Soul Ranger
Where are my teammates? I’d lost track of their positions. I only knew that they were there, dead motionless in the dark. Soft and muffled voices whispered ten yards away. A metallic click…followed by breaking twigs as more enemy soldiers joined the hunt.
The night was so eternally black; I lost the distinction between sight and sensation, between real and ethereal. Everything around me fell away and dissolved, eaten by the blackness. I drifted. I resisted the sensation, trying not to succumb, but the night was powerful and strangely narcotic, and I lost my bearings. As I lay in the strange heaving blackness, the tiny piece of ground touching my belly remained my only sure connection with the finite. It was my raft, and I was floating through a nightmare.1
Excerpt from the “The Frog Hunter: A Story About the Vietnam War, an Inkblot Test and a Girl”1
During combat, time stops, and the war has its way with us. One scoop at a time. It hollows out the soul. After the battle, when darkness descends, it can take on nightmarish, even fantastical, proportions. Alone and silent, too many of our brothers and sisters have surrendered to the darkness, turning it inward on themselves. Why do warriors who fight fiercely and bravely against all odds give up the fight after coming home?
In the book, “The Red Badge of Courage,” Stephen Crane wrote, “So it came to pass that as he trudged from the place of blood and wrath, his soul changed.”
War wounds the soul. Combat-related trauma is unlike other forms of PTSD, because it involves not only what happened to you but also what you did. “Why?” is the universal, existential question of war and it can drive men mad with grief. By the time veterans returned from the Vietnam war, there were few studies about the effects of combat trauma, and the havoc it can wreak on the mind, body and spirit over a lifetime. The misunderstanding and stigma surrounding the effects of the war on Vietnam Veterans lingered for years.
We now know through extensive research conducted after the Vietnam War that PTSD and combat trauma-related disorders are physiological—it’s how the human stress system works when exposed to fear, death and horror, during prolonged combat, and especially during multiple tours that our younger veterans have experienced in the Middle East.
Photo by Horst Faas
“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.” ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Thank you fallen brothers, for your sacrifice.
Dear Soul Ranger Subscribers and Friends,
I am pleased to announce the release of my new book: The Frog Hunter: A Story About the Vietnam War, an Inkblot Test and a Girl.
It took me twenty-five years to finish the five-pound book, and twenty-five years to whittle it down to something you can comfortably hold in your hand and read. A true story, it chronicles a tumultuous three-year period in my life—before, during, and after Vietnam.
The story begins in the summer of 1968, and a perfect balmy night at the Scotchman Drive-In. At seventeen years of age, my life is good—cruising the circuit with the other hot cars in my cherry ’41 Ford pickup.
It was our Friday night ritual, and my best friend Port Tuley and I are looking for a date or a drag race, whichever comes first. While we munch on our hamburgers and drink our sloppy malts, we casually contemplate the war. Should we sign up or wait for the draft?
Nine months later I am an Airborne Ranger in Vietnam. Our five-man, long-range reconnaissance teams (LRRPs) run intelligence gathering missions deep into enemy territory in the mountains of the Central Highlands, crisscrossed with a vast network of NVA supply lines from the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
While in the VC’s backyard, anything can happen. Marinating in adrenaline, straining against the incessant tension and the nonstop threat of harm, I live in a state of overload, with the war assailing my mind like fifty thousand volts running through a twenty-amp wire.
We flew home one by one from the war on a commercial airliner—forty-eight hours from the battlefield to mom’s kitchen table. I took off my uniform and put on my blue jeans, but my mind and heart didn’t adjust so easily. I came home but remained at war, and I knew there was no road back to normal.
And then things get really crazy…
The book is available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle version. You can find it here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09K26D5
View Video of the Christmas Truce
As the story goes, in the winter of 1914 during World War I, on the battlefields of Flanders, one of the most unusual events in all of human history took place. The Germans had been in a fierce battle with the British and French. Both sides were dug in, safe in muddy, man-made trenches six to eight feet deep that seemed to stretch forever.
All of a sudden, German troops began to put small Christmas trees, lit with candles, outside of their trenches. Then, they began to sing songs. Across the way, in the no-man’s land between them, came songs from British and French troops. Incredibly, many of the Germans, who had worked in England before the war, were able to speak good enough English to propose a Christmas truce.
British and French troops, all along the miles of trenches, accepted. In a few places, allied troops fired at the Germans as they climbed out of their trenches. But the Germans were persistent and Christmas would be celebrated even under the threat of impending death.
According to Stanley Weintraub, who wrote about this event in his book, Silent Night, “Signboards arose up and down the trenches in a variety of shapes. They were usually in English, or from the Germans, in fractured English. Rightly, the Germans assumed that the other side could not read traditional gothic lettering, and that few English understood spoken German. YOU NO FIGHT, WE NO FIGHT was the most frequently employed German message. Some British units improvised MERRY CHRISTMAS banners and waited for a response. More placards on both sides popped up.”
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