Vietnam Veteran Finds Purpose After PTSD

Three decades after Vietnam, Tom and Lolly Laing remaster trauma into purpose
by Julie Sullivan

VENETA — Like many combat veterans, Tom Laing carried traumatic memories home from Vietnam, and with them, drinking, night terrors and despair. For three decades, he beat his demons back, working as a master car mechanic, raising five children and 19 foster children with his childhood sweetheart, Lolly.

He coped — until the war in Iraq. Images of flag-draped coffins, uniformed soldiers with missing limbs, and an increasingly unpopular war brought back Tom’s own experiences with such devastating force that his wife, Lolly, finally sat down at her computer.

In a letter to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs addressed “To whom it may concern,” she poured out the most intimate and harrowing development in their long and wounded marriage:

July 26, 2004

My name is Laurel Laing, wife of Thomas Laing. We have been married 37 years. Since the start of the Iraq war Tom has had increased nightmares, night sweats and acting out. He has become more short tempered and withdrawn from his family, work and daily activities of a normal life. Tom is restless and he cries when the news announces that we have casualties and soldiers are dying. He says this War is turning out to be another Vietnam…

On April 28 around 2:30 a.m. we were sleeping and all of a sudden someone had their hands on the top of my head it felt like it was moving to the right in a fast direction and that my neck was going to be snapped. I yelled out some awful noise and the movement stopped. I turned around and looked at Tom who was on his knees breathing so hard and saying “so sorry, I’m so sorry, I could have killed you.

“I thought I was in Vietnam.”

As the United States enters its fourth winter of war with President Bush poised to “surge” tens of thousands of more troops into Iraq, the conflict is having an unforeseen effect on the veterans of earlier wars. For some people, the extreme stress of combat appears to change their brain chemistry and physiology. They can recover, but the memories remain embedded, a latent wound that can be torn open by the seemingly innocuous sights or sounds of the modern world.

The military does a far better job preparing today’s soldiers to deal with the trauma of combat; they’re educated before they ship out, screened for symptoms before they return and welcomed back by supportive communities. Still, experts say that some veterans and their families are as likely as the Laings to find themselves battling the effects of Iraq years, possibly decades, later.

“One of the major issues that the public really doesn’t understand with trauma is how it lives on in a silent way,” says Fred Gusman, a pioneering expert and the director of the National Center for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder’s education division.

“There is every reason to believe a lot of these young military, Guard and reserve folks too, will for a wide variety of reasons, not go into treatment for many years and their experience will take on some of same manifestations,” says Steve Woodward, a research psychologist at the National Center for PTSD education division in Menlo Park, Calif. “They’ll be workaholics, superficially very successful and effective, but have difficulties in their marriages and roles as parents.

“It’s a tragedy to anticipate all over again.”

He was a hockey playing boy, she was a surfer girl and theirs was an “American Graffiti” courtship in Culver City, Calif. Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, Tom Laing was not even a U.S. citizen when a high school recruiter persuaded him to join the Marine Corps, so he bid goodbye to his beloved 1944 Ford coupe and a 95-pound bikini-clad blonde named Lolly.

Feb. 28, 1967

Hi Love,

You should see the stuff we have to say when we march. We say, Viet Cong Kill, Kill, Viet Cong, Kill, Kill, and when we have bayonet practice, everytime we must say Kill. So I’m turning into a professional killer. They tell us to think kill, talk kill and live kill. Well, so much for that.

Honey don’t forget to send the picture of my car and a full length picture of you okay? Love Always, Tom

He landed Oct. 10, 1967, literally, in a foxhole, a radio wireman jumping from a helicopter with the 1st Battalion, 3rd Marines. He’d never seen mortars, so when they began exploding at 4 a.m., he thought, “Wow. Cool.” Within seconds green tracers lit the sky, the company before him overrun by the North Vietnamese. The captain behind him began screaming, “Fix bayonets and charge.”

In the next 10 days, 35 Marines were killed and 174 wounded. That first daybreak, Tom recalls sitting dazedly in his foxhole asking, “Why am I here?”

Oct. 31, 1967

My sweet little wife,

It’s our fifth (month) wedding anniversary today. I’m sending you a present, a can opener. It will come in handy for canned food because when I get home it will take me a while to get used to eating food off a plate instead of a can.” Your loving Boo-Bear Tom

Nov. 6, 1967

I forgot to tell you I started smoking again. I got so scared and nervous that first operation, I had to do something. Would you believe last night was the first decent night’s sleep I’ve had in a long time, I slept like a baby. I thought I had pneumonia. I had chills, got dizzy, had pain in my chest, man was I messed up. Well Angel Baby, I am going to quit now cause I got to put my hooch up and get squared away.

Dec. 13, 1967

I will sure be glad to get out of here. I hit the deck at the sound of every loud noise. I am going out of my senses.

March 26, 1968

Angel, I stay awake at night thinking of you and how we met and our honeymoon and I want us to be that way again. To tell you the truth I’m scared as hell. I’ll admit it. Anyone over here is scared and if they say they aren’t, they’re lying. I just want to be with you baby for the rest of our life till we are gray and old. Well, I think I’ll go and get drunk. Maybe that will help me out.

May 30, 1968 My darling wife, I would have written last night but I started celebrating our anniversary and well, you know what happened I got drunk. I am celebrating again tonight and tomorrow night. I have two bottles that I bought in Guam, a fifth of vodka and a fifth of Bacardi so I am going to get drunk. I still can’t believe we’ve been married a year.

Aug. 7, 1968 I really don’t know what I’m going to do when I get out of this green machine. Honey to be honest with you, I’m so screwed up I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’ve got some kind of problem but I can’t just put my finger on it. I don’t know if I’m trying to figure myself out or what. Maybe I just miss you and I’m lonely, oh well whatever it is it’s bothering me. Well I don’t want to bother you with it. I love you so much that it would take a million years to tell you.

Sept. 8, 1968 My problem? — nothing physical, I don’t have V.D. and I’m not on dope. This is more or less a mental problem I have with myself. When I come home I’ll tell you about it. Ok? I love you always, Tom

He came home, but told her nothing. They drove 60 mph past the protesters at the Marine Corps Air Station El Toro gates in Orange County, Calif., and pulled up to a warm neighborhood welcome. The couple checked into a hotel later and when a plane flew over, Tom hit the floor.

“What are you doing down there?” Lolly recalls saying with a laugh.

From that moment on, she knew he had changed. Tom had to check every door and window. He rarely slept. He felt betrayed because the Marines did nothing to help him become a citizen. For the first time, he was a mean drunk, prone to rage. Lolly was baffled.

“I thought our life was going to be Ozzie and Harriet,” she said.

A decade later, the couple had Tammy, Tommy, Christopher and Douglas (Chad arrived later) and had settled in the verdant hillsides around Veneta, west of Eugene. They’d moved from California to Oregon for a “fresh start,” but Tom’s anxiety ruled the family. They moved almost every year into homes increasingly isolated from other people. Finally, they were living in an underground dwelling where Tom could see every door.

May 1976 By October, fall set in and Tom’s behavior as always this time of year, began to change. Sometimes he was so depressed he would talk about suicide. He ran the truck into a concrete barrier. He was so abusive that I told him I was going to leave with the children. He said, “Lolly, if you ever take off with my children I will hunt you down and kill you. Do you understand?”

I never talked of leaving again cause I knew what he said was true.

Trauma experts now know that anger often propels soldiers through horrific situations and that long after combat, that coping mechanism can flare in a traffic jam, a confrontation at work or at home.

War involves a lot of screaming, and that means that years later a child’s tantrum can trigger anxiety and rage. A tap on the shoulder or foot while sleeping — like the one a soldier experienced when it was his turn to take watch — could bring an explosive response.

On Tammy’s 16th birthday, Lolly went to retrieve Tom from a dark bedroom. He shoved her away with such force, she flew out the door and suffered a separated shoulder.

May 20, 1988, Senior English “Aftereffects of Vietnam” by Tammy Laing

“When the Vietnam vets came home from the war they changed, becoming cold, hard, and insensitive. One of those young men happened to be my dad, Tom Laing. . . . He couldn’t understand why he was doing things like lashing out at his family, drinking, mood swings and his violent temper. Tom has wanted to talk about the war, and what he had gone through, but he feels like no one is interested. Tom has a lot of built up anger inside him and a lot of unanswered questions like: why doesn’t anyone care how vets feel? Tom also had a hard time making the dramatic transition from war (reality) and back home (fantasy land.)”

“Zero to crazy,” is what Tom called it.

Tom’s symptoms never entirely abated. He continued to drink and slip into a depression every October, the anniversary of his first night in Vietnam. A 1988 trip with Lolly to the Wall, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., helped ease his pain. He connected emotionally with other veterans. For the first time, he marched in a veterans parade.

The invasion of Iraq shattered him. When the first Oregon Marine died, he drove to the man’s funeral in Klamath Falls and wept uncontrollably. Tom began attending funerals until Lolly made him stop. She sent him to the Vet Center in Eugene, where they’d both gone for counseling since the 1980s. Nothing seemed to help.

After Tom attacked her in April 2004, a counselor advised Lolly to sleep with a dead-bolted door between them. But Tom seemed so anguished by his actions that she chose to sleep beside him, even though she was afraid. Then Tom’s boss fired him for insubordination — after years of a successful career, he’d lost three jobs in as many years. Five days later, Lolly wrote the VA:

July, 26, 2004 The next few days as it sunk in I became angry and then sad. I had no idea what to do or who to talk to. Who can I trust to talk to? I love Tom with my whole heart and want the best for him. I have always been there to protect him and not let others hurt him. I have watched us both suffer and our children suffer because of the trauma he experienced serving our country.

Encouraged by a counselor, Tom had applied for disability, and in 2003, the VA had found him partially disabled by his war experience. On Jan. 6, 2005, the VA pronounced him 100 percent disabled by post traumatic disorder with alcohol dependence. Tom is now one of more than 161,000 Vietnam veterans being compensated for traumatic stress.

Years earlier, Lolly had maneuvered Tom into leading the local chapter of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. After the invasion of Iraq, he decided he had to make a difference for the new vets. The post adopted the Oregon Army National Guard’s 2nd Battalion, 162nd Infantry and the Marine Forces Reserves 6th Engineer Support Battalion Company A. Tom met with each unit, telling them what they might expect. Lolly spoke, too. Before anyone serves in a war, she said, their family should talk to someone like her.

“They should know that their veteran is not necessarily going to come home whole. This veteran will be broken. A lot of what we went through is going to happen to these kids.”

Tom says his wife saved his life. Asked why she stands by her husband, Lolly says: Not every day is ugly. Tom, 58, adores their children, who all live nearby. He dotes on the six grandkids he and Lolly care for daily. And when Tom’s helping others, he’s at peace.

And so, Tom and Lolly show up every time a local soldier or Marine comes home, even at 2 a.m. They drive to Madras to comfort a grieving family. They stand in the rain selling poppies. They visit Congress and the Oregon Legislature over veterans benefits. When they see recently returned vets at the hardware store, they bring them home for dinner.

Sometimes, Lolly admits, she gets tired and says, “Enough!” But that’s how Tom gets to the next day. Knowing there is a veteran who needs him. And, Tom says, many days, that is enough.

“That first morning, in that foxhole, I woke up thinking, ‘Why the hell am I here?’ I asked God: ‘What’s the purpose?’

“I think I found my purpose.”

Julie Sullivan: 503-221-8068, [email protected]