Bringing It All Back Home (30 page)

Drinking became a significant element in Kenny's life too. After he returned, his father took him to a Veterans of Foreign Wars post where, Kenny recalls, one of the older World War II members told him that Vietnam was “not a real war.” Kenny believes this was a turning point, a social declaration of what his family was already telling him—that he did not matter. His experiences were not relevant, his thoughts not wanted, his presence not welcome. At this point, Kenny began to grow his hair long. Family members began telling him that he had, indeed, died in Vietnam.

Also contributing to his tumultuous return was how difficult it was for veterans to find work in the early 1970s. A study written for the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress in 1975 concluded that New York City experienced a net population loss between 1960 and 1973 of 1.7 percent. At the same time, private-sector employment appeared to dry up. The report notes that while total private-sector employment grew 7.4 percent nationally, New York City's private-sector employment fell by 6.2 percent. Only Philadelphia and Detroit fared worse.
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Kenny had dropped out of high school. Returning home from the Marine Corps in 1969 with his one Purple Heart and a Navy Commendation Medal, he had difficulty finding work. What he did find were low-paying, dead-end-seeming jobs. Without a high school diploma, he felt he didn't have the grounds to object.

Issues related to PTSD began to get in Kenny's way, most especially the drinking. Excess became a theme in his life. Sex, drugs, and alcohol were all available in abundant quantities, and he used them to distance himself from the trauma of his recent past and the people, places, and institutions that he believed were rejecting him. Uncle Frankie, his mother's brother, would see him on the street and walk right past.

Kenny reconnected with his Marine Corps buddy Phineas, who was in California, and decided to visit him. He arrived in San Francisco in the summer of 1969, having left the Marine Corps in January. He remembers seeing Jim Morrison and the Doors perform at the Cow Palace, as well as the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company. Somehow, he got mixed up with LSD. As he thinks of it now, drugs were an effort to make the pain go away.
We had this code of good drugs and bad drugs. I was kind of going over to the side where I shouldn't go
.

After about four years of this kind of life, he took steps toward pulling himself together. By 1973 he was a married father of two and twenty-two years old. His father-in-law got him a job with Union Local 3, where he would make good money as an apprentice electrician. But he had to get a haircut for the job. He refused. Kenny faced a host of pressures,
and I think underneath all of that was probably this incredible pain and anger of what I experienced from my eighteenth to my nineteenth year, in the war.

He had applied to the New York City Police Department when he got out of the Marine Corps but was never called, probably because of the dire financial situation the city found itself in. But in 1974, just as the department was about to close his file, a member of the staff realized that Kenny had relatives on the force. His file was reactivated and a background investigation begun. Kenny recalls that he was smoking marijuana in his house when the background investigator arrived. He took the oath and was sworn in to the police department on February 4, 1974. It didn't work out.

This would trigger a truly bad time in his life. More drinking and more drugs, mostly marijuana, followed.

I was going to hell in a handbasket, and I didn't even necessarily see it. It's always, “Well, it's not my fault; it's her fault.” Everything was outside myself, like I wasn't the problem.

As things deteriorated, serious financial need set in, and he had to take a job as a private security officer at the Breezy Point community where he lived. He felt utterly humiliated, working in what he calls a
rinky-dink
job for an ex–police officer.

The New York State Police offered a way out. Kenny became a New York state trooper in 1977 and found the state police force more congenial. Many members of his State Police Academy class had served in the military; they were the first group hired after the end of the hiring freeze of 1975. His wife and children continued to live in the Queens neighborhood of Breezy Point with his in-laws while he commuted to Albany to attend the academy, driving home on weekends. One of the members of his graduating class at the academy had been a childhood friend of William C. Wray, a member of Kenny's squad killed in Vietnam.
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Finding out about this connection to Billy Wray painfully reminded him of all he had experienced in Vietnam.

I went out that night and got fucking obliterated—I mean obliterated. I came back and I was a mess and I was crying and couldn't believe it.

Despite the troop handler's explanation that drinking could get him terminated, Kenny didn't care. He managed to graduate and made friends in the state police barracks in Peekskill. Many of the other troopers there were roughly his age, even though they had been on the job for a few years and had not been in the service. Drinking, women, and running around became common. He recalls that on one of the first nights out with his new colleagues, they told him to take off his wedding band.

Soon stationed at a different barracks, with older officers, Kenny felt as though he fit right in. But, as he says,
my drinking was off the charts.
He would do a shift from 7:00 a.m. until 3:00 p.m. and by 3:15 would be at the Fishkill Inn, drinking. Sometimes he couldn't even drive back to the station house and would need to phone for a lift.

I was living this wonderful life. I had a wife with three kids at one place. I was working somewhere else. I had all the booze I wanted. If I wanted drugs, I could get all the drugs I wanted. Nobody would ask any questions.

But it wasn't enough.

There was this fucking huge emptiness inside of me. There was a hole where my soul and my heart should be and it was just gone.

Eventually, Kenny began to run into trouble on the job because of his drinking. Civilians complained of abuse. On one occasion, he attended the St. Patrick's Day Parade in Manhattan and then a Patrolmen's Benevolent Association party. Apparently, the alcohol flowed freely, and Kenny pulled his weapon on a New York City police officer.

In another incident he got into an argument with a man at a bar, pulled out a revolver, and stuck it in the man's mouth.

I have a trigger cocked, and I had a hammer back; I mean, if somebody had said “Don't,” it could have gone off. I said, “I'll blow your fucking brains out if you don't shut the fuck up.” And he just stood there like that, and I just put it away. It wasn't necessarily the case that it was my intent, but there wasn't a control to realize, you know, you can deal with this with words. And I guess, really I was drunk, but that's not an excuse, because the drink or the drug or whatever the fuck it was, was something you choose to do.

His substance abuse had damaged his reputation on the job, and his anger problem had earned him no real friends. He began to lose his will to live.

I was just empty; I was totally empty. I thought, “Well, I fucked everything else up.” I had fucked the marriage. People don't like us, because we went to war. Whatever you did that was right was wrong—it didn't matter.

At one point, he devised a plan to kill himself while pretending to be in pursuit of another automobile, thereby providing his wife and children with substantial insurance money. On another occasion, he thought about using a service revolver.

One morning, instead of committing suicide, he decided to leave a note on his lieutenant's desk:
I just want to advise you that I can no longer be responsible for what I'm doing and I need some help.

Kenny left the note at 7:15 a.m., and by 9:30 a.m. troopers had tracked him down and brought him back to the barracks. Because he could not be placed into an inpatient treatment center until Sunday, Kenny asked to work with a fellow Vietnam veteran during his weekend shift. He felt comfortable in a fellow veteran's presence, as though someone who knew what he had been through would be able to help him over the ensuing thirty-six hours. By the time the state police offered him two weeks of inpatient therapy, he had begun to persuade himself that things were not really so bad. He took the offer of inpatient therapy, conning himself, as he says now, into thinking that
maybe the fucking heat will pass, you know, and I'll stay away for two weeks and I'll be okay. I can get my breath and go forward again.

On September 14, 1980, a fellow officer took Kenny to Villa Veritas, an inpatient drug and alcohol addiction treatment program in the Catskills town of Kerhonkson, New York. Later one of the counselors there told him that in the first two weeks of his residence, the staff had serious doubts about his ability to successfully recover from his alcoholism. He was told, “We really thought you belonged in the insane asylum.”

Originally scheduled to stay only two weeks, Kenny was persuaded to stay for three. He participated in group meetings, where the members went around the circle and introduced themselves as alcoholics. In the third week, Kenny suddenly felt differently about doing so.

That was devastating. I remember that moment because that was the acceptance of what I am.

Soon, his wife served him with divorce papers. That very same day one of his fellow troopers delivered the paperwork containing the charges and specifications that had been filed against Kenny by the New York State police force. Disciplinary proceedings followed, but Kenny knew the job was gone before the hearing. He recalls an older woman at Villa Veritas saying:
If God didn't want you to stay there, no force in the universe can keep you there. There's a reason and purpose.

He understood.

Eventually, he would learn that the state police thought he had been involved with the murder of a drug dealer in Breezy Point, and had even tested his service revolver to see if they could identify a ballistic connection. They failed to demonstrate any connection between Kenny and the killing.

In the end, Kenny had no money and nowhere to go. He asked the staff if he could stay at Villa Veritas. They agreed.

He had arrived in September 1980 as a New York state trooper. He would leave in January 1981 with no job, no family, no home, and no bank account. Nothing.

But I was sober, and probably for the first time in my life I was like, you know, it's going to be okay.

He ended up in Jersey City for a while, staying with his sister and attending meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. He slowly began to rebuild his life. Tom Dillon, first deputy commissioner of the New York City Fire Department, learned about Kenny's predicament and got him a job with the department as a confidential investigator, a CI-2, with the Internal Affairs Division. Soon he had an apartment on Eighty-Sixth Street in Bensonhurst and sole custody of his children.

I had a living room and one bedroom and bathroom, and there was nobody above us and just the store below us. We made a go of it there.

After completing a bachelor's degree in sociology at Brooklyn College in 1985, Kenny left the fire department, taking a job as a high school teacher in the New York City public school system. He retired in 1995 after another explosion of rage forced him to consult a Veterans Administration psychiatrist. He now receives a PTSD-related disability pension from the VA.

With the passage of time, Kenny feels that he has gained a perspective on PTSD that he now willingly shares, especially with fellow Marines. Reflecting on his experiences in Alcoholics Anonymous and the nature of post-traumatic stress disorder, he explains what he calls “the triangle of life.” For him, life is made up of a mental/emotional component, a physical component, and a spiritual component, the three sides of the triangle.
All of those things were damaged by PTSD and by life.

In 2005 he heard a story about Jason Dunham, a Marine who sacrificed himself in Iraq by throwing his body onto a live grenade to save fellow Marines. Dunham had lingered for a few days, making it to the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where his parents managed to see him before he died. Kenny and a number of volunteers have set up a foundation in his memory, the Jason L. Dunham Scholarship Foundation, which raises money to pay for the education of young returning Marines.

In 2006, I traveled with Kenny to a Khe Sanh veterans reunion in Washington, D.C. We spent the weekend visiting the brand-new National Museum of the Marine Corps and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and seeing some of his old friends. On the Sunday afternoon before our return to New York City, we stopped at the bookstore on the Marine Corps base at Camp Lejeune, across the river from D.C., in Virginia. There, we met a young Marine, Jeremiah Workman, who had served in Fallujah in 2004 as a part of Operation Phantom Fury, the Second Battle of Fallujah in the Iraq War.

On December 23, 2004, Workman had led his mortar platoon into a building three times in order to rescue isolated Marines who had been trapped by an ambush. At least twenty-four insurgents were killed in the fight.
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Later, Workman was awarded the Navy Cross for his action. Kenny and Workman fell into conversation, and we invited Workman and his wife to join us for dinner. Over steaks, Kenny and Workman began to share their experiences with post-traumatic stress. To this day he and Workman are in constant contact. This young veteran has become part of the fabric of his life.

For Kenny, this represents the passing of a torch. A new generation of Marines and other veterans is returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, and soon there will be many more who need and deserve the kind of help Vietnam veterans did not receive forty-odd years ago.

Vietnam is never very far away for many of these veterans. One counselor told Kenny, “You have an awful lot of grieving to do. You're not done grieving.” Kenny replied:
“I don't know if I ever will be.”