Pee Dee area Vietnam veterans seek treatment for PTSD 40 years later
Never too late to heal hidden war wounds
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Jim and Tamera Caulder pose for a photo June 28 on her parent's front porch in...
Toni and Cecil Stack pose for a portrait underneath a painting of their son, Sgt.
By: | SCNow
Published: July 07, 2012
Published: July 07, 2012
It has been 42 years since retired Army 1st Sgt. Cecil Stack completed two tours of duty in Vietnam. He now lives a laid-back life with his wife, Toni, in Lake City. Most days are filled with fishing and church, but from time to time certain memories weigh on his mind.
One particular story centers around a young GI from Texas whose helicopter that went into a hot LZ (a landing zone surrounded by Vietcong shooting at American troops) took a lot of rounds and flipped over.
The young man, a good friend whose last name was Williams, had half of his body caught under the burning aircraft and while Cecil and fellow soldiers worked to get him out he asked them to just shoot him and then the helicopter exploded.
“I just remember that in particular, real close, and it bothered me a long time,” Cecil says quietly. It’s a story he first recounted only two years ago.
But overall he doesn’t talk about his time deployed. In fact his family said he’s not a very talkative person at all.
Now, at 77, he’s beginning to learn how to talk about his feelings, memories and how they’ve affected him and his family.
Last year at the urging of Toni, 77, his daughter Tamera Caulder, 54, and a family physician, he began treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) through the Veterans Affairs’ community clinic in Florence.
He never planned to see a “nut doctor” or “head shrinker” and jokes with fellow veterans who ask that they must think he’s crazy. But at the end of the day he had to listen to his second-in-command and set aside the negative stereotypes associated with asking for help that he learned as a younger man.
A different time
At 15 Cecil lied about his age to join the National Guard and by 17, he was in the Army. He came from a long line of military men, dating back to his great grandfather in Germany before the family immigrated to the United States. He was fascinated with learning the weaponry, and there was a different feeling across the country.
“Back when we were growing up in the 40s, there was a war on and younger people were more patriotic as far as serving the country,” Cecil said.
He did a tour in Korea, and when he came back he started dating Toni, who he’d known since fourth grade. Three months later they were married, and after she graduated from Lake City High School, she joined him at Fort Bragg, N.C.
That’s when the effects of war first began showing.
Cecil began talking in his sleep night after night, telling Toni about things he’d seen and how worried he was for the Korean children he’d watched scavenge for food in trash cans.
After a few years in Germany, four children and some time in Alaska, he was sent to his first tour in Vietnam.
“Went from 10 below zero and then when we got into Vietnam, it was about 120 degrees,” Cecil said.
The weather wasn’t the only thing foreign, though. The guerrilla fighting style was new to the troops, with the enemy hidden in the dense jungle around them. From what he’s heard and read, Cecil said it’s more like what’s happening now in Iraq and Afghanistan where unseen IEDs are a big threat and the line between civilians and combatants is blurred.
“What I always hated was the mortar rounds. I was in the 9th infantry division and our base camp, we got hit every night for nine months with mortars. Every night,” Cecil said, sounding exhausted just thinking about it.
It was different when he came home, too. Instead of getting the hero treatment with parades and welcome banners, soldiers were met with protests and taunting.
“When we went into the airport in San Francisco, and there were some of those crazy clowns around there calling us ‘baby-killers’ and all that and one of them spit on me,” Cecil said. “And I told him, ‘You do not spit on this Army uniform’ and I hit him, knocked him right on his rear end.”
To this day when he tells the story though, Cecil makes sure to recount building a safety bunker for children in an orphanage that was heavily shelled by the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese Army, not the Americans.
The family toll
After his second tour in Vietnam, Cecil’s symptoms were worse than just talking. In the late 1970s, he began having violent nightmares and flashbacks.
He’d start shaking the bed at night and sometimes Toni woke up with him pulling her by the collar of her pajama top or hitting her. He has injured himself diving out of bed and over the years it got worse.
Toni said she never sleeps well and worries that if she falls into a deep sleep, she won’t be able to wake Cecil up or he’ll fall just right to get seriously injured one day.
“We had no idea what was causing it and at first, I just thought he wasn’t sleepy. We’d never heard of things like that back then, so you just took it in stride and when anything happened, they surely didn’t go to the doctor,” Toni said.
Tamera considers herself lucky to have a father who always worked hard and provided for the family.
But, he was emotionally distant and short-tempered. The kids called him “the grouch,” and Toni said he was hard-hearted.
Tamera said that now that she’s read up on PTSD symptoms, so many small instances where her dad was emotionally walled off or angered by certain things now make sense.
Later in life she saw the same patterns in her husband, Jim, 62, who was just 18 when he was sent to Vietnam in the Navy.
Tamera admits that it took her some time getting counseling through McLeod for her to come to terms with the fact that when her husband or father seems distant, she shouldn’t take it personally.
For Toni, she didn’t know any other way than to tough it out with a stiff upper lip – a burden she’s been able to carry with grace.
“Military wives are just different,” Cecil said. “They have to be tough.”
Triggers
Though married for 23 years, it wasn’t until Jim was diagnosed with cancer in 2009 that Tamera even found out that he had served in Vietnam.
He openly told people he served his country in the Navy, but didn’t see any point in telling people where he served and wanted to avoid questions about it.
But as his diagnosis brought the family back into contact with the VA, it came out and he explained having what he calls “stupid dreams” and his emotional distance worsened.
That’s when it became clear a professional might be able to help him out.
For Cecil, the symptoms, anger and jumpiness got noticeably worse to those around him after his son, Sgt. Maj. Michael Stack, was killed while serving in Iraq in 2004. He was a 28-year-old special forces member and was shot when his team was ambushed.
After seeing how the extreme grief exacerbated her father’s PTSD, Tamera now worries about the long-term effects the men who tried to save her brother will have, knowing it was a battle convincing the men in her life to seek overdue treatment.
Coping
PTSD is not a new condition, though open discussion has only reached the mainstream in recent decades, and has been called everything from “shell shock,” to “combat fatigue.”
But discussing the feelings and grief brought on by war, a necessary step in coping, was something soldiers weren’t taught to do. In fact it was drilled into them to stay composed, show no emotion and not “waste time” talking about things in the past that can’t be changed.
“We were trained not to show emotions, because if a person were to show emotions and break down and boo-hoo and all that sort of thing every time a guy say got zapped or wounded or killed or what have you, by God in a good battle you’d be nuts. You wouldn’t be worth a nickel and you’d get your own self killed,” Cecil said.
Even the Army slang like saying someone “got zapped” or “bought the farm” helped soldiers keep emotional distance from the harsh reality of seeing brothers die.
That defense mechanism called emotional numbing isn’t always a conscious decision, but it can continue for decades.
Dr. Robert Howell, the lead psychiatrist at the Wm. Jennings Bryan Dorn VA Medical Center in Columbia and a PTSD specialist, said the Catch 22 can make getting a veteran’s foot in the door the hardest part of treatment, even if old taboos are slowly receding.
“Everybody treating PTSD still runs into the problem that the very nature of the condition is to avoid talking about it and in military culture, no one wants to talk about it,” Howell said. “We’ve got to break the stigma of coming in and treating it, and that’s something we’re always working on.”
Howell’s colleague, Dr. Diana Thorne, agreed, saying it’s important to recognize the commitment it takes for a veteran to talk about their experiences.
“It takes a great deal of courage to come forward and get care, it’s very heroic and courageous,” Thorne said. “We are very mindful of the sacrifices they’ve made and make sure to thank them and take time to hear about their circumstance and make sure they understand what PTSD treatment entails.”
And unlike decades past though the VA is not the only avenue available to veterans.
Many groups exist to help new veterans, but Hidden Wounds aims to help any veteran struggling with the lasting psychological effects serving in a war zone can have.
The volunteer-run group started in Columbia in 2010 and has served 700 vets already, about 55 percent of whom are out of state.
Marine Cpl. Steven Diaz is one of the directors and was injured in Iraq in 2005. He said the organization sees a lot of people who served in Iraq and Afghanistan just because there are so many coming home right now, but they are open to any vet. He said the major advantage to the organization is that veterans can get help from other veterans because they can relate to one another in a way others can’t. Plus the group will quickly line vets up with a licensed therapist within five miles of their home and help cover the cost if insurance or the family can’t pay it all.
The confidentiality also negates the fear of a paper trail he said many veterans have because they don’t want mental health care to factor into promotions in the military or private sector after retirement.
“This is tailored to fit veterans and we’re people oriented,” Diaz said. “There’s always someone on call to talk to and it’s a holistic way of looking at it. We’re not just sending you to a doctor because everyone’s way of healing is not the same.”
That’s something Howell emphasized, too: There are better ways to treat PTSD now than ever, allowing treatment to be tailor-made.
New research-based PTSD treatment-techniques have come to the VA in just the past five years. The standard options of one-on-one sessions with a psychiatrist, group counseling and marital counseling are still used but there is also new medication, cognitive processing therapy and prolonged exposure therapy.
Though there is no cure for PTSD, treatment is about learning constructive ways to cope with the emotional scars war can leave. Thorne said she’s had patients who served in Vietnam who dove for cover when they heard helicopters or walked out of military graduations when guns were fired, but that coping means carrying on with life without beating one’s self up or blocking others out.
Cecil is a bit calmer now, less ornery and less likely to “fly off the handle.” He said the medication he’s on helps him sleep better, even if he’s still jumpy.
As for Jim, he said the one-on-one therapy has allowed him to open up to a doctor he trusts and he feels better, with less anger, less road rage and fewer nightmares. Tamera can vouch that it’s helping him deal with emotions. He used to worry what other people would think of him for asking for help; now he’s just happy to be closer to the people he loves.
“I come home to her [Tamera] every night, not them,” Jim said. “You can keep it in and that’s fine at first, but you’ll have a short temper and cause havoc for the people around you and that’s not a good feeling. What people say doesn’t matter. Family, that’s what matters.”
One particular story centers around a young GI from Texas whose helicopter that went into a hot LZ (a landing zone surrounded by Vietcong shooting at American troops) took a lot of rounds and flipped over.
The young man, a good friend whose last name was Williams, had half of his body caught under the burning aircraft and while Cecil and fellow soldiers worked to get him out he asked them to just shoot him and then the helicopter exploded.
“I just remember that in particular, real close, and it bothered me a long time,” Cecil says quietly. It’s a story he first recounted only two years ago.
But overall he doesn’t talk about his time deployed. In fact his family said he’s not a very talkative person at all.
Now, at 77, he’s beginning to learn how to talk about his feelings, memories and how they’ve affected him and his family.
Last year at the urging of Toni, 77, his daughter Tamera Caulder, 54, and a family physician, he began treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) through the Veterans Affairs’ community clinic in Florence.
He never planned to see a “nut doctor” or “head shrinker” and jokes with fellow veterans who ask that they must think he’s crazy. But at the end of the day he had to listen to his second-in-command and set aside the negative stereotypes associated with asking for help that he learned as a younger man.
A different time
At 15 Cecil lied about his age to join the National Guard and by 17, he was in the Army. He came from a long line of military men, dating back to his great grandfather in Germany before the family immigrated to the United States. He was fascinated with learning the weaponry, and there was a different feeling across the country.
“Back when we were growing up in the 40s, there was a war on and younger people were more patriotic as far as serving the country,” Cecil said.
He did a tour in Korea, and when he came back he started dating Toni, who he’d known since fourth grade. Three months later they were married, and after she graduated from Lake City High School, she joined him at Fort Bragg, N.C.
That’s when the effects of war first began showing.
Cecil began talking in his sleep night after night, telling Toni about things he’d seen and how worried he was for the Korean children he’d watched scavenge for food in trash cans.
After a few years in Germany, four children and some time in Alaska, he was sent to his first tour in Vietnam.
“Went from 10 below zero and then when we got into Vietnam, it was about 120 degrees,” Cecil said.
The weather wasn’t the only thing foreign, though. The guerrilla fighting style was new to the troops, with the enemy hidden in the dense jungle around them. From what he’s heard and read, Cecil said it’s more like what’s happening now in Iraq and Afghanistan where unseen IEDs are a big threat and the line between civilians and combatants is blurred.
“What I always hated was the mortar rounds. I was in the 9th infantry division and our base camp, we got hit every night for nine months with mortars. Every night,” Cecil said, sounding exhausted just thinking about it.
It was different when he came home, too. Instead of getting the hero treatment with parades and welcome banners, soldiers were met with protests and taunting.
“When we went into the airport in San Francisco, and there were some of those crazy clowns around there calling us ‘baby-killers’ and all that and one of them spit on me,” Cecil said. “And I told him, ‘You do not spit on this Army uniform’ and I hit him, knocked him right on his rear end.”
To this day when he tells the story though, Cecil makes sure to recount building a safety bunker for children in an orphanage that was heavily shelled by the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese Army, not the Americans.
The family toll
After his second tour in Vietnam, Cecil’s symptoms were worse than just talking. In the late 1970s, he began having violent nightmares and flashbacks.
He’d start shaking the bed at night and sometimes Toni woke up with him pulling her by the collar of her pajama top or hitting her. He has injured himself diving out of bed and over the years it got worse.
Toni said she never sleeps well and worries that if she falls into a deep sleep, she won’t be able to wake Cecil up or he’ll fall just right to get seriously injured one day.
“We had no idea what was causing it and at first, I just thought he wasn’t sleepy. We’d never heard of things like that back then, so you just took it in stride and when anything happened, they surely didn’t go to the doctor,” Toni said.
Tamera considers herself lucky to have a father who always worked hard and provided for the family.
But, he was emotionally distant and short-tempered. The kids called him “the grouch,” and Toni said he was hard-hearted.
Tamera said that now that she’s read up on PTSD symptoms, so many small instances where her dad was emotionally walled off or angered by certain things now make sense.
Later in life she saw the same patterns in her husband, Jim, 62, who was just 18 when he was sent to Vietnam in the Navy.
Tamera admits that it took her some time getting counseling through McLeod for her to come to terms with the fact that when her husband or father seems distant, she shouldn’t take it personally.
For Toni, she didn’t know any other way than to tough it out with a stiff upper lip – a burden she’s been able to carry with grace.
“Military wives are just different,” Cecil said. “They have to be tough.”
Triggers
Though married for 23 years, it wasn’t until Jim was diagnosed with cancer in 2009 that Tamera even found out that he had served in Vietnam.
He openly told people he served his country in the Navy, but didn’t see any point in telling people where he served and wanted to avoid questions about it.
But as his diagnosis brought the family back into contact with the VA, it came out and he explained having what he calls “stupid dreams” and his emotional distance worsened.
That’s when it became clear a professional might be able to help him out.
For Cecil, the symptoms, anger and jumpiness got noticeably worse to those around him after his son, Sgt. Maj. Michael Stack, was killed while serving in Iraq in 2004. He was a 28-year-old special forces member and was shot when his team was ambushed.
After seeing how the extreme grief exacerbated her father’s PTSD, Tamera now worries about the long-term effects the men who tried to save her brother will have, knowing it was a battle convincing the men in her life to seek overdue treatment.
Coping
PTSD is not a new condition, though open discussion has only reached the mainstream in recent decades, and has been called everything from “shell shock,” to “combat fatigue.”
But discussing the feelings and grief brought on by war, a necessary step in coping, was something soldiers weren’t taught to do. In fact it was drilled into them to stay composed, show no emotion and not “waste time” talking about things in the past that can’t be changed.
“We were trained not to show emotions, because if a person were to show emotions and break down and boo-hoo and all that sort of thing every time a guy say got zapped or wounded or killed or what have you, by God in a good battle you’d be nuts. You wouldn’t be worth a nickel and you’d get your own self killed,” Cecil said.
Even the Army slang like saying someone “got zapped” or “bought the farm” helped soldiers keep emotional distance from the harsh reality of seeing brothers die.
That defense mechanism called emotional numbing isn’t always a conscious decision, but it can continue for decades.
Dr. Robert Howell, the lead psychiatrist at the Wm. Jennings Bryan Dorn VA Medical Center in Columbia and a PTSD specialist, said the Catch 22 can make getting a veteran’s foot in the door the hardest part of treatment, even if old taboos are slowly receding.
“Everybody treating PTSD still runs into the problem that the very nature of the condition is to avoid talking about it and in military culture, no one wants to talk about it,” Howell said. “We’ve got to break the stigma of coming in and treating it, and that’s something we’re always working on.”
Howell’s colleague, Dr. Diana Thorne, agreed, saying it’s important to recognize the commitment it takes for a veteran to talk about their experiences.
“It takes a great deal of courage to come forward and get care, it’s very heroic and courageous,” Thorne said. “We are very mindful of the sacrifices they’ve made and make sure to thank them and take time to hear about their circumstance and make sure they understand what PTSD treatment entails.”
And unlike decades past though the VA is not the only avenue available to veterans.
Many groups exist to help new veterans, but Hidden Wounds aims to help any veteran struggling with the lasting psychological effects serving in a war zone can have.
The volunteer-run group started in Columbia in 2010 and has served 700 vets already, about 55 percent of whom are out of state.
Marine Cpl. Steven Diaz is one of the directors and was injured in Iraq in 2005. He said the organization sees a lot of people who served in Iraq and Afghanistan just because there are so many coming home right now, but they are open to any vet. He said the major advantage to the organization is that veterans can get help from other veterans because they can relate to one another in a way others can’t. Plus the group will quickly line vets up with a licensed therapist within five miles of their home and help cover the cost if insurance or the family can’t pay it all.
The confidentiality also negates the fear of a paper trail he said many veterans have because they don’t want mental health care to factor into promotions in the military or private sector after retirement.
“This is tailored to fit veterans and we’re people oriented,” Diaz said. “There’s always someone on call to talk to and it’s a holistic way of looking at it. We’re not just sending you to a doctor because everyone’s way of healing is not the same.”
That’s something Howell emphasized, too: There are better ways to treat PTSD now than ever, allowing treatment to be tailor-made.
New research-based PTSD treatment-techniques have come to the VA in just the past five years. The standard options of one-on-one sessions with a psychiatrist, group counseling and marital counseling are still used but there is also new medication, cognitive processing therapy and prolonged exposure therapy.
Though there is no cure for PTSD, treatment is about learning constructive ways to cope with the emotional scars war can leave. Thorne said she’s had patients who served in Vietnam who dove for cover when they heard helicopters or walked out of military graduations when guns were fired, but that coping means carrying on with life without beating one’s self up or blocking others out.
Cecil is a bit calmer now, less ornery and less likely to “fly off the handle.” He said the medication he’s on helps him sleep better, even if he’s still jumpy.
As for Jim, he said the one-on-one therapy has allowed him to open up to a doctor he trusts and he feels better, with less anger, less road rage and fewer nightmares. Tamera can vouch that it’s helping him deal with emotions. He used to worry what other people would think of him for asking for help; now he’s just happy to be closer to the people he loves.
“I come home to her [Tamera] every night, not them,” Jim said. “You can keep it in and that’s fine at first, but you’ll have a short temper and cause havoc for the people around you and that’s not a good feeling. What people say doesn’t matter. Family, that’s what matters.”
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