[music playing]

[rapid gunfire]

There's nothing like being in a firefight that, you know, gets everything moving. Every emotion you ever sustained, you got that within two minutes of a firefight. It was a very frightening thing.

[gunfire]

You lay there— you're helpless because you don't know they are. They're throwing grenades at you.

[boom]

They're shooting machine guns at you. You don't know if you can get up, run. There's no hiding, 'cause they'll find you. I mean, where can you go?

[music playing]

'Nam was hell. 'Nam took our souls. It took my soul and— took it away from me. Whatever goodness, real goodness, I had or happiness, it's still over there somewhere.

Psychiatrist Doug Bremner has been working for 10 years with patients like Dennis who have been permanently traumatized by the terror they experienced in Vietnam.

Dennis has symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, including intrusive said memories of the war that come back to him at any time of the day and which he has little control over, and they replay in a repetitive manner. He has nightmares of the war. He's jumpy and easily startled. He's hypervigilant and on guard all the time.

Nearly a fifth of Vietnam vets returned, like Dennis, traumatized.

I feel trapped in my life. I feel like I'm trapped in some kind of shell that— something that's never going to go away. I'm suicidal at times, and— uh, hopelessness, you know. And the dreams. I think because of thinking about Vietnam so much and how hopeless that situation is, I just kind of carried it into my life today.

I don't like busy streets all that much. I— I try to stay away from it. Walking the streets of New York or somewhere, I'm a little more watchful, you know, of— of the ambush.

Someone like Dennis knows that anyone could pop out of the bushes at any time with a gun and shoot you, and there's nothing that you can do about that. And he walks around with that knowledge all the time. But that makes it more difficult for him to work and to be close to his family and to do all those other things that we all take for granted.

Dennis is on a hair trigger to fear. Cars backfiring or just the smell of diesel take him back to Vietnam.

I need a perimeter set up here, quick!

[gunfire]

Oh, man.

[gunfire]

Perimeter set up around us! Get another [inaudible] in here.

You got a—

[gunfire]

[engine roars]