Checkpoint One-Four
Subtitle: A Vietnam Veteran's chronicle of Survivor Guilt, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Mending The Invisible Wound
Publisher: Self-Published
Published: 2009
Place of publication: Fairlawn, Ohio
Language: eng
Number of pages: 96
First sentence: All I knew was-we were going! almost eight months had passed since I graduated from Boot camp at Parris Island and infantry Training at Camp Geiger in August, 1966. After a 30 day leave at my home in Akron, Ohio, I had reported to the Marine base at San Diego, California where for twenty six weeks I'd be learning Morse Code and how to operate a variety of field radios. The result was what some considered the best communicators in the Corps and even though morse code was phased-out by ht 1970's. it's value to frustrate enemy field operatives caused it to be reintroduced into special operations units.  My best friend at radio school was a native Calafornian, Phil j. Before leaving San Diego for our last leaves before reporting to Camp Pendleton and tours in Vietnam, I arranged (I would have lied if I had to),  to spend the night before check-in at his family's home near Los Angeles so we could report together.
Description: Written by Bernie Weisz Historian/Vietnam War Pembroke Pines, Florida April 11, 2010  e mail address: BernWei1@aol.com  Title of Review: A Vietnam Vet at 63:Recently Realizing What it Means To Want to Live!" 

It could easily be called immaturity, poor impulse control, low self esteem, or whatever psychological label you care to affix to sufferers of "Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome" brought on as a consequence of what a Veteran witnessed in their tour of Vietnam from the vantage point of forty years after the final American left S.E. Asia. Certainly, everyone reacts to trauma, disasters, catastrophes and death differently. From the priest to the doctor or mortician worker, seeing carnage at it's worst is processed differently by everyone. Personally, I watched the series "Faces of Death" very briefly, and quickly shut it off, aghast with horror. My father, a Royal Air Force pilot during W.W. II in England, saw much death and destruction from 1939 to 1945. He ultimately obliterated the painful memories of taking his crew member's corpse out of the bombardier's bay, strafed mercilessly by opposing Nazi Fockle Wolfe and Messerschmitt fighter bombers with alcohol, with cirrhosis  of the liver being his final demise. It is "Monday morning quarterbacking" to say that anyone who lets memories of what happened in Vietnam senselessly and needlessly interfere with a Veteran's future life. P.T.S.D. is real and debilitating. For doubters, simply read James McGarrity's ordeal in "Checkpoint One-Four" and see for yourself if the syndrome is a fictional entity. 

Nobody knows how they will react when they see death. When one volunteers or is drafted during wartime, there is a high probability that a soldier, unless designated for rear duty, will see combat and loss of life. There is no telling if the bravest man during basic training will act like a scowling coward or Audie Murphty when the bullets starts flying. In 1966, with the war in S.E. Asia heating up, J.P. McGarrity joined the Marine corps. After graduating from Boot Camp at Paris Island, South Carolina, and Infantry Training at 
Camp Geiger (Camp Geiger is part of the Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune complex, North Carolina) he reported to California's Camp Pendleton for final embarkation to Vietnam. As was customary for deployment during the Vietnam War, McGarrity flew a commercial jet via Honolulu and Okinawa, with the final destination being Danang, South Vietnam. 

However, there were chinks in McGarrity's mental armor before he ever set foot in Vietnam. The author wrote how he was facially disfigured as a young boy, the result of being hit by a speeding car while he was on a bicycle. In regard to that, McGarrity wrote: "I didn't die that day, but my self esteem did. I had become a victim". McGarrity also described witnessing his mother's abuse of prescription drugs, as aside from being married twice, her second husband was a pharmacist and the kitchen's cupboard was always loaded with amphetamines and tranquilizers. During McGarrity's stopover in Okinawa, his Gunnery Sergeant demanded that every man that passed through "the Rock" donate blood for the wounded G,.I that needed it. There are some people in this world that simply can not give blood. McGarrity was one of them. The sergeant, making it an issue of manhood, challenged everyone to give it. McGarrity described what happened next: "As we left the donation ward and headed for chow, a Corpsman in the hallway offered each Marine the choice of a shot of whiskey or a small paper cup of orange juice. Since I was feeling very macho, I said whiskey and gulped it down with one slug. A few steps further another corpsman handed each of us what would be our first malaria pill. Once in country it would be our responsibility to make sure we took it each Sunday. But this was our indoctrination. No big deal, right? After noon chow we mustered in the blazing heat, waiting for instructions for the remainder of the day. Without warning, my body fell forward in slow motion, pushing a Marine in front of me from the ranks, causing him to pivot aside and provide me a clear spot to land unconscious on the hot pavement. I never made it to liberty that night. Evidently the combination of giving blood, drinking whiskey and the malaria pill was too much. All I could do was lay in the rack that night, watching, as one by one the others returned to the squad bay, drunk as skunks, laughing and bragging about their first encounters with Asian girls. 
During the Vietnam war, Okinawa was a key staging point for the United States. Along with Guam, it  presented the U.S. military a geographically strategic launch pad for covert bombing missions over Cambodia and Laos. The Republic of Vietnam presented extraordinary logistical challenges for medical Evacuation. Saigon was positioned in the tropics of Southeast Asia, halfway around the world from Washington, DC, with a 12-hour time difference between the cities. The nearest off-shore U.S. hospital was almost 1,000 miles away at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines. The nearest logistical support base was about 1,800 miles away in Okinawa. The nearest complete hospital center was in Japan, some 2,700 miles distant. Patients being evacuated to the United States had to travel some 7,800 miles to reach Travis Air Force Base in California, or almost 9,000 miles to reach Andrews Air Force Base, near Washington, DC. Because of these extended distances, even with modern air transport, the need for self-sufficiency in the combat operations zone was greater than what had been required in other wars. To compensate, the U.S. military deployed a higher ratio of service support troops (including medical) to combat troops than would be provided in more conventional situations. Advances in medical evacuation of our troops improved medical care during the Vietnam War. Rapid evacuation of the wounded from Vietnam's battlefields by helicopters, followed by jet transports to advanced treatment facilities in Okinawa saved many lives. McGarrity had an interesting comment about his short stay there, describing the following: "On Okinawa, the sights and sounds of Asia rattled my senses as we were ferried by cattle car, a bus, to the Marine base. Passing through a small town with family-run stalls on both sides of the road, I was mesmerized by the strange varieties of food and bizarre products. Now and then, many of us would gasp at the sight of a snake, as long as two men are tall and big around as a loaf of bread, hanging from hooks outside a market". 

Jim McGarrity had a best friend whom he met at radio school in California named Phil. He made it from California and Okinawa to Vietnam with Phil as his companion. McGarrity described his first day in Vietnam vividly, as well as his next trauma, being separated from his last remnant of familiarity, his best friend. Accordingly, he wrote: "Sleep probably isn't the right term for how my first night went in  Vietnam. The smells of the world outside the dirty hooch screen were intoxicating; a combination of flowers and burning wood and stale beer;cigarettes and gunpowder;coffee and aftershave;dirty feet and diesel fuel-a lot of diesel fuel. I was glad Phil was still with me and in the morning we went to chow together, anxious about our assignments we'd be getting. Afterward we mustered in front of a small plywood shack, not much bigger than a chicken coop. From there things happened so fast, that before I knew it, Phil was gone and I was alone". 

Despite the fact that his Military Occupational Specialty was as a radio operator, McGarrity was shipped up to I Corps, Phu Bai, as a truck driver for the "3rd Motor Transport Division". Throughout the beginning of "Checkpoint One-Four", McGarrity continually wrote of his fear of responsibility and low self esteem based on complicated issues from his childhood and upbringing. McGarrity's job in Vietnam was to deliver cargo, i.e. food and ammunition, and in March of 1967 he found himself driving what was called a "mine truck". He described his job in the following words: "Most of the guys hated it, but I actually enjoyed it. Leading the long line of vehicles gave me a great sense of accomplishment and thankfully, the only incidents we encountered were from occasional light road mines that would blow a wheel or fender off". Then, the first traumatic incident occurred. On day in June of 1967, while driving the mine truck, he wrote: "I was doing my best to get moving before last call for morning chow but from my rack, my cot, I had a perfect, captivating view of Highway 1, Vietnam's north to south highway. Each day, from the crack of dawn, the dusty two lane roadway bustled with an endless parade of peasants and scooters, stray dogs and ARVN soldiers, dodging sputtering caravans of overloaded micro buses, oxcarts and limping Diamond REO trucks in an endless frenzy to get to God knows where." 

In an attempt to bolster his elusive sense of responsibility, McGarrity commented: "Soon I'd be back on the highway myself, heading north to Camp Evans or Dong Ha or Quang Tri or maybe as far as Khe Sanh; delivering the precious cargoes of ammunition and food and clothing and everything imaginable that our fellow Marines in the far off camps and fire bases of I corps required for their every day survival". With the convoy on it's way to Hue, Jim placed a speaker, which he called a "squawk box" between himself and the driver, to amplify transmissions from his PRC-10 (Portable Radio Communications). Both fearful of driving over land mines planted in the ground by the Viet Cong, Jim thought he heard a garbled communication over the squawk box of a firefight ahead. Accidentally, the speaker fell off the seat between the two, and as the driver reached for it on the cab floor and took his eye off the road, the cab  violently overturned. 

The driver leaped from the cab, but McGarrity was trapped inside it, neck deep in muddy water. He described his first trauma, something that started his descent into hopeless P.T.S.D. as follows: "Soon, I heard voices around me in the water and I saw several Marines kneeled outside the window, pulling the soaked sandbags off of me. In no time I was free and being dragged up the bank to the road, soaked and filthy, but otherwise not visibly injured. There was a somber mood when I arrived topside. I could see several Marines gathered in a tight circle, looking down at something on the pavement. I expected it to be the driver. but as I moved closer, I was shocked to see our beloved battalion Master Sergeant, broken and twisted, struggling for his last breath, as a jagged bone protruding from his forearm waved at the sun with each exhale. He died right there. And then it hit me. He had been riding in back in the open bed. I didn't know he was there. He hardly ever left the compound. When the truck flipped he must have been thrown off, or jumped. "Oh my God," I said to myself."Is this my fault?" 

This was the tip of the iceberg. In late summer of 1967, while driving convoys in the Ashau Valley, there were increasing incidents of enemy terrorism. McGarrity wrote about NVA subterfuge: "These were the real bad guys: the NVA, the North Vietnamese Army regulars who operated the miles of underground cities and weapons' caches and dirt-walled surgery rooms lit by coal lanterns. These secret tunnels also accommodated NVA political cadres from North Vietnam who coordinated guerilla activities between local VC and battle-hardened troops of Ho Chi Minh's liberation forces. Road mines were getting more powerful, some blowing our heavy trucks straight up in the air, sending them cart-wheeling end over end. It was a frightening sight as the vehicles landed on their topsides with their drivers inside; artillery rounds scattering onto the road and diesel fuel seeping around us and into the rice paddies and canals. Once, on a section of road into the Ashau Valley as we plowed ankle-deep through an unnaturally deep, red powder;maybe Agent orange, vehicles returning toward us from the valley were exploding within yards of me on the oncoming side". 

Next, in August, 1967, slightly south of Camp Evans, Thua Thien Province, one of the vehicles in McGarrity's convoy went over a land mine, producing a mass-wounding of his fellow Marines. McGarrity was asked to bring in the Medevac Helicopter by radio to extract the most severely wounded Marines. While the Chopper was hovering close by, McGarrity couldn't seem to raise the Chopper over the radio. Unable to establish radio communication with the pilot, McGarrity wrote: "I seemed to be doing everything right. I had a smoke canister ready to throw-there was background noise on the frequency, and I continued to call him. A fellow Marine asked why the chopper above kept hovering without landing. McGarrity exclaimed that he couldn't reach him. Then, with a humiliating blow to his pride and ego, McGarrity was shown that he was using the wrong frequency to contact the chopper. After the chopper finally landed, McGarrity depressingly mused that if the other Marine wasn't there, he wouldn't have ben able to reach the pilot, the chopper might not have landed and the wounded Marines could have died. With great remorse, guilt and chagrin, McGarrity promised himself never to fail, make a mistake nor let his brothers down. However, the worst was yet to come. 

In September, 1967, McGarrity was part of a convoy that came upon a bridge that appeared to have some roadwork going on alongside the approaching road.  McGarrity  stopped his truck and watched some combat engineers check some pyramid shaped piles of gravel. Although no one was hurt, McGarrity watched    engineers find and disarm communist rockets perfectly positioned to blast his convoy to "kingdom come" if they were not discovered and rendered harmless. Two weeks later, McGarrity was on another convoy, going along Highway 1 towards Hue. As the name of the book is called, the convoy reached "Checkpoint One-Four" just before another bridge. With  the memory of the incident from a fortnight ago fresh in mind, McGarrity got out of his truck and watched  engineers again check for a booby trap around the bridge they were to cross. Out of nowhere, an old man came out from under the bridge and started mysteriously running away. McGarrity wrote as follows: "In my mind, only one thing was clear-he almost got caught hiding a mine or a detonator and he was trying to escape. I drew my .45 and led the old man like a hunter with game on the run. I had absolutely no thought of the consequences; no moral compass;no compassion or logic for what I was about to do. I had decided in an instant that I would kill him, and that would be all there was to it. Then, out of nowhere, a convoy commander grabbed McGarrity's wrist a second before he was to fire his weapon, exclaiming: "You just can't shoot unarmed civilians!" And then the officer stomped off, plopping himself down in the passenger seat of the jeep.  No bomb was found, McGarrity was humiliated,  the "Papa San" made off unscathed, and the convoy continued without incident. 

Next, the defining moment in Jim McGarrity's life would occur in October, 1967. This event would precipitate a lifelong battle with it's horrible memory and concomitant P.T.S.D. Permanently etched in his hippocampus, the memory storing organ  of one's  brain, this occurrence would also activate and overwhelm another part of the human psyche, the amygdala. Although I didn't entirely understand this concept, McGarrity elucidated that a human's amygdala doesn't process facts. It only prepares a human for "fight or flight". What happens when a soldier's brain is overwhelmed, seeing extreme horror or death? McGarrity explained the result like this: "The result can be a "burned-in" recollection of the event as the hippocampus is saturated and parts of it "drowns" damaging memories based on logic with those of the horror or death; the abandonment and guilt; the fear of insanity and the helplessness of betrayal. This is where forever after, those of us with P.T.S.D. will act irrationally during moments in which our brains can only recognize a fight or flight situation. Like preparing to kill or be killed at the sound of a snapping twig. This is what happened to me on an October morning in 1967, when our convoy was ambushed on a desolate stretch of highway in the northern-most section of South Vietnam". 

What could have happened that was so devastating? I have spoken to Bobby Briscoe, author of the book  "Jungle Warriors". He explained to me the trauma of himself being the only survivor of an ambushed 6 man L.R.R.P. team, with the only body part remaining of his fellow team members was one man's chest cavity. There is Robert Topmiller's  description in "Red Clay On My Boots" whereupon he vividly wrote about the horrors he witnessed as a medic at Khe Sanh during the January, 1968 Tet Offensive. Did Topmiller ever recover? It just so happens that he was buried last year, the victim of a self inflicted gunshot wound in his mouth. A Chinook pilot, Bruce Lake, described transporting from the battlefield decaying bodies of dozens of U.S. soldiers. In "1500 feet Over Vietnam", Lake wrote  that the smell of death was so horrifying that he had to keep a piece of "Wrigley's Juicy Fruit Gum" under his nose to tolerate it. Has he ever mentally recovered form this? Jim McGarrity's ordeal was equally traumatizing, if not the most horrifying I have ever read. 

Early October, 1967.  Just 
north of Hue, McGarrity was a passenger in a convoy that stopped  short of a bridge once again. Halting at a checkpoint, the driver of McGarrity's vehicle  pulled up just short of the approaching bridge and got out to stretch his legs. McGarrity sat in the cab of the truck and relaxed as he smoked a cigarette. Having a clear view of the convoy commander in his jeep, McGarrity wondered if he should warn him of the rockets found back in September. After careful consideration, McGarrity thought to hell with this convoy commander, letting him become a hero with someone else's help. That was the last conscious thought McGarrity had before his world would be permanently turned upside down. It is best to let McGarrity's words describe the following: "In an instant, everything I understood and believed in was vaporized as a wave of air swept over my right arm, followed by a sound that any narrative I could offer would be an injustice". 

Thrown from the truck in the blast, McGarrity continued: "Instinctively I grabbed my radio and jumped, or was ejected out the door, where I landed in a shallow  swale in the grass. I reached over my shoulder with my right hand and rolled the two   pre-set dials to the MEDEVAC frequency. Realizing that I had lived, sounds, at first like buzzing alerted my senses. The inhumanity of the injuries that began to unfold was staggering. A Marine had  been decapitated, and looking at his face I got the impression it was still conscious and surprised. The head seemed to be looking at it's own body lying a few yards away and thinking: "That can't be me-I'm right here".  McGarrity continued: "Not far from the startled head, another Marine was sitting on a log, holding one foot with both hands, wondering where his toes had gone, while 10 yards from him, Pappy, a well-liked and popular driver who had served in Korea and  reenlisted  to serve in Vietnam was on his back, burnt to a crisp-both arms frozen upwards to heaven, as if he were calling the angels to take him home". 

With smoke coming from Pappy's charred remains, McGarrity stared at his corpse and explained his thought processes: "I knew there would be a full can of water strapped to the rear of the lead jeep, so I figured if I poured water on Pappy he'd stop smoldering and I could cover him with something. Purely out of courtesy, as now I was seeing us all as victims, I thought I'd tell the CO my intentions". This officer was the same one who prevented McGarrity from taking a shot at the old man by the bridge that past September. After McGarrity asked this CO if he could pour water on Pappy to stop him from smoldering, this formerly admonishing officer just stood there catatonically frozen, unable to answer. McGarrity did pour water on Pappy, and then covered his corpse. As he did this, he felt extreme pity towards this officer. McGarrity saw Marines that were legless, bleeding, and crying for their mothers. To this, he wrote: "Everything was clear now; the sounds, the smells, the color of the grass, the feel of the air, the odor of blood, like the smell in my cousin's basement where we skinned muskrats". 

Then, McGarrity walked by a small and immobilized tracked vehicle called an "Ontos", and was asked by a G.I. to help get the body of one of the wounded to the ground. McGarrity continued: "I reached out with both arms and prepared to receive the body of whom most likely had been the Ontos' operator standing in the driver's hole, exposed when the blast occurred. I put my right arm under his neck as his upper body descended; bracing myself for the expectation of a person's full weight. but instead, as he flopped into my arms, it was as if a child had been delivered to me, as nothing but his bottom torso from the pelvis down rested in my left hand, and the upper-half of his body with the flak jacket wiggled it's way onto my right hand. All that was connecting his two halves together was his flesh-stripped spine; red and bumpy, like a grotesque slinky-toy tapping slightly at my belt line." 

McGarrity carried the dead kid in his arms a few feet, and was warned to watch where  he walked, as he could possibly step on a NVA land mine and cause more horror.  McGarrity next wrote a chilling passage, a small iota that caused a lifetime of guilt: "I seemed to be getting weaker with each step, and when I reached the edge of the road I let the dead Marine slip from my arms. He folded into a twisted heap at my feet like a broken puppet. I remember feeling that I might go insane; that something was changing in me with each step. For a moment I seemed to be aware of what crazy people  must feel like and it scared the hell out of me to think that I might be seconds away from what some describe as a person "snapping". McGarrity's thoughts after this became muddled. He wrote that he saw the old man that he shot at back in  September and decided once again to kill him. but before  McGarrity  could do this, allegedly everything went "blank". 

Obviously in shock, McGarrity vaguely recalled unloading bodies from a field ambulance, possibly at Phu Bai. The rest was a blur. He rotated back to the U.S. in April, 1968, right after the April 4th assassination of Martin Luther  King by James Earl Ray in Memphis, Tennessee. His hometown of Akron, Ohio was under curfew, due to riots as a reaction to the King killing. McGarrity lapsed into a life of drugs, alcohol and isolation, a psychological recluse captive of the pervasive effects of P.T.S.D. However,  through"Checkpoint One-Four"  Jim McGarrity teaches the reader that P.T.S.D can never be cured, but rather arrested with daily vigilance. McGarrity  diligently explains the causes, effects, and the curative therapy. He also writes of his eventual discovery of happiness, enjoying a wonderful and supportive wife and loving daughter, and a zest for life that before his first-ever visit to a Veteran's Administration health clinic in 2004 never existed.. What is it like to be affected by P.T.S.D.? In Terry Rizzuti's book "The Second Tour" there is a passage where the protagonist, severely afflicted by this debilitating condition, is trying to describe to his wife what being in Vietnam was like. Rizzuti  wrote the following: "I opened my mouth to yell, to tell her what Vietnam was like, but no sound came out, only a tremble and then a tear and then several tears and then convulsions followed by silence and that haunting single thought I'm alone again, I'll always be alone." However, as Jim McGarrity proves, there is hope and recovery, and the nightmares, anger, depression and hopelessness can, by various therapies explained within the pages of this book, be vanquished. This book is an absolute must for any VA hospital, Veteran or family member of one, or for that matter ANYONE trying to comprehend Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome regardless of it's causes.
Notes: Jim McGarrity's web site: www.checkpointone4.com  CONTACT  Mr. McGarrity at: jmcgarrity@ohio.net
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