Steven Piotrowski

I went over in '69, so we're talking 39 years. I still regularly have nightmares of Vietnam. I was put on a medication about a year that's reduced them, but I till regularly have them. I think about it every single day. How many things that happened 40 years ago do you think about every day? And part of it is that unreality and part of it's traumatic. Part of it's that fact that when you were 18 or 19, what was the most important thing of your life most of the time? Was it, did I make the varsity football team when you were 18 in high school? And that's where I was. I was playing sports, doing all the high school things. Within a year, the most important thing of my life was do I have enough ammo to survive another day? Do I have water? Do I have food? Am I going to survive? Am I going to lose a body part? That ain't normal for a 19 year olds, an 18 year olds... That becomes very scarring.

Normally when you're 19, you're in college, you're getting the chance to explore in a fairly safe environment... we didn't get that chance. We had to grow up and be deadly adults at a time when we should have been exploring who the hell we were. Instead we were locked in to being soldiers. And we had to be good soldiers to live. And all of a sudden they say, 'Okay, we're done with you. Go back and be whatever you want to be.' How do I do that? You spent several months telling me how to be a soldier but you didn't spend anytime telling me how to be me again. And who is me after that experience? And that's just.... I don't know how better to explain it, but it's finding yourself again. I was a small town kid, play a jock in high school. And all was said and the only thing I am is an ex-soldier, a veteran at 19.