To Whom It May Concern:

From: William L. Sansom 23-785-835

Date: December 30, 2007

Before I was diagnosed with PTSD, I never gave it much thought or credence. Whatever was wrong was certainly something more immediate. I knew I had episodes or moments that might be considered unusual.

What gives each of us strength? Faith, hope, belief, home, loyalty?

Belief in one self … belief in another … or belief in honor, country, your commanding officer, the rectitude of Washington?

We started out as a platoon. During 1-1/2 months we moved towards Chu Lai and our outfit dwindled steadily. We were used as a blocking force against the NVA moving east towards Hue and encounters became more and more frequent.

The village – burning hooches and then later seeing a tableau of our lieutenant and a helpless medical corpsman – both frozen and staring at the mother before them holding her infant with a bullet hole through the baby’s head. There was no bandage the corpsman could offer or command the lieutenant could give. Our noble fight against an unseen enemy had done this as well. I don’t think anyone of us have ever walked away from this for the rest of our lives.

Snipers take us one at a time for days. Mortars take us at night – less personal. If it doesn’t land in a hole, you’ll probably live, assuming you made it to the hole. You’re supposed to make it.

We set ambushes with claymores, auto-fire, kill zones of crossing fire and grenades. Unimaginable violence of directed metal ripping through flesh – much continuing on – maybe someone’s body provided enough tissue resistance to slow the metal to a stop. Next to me, a guy I know must be trying to catch all this churning metal with his chest and arms.

Helicopter assault. Charging machine gun. Watching my friend seem to disappear as he was hit with nine rounds at once. There are holes and there are gulleys where tumbling bullets passed like ice cream scoops, carving huge blood furrows along his arms, his neck and his chest. The ones that hit his chest tumbled to a stop inside him and the rest continued on their trajectory. But all of the rounds picked him up, yanked him like a rag and smashed him to the ground 10 feet away.

I was sure the quivering, shocky flesh sculpture – changing to a deep red all over was actually my friend, who 15 minutes ago, amazed me with a brilliant Gary Cooper imitation. It was so good that for a minute then I wasn’t in Viet Nam, part of a walking right flank part of a decimated platoon of 48 marines that couldn’t understand why we weren’t re-supplied. My friend’s imitation of Gary Cooper put me back in my living room watching Coop outsmart Walter Brennan. For a moment I wasn’t there I was here. After my friend’s horrific exit, no matter what living room I am in, I am still there. There were just 23 of us at that point and 15 minutes later there were only 17.

I was number 18.

Mostly it seems like no matter how fast or strong I can be something important is suddenly gone. Whatever matters to me can be ripped out of my hands in a second – by something I will never be able to see unless I spend absolutely every second watching.

Too often, I can’t see past this looping pattern and realize I’m mostly in a state of frustration, then of rage. The ability to instinctively react full tilt in a heartbeat was so important then. For years after Viet Nam it helped me rescue babies on escalators, old men between the train and the platform, anybody getting mugged. No problem. No choice.

Now? My nurtured “full tilt” is howling at a dark moon. And the dreaded “So what?

And then I know I receded somewhere, just like then, running to the suddenly unmanned machine position. Whatever this is now is so important like helping somebody with their groceries or finding some answer, but everyone here doesn’t understand the life and death quality of my exaggerated behavior. The quality I should have shown even stronger so that my friend might still be standing next to me – joking about Gary Cooper. I keep saying, “just try harder, move faster.” I’m never fast enough. Everything still seems to blow up in my face. Can’t stop. Try again and watch out for that guy, and that guy and that guy.

Almost never can you actually see the enemy. Years later, I realize they often didn’t see us but mostly I thought of us marines as large people with lots of gear and boots who never spent a lot of time in the jungle. I believed all the enemy grew up in or near this foliage. That we had driver’s licenses and cars back home didn’t help us there.

I can barely remember any time we weren’t on the move with too much to carry. We hacked. They weaved. We glanced anxiously. They probably watched. To live is to be intensely suspicious of everything around you. Even later, after walking away from some place that remained calm, there is lingering suspicion. It’s your responsibility to be more than vigilant. Be distrustful of apparent calm because every other day or so some part of it will explode with machine fire, out of the lushest green foliage or rocks and trees or in the dark. Or a sunny morning. I don’t think any of us ever thought about reaction time. Later you simply are alive but there are always fewer of you. I wasn’t suspicious enough for them.

For some reason that seemed so important, then we still had to go on and have the world jump out at us again. What would hold you together is camaraderie.

At some point we had become the target of a sniper. I was sent along with a few other guys to find him. We worked our way along the side of a river. We had spread too far apart and I became separated. I spotted another marine ahead of me but from a different company.

When a sudden downpour hit, we both ducked into this isolated grass shelter. After review – how are paths crossed and where our outfits probably were, we waited a few minutes for the rain to stop. We talked about home and girls and music and then he sang a verse and chorus of John Sebastian’s “Younger Girl.” Good enough to break hearts. Later we were running together back towards massive gunfire – surely from our units. I had dried out a little from the rain but suddenly my left side was all wet again and red covered with bits of pink. He had caught a round through his left temple. It had exited his right eye and carried everything onto my cheek and neck and arm. His blond hair was untouched. We thought we might get together back home and talk about getting a band together with him singing and me playing guitar. You could see a little blonde hair caught in the bag zipper.

At this point, there was only about half my company left and I had let myself get close to that guy in about 20 minutes of talk. I must have lost it because even though I could see the bag, they kept telling me he was alive to calm me down.

Never get close. Everything is snatched away in one horrified second.

Everyone I was even a little bit close to.

We had started out as a full platoon and even when we were down to 23 men, I know I held my own with every other man but it seemed like if someone got a little close to me …

I lied to Dr. McMath during my last interview. I haven’t worked in years. I told McMath I did research and welding. I have no idea how to weld. Maybe solder. And nobody has ever used even a scrap of my “research.” But I felt such a wall of shame I couldn’t admit. I keep thinking I am capable. Just like then -- with a right leg blown through and my own pink flesh bits from my right leg covering my left leg.

On the last day (for me) our 23-man platoon was moving in three squads or flanks. Explosions. Deafening automatic fire. The left flank had walked into a “wall” of fire and was immediately wiped out. The center and right flank that I was in ran to help. That’s when my friend who did Coop so well was hit by all those rounds and was yanked away to eternity. But the “wall” never stopped firing billions of bullets all around everyone. I knew it was important to get to the left flank’s position for any return crossfire or maybe I was told to. I raced broken field with all the speed I had known as a winning soccer player across 50 or 70 feet of open terrain to a machine gun position. Like a movie scene with bullet presets, bullets, dust and dirt flew up all around me narrowly missing my always capable speed. Until an AK-47 round caught my right tibia so solidly as to spin me around in mid-air. Most of my life’s stupid falls were forever forgotten as an unseen hand steadied my landing and guided the rest of the run on my smashed right leg.

I must have used the fat compress bandage from belt pack to keep from passing out. The only other guy alive near the position I hadn’t quite reached was on his back using both hands to push his intestines back in. He called for his mother and I didn’t think it was even a little bit funny. I looked down at my own legs and saw lots of pink flesh bits and some boot leather and green fatigues cotton from my right leg all over the inside of left leg. And still the wall was firing and I did my best to return fire. To live a little longer. They had us just like we had done them other times and things were getting worse. Not long. My arms stretched among the fallen near me for their ammo magazines when I ran out. I must be capable.

I couldn’t admit to Dr. McMath to what degree I had fallen now. Nor could I tell him any of this. Or anyone else. Sometimes at night I realize I am searching as far as my arms will reach among the fallen for ammo magazines because mine has run out. I don’t know why Donna stays with me.

Twenty or 30 years ago, while I was living in New York City I began a to realize I was having a special brand of nightmares. I would be on the beach where I grew up and hearing a thrum thrum sound louder than the waves. The dots in the sky took shape. They were the helicopters that my unit had flown during an assault but now they were coming for us – my friends, children I know, everyone I grew up with were racing for our secret paths we had blazed as kids. But we were not fast enough. As I dove headlong to pull a girl and her dog to safety, several rounds caught me midair, all along the left side of my chest and legs and I hurtled forever away from the safe memories of home.

It was another repeating nightmare and I desperately wanted to deny it.

I have never been able to talk about these things to anyone. At most, I would see something in another man’s eyes and I knew his truth or pain or whatever. I think I was always right.

So I made my first attempt to reach out. I flew to Washington and headed straight to the Memorial Wall at 2:00 in the afternoon. I stared ahead, lost inside memories behind the smooth black surface.

Then I glanced at everyone else.

I left in complete tears trying to hide my face myself, our loss.

Nowhere could I find the cavalier gloss that had helped me around this. Looking back to any previous time, I always see myself as somehow always “reactive” even if I started it.

Because of Dr. Dwivedi’s gentle, but firm persistence, I have finally started this writing. I was out of excuses and I stared at the page many long times. I want to imagine a change in the future. Maybe not instantaneously. Things are already better and worse. I never realized how close to the surface all this was. After 40 years it’s like yesterday afternoon and I know I could write another hundred pages easily. But I have been hyperventilating through every second of this. And I think I won’t ever want to look at this again afterwards.

Pinned down in high grass, all of us, including the South Vietnamese Army guys we were supposed to take along with us. CAC, a combined action company. My squad had our few “good gooks” back at an army artillery hill near Chu Lai. I was told we had to retake that hill from NVA because our army couldn’t hold on to it. Probably marine corps bullshit to get you to do something no one in his right mind would ever, ever do. Mostly, I can vividly remember the absurd horror of climbing steep surfaces with bullets ringing off rocks around us. I had no idea where the fire was coming from – it seemed everywhere. If you try to return fire, you’d probably fall. The craziness seemed stupendously funny, like a bunch of guys with machine guns all hanging from swinging ropes and shooting at each other. But the hill wasn’t that steep and absolutely nobody was laughing.

Days later on top of the hill we first met our South Vietnamese Army guys. As marines we all had M-16s. Sleek shaped, Darth Vader injection molded plastic assault rifles. I came to revere mine. Especially that day when I thought I was following that sniper. He had suddenly veered from the river’s edge and started to jump rock to rock in a 25-foot wide swift moving body of water. I followed across without thinking. When he clambered over the ridge on the other side and turned and saw me, he blasted machine gunfire at me, water and rocks. I had already slipped and started a high speed pratfall going completely under the surface, rifle and all. And when I surfaced with my soaking wet M-16 I sprayed the top of the ridge like a goofy take on “Rambo.” Of course that guy was well gone. But my rifle worked and it could do no wrong. I followed up and over into a French graveyard (I’m told) with obliquely angled hedgerows and mounds above the short grass. I had never seen such a thing.

But back to the top of the hill guys all the South Vietnamese guys had M-1 carbines, which were made not out of plastic but with polished wooden stocks and grips. I had trained with an M-14, a larger, all business, and supremely excellent bringer of distant death. They had wood too but, to me, they were too firmly entrenched in my mental department of serious death tool respect, quite beyond any of notion of art or displaced antiquity.

You must understand the profound relationship so relentlessly instilled in each one of us between a marine and his rifle. The marine next to you may die. Try and help him but don’t drop your rifle. Or your arms or legs. They are attached, as well. Changing to an M-16 from the M-14 was like a divorce and newly arranged wedding. I felt somehow disloyal and feckless. Over a rifle. We were pretty loyal to each other too but don’t drop your rifle. That is whom each one of us slept with. Think one day the war is over for you and they send you back and you’re not still that way for a week or two? Try most of the minutes and seconds for the rest of your life. Taking that rifle away was like an amputation. Here marine, you and that rifle welded to you (in life and death which was reaffirmed pretty much every day in combat) are both government property. That is up until now. Take your shattered leg and dreams and step suddenly into a world of people who can’t possibly understand what we’ve done to you. This is 1968 so you’re on your own with all that stuff percolating inside you for about 40 years. Don’t call us, we’ll call you. I don’t need Charles Whitman up in the Texas tower nightmares. I’m quite glad I don’t have my rifle now.

I think I was a much nicer guy before daily combat with a futility award. Wars are only fought by 20 year olds. Careful with that honor and quick belief stuff. Think “man test,” rite of passage, severely focused hormones, the indescribable first taste of passion and fear. All those things will melt. But not the indelible damage and “so what?” of it. The futility award.

It’s all self-regenerating in sweat every couple of nights. Especially if you can’t, won’t or don’t know how to talk about it. You could ask anybody who has known me, for example. I doubt I’ve said even four sentences of what is in this writing for 40 years and I doubt I will ever put myself or anyone else through this again. I know this will not free me – even tomorrow – but for the first time in 40 years of clenched teeth, it has a face. Up to now I had clenched eyes.

I have heard that when you lose somebody it’s natural to feel anger for the loss and guilt … that it was them and not you. For me they nearly all died and I only got wounded and my anger over the skyscraper “so what?!” of it turns me into a raging asshole all of the time and that none of this can ever be a foxhole for me or any dead and constant friends. They visited for years and we yell at each other. But real people back off frightened, bewildered at my screaming and later I’m desperately trying to retrace a path to apology. Again, I’m bewildered too. If this unbidden thing won’t stop maybe I can be further away. To even those next to me.

My engagement to my rifle took formal vows when full automatic fire and controlled bursts became part of mine and everyone else’s skill set.

One day it was a tree but within a week I cut a man in half emptying a full magazine into someone. It was that guy I had chased across the water who gave away his position when he tried to shoot a helicopter that suddenly flew overhead. In the French graveyard. Maybe all the extra fire to end the war faster. Or avenge my friends. Or focus this new emotion of universal hatred of everything that wasn’t just like me. Or more likely because just before that moment I was scared out of my mind and didn’t trust just a few bullets.

I think all of us were basically nice guys with training. Until the remaining half of us realized one day that maybe nobody’s going home and we might never know why we couldn’t be resupplied.

Through the veil of exhaustion, little sleep, dwindling ammo, denser jungle, resolve is replaced by ferocious desperation and will to live. Maybe if I kill this guy deader, my rifle and I can sleep tonight.

God, I am glad some of this is out. You can’t imagine what a festering, still angry boil on the inside this has been. I’ve felt guilty about feeling guilty and frustrated that it only surfaces as rage. I can’t believe we all don’t deserve better. Even the dead. For the sake of the living.

Addendum: I stopped to think of this in terms of original purpose. When I finally started writing it simply poured out in pretty much one long broken session. I was panting, scattered, focused, unfocused, frantic and filled with the terrible resolve to birth the “terrible unspoken” that might give me peace. Or redemption. Or at least finding out what the formal charges are that I hold against myself.

Like I didn’t mention it but I know that when my Coop imitator friend who got blown away by all that terrible metal at once, it was because he had taken position just “before.” That is, “instead” of me at the apex of three big rocks that we thought would provide great cover. But when his first tracer rounds were identified and visually located by the “wall of fire,” those same three boulders now focused all of the walls’ automatic fire into the same narrow spot occupied by my friend, like all those fuckers got “bulls eye by default.” The leftover wreckage of his physical self was instantly transported to some place ten feet away to a deepening red puddle. His sense of spirit and humor and caring and courage left for the grace of another plane of existence. When I saw him again in my hallucinations of the dead (I desperately assume we all have something like this, DO NOT TELL ME), he was still funny and kind. And truthful. And didn’t hold me in the least accountable for him instead of me getting blasted from this realm by being hurled into a terrible blender face first. He could still smile more peaceful than funny but it looked as if the grave had it’s way with him, except for the last time (I didn’t know at the time it was the last visit/hallucination) when he looked great, not even sweaty like how I first met him and was amazed. He didn’t even yell at me for not trying to bandage up his dead body quicker when we were still in the middle of a losing ambush firefight and somebody had to yank me back to the desperate task of staying alive and moments before we’re about to be overrun. (Don’t miss this chance assholes, we wouldn’t.) We were saved by the hand of God or at least his bad advice that caused one our units, like a weapons platoon, to get unaccountably (it wasn’t that hard) lost, stumble into what was left of us and thankfully blow the “wall” to the kingdom of bejesus with frightening amounts of mortar and I think RPG fire. I had already been hit maybe forty-five minutes ago. It was four or more hours of suppression fire before a helicopter could get anywhere near us. We were still killing and they were still killing even as I was medevaced out.

But don’t think I wasn’t sweaty night haunted in dark jungles of guilt by what happened in a heartbeat to my friend and not me. Until he/I let me go. Calm water.

The next moment of profound sorrow for me, to say nothing of him, connected me back to Cold Spring Harbor High School.

I believe that most of the good parts about myself came from immediate home and high school. I remember even playing halfback with Charlie Ross and Steve Burczak on our nearly champion soccer team where Ralph Whitney taught me how much heart you can have in a team. Much of the ferocious passion in my marine corps fire team in Viet Nam was learned through years of intense play with the solid team in soccer. It mattered.

I can’t believe I still cling to an ancient innocence. Face it, soccer was love of game, team-mates, school pride, etc. Motivation in Viet Nam was like learning the Dark Side of the Force with a side order of Fear.

To me, the four years of our class of CSH’64, defining its own way, heedless of the normal of example of the upperclasses, produced a kind of wide eyed take on the world you only get once, at the birth of a school. Learning to be cynical was a few years away. We were the first graduating class of ninety-six kids who believed in the world. Only one Kennedy had been assassinated so far. The country still had his glow. My innocence was about to be mugged.

But I would not get the connective collision of Cold Spring Harbor and Viet Nam until my eighth month in a New York Veteran’s hospital in 1968. I was recovering from further surgery that saved my right leg but kept me in isolation on an upper floor. The first visit from a friend at Cold Spring was the best and the worst. It was Steve Burczack. The world’s most reliable left halfback was in a wheelchair with both legs blown off beneath the knees. A mine had come up through the bottom of his army tank in Viet Nam. No more running like the wind, passing the ball at just the right moment. We would never be racing again toward the heartbreak of a narrowly missed championship. Never.

Not with this new heartbreak.

But just like soldiers used to damage and fate, we made only cursory remarks about our injuries and hospitals. We laughed and joked and told little stories. Inside I was crying hysterically. I probably still am. It’s pointless to say Steve deserved so much better. I’m saying it anyway.

Though this all comes off like the walking wounded, believe me it is so much better to finally get some of it out. And it has “light of day meaning” when someone else reads it. It should take some of the warp out of the last few years. Maybe.

Adding to the addendum:

I had to remind myself after reading the foregoing of one or two things. First, I absolutely volunteered. I would always cross the street to try and help someone. We’re all in this together, right? So, in my heart I knew it was imperative to help save an entire country from the certain oppression of communism. I’m dead serious. Where I came from people talk like they really believe in such things. I did too. When the draft came, I was called. When I heard the Marine Corps was drafting, I volunteered.

I had pleaded to go to Viet Nam and help save those people. In a front line company. The powers that granted this either smirked or shook their heads sadly. But I have known that your own moral imperative means what you will live or die for. The measure of Good. And that’s all that matters. I’m sure I thought that those men who laughed behind my back feared such a life affirming task.

It was nearly a year before I left for Viet Nam and got the chance to help. And my moral imperative was sent into the jungle with a gun. Apparently, I’m still there trying to help. I was right about those men fearing the task. They should have. But that was never my problem. It was having no meaning after you were willing to give your life.

It’s depressing to admit but the first draft of all this in wild jumpy scribbling probably is more to the point about who I’ve become than the reworked sentences and Donna’s typing you see here. I’ll make the attempt to dress up for a new job or tone down and type neatly for this “paper”, but the truth is I’ll probably not survive the first week of work or friendship because I truly am that manic high speed scribbler. I not sure I care anymore. I just wish I were faster and I don’t care about the cliff ahead either. You worry about it. Move fast enough you won’t die.

And guess in which “war of futility” this obsession with “faster or we all die” was indelibly imprinted?

Point is: I’ve been sort’ve dead for some time and use the speed of compulsion/obsession to avoid the truth. Smash the rear view mirror, I’m in full scribble.

I think I am too old to actually move that fast. I’ve probably been worrying that fast.

Seeing this in writing hurts me good. I’m such a delusional asshole, I can’t stand it anymore. But I never see it ‘till later. Too late. Like I’m in my own rear view mirror.

I felt disgust and rage as the Paris Peace Talks were dragged to a halt because our world leaders were arguing over the shape of the Table. How many more marines died while they were publicly playing poker with our lives. None of us wanted this lesson.

It’s important to realize that no one charges a machine gun because of discipline. You run broken field screaming and bounding in the air with weapons on full auto because you believe in something important and greater than yourself. We never thought we were fools.

The sense of trust and belief gives you wings. All of us search all of our lives even for the feathers. It’s called “hope”. That, plus its achievement, pretty much defines our lives.

The blood is secondary.

Our sense of trust and belief should not have been murdered so easily in Paris.

Now the even the History Channel can set me past scribble and straight to rage. The dull ache of the price of Paris can cloud my present sense of purpose and will. Obviously it isn’t just Paris. For me that was the blackest punchline to the gutter lesson that our total tragedy amounted to little more than their political posturing. I mean, REALLY, the shape of the table. While men died. Some believing as strongly as I did.

Soon my frustration turns to unfocused rage. Same as anybody else. Just much worse.

Frustrated rage targeting maybe the lamp, or that table, or you and your fucking opinions, or this stupid “job of futility”. It can’t change the war, or Paris, and nobody needs my misdirected abuse. For a long time I wasn’t like this. Maybe my worst habits kept me in check or maybe this writing is the expiation needed for something a long time in coming. I don’t whine. This is in the nature of a serious complaint.

40 years after the war. It’s never after the war. Just look around.

I didn’t mean for this to be confessional but it seems important. Now that this must be close to getting done. I can’t get along with people anymore and I‘m getting a glimpse of why. It’s not that I don’t want to but I must be always confused with thinking I have to get us all out of here alive. DON’T YOU FUCKING UNDERSTAND FOR GOD’S SAKE!!! DID YOU SEE WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DON’T???!!!

I still don’t think of myself as crazy. At least no more than useful and I could have been faster and crazier in Viet Nam so that more might have lived.

Even reading the first time on paper, these paragraphs are telling me a big something.

I would like to get along better with people but not because I’m full of pills or warnings. I think I still have something to offer out of care for all of us. But apparently I don’t do that well in structured environments. Like society.

(Typed by Donna Moseley)

This was all written in late Dec 2007 and in October 2008, I was re-evaluated at 90% PTSD and 100% overall. Within that week a Lt.Col Schaffer USMC, called me from California, having tracked me down through documentation, internet info and deduction. He was the second person to come upon our unit the day I was hit and told me that only six of us survived. He described many scenes from that day including the marine with the terrible stomach wound. He even remembered the H-34 helicopter that took me to the start of nine months of intense medical treatment. But to have those images that haunted me for so long confirmed was scary and liberating at once. The personnel I thought were other survivors from my unit were in fact, rescue from the unit that found us.