I really wanted to die this time.

It was criminal for me to be me.

Remember?

I tell my story because I want the honor that matches.

Do.

Bobby and Tom.

I want us.

To be remembered.

I'm afraid right now there's a process going on in the United States of erasing gays in the military, and that we're due respect and honor.

This is only a partial story about a single United States Navy hospital ship somewhere off the coast of Asia.

Its mission to measure the damage of war upon you would be.

So.

Yeah.

My name is Dave Lara, and I've known ever.

Since I was five years old that I was different.

I was gay.

I didn't have the word for it, but I was gay, and.

There was no model for me to follow in those days, so I just.

I just learned it on my own.

I, a Mexican Jew born on a farm, went into the Navy, served in Vietnam, and then did everything else in between.

Gay rights movement of the 70s, the Aids crisis of the 80s, and then recently making myself visible to Iraq and Afghanistan vets to make sure that they know by my presence that you can push through what war does to you.

I actually was born in Castroville.

California, the artichoke.

Capital of the world in Salinas Monterey area.

We moved down here when I was seven years old, literally to this neighborhood, almost.

Yeah, literally to Highland Park here, which is where my home is now in the 50s.

In the 60s, there was a big, big which hunt going on, rooting out communism.

McCarthy you never heard it, but I did.

And homosexuality out of out of government and public life.

How did that form someone like you of how you needed to operate within?

Yeah.

Hide.

Like I said, hide and be afraid and monitor my movements.

Literally.

It went down to micromanaging my wrist movements to make sure I didn't do that.

I know it's laughable, but I had to do that.

I also had to monitor the way I walked, and in fact, I'd literally get cramps so that my my butt wouldn't swing in any way, even resembling effeminate walking.

I mean, it was horrible.

I joke now, I had to stay alive somehow.

So I made my own world.

I didn't have it at home.

God bless.

My mother was just trapped with a father.

That was a man that was horrible.

And when he realized I was gay around the age nine, I had to.

I had to navigate him in his torture and his physical abuse on me.

We're up north.

In fact, back home.

And I was in the redwoods up there above Salinas, the hills.

Many rich people have these redwood homes.

Beautiful things, beautiful things.

So my dad told me to paint the porch, the railings, you know.

So when I finished the railings, I started painting underneath the window sill of the redwood house.

But you don't paint redwood.

And he came around the corner and he saw me painting, and he had a large pipe wrench, one of the large ones, not the little one that you have in your your tool chest.

A large one, big one had this big.

And he came over and he said, you son of a bitch.

And he took that and he swung and and knocked me out.

The woman owner of the home was actually at the window, saw him do it, came out, yelled at him.

He jumped in his truck and took off.

She called an ambulance and I was taken in.

And one more blown it would have.

Would have shattered my skull.

That was the final blow.

My mother then kicked him out, and I was home alone when he was walking out for the final time, and he turned around and he said to me, I never loved you.

I know what you're going to become.

I hate you.

And then he left.

But it was also her final blow, and that she died at the age of 48, which triggered me to have to go and find a life for myself.

17 years old.

Started with the emancipation of me to be an adult.

And then I joined the Navy.

What made you then decide that the Navy was the answer?

You asked me why did I voluntari I had no choice, my friend.

I've said it before.

It was illegal for me to be in life outside the military and in the military.

I needed paycheck, I needed a bed and needed some food.

And I also always had fantasies about being in the Navy.

My favorite TV show of all time is the victory SC of documentaries that were done in the 50s.

So I thought very wisely, I'm going to join the Navy, and that way I won't have to be on land.

They weren't sinking ships or anything, so I'd be safe.

I had worked as a volunteer at General Hospital here in Los Angeles, and the guy in boot camp saw that.

Though you're going to be a corpsman, these things were assigned to you.

You didn't choose them in those days.

And so I became a corpsman, not knowing that the Marines didn't have their medical medics with them in the field.

And that corpsman were the Marines medics.

And so, nine months after joining the Navy, I ended up in Vietnam.

Luckily on a hospital ship.

Unluckily, I did have to spend about, in total, a little over a month on the ground with, with, with the Marines and all of that entails.

You're somewhere.

Here it is.

It's the original.

Commanding officer.

Enlisted personnel, US Navy support activity denying Vietnam.

See attached list.

In these orders are the.

I should have counted them, but these were guys.

Mostly.

I went to Hospital Corps School.

Some of them even.

I went to boot camp with Casey and Tony.

Emmerdale.

They were straight.

They were good friends.

They were good, good friends.

I was assigned as an aid station up in Dong Ha because I had what they considered dual service.

Could they?

Whenever they wanted, they could use me as a marine, medic or corpsman.

And then but most of the time I would stay on the ship landed in Ghana.

It was must have been three in the morning.

And we were waiting for two corpsman that were going to bring us up to speed to do some temporary work while we were there.

There was certainly a lot of work, so we waited and then finally these two guys came in and there's a mat and Joe mat was this burly, really cute blond kid, really battle hardened.

I mean, he was tough little short mother.

And Joe was a Polish guy.

Burly and dry sense of humor who was really.

Really cool.

They both walked in and their eyes were like they were.

They were crazy.

And I don't know how I got the the info, but they had just come from a dust off.

And so there was adrenaline running through them and it caused their eyes to, to jiggle.

So that's when I first looked at two men that I wished were like me.

Gaydar was in existence in those days.

Or leave it or not, the dance at that point.

Now now you're talking about what it was like to really be gay in those days you would listen to cuz like, do you have a girlfriend?

You not have a girlfriend.

There were these little subtle cues and there was that look.

Then that finally happened, began to happen that we began to identify.

I held back because I thought I was making it up in my mind.

I so wanted Matt to be gay.

So I never made it official until he came out and I was getting ready to leave, and he goes, look at come to the storage locker, we're going to have some booze and wish you off.

And by the way, we were like you.

And that's how all of that began.

My.

And and my Joe.

The paper.

Is very.

Very delicate.

The repose in a blueprint.

I was up in this area here for my ward officer.

Country was up here.

The crews, the corpsman quarters is right in this area down here.

I'd have to get.

Oh, there it is.

Hospital, There it is.

The hospital corpsman quarters, by the way.

It was beautiful.

When you come off of the the way from Dong Ha and you're over the sea in a Huey.

It's beautiful.

The blue water and the repose, which is white, looks like a pearl on the water when we come in and land.

And now I'm being rushed down.

The gang play off of the flight deck and into the triage area to get then assigned to my billet and all of that stuff.

And as I land, the flight officer there had a stack of paper with him, and as each one of us went by him, he handed this to us.

And it's the story of the angel of the Orient and of the repose and what its mission is.

And I still have it.

We came to calling the angel of the yet the albino, because it was tough work, man.

What we had to do.

As far as the routine on the ship is concerned, we all had to be assigned to triage, fly quarters, sweated calling.

Blackwater to.

Receive five emergency patients.

Then that was our cue to go up top side and get into alignment to be able to go to the landed choppers, take wounded off down another ramp, and then into the triage area where a determination was made whether the person needed immediate help, they could wait, or sadly, also hopeless.

I still had to deal with wounded coming directly from the battlefield.

And it was normal.

For men to die in my hands.

One morning I looked down and on the bunk across from me.

They were for high.

I was at the top.

There was this cute little kid and he was looking at me.

He was just laying there looking at me and I looked.

I go, hi, I'm Dave, and he goes, I'm Bobby.

You know, there was something about him that was mischievous.

He was a little gnome and.

And again, this is when all of a sudden you realize, and I don't know how to put it, but I realized that he was gay and that he was signaling me.

Not not in a, you know, come on way, but of a way of you're safe with me.

And it was just implied.

Always implied.

Oh, Dave, you've got to meet Tom.

He's on the ship to.

And, you know, once I meet them, we start just.

We knew we were gay.

We just didn't say it.

We think we.

At one point, we finally did go.

He's just like us, you know, that kind of thing.

As we spotted other gay men on the ship.

This would have been November.

And then the repose got.

Ordered to go to Hong Kong for rest and relaxation, what's called R&R.

Do join the Navy and you will see the world.

I had told them about Matt and Joe and how cool they were, and they wanted to meet them really bad.

So I got Ahold of Matt.

We would actually be able to pass notes via the choppers that were bringing in the wounded from Dong Ha and back into the ship, so I was able to get pretty regular correspondence with him via that underground mail service.

So we arranged to meet in Hong Kong, and I don't know who got the reservations, but we got a double suite at the Hong Kong Hilton and we all met there, Matt and Joe and Tom and Bobby and me.

And we spent that first night just talking about being gay.

Is it hard for you to understand when I say we had never met our kind before, but to actually meet us on a level need each other on a level that was human and community.

So this was the first time for all of us, and we spent all night long talking about what that meant.

Matt and I got into a deep discussion because we didn't know then, could two men really love each other or which is degenerates and and carnal, and could there be a relationship?

Obviously there could never be marriage.

Never.

But could you make a life together?

I remember Matt going to bed that night.

Everybody had already crashed out.

Must have been four in the morning.

And Matt turning around and heading off.

He was in one of the suites.

I had the couch and he goes, I don't know if we'll if we can have a relationship, but I want to find someone to love, that's all.

Just someone to love.

The next night, we began to talk, and we realized that we'd all read a book called the Group.

It's a novel written by Mary McCarthy, and it's about these sorority girls from Vassar College, and we followed them through their life in the novel of sexism, job discrimination, and, of course, men.

And we related to that.

And at this point, this is when we learned that gay men actually have in, in, in is in our DNA camp.

And so we became very campy.

We assigned ourselves the various names of the characters in the book.

And, and then we would just talk about our lives, but using that as a basis of how we could interact in the world.

And we started to call ourselves the group.

One of the other things, though, that was being done, was that military men were getting all over the Pacific Zippo lighters, and on those lighters they would have inscribed their your ship name or their MLS, their job title, or maybe a base, you know, like Yakuza Hospital or whatever.

At that point, we decided, let's get our own lighters, our own suppose, and let's inscribe on it the group.

And so I have one of those lighters still.

What is it, 55 years?

It makes me both sad and happy.

I continued what I did in high school.

I would stiffen my walk, watch how I spoke, made sure that I butchered it up.

And you don't go to bed where you live, you don't run around.

So.

And I to put this for the audience.

Believe it or not, gay men in the military are not looking at your ass in the showers.

There are literally dying men coming aboard.

Am I going to start fraternizing?

I was a professional in the military, and I'm here to say that most of all of them were that way.

In 1960, there was an accident aboard the aircraft carrier, the USS forced off, and it was late at night for us when they got the word that we would have to go down or up to the Tonkin Gulf area, where the forest all to render aid.

We're split up in groups.

One of the ship's crew, one of the guys that I knew, he was sent down to empty out the food lockers, the two large cold food lockers on the ship.

Other guys were assigned to triage, and there was another group that were assigned with buckets and masks, and I was assigned with a small group of 79 guys.

And we were going to go over on the choppers to go pick up wounded.

As I walked through.

There's no power.

There's only emergency lights, some that glaring white, some just that red, those big red boxes.

And through the the walkways of the ship, there are just pools of water that are probably about a foot and a half.

So I'm slogging through this stuff, and on it is the sheen of all and gasoline and other chemicals.

And it's, you know, I don't know if you've ever seen it, but it's in water.

All is pearlescent.

So the ghostly light was causing these rainbows to be shimmering on the water as I slog through and moved from compartment to compartment.

And finally I get to this crew area.

Most of it is caved in, and that's where we began to look for some dead.

And remember this other guy go look at there's this stacks here, there, I think for or five high.

And then there's, you know, let's move them off and we lift them off.

We lift them off.

The bottom one had a man there and he had his arm across his face like this, like he was just sleeping.

And then as I look around, I realized that there is a stack in stacks and stacks of black, shiny body bags on the all deck.

When we get down there, there's the chief corpsman is there?

He's got a cigar in his mouth, not lit, but sitting.

And it's not.

And he says their jaws are right now locked, so you'd have to get down and break open their job.

Some of them you'll need to cut their face.

He held up a scalpel from ear to the mouth.

There.

Jump both sides so that you can get in there and look at their teeth, and he goes.

I know what we're asking you to do, but it has to be done.

We need to get these boys home.

So for the next, what, eight hours I spent and the rest of us spend our time literally looking into the face of death.

The smell was getting crazy.

The bodies were getting to bloat from bacteria growing in them, and they would burst and olive sudden intestines would spill out of the stomach.

Whatever.

I realized that he had that cigar in his mouth so that he was smelling, at least that that would mask a little bit of what was going on.

We went to the Nang and Doc and White Elephant Landing, I think, and then a bunch of Marines came aboard and began to remove the bodies.

Finally, about 126.

I had got caught kissing Matt that New Year's in Hong Kong.

By Casey and I had been living under that hammer.

All that time.

With regard to Casey, he was drunk when he caught us and he beat me up when we got back to the ship.

You.

You queer.

But he was behind me as I was looking at the the dead being loaded under the refrigerator trucks and behind me, I heard him say, I don't know what you call yourself, homos.

But I know you're more of a man than anyone I know.

I saw you do about 18 of those dead down there.

I fell out after three, and as he started to leave, I said, gay.

I call myself gay.

The group was able to form again.

You know, we got they got the time off.

Matt and Joe and Tom and Bobby and I, we all met in in Singapore.

And one night we went out to this street called Burgess Street.

But all the Navy sailors from all over the world because the war was going on and everybody was Australians, British, whatever.

We're all there.

They called it Boogie Street because it was pretty rad.

Crazy.

At night they would block off this street, they would put tables with cloths and candles and everything, and they'd be all night long.

And what it was was a street where drag queens, trans and just Strange's men would dress up in makeup and dresses and the whole bit, and they would be the servers and the entertainment on long Burgess Street, on Boogie Street.

So we went, and it was great because the third of the ship was there too.

So here we are, gay men with straight people being entertained by guy queens.

It was so much fun.

But there was a feature.

There was a men's bathroom at the end of the of one end of the street and on that flat roof.

And I don't know why the British should do this.

And the Australians both do it.

They're weird.

They're weird, I don't know.

On Liberty, they would get up there and it's called the dance of the Zulu Warrior, and it's a song.

They would drop their pants and draw their underwear, and they would stick a rolled up newspaper or toilet paper up their butts.

They relied it on fire and then dance as the whole crowd would sing this song, you know, dum, did it come Zulu fighter, warrior or whatever?

And whoever pulled it out first lost.

They were drunk and it was the craziest thing.

And that's at that point.

It was one time that I was able to put mine around to round that and just laugh, because everybody was drunk and doing it anyway, and he pulled his hand back and we really, really, really had a good time there.

It's a crazy night.

We saw one of the other gays from the ship, David King.

And he was making out with a marine in a alleyway.

And I remember going, dude, dude, this is dangerous.

What the hell are you doing?

He was breaking all the rules.

So it wasn't long after we finished in, in Singapore that we had to go back to a long Apollo to take on stores for the ship.

We'd always go into town.

It's probably one of the best Liberty Report ports in all of naval history.

I'm honest about that.

But one of the tactics to keep me and other the other gang guys in the group, we all had an assigned girlfriend that we see in that port in their favorite bar that we would go to.

She was most happy to be paid to do nothing except drink with us, and so we would use these girls as our beards, what we call today.

And I had a drag queen, one that was pretty and she she passed.

Her name was fancy, but like us, there was David King again.

And so one day, coming back to the ship, standing out on the railing, I see the chase team, two guards and a chief and a man between them, and it's David and they're bringing them back to the ship.

He had got caught making out with another marine, a white marine.

But I remember going down into our crews quarters and seeing him packing his sea bag with the two chasers, the guards standing with him, and he looked up at me.

I averted his eyes.

Shaming him like everybody else.

It was, again, one of those survival tactics that we as gay people had to to do.

And he was taken away.

And we found out later that he was sent to prison.

He received a sentence of 19 months at Leavenworth.

So when I got to danger, everybody was up in a really, really strange way, you know, Matt pulled me into a cat, into a tent, said, look it, guy, there's really going up on up in an area called the canteen that was a base on the literally the border of north and south of back.

This is a CBS news special report, The Ordeal of Concierge.

Here is CBS news correspondent Mike Wallace.

Kantian is here.

Two miles south of the demilitarized zone at the narrow top of South Vietnam, 12 miles inland from the South China Sea.

It had been raining like crazy up there, and there was no way to get wounded out.

And it had been several days.

I mean, several days to us is three because casualties mount.

The rain finally broke probably the third day that I was there, and the command was looking for some volunteer corpsman to go up and and make a medevac.

So Matt and Joel and I volunteered.

Actually, Joe was already up there.

He was already in the thick of that shit.

So Matt and I and some other guys went in three different choppers.

Mount was in one, I was in a different one.

And then there was a third one.

When we got there, we began to put our wounded on.

Joe was orchestrating what was going on, making sure that we got the weight distribution proper, the walking, the stretcher.

We were putting them on.

Our choppers were already full.

There was a moment where we always did it on a on a desktop.

After loading, we would turn around and look at still standing outside the chopper and make sure that everything was covered.

We got everybody.

Everything is going good.

Then we board the chopper as the last person to get aboard.

So I was doing it and I could see Matt was on his turned around also.

And that's when a rocket hit his chopper.

He grabbed a couple of the of the men that were on stretchers like this and ran away from the chopper, dropped him off.

Joe was there, grabbed them, moved them away.

He went back to get more, but when he went back, that's when the chopper blew up.

He flew several feet, several feet in the air, and he landed not far from the.

As a corpsman, you know, when someone's dying just by looking at them.

And he looked at me and he said, I wish, I wish.

And I knew what he was talking about because Matt and I were in Hong Kong that night, that we were talking about whether you could have relationships.

That's what he said.

Then I wish, I wish I could find somebody to love.

We had already formed a relationship.

We had already kissed and lived in a. Partnership.

And I said, I know, Matt, I know I love you, man.

I wish we could have been lovers.

I love you.

Many died.

It just kind of died.

Joe came running up.

And he looked at Matt and he said, Look at Dave.

You got to go.

You gotta go.

And I looked up and of course, my chopper's there with its blades spinning like crazy.

And I know I've got to get out of there, because if I don't, that may get blown up to in my men there on that ship will get blown away too.

But I was stunned.

And then finally Joe looked down and said, look it, you've been here long enough.

You know how this works.

And then he whispered.

The friendships over.

Now go.

It kind of brought me out.

And then all of a sudden I decided I wanted to get Matt Slider, the one that said the group and I searched and I knew he had it on him and I found it.

And then I got on my ship and left.

So I walk into the office and there's a man in a black suit and tie, shiny shoes.

I'm going, this is some sort of undercover.

And I put me in a empty room, which is a table and two chairs, and he came in and he goes, well.

We have information that you're of.

And oddly, just a few weeks before that, I had learned that David King had died in Leavenworth.

I never did learn how, but it didn't matter.

He was a black man.

That had to be to kiss a white man.

And they put him in jail where they knew something like this could happen.

The interview was just, we know we have lists so you can get out of this.

You know, Dave, if you give us the names of other and that you know, of here in the military, even the Navy guys, you know, in Bethesda, you give us names, we'll make it easy for you.

You can get out, you know, no problem.

So, allies, of course, I knew that I was going to end up in Leavenworth.

I became really frightened.

The man that I worked with had family, and he always took off during holidays because he had kids and stuff.

So I was alone in the laboratory and I went there.

It was dark.

It looked like Frankensteins lab.

Got a plastic bag, you know, Bunsen burner.

And I taped the bag around it, around the tube.

And then I put the bag over my head and I taped it so that it was shut, and I turned on the gas.

I really wanted to die this time.

It really did.

I lay my head down on that counter when I knew there was enough gas in there.

I turned it off and just waited.

But I looked up and I took through that plastic bag and a in a fuzzy world that just didn't make any sense to me, and I decided I didn't want to do this.

I was beginning to actually like myself a little.

So I took off the bag and I turned myself into emergency and told him what I had done.

Maybe I knew this, but I bet they wouldn't give a dishonorable discharge and put a man into Leavenworth.

She was crazy.

So I played crazy.

I tried to commit suicide.

I'm crazy.

And that did stop the investigations.

Sid stopped talking to me and I was sent to Bethesda, Maryland.

The hospital there, Davie Hospital in the psych ward.

I was put into a padded cell and shut the door and locked, and they began to pump psychotropic drugs.

And something called for a scene that made me like a zombie.

It's a walk.

They called the authorities scene walk because you can't pick your feet up.

And I said, sat in that room.

You know, they told me so that you'll be safe.

You won't hurt yourself.

But really, they were protecting the normal crazies from it.

They didn't know if I would start doing stuff.

So I packed all my stuff, my uniforms, my medals into my c bag, and I left the base.

I threw it away.

I was really proud of those medals.

I got into a cab and went to Arlington, which is where Matt is buried.

I took his lighter and oddly, it's the same shape as his headstone.

And I looked over his grave and out across Arlington.

And I said to him, I am going to do something to make sure that guys like you and me could serve honorably someday.

You hear about homeless vets and they call him homeless.

I don't know how they were, but I didn't consider myself homeless.

I considered myself clearing my mind.

Took a long time to walk across the US.

I ended up in Tucumcari, New Mexico, washing dishes at a lousy little diner.

They let me sleep in an old camper in back, fleas in the bed just outside of Saint Louis.

I was sleeping under a bridge, but sleeping under there.

One night I could hear somebody coming in there and started walking towards that area and I yelled, hey!

And then all of a sudden a shot rang out for had a gun.

I didn't know what I was looking for until around then.

I realized, man, I got to get, you know, this is crazy.

I got to get some sort of safety situation.

And I had Bobby's address with me.

He lived in Cincinnati, so I called him up and his phone number, and I went and spent a couple of days with him.

Veterans.

What?

You got to understand, it's almost a universal situation.

You think we're all going to be real pallets when we get out, but in reality that doesn't happen very often.

Maybe 1 or 2.

But really, no, it really doesn't happen a lot.

And what I've heard others say is that I don't know how to be friends with you outside of the service, and that's what I was experiencing with Bobby.

He had become a rent boy to Richmond in Chicago, and he would go up there for months at a time with these old guys, get paid.

He wasn't a happy gay.

I left there and I headed to D.C., where Joe was still and tried to live with him for a while, trying to see if I could get a job and stuff.

But that wasn't that wasn't working.

So I ended up checking all the way back to LA.

And I was able to get my life in order.

And in the 70s, I decided that I needed to fulfill that promise I made to Matt at his grave site, and I helped create the first ever in the United States Gay Men's Support System, or community, or whatever.

It was an old Victorian out on Wilshire Boulevard that we got, and I, of course, was a lap tech taking blood and doing STD testing.

And other things.

You know, I just out I was out at that point.

We began to have gay rights marches and protests.

There were things called kiss ins, which would be go in the straight population by having men gathered together in public and kiss.

In the 80s to continue my promise to Matt, I became a really strong militant in the Aids movement.

I joined a group called Act Up and we would actually chain ourselves to the pharmaceutical companies.

We would do demonstrations in Washington, D.C.. I got run over by a horse once, and one of the riots, we wanted action for our government and act up was how I did that.

But on the other side of that, I was also a member of the Names Quilt Project.

Nobody thought anything about us dying in.

The numbers were dying.

So by ourselves we created the Aids quilt and we would take that quilt to Washington, D.C.

and lay it out on the mall.

When I finished one shift when I was there, and this must have been 92, 1992, I was walking off the quilt and there in front of me was Joan.

Was Joe.

I walked up to her, I go, hey, Lynskey.

And he looked at me.

He didn't recognize me.

And then all of a sudden I go, it's me, Dave.

And he shook.

And we sat there.

They were still reading the names and was just getting ready to finish the loudspeaker, and so I just put my arm around him and we both sets just stood there looking at the quilt, crying.

I talked to him after that and he was broken.

Not like like Bobby was, but still similar.

He told me that he thought God was against us, that he hated gays, that we were wrong, that we shouldn't exist.

He'd become a Christian fundamentalist.

I think it was just a reaction to all the horror that he had seen in his world, like I had seen.

Like Tom, broken in the way he was, in which he couldn't live in society as a gay man, and he would marry and have kids.

In San Francisco, had seen a couple of doctors, and I just didn't make any sense.

They they would put me in anger management groups and, and such, and then I would get kicked out for being too angry.

Anyway, I was lucky enough to find a VA doctor here in LA.

He was gay and that's the ticket, I think.

I think it applies to anybody requiring psychiatric help.

You must have some sort of common connection with the doctor to be able to have effective treatment.

He put me through the most harrowing three four months of a treatment called prolonged Exposure.

He made me relive the four star every cut for every tooth parting, moving and touching burned bodies that were exploding.

And there he made me live through that.

And all of that time was spent me writhing in the corner, screaming and yelling as I described.

To him.

And welling up right now, but understand that it.

Eventually got less and less in less.

And then he released me and said, you're not over your PTSD.

It's going to be with you.

But use these techniques.

Talk about it.

Meditate.

And you can at least control the PTSD.

I joined Afghan and Iraq veterans groups at that point.

I wanted to show them that by being my age old that they should see they could survive what war does to them, like war did to me.

I've often described Vietnam.

It's the best time of my life.

Regardless of what happened to Matt, the connections that I made with those boys.

And I've never, ever been able to experience that sense to be alive when you're going to die.

That, for some reason, makes living better.

I don't know why, but about four years ago I wanted to see if Tom was around and I looked up where he lived.

Lewiston, Massachusetts.

And damn it, there was a number, a phone number, and I thought, I'm going to call, a woman answered.

And I said, is this the Tom?

Who was in the Navy in Vietnam on the repos?

And she goes, yes.

I asked to talk to him, and she said he died in 1998 of a brain aneurysm due to cancer.

Probably Agent Orange.

Related.

Tom had the such a humorous way he would cup his hands like this, and then he'd look at me like.

And it was so funny.

And I asked her.

I described it as he still laugh like that.

I just described it, and she began to laugh because I had triggered a memory in her, and he was the same Tom to her.

I asked if she ever found a lighter, a zipper that had an inscription, the group on it, and she said, I did.

I have that, I don't know what it is, but I have it.

I go, it was our group of pals called ourselves in Vietnam.

Said, would you like to have it?

And I gave her my address and it came in the mail.

I had already given my Zippo to the doctor, the gay doctor at the VA for bringing me back from the war, for getting me out of the war.

And then Tom's.

I gave it to my brother.

So I just keep matt's.

In the end, I realized that my.

Group of friends, the group, they weren't able to make it.

They were broken.

It was what I was working for as a as a. The promise to Matt was to get dignity for us and let us exist on this planet as regular people, normal people.

But I wasn't able to do that for my friends, the group.

And Dave, Laura McKay, Mexican Jew veteran.

And in 2020, I got my discharge corrected, not upgraded, but corrected.

And I now have an honorable discharge.

From the United States Navy.

And.

I have my medals and my benefits.

And I'm a proud Navy veteran.

He never came out to anybody.

And if he still has family living or anything like that, I cannot do that, though it's a thing.

You're never going to see him.

In a way.

Maybe that's poetic, but.

But in another way, isn't it the last vestiges of that shame that I felt for being gay, and I can't let go of that one.

Not with regard to Matt.

No, I can't, I just can't.

I keep thinking about it, but I can't.