University of Virginia Library

10. Phil Red Eagle (Salish and Lakota)

Phil Red Eagle, Salish and Lakota, enlisted in the United States Navy in 1967, at the age of twenty-two, after spending a couple of years at the University of Alaska and Shelby Jackson Junior College. He was with Naval Support Activities in Vietnam, and served his tour of duty in 1969-'70. In 1975, Phil entered a Naval rehabilitation program for anxiety, rage, and emotional breakdowns associated with the trauma of his war experience, which manifested itself in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. In 1989, while attending intensive therapy, Phil went through his first sweat lodge ceremony. He graduated from the University of Washington and has received several college degrees. Phil is currently involved with the Canoe Nations project and spends much of his time and energy caring for his parents; he also publishes a magazine called Raven Chronicles.

Red Eagle's Narrative

I went in late, compared to most people, because I spent a couple of years in college—University of Alaska and Shelby Jackson Junior College in Sitka, Alaska. I hung around for a while, drinking and making friends, and finally I turned twenty-two in boot camp. I went in 1967, so I was twenty-two years old. The funny thing about it is that a lot of the guys that I went down with were older guys joining the Navy. I think I initially went to avoid being drafted into the Army, 'cause my mother was always saying,

I think I had a couple of years of college; that had something to do with it, you know, looking at it from a rational point of view. Then I had the other part where my mother and my father were very loyal to the United States in that way. They believed in America. That's one of the things that bugged me for a long time when coming back home. Until now I didn't have that movie, Born on the Fourth of July; I never thought about it until then. But once I thought about it, the thought kind of dawned on me that my parents were really, really American, besides the fact that they were both full-blood. And there's a Native American tradition to serve. All my uncles and everybody (the ones I knew), served in World War II and Korea. So all the stories were about Korea and Europe and the invasion of Italy and the Battle of the Bulge, you know. We had people in all of those places, 'cause we had a high participation rate in all of America's wars. So, here's the funny thing; last year, my dad was eighty-one, and they're always saying, I don't need that. It doesn't mean anything to me, because I'm doing other things. I just don't want to be a go out and work my life away person. I've already done what my dad was talking about. Finally I just said, He's proudest of the fact that both Keith and I did Vietnam. Despite the fact that I have a book out, I publish a magazine, and I have several college degrees, that's the thing that stuck in his mind. And that was just last year. It kinda blew me away. Because I've been working just to try to be a person, not going the Indian way. The drunks and the alcoholics died young. And there it [the war] was. In one way it's the greatest thing I've ever done in terms of its impact on my life. It may not have been so great in terms of epic storytelling. Everybody, all those war stories: Ulysses, Trojan War, Odyssey, and the Iliad— all of these things are kinda warrior-oriented. Even in European history. Or maybe especially in European history, because warrior is not an Indian word; it's an English word. So, we got too many of them. In retrospect, it's been the ruin of our people, I believe.

Right now I'm trying to talk like a college guy. But ya know, I never had that advantage when I was in Vietnam, because this college stuff didn't matter. If somebody, an officer found out you had college, you wound up doing the paperwork. And you didn't want to do the paperwork because something in your guts told you that you had to go do the other stuff. Only the nerds and the geeks do the paperwork. But it kept a friend of mine from getting killed. He's a medicine man now, up in Washington. He was in Vietnam. He was in a combat unit. I was in a non-combat unit; that wasn't our job. But that doesn't mean you don't get shot at; things go haywire. He had been, like, to one or two years of college before he went, too. But he wound up (he's Cocomish Indian) in Vietnam in a military combat unit, U.S. Army. They found out he could type, so he became the company clerk. His responsibility was to straighten out the paperwork. Because of the Tet offensive, everything was a mess. A lot of army units, military units got destroyed during that time. Also, a lot of records were destroyed. So they had to go to each man in the unit and do an interview with them and redo their record.

Right now, they have this little dog-tag that carries your record on it. And whenever you go from one area to another they stick your dog-tag into the computer and the military has the only computer that can read it, because it's encoded [encrypted]. So if somebody tried to take your dog-tag and get information out of it, supposedly, they couldn't. But back then everything was pen and ink, or typewritten, and that was his job. So after six months in the field, he came in and spent the rest of his tour straightening out. He was an Indian guy, and in those days the enlistment form, paperwork, didn't have a place for

on it. When they said race on it: Other. Some people would mark in Caucasian because it wasn't on there. So he'd made sure that the Indian guys were marked And he wrote it out for them. So, he was taking care of the Indian guys.

So I went to boot camp, and went to A-camp in '67, went out to Waukegan, Illinois. There's a naval station there. They call it the Great Lakes Naval Station. There's a boot camp there, and a training facility and a hospital. I went with an Irish girl who was a WAC at the hospital there for a while. I did A-school. Got taken before the board once, because I was too wild a character. And they knew I was in college, and they knew I was smart, 'cause I scored really high on the basic batteries and everything. They were all pissed off at me because I wasn't showing it. You know how that is; part rebel.

Course, you don't realize at that time that because you were brought up Native American, you have a lot of problems. A lot of the roots of the PTSD problem with Native Americans now is not rooted in their military experience; it's rooted in their Native American experience in America. That's what we know now. Inherited PTSD. They got it from their uncles and aunts who did WWII and Korea. All of the destroyed families. It's all there. Actually, the whole United States is in a state of PTSD recovery. That's where all of the drugs, alcohol and violence come from. That's why it's so prominent in this culture.

So, I remember in boot camp there were some confrontations with some of the white racists in the company, and I had to beat up a few guys. So I kind of established

my authority. We had a recruit company commander. But I was the fuckin' new commander. That guy got to hold all the positions and the authority. But I held the tomahawk. (It's kinda gonna ramble anyway, so it doesn't matter…) And, uh, that kinda continued on throughout my Navy career. Always combat with the racists. Even to the day I got out they were doing the final evaluation in 1976; I got out in April. And this one white southern chief just really raked me over the coals. And the reason he didn't [like me] was because I was sober; I had gone to the Navy rehab in '75—February through March of '75. And he was still drinking. And he didn't like me at all. And the officer who called me into his office said, The commander there knew I was smart, and I had done paperwork, told him I straightened out the paperwork at the facility in San Diego. So he called me in and said,

I said

He said,

I said,

So it stayed in the record, but I felt so bad about the military at that time that it didn't matter; it was just a bad part of my life. (See, I'm jumping around just like my book.) You know, that relationship continued. I had always stood my ground. I would not let people push me around. That was because I was Native American; I knew who I was, and I knew what I was in for, and I just tried to make the effort to stand my ground. That's why I was the company leader. They had it in title; I had it in reality, in boot camp. Very interesting.

I went to B-school and had that kind of relationship there. Barely got out, because I was chasing Waves all the time—going down to Chicago and having a good time. Then I went to my first command, which is pre-commissioning command in San Diego. We're pre-commissioning for the summer. We spent a couple of months there, and November 10th we went up to San Francisco where the ship actually was. So we spent from November 10th to February 10th pre-commissioning. They can actually ship the ship out and do trials with it. U.S.S. Somers DVD34. My first command. I went on board as a shipmate third class, and went overseas, and we went down from San Francisco to Hunters Point Naval Station, which doesn't exist anymore like most of the stations, two Long Beach Naval Stations. Two San Diego stations don't exist anymore.

Well, they really wiped out any traces of Vietnam. Because last week I was looking at the news and they blew up the old barracks at the Long Beach Naval Station. That's the first I'd known they had shut down the base. What they did is they distributed the fleet. We have one naval station in Everett, Washington. What they did is they split up the fleet into task forces. Rather than having two or three ports, they have a dozen or so spread out with each task force, in different task forces. A task force consists of an aircraft carrier and four cruisers and six destroyers, on Class Ships, plus gunboats and submarines. They attach submarines to a task force unit for submarine protection because they built a lot of submarines for a fast attack. That's the first time I went over there; it was in late '69-'70. We did gunfire activity and interdiction. A ship of that class has a lot of duties, and we did all of them. Search and rescue, north and south, launch support, recovery support for aircraft carriers, Yankee/Dixie station, going at night, and fire all night long. So it was like a ship with a twenty-four hour operation. You do that for six or seven weeks and you go in and do a stand down—get whatever was breaking down fixed back up and go back and do it again. And I re-

enlisted over there, and I re-enlisted for orders. Because by that time, I had become kind of brainwashed and I wanted to go in-country and do in-country duty. That was a six-year enlistment.

I was stationed in Bombay, between Bungtao, on the coast of Saigon. The Nabai River comes from several sources. They kind of come together around Benwah. The river actually goes around Saigon. One of the sources of the Nabai is the Sai Gon (two words) River. I don't even know what it means. (Right now it means Ho Chi Min city). I went in-country, and my first night in-country, I caught the plane. I went to some special training in San Francisco and then I went to the air force base there—Travis Air Force Base. It was a civilian contract to take the guys over. And I was by myself. I came in as a replacement because the unit was already there. But the Navy did not have that policy that the Army had. We were attached to a unit and that was our unit. That's all we could do. DOR (date of rotation)—it's a date, something, rotation, out stateside, or something. What's the other one, CONUS? There are a lot of little things like that.

And then, after in-country, dress blues came in too. They had no idea I was coming; nobody was there to reach me. It was so hot, it was so blazing hot, that I had to go to the restroom and change into some cotton dungarees. And I got out and said,

There was a truck out there—navy guys.

They said,

and they took me down to the in/out processing station called Inapolis, which is on Plantation road, which is about a mile or two into Saigon. My first night was guard duty, so my first experience was coming down to do guard duty, which I didn't know we had to do…cause I really was not orientated like the army guys. I was a navy guy trained in the fleet; that was my job.

Now, all of a sudden, I come down and he says,

and I said yeah.

There was a black navy chief there. I said,

He said,

took off his flack jacket and handed me a flack jacket and I put that on. He said, he gave me a helmet, and I put it on. And he gave me a shotgun and he said, and I said yeah, and he says, That was my orders. So, here we are, sitting behind the net, chicken wire and sandbags, which you never noticed when you came in. And in four hours, I just tried to figure out who was acting funny. Who were they gonna blow up? These guys were coming behind me with Coke cans, they didn't have the pull-tabs back then, pop-top cans. So you needed an opener. Surprisingly enough, those Coke cans, what they used to do is carry these cans around disguised hand grenades and pull them out and throw them at you. There were a couple of guys down there flipping these, looking at us. I had the shotgun trained on them. My second night, I became in charge of the watch. So now I was upstairs on the second deck, and I was in charge of the watch from midnight to 3:30 or 3:45 in the morning. I came in, and I said what do I do?

There was this first class Jr;

I said okay, I guess I could do that. Well, about a half hour into the watch this young black guy comes in to the desk. The desk is at the top of this flight of stairs and it goes down, which is the main entrance, which is guarded by these four guys with shotguns, hand grenades and flack jackets. I had done that the night before. Now I was in charge of the watch, because I was experienced. And we also had three M-16 machine guns on the roof with two men for each one, plus four guys with M-16s on the roof. It was only, like, a two story building. It had been a motel on Plantation Road prior to our entrance in the war. And I'm sitting there, just playing with my pencil. This young black guy comes walking in and says there's something wrong with my weapon.

I said,

He said,

I said,

He said,

I said,

I hadn't, either. I had experience with M-14s and M-1s. But they gave us M-16s at that site. I said, because I knew enough that I was able to strip it and put it back together and hand it back to him. And I said, I set him up to do that because basically, all weapons operate the same. The M-16 was complex, because an M-14 had seven moving parts and the M-16 had 21 moving parts. But it was a much better weapon for a soldier because of its abilities to do lots of different things that an M-14 couldn't do. One, it weighed two-thirds as much, even fully loaded. Anyway, I handed it back to him and said, Here it was, my second day; I'm already a sergeant. I was an E-5, a petty officer in the fleet, coming in and doing an Army sergeant's job.

But I spent a year in the pier before I went into the Navy. So I know about weapons. I was in an FO (Foreign Observer), so I know about [weapons]. I can field strip an M-1, M-14, 45. I know how to call in rounds. So, I already had actually had winter training in Alaska, which is in adverse conditions. That's what the National Guard in Alaska did; they were winter forces. They were the first line of defense against the Russians when they came over through Siberia. So I knew something. Plus, I'd hunted and fished in Alaska. So I wasn't afraid of weapons, or they weren't weapons then. They became my best tools, and when we trained in Alaska with Company B, which is a weapons infantry, we actually went out into the rainforest and did our boot training—how to take cover, cleaning your weapons. I hadn't even gone to boot camp, and I had already been out in the field training with this unit, which was supposedly seeing some of the more Korean Vets. So our guys were Korean and WWII guys.

I wasn't dumb; I was inexperienced in terms of actual combat experience. Then about an hour after I sent that kid back up, another kid comes down, a young white guy, and he said,

Well, this is from a guy who had been there; he was in out-processing.

I said,

So we went out, and it was like a (lanai) with a ladder like this. The lanai was only about four or five feet. It was on the second floor, and as I got to the bottom of the ladder, he was up there. And he said,

I said,

I said,

He says,

I said,

He said,

I says,

He said,

I said,

(And I wasn't pretty sure.) I came up the ladder about four or five steps and said, He handed it to me by the barrel; he had the grip. So I grabbed the barrel with this clown on the other end. I pulled it down. I dropped the magazine out of it and cleared the round that he put in. I put it on safety and put the round back in the magazine and put it back in, and said, I knew he was going out of the country, and I said,

And he said,

And to the guy that came down, I said,

He did and the guy came out and gave him the piece and gave him instructions.

The next night I was drunk. I had already been psychologically in it. And I was always looking over my shoulder from that moment on. So I spent another four days there before I was shipped out, which is basically where I worked on boats. So I was on security detail, which is basically where we did the river security, which we moved up around the river at our point. And then we had the village security. We had our craft; some of them were riverboats and some of them weren't. But because of the Vietnamese process, we also had an outer circle of Vietnamese. And one night they fired on us. Guys were blowing the bottoms out of boats all the time. I mean, grenades were going off constantly; that was part of our security protocol.

It was just a hairy year and a half of security detail, patrol detail, and village patrol detail—where you're basically a cop. There were gunfights all the time in the village…people dying all the time. You got hit a few times. Dead bodies floating down the river all the time. Guys drowning themselves in the river all the time. Shooting barracks up with M-16s. It was like lunacy. Total chaos. It was just a constant alertness. I remember one time I went to Saigon to make a call home; I went in, and I was carrying a .45 and my buddy was carrying a .45. So we decided to stop by the Continental Hotel; we were going to eat. Because we heard they had good food there. We went in there, and we were going to go in, and they said,

And they came up to us and said,

I said,

And he says,

And I said,

Even if it was a .45, because there was shootings and bombings all the time in Saigon and you didn't wanna be caught without it. And there were U.S. military vehicles all the time. One guy from Alaska got killed the day before I came in. I didn't know it. I heard about it when I came in. Helicopter crashes, dead bodies all the time. Body parts on the street, around the rivers all the time. Anyway, I told the MP,

He said,

And we said okay and took it off and went in and ate. And one day I got the duty to drive in some guys that were rotating out. Their enlistment was up, or something. I went into town, and I had an M-16 that time. So I was running around with an M-16.

And you hire people to watch your vehicle so it doesn't get booby-trapped. A bunch of kids will run up and say,

And I says,

The kids say,

And they'd point over to this six or seven South Vietnamese Army guys and I'd look up and they'd say, So, somebody was watching your vehicle. And you couldn't trust them, because half of them switch coats at night. But the kids seemed to be fairly honest; you could trust them. But some of them, they used them a lot. They were playing the kids all the time. But I got back to the base and the next day, a guy from Alaska who was on that base too, went in and his window rolled down on the shotgun side, and somebody run up and smashed it, (They won't smash the window, but they'll ram it through so it'll break) and he got burned up. He didn't get a chance to get out. It blew up and burned him to death. And he was from our base. So, it was always on your mind, always on your mind. They were always trying to fuck your brain.

I almost killed an officer one night on security detail. There had just been a shootout, so all you could see was flash, and my partner and me had ducked behind water barrels. We ducked behind there when the firing was going on. Because we only had the .45s, the guys with the M16s were up the street a ways. And we waited there 'til it stopped, and they got a hold of these guys and put an end to that. But they when I ducked behind the barrel I had cocked my weapon and chambered a round and let the hammer down. But after that I just left the hammer down and put it back in my holster, so we could kinda continue to patrol. We kinda felt useless because some of the guys that were causing the trouble were better armed than we were—the Vietnamese guys all the time. See, the Vietnamese guys got to carry these M16s around. M89 is an M16 with an M79 strapped to the bottom of it. An M79 is a 40mm grenade launcher. So these guys were armed all the time, and they were threatening us all the time. They didn't like us, and we didn't trust them and they knew it.

Anyway, that guy there looks like my friend George; George was a Marine over there. He's my buddy now. Anyways, I went into this bar that I hung out in, and I had a girlfriend in there. I started talking with her, and I started talking with this other girl. Well, there was this officer sitting there, and he got all bent out of shape because I was in there talking to this girl; said that wasn't my duty. He was drunker than a skunk. He started calling me a dirty Indian, fucking Indian. Before I knew it, I had the .45 cocked back and ready to blow him up, when my partner grabbed my wrist and pulled it down and the young woman ran at me and strapped my arms up. I would have shot, and on the second thought I was gonna just put one between his legs; because in that millisecond

when you go from kill to not kill, by that time you know that you'll do it, and there's nothing in the way. You don't have anything to stop you after a year and a half. That's what happened to a lot of guys when they came back; they didn't have anything there. No rational. See, I'm shaking now. And rational is gone. And that fucker said, And I almost did.

I learned about a year later that, talking to somebody, somebody brought this up who had been in country, and they said that officers only die in combat. So, how would they justify that an officer dies in combat if they had to bring somebody up on charges for killing them. A lot of violence. You get in tune with a lot of violence, and that's what you carry. About two months in, you stop walking behind walls and ducking behind walls and walking next to things. Because by that time you say, if it gets me, it gets me. If I'm the one, I'm the one, and there's nothing you can do about it; so you just kind of unbend your back and start walking straight and upright. How can you tell the difference between the guys who have been in country for awhile and the guys who just come in? The guys who just come in are kind of walking like this. But when you come back home, that's what you start doing again. So it's not your ordinary Vietnam experience.

Everybody had a different experience that I talked to. In all the guys that I talked to, there's nothing similar about each experience. Navy guys, Marine guys, Army guys, Chopper guys, Air Force guys, different Navy units…I was with NSA, (Naval Support Activities) MacV but our sister unit and we had guys who went from our unit right into the NAG, Naval Advisory Group. So even though we were technically Naval Advisory capacity/ Naval Support, we were technically advisors during the Vietnamization period, which was the worst time because there were no ethics at that time. You know, there's kind of this code of ethics in the war. Take care of your own, take care of your guys, and take care of the Americans; that all went away.

I remember I was out working on the boat at the edge of the river, and at the part of the river I was working on, it's about 200 yards. I was sitting there, and my buddy and me were working on the boat. I was sitting up in the boat, and he was down underneath jiggling. And we had worked on several boats there before. But I was relatively new. He had been there for a while. I said,

He said,

I said,

He said,

I said,

What it was was that they were shooting at us from across the river. Because there's so much background noise there, hand grenades and gunfire and stuff going on, you can't tell. All the noise is the same.

They were firing at us. The bug was the bullets going by. (Weird bug man, don't try to chase it.)

There were three Indians, actually four. I found out last year when I was in Decatur that there was another Indian guy there; he worked that part of the river, but he was not attached to that command. He was an Army guy. And the Army guys had their own boats. So he worked with the Army; they had these MP's that patrolled the river in lieu of the Vietnamization. So, even though most of the 600 or so boats were turned over to the Vietnamese, the Army-held boats and the U.S. Navy-held boats,

which weren't quite turned over. And in lieu of the Vietnamization, they had these MP units; plus we were allowed to have our own security. See, we could defend ourselves, but we couldn't aggress.

There was this one guy there; he was quick. And his nickname was Frog; he looked just like a frog. And he must have been only about 5'5". He had this really wide face and he had these Muskogee teeth; it's really hard for him. But he was the ugliest Indian I had ever seen. I told him, I said,

And he said,

And the other guy was attached to another command there. One other Indian was attached to my command; he worked on the boats. He did the same work I did; he did security work and he did close security and boat, and he did the river, local river patrol. His name was Glen Tatusas. You know, that movie guy Jack Tatusas; this was his brother, Glen Tatusas. His cousin, Jack Tatutas, is married to my auntie in Fort Packer. He's Creek. So I got to know him only in the last month or so, but he had been there for quite a while we just had not; we had seen each other and nodded at one another, but we never really got to know one another. So I didn't know really who he was until we left and came home. Came back on the same plane and stayed at my sister's house; then he went back up to Canada 'cause he was being discharged.

I wish I could think of more. Most of the time it was this kind of this high tension, a few outbreaks, shootouts, firing, and you could see the war coming across. It'll be quiet and all of a sudden a plane would fly overhead at about fifty feet off the ground. You couldn't hear them until they were swooshing by. You couldn't see them; you could see the shadow. All of a sudden going boom, boom, boom, boom. Because they used these flashes to take pictures. They were always taking pictures of the area across the river from us. Then after that, pretty soon the helicopters from the base would start going over there like bugs. They'd look around and check around. Then they'd trace; the green tracer would go up and the red tracer goes down. It was really weird. Then we'd go into two weeks of condition red.

I was ruined when I went back to the fleet; I couldn't function any longer except under pressure. I was really good under pressure. Luckily the XO who had been in the country was now on my third shift, and he was on my side; he gave me a lot of breaks. He knew that I had been in country, and he cut me slack. Of course, in my mind I wasn't going to be alive for long. I had gotten too dysfunctional. I couldn't function in a military unit anymore. Actually, I went over again, and the war ended while we were over there, and we went through security for de-mining operations in Hai Phong Harbor, which is the first time I saw North Vietnam offshore. Then I came back, and we didn't do nothing over there except hit quarts. And we came home in September of '73.

I remember one day we were working on some equipment and it was a Development and Training Center/Fleet Maintenance and Assistance Group. Well, those had been two organizations, and what they had come to at that time was that they decided that people with six years of sea duty had to go to shore duty. I was saying,

And they said,

I said okay; so I went to shore duty, and I went there for two and a half years and then I got out. I quit drinking in January of '75; I went through a Naval rehab. I remember one day in '74, I blinked in the shop; and when I came back into rational I was beating this piece of equipment with a ball-peen hammer, and I kind of just stopped. I could feel my head going boom, boom, boom, boom. I was in a rage. I had rage. And I looked around, and everybody had moved about twenty feet off and the Chief came up and said

I said,

Then over the years I've had these series of flashbacks…mostly when I was in limbo. When you go into an organizational limbo, that's when it hits you. It didn't hit me until I left the service, and I was driving up the coast going to Alaska, going home. All of a sudden I turned paranoid, and I couldn't sleep at night. There was this woman riding with me, and I was saying, But I was so weird that she wouldn't have anything to do with me. She was kind of trapped with me in my van riding up the coast. There was this weird paranoid guy, you know, couldn't sleep at night, having nightmares.

And then I got home and everything was okay. I was home for four months. Worked in a marine shop, in a marina. And then, when I went back down, I felt a little bit better; I wasn't as paranoid, and I could sleep a little bit if I took some sleeping pills. I hit the University of Washington and boom, went away. Then I graduated. Not one day outside of the University of Washington, it started hitting me again. So whenever I went out of structure, I had these. Whenever I had alone time. So as long as I felt secure and content, I was okay. The minute things started to loosen up, I'd start getting paranoid. Funny how that stuff sticks to you like that. I was going to a relationship at that exact time, and I was hobbling around; I couldn't walk because my knees and ankles hurt so bad. It was really weird. I didn't realize what it was; I was so tense and wound up that it was pulling my ligaments.

I don't know whether this was lucky or not, but the woman I took up with at the time was into acupuncture and acupressure. So she taught me how to relieve it. Then in '85 she sent me off to the first _____. Didn't take. Two years after that, the relationship was over with because I had gotten weirder and weirder. Matter of fact, I had walked around with a broken arm. I had fallen, and I broke my foot and my arm and didn't know it. I splintered my arm…like a stress fracture. I know it because there's a bump there where it healed. I was so used to being in pain that I didn't even know that I had broken myself. Four years later, I wound up going through my first sweat. But I was in therapy up until that time. There wasn't even a name for it. I remember back in '85 the only word that was coming out was hypervisuals. I was just getting out of that. There's probably a lot of other things… I think I'm okay; I can sleep all right the last few years. Matter of fact, the other night, I was sleeping well in LA at this cheap hotel a friend had set up for me (because she didn't want me to sleep at her house, because we were only e-mail buddies; she didn't know me). She said that if I ever go to LA, we'd go around and do some things and see some people. So we did that, but we didn't have any sex. Right now, I'm my mother and father's caretaker. I take off two times a year. I do the Canoe Nations project in the summer. Because it's so close to home, every week I have meetings where I do things. But I actually take off for two weeks in July. And then I do this in October, November. These are my two times off. My brother and sister each take responsibility for a week.

In 1988, I had this dream; it was an enlightening dream, and that was seventeen years after I came back from over seas, to the day. I found out later that it was the seventeen-year click. A lot of guys after they return over from overseas, seventeen

years later they begin to experience the emergence of the process of the PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). Up and until that time, you're dealing with the PTSS (Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome). And then it goes into disorder after that, where you basically become dysfunctional. I had my enlightening dream that led to subsequent dreams, where I process through the healing.