a blank. “To be perfectly honest, I didn’t remember who she was. We knew Josh was living with a girl, but he had so many girlfriends. I like Heather, but as time went on during those first few weeks and months there was a lot of friction between us.” There was also a lot of confusion as the prognosis for Josh worsened by the hour. Surgery was postponed because Josh “coded” when he was positioned on his stomach. There was a serious possibility of meningitis.
Josh:
Five days later, after surgeons were finally able to operate on his injury, Josh developed an infection and a fever. The fever went from 102 to 105, then during the night spiked to 108.8. First ice packs were placed around his body, and then he was wrapped from head to toe in an ice blanket, but by the time the fever broke it was too late. The high temperature had literally cooked his brain, giving him severe Traumatic Brain Injury. He went into renal failure and was put onto life support. His body ballooned to three times its normal size. His eyes were swollen shut, and his lower lip was so big that it touched his nose. His body was covered in blisters from the fever. Jim, Hazel, Jacob, Carmen and Heather assembled in a waiting room and listened as doctors told them Josh had 24 hours to live.
Hidden Battles on Unseen Fronts Page 12
