Stuttering Through Life With a Stop in Vietnam: A Journey to Becoming Myself

By Charles Sacks and Marilyn Levy

Charles Sacks grew up Jewish in the post-World War II era in Cleveland, Ohio, in a secure middle-class neighborhood. After completing his medical and psychiatric training, he was drafted into the army as a division psychiatrist. While stationed in Vietnam, he learned t

• Language: English
• Publisher: CHARLES SACKS
• Release date: Jun 3, 2024
• ISBN: 9798988341772

Charles Sacks

Charles Sacks, a retired psychiatrist, has two adult children and resides in Chevy Chase, Maryland with his wife, Jane.

Book preview

ONE

What is Sacks Doing in Vietnam?

Seeing that shit-eating grin on his face really pissed me off. Then he was saying, Come on call, find out, don’t be a baby. Bob, who was a good friend of mine in our residency program, was safe, as he’d found out from the Surgeon General’s Office that he was going to Fort Ord, in California. Bob was married, which I was not, and I had a bad feeling that meant I would be going to Vietnam. We were all part of the Berry Plan, where the government allowed you to finish your post-graduate training (internship and residency) and then you volunteered to join the military for two years. You sign a contract.

Well, I did call and as I got the news, I guess Bob could see the blood drain from my face, and he momentarily looked ashen too. He quickly recovered, and you could say he was gleeful it was me going and not him. As that became clearer to me, I could only say to him, Fuck you, Bob!

After the initial panic subsided, I was left feeling depressed and not exactly uncertain I wouldn’t die. I put it this way grammatically as I don’t want to sound like some kind of crazy pessimist or too fatalistic. That night I went to see my girlfriend, Caroline, as usual, and she was great. She was very empathic, sad for me, but also bolstering in a beautiful way and we had the warmest connection I could remember. As I held her in my arms that night, I wondered if I would be able to come back to this and if it would feel the same. Or more to the point, would I come back at all and would anything be the same.

I had phoned the Surgeon General’s Office in March 1969 and the last three to four months of my residency proceeded without a problem—other than my being assigned as a ward chief at Chicago State Hospital (CSH), a stressful experience on its own merits. However, between finding out I was going to Vietnam and working at the hospital, I never slept well again, at least not until my kids grew up and left home.

Meanwhile, my dear mother was beside herself with angst. She insisted I write to the Surgeon General’s Office asking to be placed on duty in CONUS (continental US) because I was an only child and my mother’s sole support. Their response was that unless someone in the family, a brother for example, was killed while in the service, I could not be reassigned. I surprised myself by feeling relieved that I couldn’t get out because I could not have lived with myself feeling I was a coward (even though I didn’t believe in Vietnam’s civil war). We had betrayed Vietnam in 1956 and now were obsessed with fighting communism. Therefore, young people had to die—58,000 of them.

As the time neared for me to leave for Vietnam, I made all the necessary preparations regarding the ending of my residency training program, leaving the many relationships I had made living in Chicago for four years, and supporting those relationships that needed it, like my mother. During the last few months, I somehow managed to carry on and not think about that which filled me with a sense of foreboding, of some inevitable doom. My conflicted relationship with God probably didn’t help, as I wondered whether He would get involved in my welfare, yea or nay. Boom!

I was leaving my life as I knew it, again with the feeling that I had gotten my act together and was becoming the person I wanted to be, and now I was to start over again, entering another unknown environment amid a new and certain to be stressful experience.

During my last few days in Chicago, my apartment lease was up, so I rented a hotel room and gave myself a going away party in their events room. I think perhaps, I was using my assignment to garner some sympathy. It was a very cool party with food, drinks, music and lively conversation, though I didn’t really enjoy it. Both my old and current girlfriends, Bryna and Caroline, were there. Both I sadly believe felt hurt or maybe even angry, as each of them at different times were not getting the attention from me they deserved. Looking back, I guess I was not thinking empathically, just wanting everyone I knew to be there to say Bon Voyage to. Nothing mattered to me at that moment, as I believed I was probably not coming back. Jokingly, Caroline said, I’ll come to San Francisco to see you off. I didn’t know if she would, but I gave her the hotel name where I would be staying.

When I got to San Francisco, I went to my room and there was Caroline in a negligee. She apparently told the desk that she was my wife. She looked fantastic and I was overwhelmed with joy and lust and a touch of guilt, as I didn’t know if I would ever marry her, and I believe that she may have had some thoughts about that. We had a great time sightseeing and eating and carousing for a few days, and during our last night, I told her I would not marry her or some such thing, and she became extremely upset, of course, and was going to leave the room immediately. Since it was 3:00 a.m., I held on to her and tried to comfort her as best I could. I felt terrible, cursing myself for being an idiot or too honest. Why even bring that up? To have a clear conscience? I certainly knew I was not ready for marriage. Was I just playing house, was the relationship real? Hell, I genuinely didn’t know if I would be alive in a year.

Caroline did calm down, went to see her relatives as planned beforehand, and I was now alone. That afternoon I went to see Midnight Cowboy, a phenomenal movie, but I felt so down after seeing it that it was actually painful; damaged, desperate people trying to survive any way they could. Of course, my own fears of destruction, both physical and psychological, undoubtedly played a part in how I felt.

Out of the blue it occurred to me to call Judy, someone I dated in med school who was a very special person. I am not sure why I called her other than knowing that she was living in the area and perhaps, I really thought I would die, and I wanted to hear a loving voice or maybe to apologize to her for the way things ended at Ohio State??? Her roommate answered the phone and said she wasn’t there and that she was getting married but also asked if I was the guy from Ohio. Even though it had been four years since we had been together, she must have talked to this roommate about me. I registered my happiness for Judy and asked the roommate to please not tell her that I called.

That evening I had dinner with an old friend from med school and later his parents drove us to the San Fran airport where we would catch our transport plane for the nineteen-hour flight to Ton Son Nut Airbase in Vietnam.

I wondered how a Jewish kid who never had a serious fight wound up in a war zone and how would he do there. I had developed some confidence. After all, I’d managed a life without my father, had seen the deaths of many relatives early in life, graduated from college, med school, and completed internship and residency training despite everyone’s concern about my speech impediment. The question remained, how do you negotiate life and become yourself when you have such an obvious disability; one you can’t hide unless you never speak.

When the plane landed, we all disembarked and found our suitcases, then lined up for uniforms, medical exams and vaccinations for such diseases as cholera, bubonic plague, yellow fever, typhus, etc. and got pills for malaria. All very scary. As we stood together across from our luggage, I thought I saw a small bird fly into and among our suitcases. I pointed it out to a few of the guys and we walked over to check it out. It turned out not to be a bird but a flying cockroach, three inches long. So now I would have to deal with not only the threat of armaments, but also malaria, rats and flying cockroaches.

A great intro to Vietnam. But here is the weird thing; I thought I would rather get killed than be humiliated by falling apart. Especially, I did not want to stutter in this macho environment and be seen as damaged goods and even ridiculed, which would have made my job much more difficult. I was determined to cope and deal with whatever came my way.

When I first got there, I was uncertain how to negotiate my relationships with other officers in my Company. Some, of course, were grieving the loss of the previous psychiatrist who many of them liked a lot and now here was this new guy, who was nervous, unsure and asked too many questions about the dangers he might face.

What I eventually learned is that in a combat zone you learn to live with a high level of anxiety that begins to feel normal, so after a while you don’t feel anxious anymore. Then, you accept the ultimate anxiety reducer—you’re probably going to die—and after that, there isn’t much that bothers you. So, I guess I learned to cope, an ongoing and stressful process.

TWO

Stuttering = Shame—Growing Up

The experts say that dysfluencies (dictionary definition –involuntary disruptions in the flow of speech) typically develop in children between two and five years old, as the brain and its connections are developing. I have only the vaguest memory of stuttering before I was twelve years old, although I must have done so, because my parents took me to see someone when I was around six years old for an evaluation, but that was a one-timer. Because I wasn’t aware of it, I had no anxiety about stuttering. I was aware of my father’s displeasure with me, but I didn’t know exactly what that was about.

To start at the beginning, I was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1939. My parents were both immigrants, my mother coming from what is now Belarus at ten in July 1914 (just in time), and my father from Ukraine in 1907 at seven. I know more about my mother’s early life than my father’s; he died when I was fifteen and I had no sense of needing to know his history at that time. I recorded a three-hour oral history of my mother’s life when she was around eighty-seven as I could see that she was becoming increasingly frail, and I am grateful for having it.

What I do know about my father’s family is that his father died young and then his oldest brother died at the age of thirty-nine, so my father was responsible for his mother and became the male elder who occasionally was consulted on family matters. My father, Jerry, was short and stout, perhaps now thought of as overweight, but I remember his muscles feeling like steel. and I guess I was somewhat in awe of him. He had significant heart disease, so he was ineligible to serve in the military. As it happens, he dealt with chemicals in his business, so he was considered a civilian asset. He worked very hard to build a business and I think that these factors contributed to his attitude toward me, wanting me to grow up quickly. Anyway, 1939 was not only the year of my birth but was a seminal year for other reasons; the Second World War began, and Sigmund Freud died.

My mother, Frances, her mother and her two brothers, Lou and Al, arrived in the United States together, joining up with her father, Isidor, who had come a year earlier. He had been a foreman managing forests under the Tzar. He collected a lot of furs and brought them with him to America, thinking he would make a killing with his furs, but it didn’t work out that way and he wound up as a peddler with a pushcart in downtown Cleveland. Eventually, he did get into the garment business. I believe my mother and the others sailed from Liverpool, England, to Canada and then on to the United States. Like many Jews, they were escaping persecution. My mother described the pogroms and how they were hidden in the basement of their neighbors when the Cossacks, after imbibing alcohol, came looking for Jews to beat up on the weekends and especially on Easter.

My mother learned English quickly because her father would not allow anyone to speak Russian or Yiddish at home. She got good grades and was accepted into what they called Normal school in those days, where you studied to become a teacher. Her beloved mother Kraina, who died before I was born, had always saved money, especially from the sale of the bakery she owned in the old country. She gave my mother the money to go to school despite her father’s antipathy toward women getting an education. During the Depression, my mother was the only one in the family working and making money and therefore contributed to the support of her brothers, Lou and Al, who had moved to California after she had urged them to leave the family home as she had done, because after their mother died, her father married a woman who was unpleasant and could be cruel. A younger brother, Jack, born in this country, still lived with his father.

During the Depression, my mother traveled twice to Europe by ocean liner. Once was to see her family in what had become the Soviet Union. She told me that they had changed and were now guarded and fearful and had to whisper, as Big Brother was everywhere. The second trip was a vacation with some friends. She used to send care packages to her family during the war, hoping they would receive them. They wrote letters to my mother about their lives and thanked her for the care packages. When I asked what all the ink splotches on the paper were, my mother said they were tears, and that life was difficult for them. And then the letters just stopped. What happened to them?

My mother on an ocean liner.

Like many young Jewish people, my mother was involved with social issues and social groups that were concerned with humanity and the effects of the Depression, and she continued to be concerned with those same issues, if