Therapy helping Utah veteran deal with old demons

Hollenbeck began by helping Paul understand PTSD, what was causing his nightmares, how to deal with them and how Aline could help her husband. Hollenbeck got him talking about Vietnam again.

In an interview for this story, Paul recalled how he threw up while trying to help his first patient in the war. The young man's belly had been ripped open. Paul resorted to using safety pins to try closing the wounds.

"Your training only prepares you for so much," Paul said.

When he remembers working on the helicopter, he focuses less on the wounded he helped save and more on those he lost. One injured soldier kept talking about his family, scared he was going to die and never see them again.

"I kept telling him, just hold on, think about your wife and children, it will be all right," Paul said. "But he wasn't."

To do his job, Paul had to suspend his emotions and feelings about the horrors he saw. "You just keep your wits about you — you've got a job to do," he said.

He can still see with too much clarity a Vietnamese girl who was hit by a mortar round nearby. "She disappeared in front of my eyes," he said. "I was covered with her blood."

To protect himself from being hit by bullets from below during takeoffs and landings, Paul sat on his protective armor. "It's a frightening sound to hear the sheet metal of your helicopter getting hit," he said. One chopper he was in was shot down, and another was forced to land because of damage caused by enemy fire.

He never applied for a Purple Heart, but he has the permanent scars on his arms and legs from shrapnel.

After nine months, Paul was transferred from Vietnam to the Philippines. When he arrived back in the United States, the only advice he heard was to "forget about it" and to "get back into the world," as if his time in Vietnam hadn't actually happened.

"You didn't dare talk to anyone about it, because people thought you were crazy," he said.

Paul and veterans like him buried the Vietnam experience in their heads, not knowing if, how or when it might come back to haunt them.

A family crisis

The first of Aline and Paul's five children was born in 1975, and Aline then started to notice a difference in Paul. He was quick to anger. He began to close himself off from the family, preferring the company of only himself.

Their marriage was different. It was the beginning of what Aline calls their coexistence. For almost 30 years, she lived with a stranger in the house. She refers to herself during that time as a single parent in a two-parent household.