Reliving Vietnam: The Next Wave : Years Later, Stress-Related Disorders of Veterans Take a Toll on Their Kids

Twelve-year-old Bryce Gerken remembers the afternoon he and his two younger brothers watched their father, Mark, go berserk in the living room.

“We were just kicking back and he got all mad,” Bryce said. “He threw a cigarette lighter through the window and he was yelling, ‘Where’s the gun? Where’s the gun?’ Then he had me in a bear hug and he was crying. He was scared and so was I. Jarrod was saying, ‘Where’s Mom? You better get Mom.’ ”

Mark Gerken’s memory isn’t clear about that afternoon three years ago. He isn’t sure which gun he meant, one of those he keeps at home or one he had in Vietnam. He suspects it was the latter.

“In those blackouts I was back there in ‘Nam,” said Gerken, a plumber who lives in Saugus.

Gerken, 35, counts himself lucky that no one was hurt in the blackouts, which usually were preceded by heavy drinking, and that his family has stayed together. Today, he has been sober more than two years and says that his nightmares, depression and self-imposed isolation are greatly diminished.

But although Gerken and his three sons have grown close, playing baseball, fishing and riding dirt bikes together, some disquiet lingers.

“The children are a little more reserved around him than around me,” said Linda Gerken, 33. “They’re still careful.”

Mark Gerken served with an Army mechanized-infantry unit in Vietnam in 1971 and ’72. He is one of up to 800,000 Vietnam veterans, according to Veterans Administration estimates, suffering some degree of post-traumatic-stress disorder.

Largely untreated during and immediately after the war, the disorder has received significant attention in recent years. But while the stress disorder in veterans is now much-studied and treated, little attention has been paid to its effects on their children.

“Nobody’s looking at this,” said John Parsons, regional manager of VA outreach centers in the Northeast United States. At a March conference of school psychologists in New Orleans, he and an associate presented a paper on psychological problems of veterans’ children.

“We’ve found that the kids at times have the same kinds of symptoms as the fathers,” Parsons said.

“The children have war nightmares when they never have been in a war zone. Some of the fathers have great difficulty being intimate, and the children adopt this same attitude. They keep their distance. They have a hard time making friends.”

Parsons and University of Utah psychologist Thomas Kehle plan to study the problems of Vietnam veterans’ children more extensively by querying a sample of schoolteachers on the subject.

Scott Sheely, executive director of the Society for Traumatic Stress Studies in Lancaster, Pa., said he organized four conferences in the early 1980s on post-traumatic stress disorder in veterans, and that children were not discussed at all.

“We’ve only seen this appear as a major theme in the last two years,” Sheely said. “A lot of this generation waited to have children, and the issue is just now becoming a hot one. Some people are calling it secondary victimization. Another name is family and intergenerational transmission of victimization.”

Tony Johnson, 40, of Woodland Hills, is among those Vietnam veterans who waited to have children. Johnson and his wife, Kay, were married in 1973 after they met on a Michigan college campus, but the couple’s first child wasn’t born until 1979.

“I didn’t understand,” remembered Kay, 36, a native of Hong Kong. “Everyone wants kids, why didn’t he? He was reluctant to bring kids into the world after what he’d seen.”

Didn’t Blame Army

Like Gerken, who said Vietnam “didn’t pour the alcohol down my throat,” Johnson avoids blaming all his problems on the war. He said that even before joining the Army, he did not envision himself as a father. But 18 months of combat, mid-1968 through 1969, intensified the feeling.

“You see the viciousness you’re capable of,” he explained. “Maybe the enemy is lying there wounded and you cut him in half with your M-16. You come back and you have to sit on that. You don’t want it to get out of the cage and hurt children.”

Gerken, who admits taking part in a My Lai-type massacre, said: “I think about it and I see, God, I could do it again. It scares the hell out of me.”

His recovery has come in part, Gerken said, because he no longer tries to bury such memories. “Today I admit it when I’m feeling bad,” he said. “I talk to somebody.”

The ability of a veteran to become a loving parent is threatened by an awareness of his own potential for brutality, the men and therapists in the field agree. Other contributing factors are two skills drummed into a soldier by military training--those of burying one’s emotions and remaining constantly alert to danger.

“We’re conditioned to be watchful, to be vigilant,” observed Johnson, a man so intense he said his manner sometimes frightens people. “But you realize later that the danger lies in you.”

Johnson is a psychologist who works at the student counseling office at California State University, Northridge. He did volunteer counseling for three years at the VA outreach center in Northridge and says that compared to other veterans, “I got off light.”

Still, his combat service influences how he behaves toward his children, Allison, 8, and Jeremy, 4.

“My little boy has no guns; I won’t allow them,” Johnson said. “And I expect there aren’t a lot of 8-year-olds who know as much about Vietnam as my daughter.

“One of the impacts on her is to be more skeptical of the government. We’ve seen ‘Platoon’ together and we’ve seen ‘Rambo.’ I tell her how fake ‘Rambo’ is and the difference between a real war and a glorified war. She knows that wars aren’t fair, that they’re fought by the underprivileged.”

Johnson said there is one message about Vietnam veterans he wishes to communicate to his children and anyone else who will listen: “Don’t feel sorry for us, but don’t make any more Vietnams.”

The Guy of the Ground

“When my dad talks about ‘Platoon,’ ” Allison said, “I always think of the guy on the ground and a lot of people--it’s like the whole neighborhood--are chasing him, and then they’re all around him.”

Showing war movies to an 8-year-old did not introduce her prematurely to violence, Johnson believes.

“What’s America’s greatest fascination besides sex?” he asked. “It’s killing. So this isn’t something she hasn’t seen before.”

If anything, said a spokesman for the Washington-based Vietnam Veterans of America, movies such as “Platoon” are opening lines of communication between veterans and their children.

“There’s a show coming on television in September, ‘Tour of Duty,’ along the same line as ‘Platoon,’ ” said Michael Leaveck, the group’s public-relations director. “We’ve been talking to psychologists to see what the effect of this will be on families. Some of them will be watching something that maybe they have never talked about.”

Leaveck said he and others in the field expect the CBS series to give some uncommunicative veterans an opening for breaking out of their isolation at home.

While a difficulty expressing intimacy with their families is common in Vietnam veterans, counselors agree that few of them physically abuse their children.

“Sometimes what will bring a guy in is that he’s spanking his kid too hard,” said Roger Melton, head of the VA’s storefront counseling center in Northridge. “But not often. Child abuse isn’t one of the big problems.”

Tom James is a volunteer counselor who helped found Community Outreach to Vietnam-Era Returnees (COVER), a private nonprofit counseling effort based in Charlottesville, Va. The program has seen 3,000 veterans throughout Virginia since 1979, James said, and encountered no child abuse at all.

Change Federal Law

“The problem is that the fathers are too concerned about the children, because they know what can happen to a person, how fragile life is,” James said. “Vets, especially combat vets, are very afraid of losing control of their anger. Either they become overprotective or they totally ignore the child. I had one guy--when his child was born, he couldn’t bring himself to hold it, because he was afraid that then he’d feel something.”

COVER may have the nation’s only ongoing counseling program for children of Vietnam veterans. Arthur Blank, a psychiatrist who heads the VA’s counseling outreach effort, said that many of the 189 centers offer group therapy for wives and other family members, but that he knew of no programs tailored for children.

Nevertheless, the VA storefront centers have been a success with veterans, and a campaign is under way to change a federal law that would close many of them.

“Current law requires that the majority of the vet centers move to VA hospitals over the next two years,” Blank said. “That clause has been in law quite some time. But Sen. (Alan B.) Cranston (D-Calif.) has introduced a bill to change that.”

In the COVER program, once every two months therapists gather children between 8 and 14 years old into small groups.

“I don’t want to brand children of vets as troubled, but many of them were very reserved, very self-contained, very independent,” James said.

“We don’t make them reveal what’s going on in the family. It’s a very gentle approach. We talk about Vietnam and the Army. We have them put on a helmet. They were astonished about how heavy a helmet is. Things like that.”

James said a chief benefit of the program is that it “gives the kids a chance to see their dads are trying to make changes in their life.” Those changes include such seemingly simple matters as listening to a baby cry without becoming anxious.

“There were always children crying in ‘Nam,” he said. “Vets hear their kids crying and it makes them tense.”

James and others said some children of veterans grow up quickly because they have acted as therapists of sorts for their fathers.

“Until only four or five years ago the vast adjustment vets went through was in the family setting,” said Jim Pechin, business manager of the 35,000-member VVA. “This was during the time that the Vietnam War was very unpopular and the vets were taking the blame. There was a lot of confusion among their kids.”

Parsons, of the outreach centers, agreed.

“In many cases the family has been the only source of support for these men who have been so isolated,” said Parsons of the outreach centers. “As the children grow up and move out on their own, the fathers may feel a great loss. They may in some way oppose it.”

Johnson, of Northridge, has the outward trappings of a veteran who has adjusted well--a solid career, a measure of affluence. Yet he said that his children often are his only outlet for expressing love.

“I’m a Ph.D. psychologist; I’ve been through therapy myself, and I don’t understand it,” he said. “Even with my wife, it’s hard sometimes to let her know how much I care.”

But with the children, it’s different.

“My kids civilized me,” he said.