mama says gramps has something called ptsd
she says he got it in vietnam
i dont know what ptsd or vietnam is i havent heard of it before
but it sounds epic :))))
Otis “Eddie” Smith Jr. choked up as he recounted the advice his mother gave him as a 20-year-old Marine about to depart for Vietnam.
“She said, ‘You do what’s right in your heart, and you’ll come back to me,’” he said.
As he recalled that moment, his eyes filled with tears. He stood up and left the room, apologizing to a reporter.
Just as his mother hoped, Smith returned from his yearlong tour in Vietnam unscathed, at least to the naked eye. But the 66-year-old Ijamsville resident has continued to cope with the mental and emotional ramifications.
Most often, it’s the memories that inspire tears — things he never talked about until recently. Some pieces of his past he is discussing for the first time in this interview — of water running down dirt paths stained red with blood and bodies left on the side of the Que Son Mountains for days before helicopters could retrieve them.
It doesn’t take a war story to bring on waves of emotion, though.
“I can be driving down the road, and my emotions just start for no reason,” Smith said.
He recalled a recent conversation with a fellow customer at Home Depot. The woman told him that her son was a machine gunner in the Marine Corps. He immediately thought back to a machine gunner in his squad with the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, who was killed in combat.
Fresh tears filled his eyes as he explained the connection.
“It really shook me up,” he said.
Smith is not alone. About 271,000 Vietnam theater veterans have post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as a specific subcategory called war-zone post-traumatic stress disorder, according to a 2015 study published by the American Medical Association. The subcategory applies specifically to people who experienced trauma in a violent war zone.
About a third of those veterans also suffer from depression, more than four decades after the war.
Smith returned home from frontline combat in 1970. For the first 40 years, he threw himself into his work, rising through the ranks to various leadership positions for large construction and development companies in Maryland.
It kept him busy, kept the difficult thoughts at bay. When those memories caught up with him, he turned to alcohol for comfort.
