The VA

He was a hard drinking, hard living kind of guy.  He lived alone, with his portrait of his fallen comrades, and an etching someone had made for him from the Vietnam War Memorial.  The name inscribed on it belonged to the person who had come to replace him when he finally left Vietnam as the war was winding down. His replacement was killed two days after his arrival, lying in the same bed my patient had used for months before.

Now my patient had joined the ranks of the legions of Veterans for whom we minister care.  For one month out of each year, we rotate through our local VA.  The patients that land on our doorstep are a unique group of people, most of whom have faced combat time in Vietnam, Korea, or the Persian Gulf.  Soon there will be a new crop of Vets who join this older crowd.  They will be the soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan.  They will join the thousands upon thousands of men and women we see in our hospitals who are living the daily devastation that War unleashed decades prior.

Many years ago I went to Vietnam to help those who were battling the ongoing spread of HIV.  My father, initially hesitant to see me go to a country that had been our enemy for so many years, subsequently came out to visit me there. He, like myself, came to be inspired by the Vietnamese people. The kindness that was bestowed upon us was only matched by their fierce pride, and their gracious manner.  It was during that year that I came to have an intense anger towards those who had invaded Vietnam and all those who supported that war.

I recall saying that I felt unsure of how my experience at the VA would be.  I felt fearful that I would face Vets who would tell me with glee how they had participated in the massacre at My Lai, rattling off the number of Vietnamese they had killed.

What I found, however, was an entirely different picture.  The most common diagnosis I saw on almost everyone’s chart read “PTSD” for post-traumatic stress disorder.  Each soldier had his or her own story.  My patient had managed to cope with his pain by drinking until he could make it through a day.  As a result of his many years of hard liquor, his liver was now failing him.  Every month he would come into the hospital and get some fluid drained off his belly.

He and I sat together late one evening after he had been admitted.  I carefully stuck a needle into his abdomen and started the process of removing 5 liters of fluid that had accumulated.  While I worked, he talked.  He told me about his son who had left home and died from a drug overdose at age 30.  He told me about his recurrent nightmares only made worse after September 11. He told me how he had gone into therapy to try to cope with his pain.  Tears trickled down my patients face as he lay there, helplessly watching me try to ease his suffering.

I looked up at him. He had no teeth.  His skin was yellow.  His eyes were bloodshot.  “What do you think of this war we are fighting now?” I quietly asked.  “War is pure evil, he replied.  “I pray for those young men and women over there.”

“ So do I,” I thought.  So do I.

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