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My name is Tim.
I'm a Vietnam-era Veteran Marine.
I was in Vietnam just under six months and had an RPG land
about three feet away from me.
And I was wounded.
And fortunately, I was just about to jump over the side of
a bunker, and it landed right in front and splattered me up
my whole right side with shrapnel.
So I was wounded in right leg, and the head, and the hand,
and in the stomach.
I think there were 44 Marines who were wounded and two who
were killed that night.
I ended up in a Navy hospital.
Everybody was pretty happy, even though
we were pretty wrecked.
And then the evening news came on.
and they were showing the big protests.
And the room just went completely silent.
It was a wound that probably hurt more than the shrapnel
from the RPG.
And it still obviously affects me today.
But it just felt like the country was against us.
I went back to the summer camp that I had worked all through
high school and the first two years of college.
Things have changed.
There were counselors there, in the first week of training,
sitting around a campfire chanting anti-war slogans and
thinking it was funny.
And I was thinking of the Marines and all the folks
still dying in this war.
It was a tough summer.
And then I got married, went back to college.
And I sat once in a political science class where
Vietnam came up.
And the students were just ripping on us.
People were saying like I could never kill anybody.
How can they do that?
And events like that would keep coming up.
The words Vietnam--
I would have this shooting hot pain in the back of my neck.
And so I began a life of avoidance and ducking and
hiding and just keep your mind on the job and anything else.
And every once in a while, things would come up and would
remind me of it.
After I started teaching, I was in a classroom one day.
It was anatomy class.
And they spent the semester dissecting cats.
And the first hour I was in there, I could just feel
myself losing it.
And then the second hour came and I taught, but I was just
drifting away.
and at the end of that class, it happened
to be my prep time.
And I wandered out into the parking lot.
And I was just thinking about this naked body of a dead
Marine being lifted up into this helicopter, and the smell
of a-- we had killed an NVA soldier and spent the--
I was on that position the next day.
And sat there in the heat smelling this decaying soldier
and thinking that could be [? Tangie ?]
who was so good to me.
And one of the system principals happened to be a
Marine and came out.
And all I could say was Vietnam.
And he took me home.
The staff was good.
They didn't put me back in that room again.
The nights--
I would just get this panic attacks.
And would just pray for it to get light again.