My Life with PTSD As Told to Dr. Freud (Part One)

“PTSD? Vat in the Vorld is that?,” the old man murmured as I started telling my story.

I understand, Dr. Freud, they hadn't dreamed up the disease in those days, sir, but let me explain.

In the spring of 1944 the 95th Division was wrapping up the war in Europe. We had taken Metz in a brutal battle that had cost us 50% casualties. Our first sergeant, a fine man from Indiana, was dead from a fatal wound to the stomach. Several of my close friends had been killed in an ambush. Our regimental commander was sent back to Paris for psychiatric treatment. Then there was a brush with The Bulge, another trauma.

I was still a callow 19 year old, shaken but not battered by these events. We ended up the war by crossing the Rhine and taking Dortmund, a Cleveland-like steel town on the Ruhr, destroyed by the battering of the final surge of the war.

We were the labeled “Victory Divison.”

On VE day we celebrated with the rest of them.

We took off our steel helmets and simultaneously breathed in the fresh spring air. No guns, no carbines, no M ones. The weight was off our shoulders.

It was like being reborn, Doctor. You understand the feeling. I was alive, I had survived the war!

“Ya, ya,” he murmured, showing absolutely no emotion.

I was ready to become a human being again. I was a young buck ready to come home a hero to my beloved girlfriend, who wrote me almost every day. To my grandmother, Goldie, my twin sister and some adoring friends. I was joyous.

But there was a hitch. There always is, Doctor.

Right?

Word somehow slipped out, perhaps through WikiLeaks, that our unit would soon be moved to the port of Hamburg and shipped back to the states to prepare for the invasion of Japan!

OMG, I screamed to myself...What will I tell my mother?!

Compared to Japan, Europe was a piece of cake, Doctor Freud. I was really anxious.

I tried to pretend this was all a bad dream, Doctor.

Why me? Why the 95th? What did we do to deserve this?!

We tried to kiss it off as just a wild army-type rumor, as we climbed aboard the troop ship in late May for the trip back to Boston and wherever destiny would take us. We were the first combat division to go back.

Dr. Freud, Dr. Freud are you asleep?

You dropped your pencil! I was going to Japan, Doctor. Did you hear me?

lnvade. Japan. A terrible place! I can't even speak the language.

The old man scowled, a bored scowl.

He mumbled, “You're time is up, son. I will write you a prescription for Valium. Take two before you go bed. You'II feel better.”

But Doctor! Japan!  Banzai! Kamikaze!

Unmoved, he murmured, "Stay calm, call my secretary in two weeks. Maybe I can help.”

(To be continued)

My Life With PTSD As Told to Dr. Freud (Part Three)

"It's over Doctor, it's over," I gleefully announced as I marched into Dr. Freud's office for my appointment, not even taking time to close the door.

Ah, you're feeling better, son.

No sir, it's not my PTSD. Not the election. It's the war.

Grab a pencil and paper so I can finish the story. You remember how the Japs* suffered after we dropped the first bomb? But the Emperor wouldn't give up.

It turns out we hadn't burned and mutilated enough bodies with the first bomb, so we did it again on another city, probably bigger than Cleveland. Tens of thousands of civilians were horribly destroyed by fire, radiation and explosion.

Remember, Doctor. And the Japs and their Emperor had had enough.

We celebrated. Can you imagine that? We celebrated the end of the war.

We celebrated the bomb.

And all that death.

Truth is, Doctor, we really celebrated because we wouldn't have to die on the beaches of Japan's southern island.

I felt a joyful, self-serving pleasure of the moment. No one, not I nor anyone else, stopped to think about what we had done. The Bomb, the Doomsday bomb, had saved our lives, but created the monstrous weapon that would haunt the world for the rest of our lives. I felt guilt inside the joy.

Joy and guilt. Is that a hint, Doc? Joy and guilt. PTSD?

But there was another hitch, Doctor. Remember in life there always a hitch. This time it was Wikileaks again, telling us that our division, the heroic victors of Metz, were to be re-trained to go to Japan for another perhaps three year stint as the Army of occupation.

"They've got to be kidding," I told Capt. Compton, our company commander, an intelligent guy, a teacher in real life. 

“We've gone though hell and now they want to make us glorified MP’s. Keep us away from home for two or three more years. Good God, haven't we done enough?” attempting to appeal to his spiritual side.

“And,” I added, perhaps thoughtlessly, “I promised my girlfriend I would be home by Christmas.”

He showed no emotion and stared at me.

“You're in the Army, Private Weidenthal. We follow orders here. No romantic bullshit about Christmas and girl friends.”

He must have wondered why a nice Jewish boy like me was so into Christmas.

I had fallen back into depression, Doctor. Orders were orders, and that was that.

But there a few guys in our unit, officers and enlisted men, who were sure that we could turn it around. We would take our appeal to the nation. A 1945 version of a media blitz.

Take the Victory Division out of the army of occupation. We've done enough. Huge casualties. Six months straight of combat without a day of rest. The Bulge. Haven't we done enough!? That would be our theme.

We sent letters to President Truman and his wife Bess at the White House who we thought might be sympathetic and influence the president. We wrote to our senators and representatives, to General Marshall, our military commander in chief. Then we turned our public relations blitz on the media: Walter Winchell, Pearson and Allen, who happened to be broadcasting from nearby New Orleans (we went to their studio while they were broadcasting).

We wrote to The News Orleans Times Picayune and sent letters to our hometown newspapers.

It was an all out assault to get the good guys on our side.

And we waited and waited.

Meantime we moved forward with MP training, learning Japanese customs and language lessons.

There was a lot free time. We spent weekends in the French Quarter on Bourbon Street. It made Soho in London look like Sunday School, Doctor.

But I remained a virgin, doctor and I was proud of that. At 19 I remained pure, Doctor. That's good Doctor, right? I did the right thing? I stayed pure. I know you have some unusual ideas about sex. Would I have been better off exercising my manhood?

Silence. A nod. Nothing more.

One day in late October while were out taking lessons on how to bow and shake hands Japanese style, the word came down. General Marshall had decided that the 95th division should be disbanded, and its members honorably discharged and sent home.

I was ecstatic. I would see Rita by Christmas. My mother would be so happy.

As I headed north to Columbus for official discharge, I had some lingering thoughts about all the uncivilized inhuman restrictions on people of color AND HOW UGLY IT SEEMED. But my thoughts slipped back to Rita and four years of college ahead, and later a career as a journalist.

I did my bit and I felt proud.

No time to be a reformer.

But it wasn't as easy as it might seem, Doctor. There was trouble looming ahead.

Unexpected trouble, Doctor.

"Ya,” he said, "in two weeks. "

(To be continued.) Next: From Warrior to Wolverine and the Worry Bird

*In this essay "Japs" reflects wartime rhetoric of the time. Usage here is meant to reflect the language of the period and no disrespect or offense to contemporary readers is intended.

My Life As A Warrior (Chapter One)

   As I may have said before, from the moment I emerged from my mother's womb hanging on to my twin sister's big toe for dear life, it became clear that I had not been born to be a warrior. I wasn’t even the passive aggressive type. In the cradle when my twin sister kicked me, I rarely kicked back. And when I did, I wasn't happy about it. I wasn't combative.

   In the fourth grade, at Coventry school when Reno Koepke, whose father was the manager of Mayfield Cemetery, viciously tackled me in a touch football game, I didn't fight back. I walked away and never played football in the schoolyard again. I didn't even blame anti Semitism.
   I just didn't do contact sports. I did try out for the track team, but was not anywhere fast enough.
   I occasionally got angry with my twin sister, and I remember chasing her around the dinner table with a sharp pencil and swinging out at her face. (I missed, Doctor Carson.) But I remember feeling very angry. Can't remember why, Doctor.
   So by the time I was ready to graduate from high school, I was perhaps the last person you might expect to volunteer to be inducted into US Army in the middle of World War II.
That was 1944. There was this ethos: War on. And for some inexplicable reason I signed on with the other guys, to be inducted the morning after graduation, it was the thing to do, to avoid being thought of as something less than a real man. I signed on. I was ready. I told every one who would listen. Particularly my girlfriend Rita Barnett, a nice Jewish SDT sorority girl. Her dad was manager of the shoe department at Sterling’s, a classy women's store downtown.

   At the time I really believed that I would be assigned to an officer training program on some college campus, since that is what happened to my good friends who went before me. Tom Schattenfield was at the University of Michigan, Larry Coben at the University of Kansas, and Bob Saslaw at Penn State. So I plowed forward.

   Reality struck when I got to Columbus after a tearful goodbye to my mother at Pennsylvania station at 55th and Carnegie. After a day of painful shots in the arms and all kinds of tests much like the SAT that I was sure I had aced, the minute the group of about 50 of us were assembled the captain called us to attention. I felt like top dog. Maybe an appointment to West Point, Dr. Carson.
But the mystique of any sort of academic future faded quickly as the captain barked:
   “We've had a new order from headquarters, the ASTP program has been cancelled."
I nearly wet my pants. He went on, “Private Weidenthal, you got the highest grade on the test. You are assigned to the 95th Infantry division at Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania.”

   At that memorable moment in my life, I had become a warrior, first class. Like it or not.
And although I squirmed a bit, I accepted reality and decided to go with the flow. None of the cheap psychotic tricks that some of the guys talked about, like the peanut butter on the toilet seat trick, or simply feigning insanity. Not for me. This neurotic kids from Cleveland Heights was playing it straight, Doctor.
   It turned out that the 95th had been training for combat for two years at Camp swift in Texas, and was assembling in Pennsylvania for the trip to the war zone and had been assigned to join General George Patton’s famed army for the march across Europe. It was not all fun and games. I saw it as historically significant, but personally dangerous.
Basic training for this kid from Cleveland was more than learning the “F word” as the adjective preceding every course of every meal.
   “Basic” had its memorable moments. Like the day someone shoved an M 1 rifle under my arm and ordered me to crawl in my belly through 50 yards of Pennsylvania mud while a fifty caliber machine gun mounted on a Jeep fired real bullets over our heads.
I remember being petrified, Doctor.
   We heard later that one terrified young man stood up and his body was torn apart by the the deadly bullets. They say the shooting ceased for awhile so they could remove his remaining body parts. I didn’t see it, but they say it happened, Dr. Carson.
   Or the day on mountain maneuvers in the Snake River Canyon of West Virginia, where I was assigned to carry tree pigeons in a cage on my back. They were geniuses. So smart, you could tie a note to their feet telling them where to go, and by God, they would make it. Of course my back was covered with more bird droppings in one day than the Ciivil War monument on Public Square gets in an entire summer. So much for basic training.
   Sometime during this period, my magnificent, caring mother, taking view of reality as only a mother can, came to Pennsylvania. She was on her way to New York on business and took me to dinner with some people she knew, including dear friend Leo Shore and his wife Shirley.

   Leo was a tough 32 year old Jewish business man who happened to be assigned to my unit. It was toward the end of the evening that she looked Leo in the eye, wagged her finger him and declared,
“You take care of my boy!”
Her words turned out to be more meaningful than we at that table in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in 1944, could ever imagine.

To be continued…

Next week:
B-bombs and blackouts
Missing the boat to Omaha Beach
“I Always Wanted to Kill A Jew”
Having lunch with Gen. Patton
Winning the air medal
The Battle of the Bulge
Losing best friends
My life as a muckraker