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Sunday, December 09, 2001
One of the strangest side effects of this war-without-a-name has been the quality of its grief.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette brings you "Homefront," a feature by staff writer Dennis B. Roddy that will appear Sundays and Wednesdays. "Homefront" will examine the continuing ways people have been affected by the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
To date, so few Americans have died in combat in Afghanistan -- in fact, so few have actually fought in Afghanistan -- that David McPeak, who counsels the shell-shocked of our undeclared wars, wonders what he'll be dealing with when the survivors of this war find their way to the Vet Center on Penn Avenue.
For now, the emotional blows of the war on terror seem to have landed hardest on the men and women from earlier conflicts, whose wars were not fought video-game style with remote-controlled airplanes and satellite-guided missiles. The sound of the explosions in Afghanistan is bouncing back inside the heads of an older generation.
"They started coming in after the B-52s were sent over there," McPeak said. The B-52s, which carpet-bombed the Indochina countryside with a rolling thunder, left craters in the psyches of the American kids who stood nearby. When the United States began rolling thunder across the Afghan plains, it was Vietnam vets who turned up on Penn Avenue.
"It's stirring them up," McPeak said. "We have an increase in guys coming in because of that."
Kelly Bird of Upper St. Clair, whose brother, Tom, died piloting a helicopter in Vietnam 35 years ago, admits that events a continent away seem a little surreal.
"Sometimes I lie in bed and think of those soldiers over there," Bird said. That, of course, makes not thinking of his own brother nearly impossible. The strange gulf between 57,000 dead American soldiers in Indochina and five lost in Afghanistan, the place that was the Soviet Union's Vietnam, makes for a strange and inexpressible emotional backwash.
The near absence of American casualties overseas delights McPeak, who fought in Vietnam in 1967 and 1968 before returning home to become a psychologist. He's 53 now, lives in Baldwin Township, and has been at the Vet Center long enough to watch the David L. Lawrence Convention Center be built and then torn down.
"If this is the wave of the future, I'm delighted," he said. Of the five American casualties, one was killed in a prisoner uprising, one was killed unloading a truck and three were taken down by a badly aimed American bomb.
"We have guys here that got hit by American bombs," McPeak said. "There was a good bit of that in Vietnam."
McPeak doesn't see many Gulf war veterans. That one killed few Americans and what combat the grunts caught was episodic and too brief to bundle multiple traumas into lasting damage.
The worst interlude of that war was the stray missile that landed atop a barracks well behind the front lines and wiped out much of the 14th Quartermaster detachment from Westmoreland County.
"That was more like a train wreck," McPeak said.
On the other hand, he said, "If you went into the 9th Marines in Vietnam, it was paramount to a death sentence. You were either going to be killed or maimed."
As the reports filtered out of Afghanistan about three Marines killed by friendly fire, the maimed came home to grieve.
"I had a widow call me," McPeak said. "She said, 'I don't want to be alone with it.' "
Officially, the Vet Center isn't expected to provide counseling for families.
"We do it anyway," McPeak said. He spoke with her about the husband who didn't come home. With so many others destined to return from this one, it remains for a nation to treat old wounds rubbed raw by irony.
Have a post-Sept. 11 story to share? Call Dennis Roddy at 412-263-1965 or e-mail him at droddy@post-gazette.com.
Dennis Roddy