Author/vet counsels troops on PTSD, wounds - Army News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Army Times

Author/vet counsels troops on PTSD, wounds

DALLAS — When America’s wounded come back from war, carried off airplanes and shuttled to military hospitals, no one understands better than Allen Clark what they’ll face in the coming months and years.

Clark took that same flight home from Vietnam. An Army captain and West Point graduate attached to the U.S. Special Forces near the Cambodian and Laotian borders, Clark was cut down in a mortar attack 40 years ago.

The shell landed about 18 inches behind him, its jagged metal payload “splashing” up and out and ripping deep into his lower legs.

He lost his left leg below the knee that day and his right 10 days later. And he lost, he believed, the life he had planned for himself.

Eight months later, with the euphoria of survival gone, the morphine drip shut down and the realities of a different life ahead, Clark suffered a breakdown, the result of post-traumatic stress disorder.

For decades, he considered his breakdown a personal failing, such that he didn’t even speak about it until a few years ago.

Now, when he watches this new generation of soldiers come home with injuries more horrific than his, he worries about their futures and does all he can to help.

He counsels some, though he mostly listens to their stories, recounts his own and offers guidance and support. And he talks with others from long-ago wars who struggle with the lingering stresses of combat.

“I’m not a trained counselor by any stretch. I’m just a guy who has been there, done that, so I can impart that to them,” he said. “But when you think of the pressures we go through with just paying the bills, or when the kid comes home with an F on the report card, just imagine seeing the body bags and the battles that these men saw.”

Clark, who lives in North Dallas and went on to successful careers in business and government, tells his story of injury, trauma and ultimately faith-based recovery in his new book, “Wounded Soldier, Healing Warrior.”

He tells the whole story, he said, at his daughters’ urging. “They told me, ‘Your story is an example of what can happen for the good. You need to tell the story, Dad.’

“I define it as a story of how the traumatic experiences in life can be faced. The story is one of encouragement and hope that there’s another world out there you can come back to. But it’s only by the grace of God and my spiritual faith that it worked for me.”

Clark’s story opens at 4:30 a.m. June 17, 1967, in Dak To, Vietnam, to the muffled sounds of mortar fire moving ever closer. Men scrambled to defend the camp as mortars began falling among them, and Capt. Clark grabbed several and ordered them to fire off flares so the camp’s defenders could at least see their targets. That’s when he was hit.

“Oh God, my legs, my legs,” he screamed. “Oh God, I’m dead!”

A medic rushed up, then ran to get help. With the mortar attack intensifying, Clark dragged himself toward a drainage ditch. The medic and another soldier found him there, pulled him onto a litter and rushed him toward the medics’ bunker.

Clark, certain he was dying, told Sgt. Jimmy Hill to leave him and help others.

“No, sir,” Hill told him. “You’re not going to die. I’ll check the others when I’m through with you.”

Forty years later, Hill recalled that what he said and what he thought couldn’t have been more different.

“I told the other guy in the bunker that I needed to get some morphine and plasma because [Capt. Clark] is dying,” said Hill, who lives in Citrus County, Fla. “I was looking at him and thinking, ‘No, no, no.’ Lo and behold, I got a letter from his dad when I was still in Vietnam saying he was in Walter Reed Hospital and doing great. That really surprised me.

“Now, when a former medic sees someone like Allen, or the guys you see coming back from Iraq, you think, ‘Why couldn’t I have done a little bit more?’”

But the morphine Hill administered killed the worst of the pain, and the plasma dripping into Clark’s veins helped keep him alive. He remembers being placed on a jeep and then a helicopter for the trip to an Army hospital.

When he awoke 30 hours later, he took stock of his injuries as best he could. His right hand and arm were numb. A needle attached to a hanging bottle poked into his left hand. His right foot and leg were in a cast, his toes swollen black and blue.

His left leg was gone.

“I kept the right leg for 10 days more,” Clark said. “I ended up spending 15 months in hospitals.

“But the greatest trauma came in my eighth month, when I was hit with post-traumatic stress disorder. I spent 14 weeks in a psychiatric hospital.”

In the months after being wounded, Clark struggled to recover, undergoing surgery after surgery. And he seemed to be on his way.

But his worries overwhelmed him.

“Basically I was facing life as a 4-foot-6 person, to take it to its ridiculous extreme,” he said. “I kept thinking, ‘How am I going to make a life, make a living? How am I going to support myself and my family?’ I went four days without sleep and I cracked.”

Post-traumatic stress has been a part of combat for as long as wars have been fought. In the Civil War, they called it “soldier’s heart,” or Da Costa’s Syndrome. It was “shell shock” in World War I, “combat fatigue” in World War II and Korea, and post-traumatic stress beginning with Vietnam.

For the terribly injured, it often follows the up-and-down emotional swings of their suddenly changed lives.

“At first, you come home as a hero. You’re happy just to have survived,” Clark said. “And then life goes back to reality and you start thinking about the future and you focus on the wound and the negatives and the pain.”

In Vietnam, roughly three soldiers were injured for each one killed in action, Clark said. But in Iraq and Afghanistan, the ratio of injured-to-killed is much higher, almost 8 to 1. Advanced medical technology accounts for much of the improvement, along with well-equipped hospitals close to the war zone.

“They’re saving a lot more now,” said Clark, who held several upper-level positions with the Veterans Administration. “But a lot of people come back with more severe injuries than we did, traumatic brain injuries, things like that.”

And just as he did, the injured face inevitable questions about their futures.

As more people hear his story or read his book, they seek him out on his ministry and book Web sites.

“Some just want to thank me for the book, and some tell me their stories and we end up being sort of pen pals,” he said.

He guards their privacy tenaciously. But he finds something heartbreaking in their pain.

“I talked with one World War II vet who was married in 1947, maybe 1948, and he said he went to an open-casket funeral and it brought back memories of the dead bodies he saw in the war.

“’That night I started to attack my wife and choke her, like she was the enemy,”’ the man told him, “and for all those years after, he was running scared, worried that he’d do it again.”

It took almost 50 years before he finally began talking about it with friends at a Bible study.

“That’s what most warriors do — they keep it inside,” Clark said, when what they need most is to seek help.

He mentioned another man, who lost both legs in Iraq.

“When he first wrote to me, he was relatively euphoric that he was OK,” Clark said. “I got an e-mail from him the other day, and he told me, ’Allen, I’m really not OK.”’