Daily News, The (West Bend, WI) June 23, 2007 Author: Buchel

POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER 'I WAS ACTUALLY HAPPY WHEN I WAS TOLD I HAD PTSD' IRAQ WAR PROMPTS VIETNAM VETERAN TO TELL HIS STORY OF 'INNER WAR AND PEACE'

When Michael Orban of West Bend started to effectively cope with post-traumatic stress following a stint in the Vietnam War and years of mental anguish, he felt compelled to share his experience.

"When I found a lot of the answers for myself, I had a voice that said 'this is not your information to keep,'" Orban said. He's completed a book which he hopes will help other veterans - who often feel closely connected, whether they fought in World War II or the current Iraq War - live with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

"If you go back to the First World War or even the Civil War, you have guys who were battle-fatigued or shell-shocked," said Dan Stateson of Fond du Lac, who was a medic in Vietnam. "It was just then they were starting to realize what this was."

Stateson met Orban at the PTSD clinic in the Veterans Affair center in Tomah, and said he enjoyed his book, "Souled Out: A Memoir of Inner War and Peace."

"It kind of seems that PTSD or Vietnam vets really don't talk much about their own experience, and if you do talk about it, you tend to brush over it once," Stateson said. But the point of PTSD counseling, and the point of Orban's book, was getting down to the "nitty gritty."

"I came home and I had such a difficult time focusing and getting back into life here," Orban said. His old system of morals and ways of life no longer seemed applicable.

While strolling around the capital in Madison, he noticed a poster for the Peace Corps, walked into a local recruiting agency and headed for the jungles of Africa. There he had the opportunity to live and work with native tribes.

"From the time they're born, they experience living and dying. There are no old-age homes there," Orban said. "They weren't traumatized by the dying experience, and that fascinated me. From that, I started to realize going to war, one of the most-traumatic things is you don't want to die. I went back and researched a lot of the history of living and dying in America." During his time traveling the world and supervising the construction of an agricultural project in Cameroon, he reflected on his time in combat.

"The thing that got me the deepest was the idea that I understood that the Vietnamese and the Viet Cong had the will to live, but I put my will to live over their will to live, which caused enormous conflict and guilt within me," Orban said. "It also infuriated me that I was in the place where I had to exercise the will to live."

He is also flabbergasted at the human race's continued capacity for war, and spoke out against the start of the current war, even being featured in a front-page story about the debate in the Daily News in 2003.

"The people in Washington, D.C., don't understand the concept of what these kids have to do, the position they're in," Orban said. "They're going to be in a place where they have to exercise the will to live. My heart aches for those kids over there."

Stateson said that society does a better job of addressing PTSD in recent veterans, but said the government still conducts wars without regard for history.

"They don't realize what goes on in war. It becomes an individual situation," Stateson said. "You're broken down into small units, you drove down the road in Vietnam and you wondered when somebody was going to pop a grenade in your jeep."

Debra Pergande, a trauma specialist at the Veterans Admin-istration hospital in Tomah, said coping with the psychological effects of war also becomes a personal battle. "Everybody has to find their own peace of mind, and issues that might bother one, might not bother another at all. Everybody's an individual," Pergande said.

Pergande said as the Iraq War drags on, it has been triggering more Vietnam veterans to seek veterans services. Veterans of the Persian Gulf War also have conflicted feelings, and Iraq War veterans are coming back younger and younger (she said one 20-year-old vet arrived at her office with a skateboard). "I think it's hard for people who have already been in Iraq," Pergande said. "I think it's particularly hard for them to see the coverage nonstop on TV everyday. It doesn't let it rest for them. They kind of mentioned to me many times that they didn't get to finish the job, that maybe if they had been able to do more, this wouldn't be happening."

Orban hopes his book will reach veterans of all wars on the journey he began well before he was first diagnosed with PTSD in 1992.

"I was actually happy when I was told I have PTSD," Orban said. "I was like, 'is that what this is?' (That led to) an understanding of it - that I accept it, I understand what it is."

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