Navy Veteran Shares His Sources of Healing After Trauma
I was assigned to a ship that had a captain, I think he was from the south. I kept waiting for him to tell me to "At ease," and I must have stood at attention while he mulled over my paperwork at least 10 minutes. It's a scary thing, especially when you're dealing with something like racism.
My name is Glenn. I was a quartermaster in the United States Navy from the year 1971 to 1972. I was a quartermaster, which was kind of a rare thing for a black man to be a quartermaster in the Navy during those days. You have to understand, I'm coming from bootcamp, which is everybody's equal environment, into an actual navy on a ship, and I'm discovering for the first time that it's not the same. Next thing I know, in 48 hours, we were underway on our way to Vietnam. Once we got to the gunline, we replaced the leading ship. Our job was to draw fire from the enemy, giving relief to the guys on land by pounding them from the sea. I had to go hump shells. I had never had any training in ordnance and when I got up there, I noticed that there was some kind of powder on the shells.
The guy showed me, he broke me in on what to do very, very quickly, like in five minutes. "You take this pack, you put this shell in there, you put this pack there." And when I got through my skin, I was like itching. It was like just felt bad. My whole body, I mean upper body, like a boil would come up and then it would burst, and then what was in it would crust over. So I was medevacked off of the ship, and this Marine is laying next to me, said, "Where do you get those Willie Peter burns?" I said, "Willie Peter? What's that?" He said, "White phosphorus, you got covered."
And then that's when it really hit me. I had been set up. I felt as though someone had attempted to kill me. I was in the Navy at a time when this racist thing was just at its peak, and people that were in power were basically doing things to men like myself for no other reason than we were black and that they could get away with it.
You need to feel safe in a safe environment wherever you are. And so that was taking something from me. But I still tried to be a good sailor. Getting back to when I found out what had happened to me, I said, "I want to report what happened to me." And I went in and I sat down. I said, "I am waiting for the commanding officer to get here so I can file my report." There was two military police and I refused to go with them when they arrived. They just grabbed me, gave me some kind of shot. They were giving me something called Thorazine.
So while I was being given this, they processed me out of the Navy. I wasn't even in my right mind. I could not remember that I wanted to file these charges. So I've been homeless, depressed. I went into major depressions. I tried to kill myself, and it got so bad I couldn't work. I couldn't do anything. My wife said to me, she said, "You're not the man that I married. You got to go get some help." Because I'd been refusing to go to the VA. And so they admitted me into this day treatment, which is the treatment that's called PRRC, and that's probably the best thing that I could have done. When I first got into the PTSD groups and the day treatment, I began slowly to open up, to talk about things and getting some techniques to deal with PTSD, how to mitigate my problems, what I was feeling inside. That's when I began to discover art. I started painting. I found a source of healing.
I was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and PTSD. PTSD did not exist while we were in the military. When we were in Vietnam, you had shell shock or you had battle fatigue, or you were just plain crazy, right? You deserve the best quality of life for what you've done for this nation. We need you. Every time a Veteran dies, I think we lose a little bit more humanity, so take care of these people, because they were there to take care of you.
