Re: From War to Peace of Mind

Date: January 27, 2004

"From war to peace of mind:
Ex-POW Hal Wilson knows the stresses that captivity, ill health and the death of a loved one can bring. He also knows how to help.

By Jan Jonas Tribune Reporter

From inside a crumpled brown paper bag, Hal Wilson begins removing memories - objects, remnants of 101 days at the Hanoi Hilton.

That most monstrous of prisoner-of-war camps during the Vietnam War yielded, for Wilson, a plastic bag holding soap, a toothbrush and toothpaste.

A box of Tamdao cigarettes.

A pair of pajamas, its red-and-white stripes faded to pink.

A tin cup, scratched on two sides with "Red," his nickname, derived from Rita Hayworth-red hair. Also scratched on it: Las Vegas, Heartbreak, Heartbreak Annex, Zoo Garage and Zoo Pigsty - names of cells in which Wilson was once held.

A B-52D pilot who flew 250 missions during the war, Wilson says his days as a captive were difficult.

But they weren't the worst situation in his life.

A stroke years later that paralyzed his right side and left him temporarily unable to speak was dreadful.

Even worse - the absolute worst - was the death of his 21-year-old son, hit by a drunken driver on his first summer vacation home from college.

Each of those situations, says Wilson, 62, brought an initial feeling of numbness followed by fear and then denial and anger.

Certain sounds, smells or pictures trigger those feelings again and again.

But out of those agonies came Wilson's mission, his passion: helping victims of post-traumatic stress disorder learn to manage those triggers so fear doesn't overwhelm them and make the business of living almost too difficult to bear.

Those efforts have now reached across the ocean to help victims of the strife in Northern Ireland.

With a woman he met a few years ago, Wilson helped to develop an international trauma center that draws therapists from war-torn parts of the world.

There, in large part thanks to the retired therapist in Cedar Crest, they receive therapy for themselves and learn new techniques to help others grow past the traumas of their lives.


The war

It was 1972. A surface-to-air missile brought down Wilson's plane and his crew of five men.

"I don't think I was on the ground 30 minutes before I was captured," he says. "I came up on three militia, wearing khakis, army-green stuff. I'm assuming they were militia. Militia or regular army were under orders to bring us in alive."

But there was a moment the next day when he wasn't certain he would remain that way.

He'd been taken to a small village about seven miles from Hanoi.

"In a semi-cellar of a building, a guy had a handgun to my head. By that time, I was blindfolded. To be honest, I thought he was going to pull the trigger. That didn't scare me. I thought, `I'm going to leave (wife) Sally without a husband and two boys without a father.' I'm not sure why the fear wasn't there."

Perhaps, he says, it was because of something that happens during a trauma.

"Your brain will shut down," he says. "You may not remember."

Released in March 1973 after the signing of the treaty that ended the Vietnam War, Wilson came home. He remained on the job with Strategic Air Command and learn to fly FB-111s, a fighter/bomber used during the Cold War.

But it wasn't easy.

He retired after more than 22 years in the military and opened a motorcycle shop in Belen while studying for a master's degree in psychology.

In the mid-1980s, as a therapist, he began specializing in post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD - a disorder he knew firsthand.

His knowledge gave him credibility, especially with other POWs. He worked with the Veterans Administration on a team to assess and treat PTSD victims.

Last week, in the dining room of his Cedar Crest home near Albuquerque, he reached inside the crumpled brown bag and pulled out a piece of damaged metal, silver on one side, gunmetal gray on the other.

"This is possibly a part of our aircraft that a friend gave me," he said.

His voice lacked the emotion you'd expect.

That's because he has taught himself how to deal with the feelings that a piece of burnt metal could trigger.


The stroke

He'd been having headaches for more than three years.

"I couldn't leave the house without Extra Strength Excedrin," he says.

But in October 1988, he had his last headache.

"I got up and went into the bathroom to start to get ready (for work). It hit me," Wilson says of a stroke brought on by a congenital defect.

"When it happened I had no idea what was going on. I remember having to hang on because my right side didn't work. Then I wound up on the floor, and Sally got me. She called 911.

"The connection between knowing what you want to say and knowing how to say it is just, like, cut."

Wilson put everything in his life on hold to focus on getting better.

"I looked on it as a full-time job," he says. "Nothing less than full recovery was acceptable."

Chuckling, he says he could say "yes" and "no" but didn't always use the right word.

"If I was going to add 2 and 2, I'd get the first 2 in my head, go for the second 2 and lose the first one," he says.

After a year, he asked a neuropsychologist to assess what he had forgotten how to do.

"I lost the ability in my head to do math as quickly as before," he says. "I've been told that my recovery was much faster and more complete based on the amount of damage" than other patients' improvement.

"Now if I'm tired or stressed, my speech falls apart. My spelling is more difficult than before."

But those things aren't too much for him to cope with.

What almost was too much, though, came about three years after his stroke.


The worst

The Wilsons' younger son, Scott, a budding lawyer, came home for the summer from his first year at Indiana's Davis and Elkins College in 1991.

Scott had been home for a week when his car was hit by a drunken driver. Scott died.

With characteristic determination, Hal and Sally Wilson fought to snap back - not to their former footing but to a place where they could move on.

Hal Wilson's work with PTSD was critical to both of them, and they had a support group of friends who were able to give comfort and aid.

While working with the Veterans Administration, Wilson had developed a method to teach PTSD victims how to handle their triggers.

It involved no drugs, no mandatory group therapy group, no reliving the event over and over with a therapist. Instead, it requires teaching yourself ways to stop thinking of the situation, to think of something else, something better.

Wilson, a former engineer, had to demonstrate its value to himself.

"You've got to prove it (to an engineer)," he says. "He's not going to believe it till he sees it and probably a number of times. It was working so well, it took me four months before I believed it."

And he discovered it wasn't only good for others but for him and his wife as well.

Years later, the technique proved so successful that people in Northern Ireland wanted to try it on prisoners there.

Wilson met Marty Rafferty, a social worker from Northern Ireland when she was in New Mexico.

"She works with people who've been affected by `The Troubles,'" Wilson says of the Northern Irish strife.

She wanted to talk to people who worked with PTSD and went to the VA for information. Wilson was suggested to her.

Later, when she was putting together a team to take to Belfast, she included him. He was a good fit for that group because of his work with PTSD. His POW status was a plus.

Wilson now volunteers on the board of directors of the International Trauma Center.

As with all character-building opportunities, Wilson says the bad times are ones he wouldn't repeat.

But they are also the times he wouldn't give up. The experience he gained has proved invaluable.

Wilson keeps the brown paper bag and its curious contents because those Vietnam days were part of his life - a part that helped him help others.

And that's what those experiences are for, he says: not to be wasted but to be used as learning tools.

He pulls one more from the crumpled bag: a black faux-leather duffle bag with a white tag marked by the North Vietnamese reading, "Willson."

"Look, Sally," Wilson says to his wife of 40 years. "I didn't throw it away."

Albuquerque Tribune, NM"