Bringing It All Back Home

by Philip F. Napoli

  In his seminal work on Vietnam veterans and PTSD, the psychiatrist Jonathan Shay identifies a state of mind he calls “the berserker state,” an emotional condition that combines rage with a complete disregard for personal safety. It would seem to be an apt description of Kenny’s state of mind at that moment.

  And I looked at the guy and I said, “If I get fucking killed, pick up this gun and keep firing.” And I stepped out from behind where we were, and I just fired two thousand fucking rounds; I never stopped firing. And as soon as I fired, almost instantaneously you heard bababoom, bababoom, and all three guns started opening up and it was perfect. It lasted all of like maybe a minute or two minutes, and then we were out of ammo. We went back up, and the Marines had gained control; they were able to get the guys with the maps and the dead and the wounded.

  According to the medal citation, Kenny acted “when the lead platoon was pinned down by a heavy volume of fire from a well-entrenched North Vietnamese Army force. Rapidly assessing the situation, Corporal Kenny boldly maneuvered his squad across the fire-swept terrain to a position from which to deliver accurate suppressing fire upon the hostile unit. Ignoring the enemy rounds impacting near him, he skillfully supervised his men in placing their machine guns and, boldly directing their fire upon the enemy soldiers, enabled the Marines to gain fire superiority over the hostile force and evacuate their injured comrades. His bold initiative and resolute determination inspire all who observed him and contributed significantly to the accomplishment of his unit’s mission.”

  As the operation continued, Kenny recalls, he didn’t have much time to focus on anything other than the two gun teams under his operational command. But he does remember being concerned about food. As Thanksgiving approached, Kenny remembers making up stories about his mother’s cooking, all of which, he concedes, were lies. My mother couldn’t boil water. But the closer they got to Thanksgiving, the more he looked forward to his turkey dinner. Turkey came in a can. Kenny had stored his away even while, as he puts it, guys were eating toothpaste on leaves for food. His group of friends included Phineas, Corporal Richard Dale James, from Shelbyville, Indiana, and maybe two others.

  We hadn’t eaten in about two or three days. And I said, “Look, man, it’s Thanksgiving; we’ve got to have a feast.” And they said, “Who the fuck has got food?” And I said, “Hey, my man,” and I whipped out this can of [turkey]. And they say, “Oh, man, you got fucking turkey.” I said, “I got turkey. What do you got?” Well, you know, Phin turned out—I think he had like a can of jelly. I said, “Jelly, that’s cranberry sauce.” I said, “What do you got?”[Another guy] said, “I got bread.” I said, “Stuffing, yeah; we got stuffing.”

  And we had a meal. Between the five of us, we each brought a can of something to that—to that circle—and we cooked it all up, and it’s bizarre because we’re standing there in this little circle: perfect targets. By then we were arrogant. And we’re sitting and everybody took the first fork and it went around—I think it went around four or five or twenty times, I don’t know. But we were totally stuffed, and it was like three ounces or four ounces of product, for God’s sake.

  I can always remember the theology of the fish and the loaves, and we were so fed.

  I’ve always said that the irony of war is that the most inhumane thing known to man, that which we call war, is where we learned our humanity. That’s where our humanity comes to us. And it’s just the paradox of it.

  Sadly, one of the young men who shared that Thanksgiving meal, the kid from Indiana, never made it home to share the story.

  I remember James. When [the food] went around, he said, “Wow, I can’t believe that.” I said, “What—what—what can’t you believe? Speak, ass, what are you talking about?” And he said, “I just took the turkey from, you know, from Phin.” I was like, “Yeah, so…”; it didn’t register … what does that mean? And he said, “Nobody at home will ever believe me when I tell them that a black man handed me that spoon, I didn’t rinse it, and I didn’t clean it or throw it away, and I took the food and put it in my mouth, and it went from his mouth to my mouth.” And everybody was like, “Yeah, duh. Well, you know.” And, you know—but it just struck him—I guess the irony.

  I watched him die, too. He never got home. He never got home to tell that.

  On December 8, Kenny and his platoon were leaning up against a rice paddy dike when a Marine named Bailey got separated from his squad. Another member of Bailey’s squad, David Ned Moore, was stuck on Kenny’s side of the dike. With incoming fire passing over their heads, Kenny’s squad waited and had cigarettes. Kenny watched as a Marine stood up to throw a hand grenade over the dike and was shot through the hand. Moore came over to complain to Kenny about the situation and asked for a cigarette, which Kenny handed him.

  I wasn’t looking directly at him and I hear uhhggg, like that. He had raised his weapon and he started to come up and he got hit right above [the] right eyebrow, and as he fell over, he landed in the dirt. But as he landed, it was like a fire hydrant. [The blood] was gushing, and it was like, “Oh, man.” I was just covered with fucking blood. I looked and the fucking cigarette was still between his lips and it was like, you know, that’s smoke curling up. And the blood just kept going. It was all over.

  And then Bailey said, “Moore, Moore.” I said, “Forget it, Bailey; he’s hit. Moore is hit.” He said, “I’m coming over.” I said, “Moore is hit; take over the squad.” He said, “I’m coming over. I’m coming over.” I said, “Wait, wait, wait.” We’re screaming. I said, “Before you come over, who’s next in command for that squad?” He said, “Why?” I said, “Because when you come over that wall, you’re going to be dead like Moore.” He never came over. He was sobbing, crying. I felt bad for him. I just knew he—he just lost a part of himself, and he was gone.

  By the time the unit returned to base, Kenny was unmanageably angry. He walked back into the tent he had shared with other members of his unit only to find their places already taken by new Marines; there was new gear spread out all over the boxes and bunks once used by men who had been killed and wounded. Kenny reacted by throwing their equipment on the floor and chasing those new men out of the tent, going so far as to throw a knife at one of them who had the temerity to speak up.

  Finally, Captain Bennett, who had been his company commander for a significant portion of his tour, approached Kenny. Bennett, by now promoted to major, offered Kenny a promotion to sergeant. At first, not understanding the implications, Kenny accepted. Major Bennett explained that in order to take the stripe and promotion, Kenny would have to stay in Vietnam until the end of his enlistment in June 1969. Kenny responded: “I can’t do that, Skipper. It was pretty bad out there. It was the worst. Skipper, my war’s over. I can never go to war again. They can keep their stripe.” And he said to me, “You know, Neil, I knew you were going to say that, but I had to ask you.”

  When he returned to the United States in January 1969, Kenny felt a strong compulsion to talk about what he had seen. Some members of his family, though, couldn’t take what Kenny had to tell them, especially those who had not been in combat. The combat vets, by contrast, were willing to listen. I always wanted to talk about it, he says; everybody told me not to. In addition, antiwar sentiment was making many Vietnam veterans feel as though they should be wearing a shroud of shame for their participation in the war. This left Kenny feeling marginalized also. Despite having done what he thought was right, Kenny felt the world believed him to be a bad person for serving there. Jonathan Shay describes the destruction of self-image as one of the central elements of post-traumatic stress disorder. It hit Kenny hard.

  Assaults to his dignity began early, starting with his arrival at El Toro Air Force Base in California. Some reservists wanted the returning Vietnam veterans to clean the barracks for an incoming reserve unit. They confronted Kenny and some other Marines. In the end, the staff sergeant making the request found himself thrown out of the barracks, physically, by Kenny and his cre
w, ass over teakettle. You’re not back seventy-two hours, and people are fucking with you. What is that about?

  By the time he got back to New York for good, his attitude was, My name is Buck and I don’t give a fuck. I did sex, drugs, and rock and roll almost until the age of thirty-two. I drank my way out of more good jobs than most people will ever have the opportunity to have.

  Most likely, he had post-traumatic stress disorder but didn’t know it. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, PTSD symptoms can be grouped into three categories: reexperiencing symptoms, avoidance symptoms, and hyperarousal symptoms. Reexperiencing symptoms include bad dreams, flashbacks, and frightening thoughts that cause problems in a person’s everyday life. Avoidance symptoms may include staying away from reminders of the original traumatic event, depression, worry, and even a tendency to forget the dangerous event itself. Hyperarousal symptoms include being easily startled, tension, trouble sleeping, and anger management issues. Kenny’s PTSD principally seems to take the form of flashes of anger.

  One day, his younger brother, Gary, and some friends invited Kenny to join in a stickball game outside the family residence in Bay Ridge. Some kind of dispute began between Gary and one of the other kids. Kenny taunted his younger brother to stand up for himself and fight, telling him, he recalls, If you don’t stand up for yourself, I will kill you. Apparently, Gary took Kenny at his word and began to fight. At some point, an older boy intervened. Kenny recalls picking up the stickball bat and hitting the older child in the back.

  When that bat hit him right in the small of the back, he was, like, frozen. And he just doubled in half backward, like I severed his spine. He went to the ground, and he couldn’t even breathe; I took his breath away.

  Someone threatened to get the boy’s father. Kenny replied: “You bring your father. I’ll kill your father. I’ll kill him in front of you and fuck your mother in your house.”

  I should have gone to jail for it. It was criminal assault. That kid was hurt.

  Kenny now understands that his early life experiences may have predisposed him to PTSD. Kenny thinks that his father, a World War II veteran who served as a stretcher bearer at the Battle of the Bulge in 1944–45, very likely suffered from his own undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder, which also took the form of drinking and violence.

  Drinking became a significant element in Kenny’s life too. After he returned, his father took him to a Veterans of Foreign Wars post where, Kenny recalls, one of the older World War II members told him that Vietnam was “not a real war.” Kenny believes this was a turning point, a social declaration of what his family was already telling him—that he did not matter. His experiences were not relevant, his thoughts not wanted, his presence not welcome. At this point, Kenny began to grow his hair long. Family members began telling him that he had, indeed, died in Vietnam.

  Also contributing to his tumultuous return was how difficult it was for veterans to find work in the early 1970s. A study written for the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress in 1975 concluded that New York City experienced a net population loss between 1960 and 1973 of 1.7 percent. At the same time, private-sector employment appeared to dry up. The report notes that while total private-sector employment grew 7.4 percent nationally, New York City’s private-sector employment fell by 6.2 percent. Only Philadelphia and Detroit fared worse.8

  Kenny had dropped out of high school. Returning home from the Marine Corps in 1969 with his one Purple Heart and a Navy Commendation Medal, he had difficulty finding work. What he did find were low-paying, dead-end-seeming jobs. Without a high school diploma, he felt he didn’t have the grounds to object.

  Issues related to PTSD began to get in Kenny’s way, most especially the drinking. Excess became a theme in his life. Sex, drugs, and alcohol were all available in abundant quantities, and he used them to distance himself from the trauma of his recent past and the people, places, and institutions that he believed were rejecting him. Uncle Frankie, his mother’s brother, would see him on the street and walk right past.

  Kenny reconnected with his Marine Corps buddy Phineas, who was in California, and decided to visit him. He arrived in San Francisco in the summer of 1969, having left the Marine Corps in January. He remembers seeing Jim Morrison and the Doors perform at the Cow Palace, as well as the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company. Somehow, he got mixed up with LSD. As he thinks of it now, drugs were an effort to make the pain go away. We had this code of good drugs and bad drugs. I was kind of going over to the side where I shouldn’t go.

  After about four years of this kind of life, he took steps toward pulling himself together. By 1973 he was a married father of two and twenty-two years old. His father-in-law got him a job with Union Local 3, where he would make good money as an apprentice electrician. But he had to get a haircut for the job. He refused. Kenny faced a host of pressures, and I think underneath all of that was probably this incredible pain and anger of what I experienced from my eighteenth to my nineteenth year, in the war.

  He had applied to the New York City Police Department when he got out of the Marine Corps but was never called, probably because of the dire financial situation the city found itself in. But in 1974, just as the department was about to close his file, a member of the staff realized that Kenny had relatives on the force. His file was reactivated and a background investigation begun. Kenny recalls that he was smoking marijuana in his house when the background investigator arrived. He took the oath and was sworn in to the police department on February 4, 1974. It didn’t work out.

  This would trigger a truly bad time in his life. More drinking and more drugs, mostly marijuana, followed.

  I was going to hell in a handbasket, and I didn’t even necessarily see it. It’s always, “Well, it’s not my fault; it’s her fault.” Everything was outside myself, like I wasn’t the problem.

  As things deteriorated, serious financial need set in, and he had to take a job as a private security officer at the Breezy Point community where he lived. He felt utterly humiliated, working in what he calls a rinky-dink job for an ex–police officer.

  The New York State Police offered a way out. Kenny became a New York state trooper in 1977 and found the state police force more congenial. Many members of his State Police Academy class had served in the military; they were the first group hired after the end of the hiring freeze of 1975. His wife and children continued to live in the Queens neighborhood of Breezy Point with his in-laws while he commuted to Albany to attend the academy, driving home on weekends. One of the members of his graduating class at the academy had been a childhood friend of William C. Wray, a member of Kenny’s squad killed in Vietnam.9 Finding out about this connection to Billy Wray painfully reminded him of all he had experienced in Vietnam.

  I went out that night and got fucking obliterated—I mean obliterated. I came back and I was a mess and I was crying and couldn’t believe it.

  Despite the troop handler’s explanation that drinking could get him terminated, Kenny didn’t care. He managed to graduate and made friends in the state police barracks in Peekskill. Many of the other troopers there were roughly his age, even though they had been on the job for a few years and had not been in the service. Drinking, women, and running around became common. He recalls that on one of the first nights out with his new colleagues, they told him to take off his wedding band.

  Soon stationed at a different barracks, with older officers, Kenny felt as though he fit right in. But, as he says, my drinking was off the charts. He would do a shift from 7:00 a.m. until 3:00 p.m. and by 3:15 would be at the Fishkill Inn, drinking. Sometimes he couldn’t even drive back to the station house and would need to phone for a lift.

  I was living this wonderful life. I had a wife with three kids at one place. I was working somewhere else. I had all the booze I wanted. If I wanted drugs, I could get all the drugs I wanted. Nobody would ask any questions.

  But it wasn’t enough.

 
; There was this fucking huge emptiness inside of me. There was a hole where my soul and my heart should be and it was just gone.

  Eventually, Kenny began to run into trouble on the job because of his drinking. Civilians complained of abuse. On one occasion, he attended the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Manhattan and then a Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association party. Apparently, the alcohol flowed freely, and Kenny pulled his weapon on a New York City police officer.

  In another incident he got into an argument with a man at a bar, pulled out a revolver, and stuck it in the man’s mouth.

  I have a trigger cocked, and I had a hammer back; I mean, if somebody had said “Don’t,” it could have gone off. I said, “I’ll blow your fucking brains out if you don’t shut the fuck up.” And he just stood there like that, and I just put it away. It wasn’t necessarily the case that it was my intent, but there wasn’t a control to realize, you know, you can deal with this with words. And I guess, really I was drunk, but that’s not an excuse, because the drink or the drug or whatever the fuck it was, was something you choose to do.

  His substance abuse had damaged his reputation on the job, and his anger problem had earned him no real friends. He began to lose his will to live.

  I was just empty; I was totally empty. I thought, “Well, I fucked everything else up.” I had fucked the marriage. People don’t like us, because we went to war. Whatever you did that was right was wrong—it didn’t matter.

  At one point, he devised a plan to kill himself while pretending to be in pursuit of another automobile, thereby providing his wife and children with substantial insurance money. On another occasion, he thought about using a service revolver.

  One morning, instead of committing suicide, he decided to leave a note on his lieutenant’s desk: I just want to advise you that I can no longer be responsible for what I’m doing and I need some help.