[00:00:01] (Host) Gus Kappler is such a sweet guy. He’s warm and funny. He laughs a lot, and he’s very generous with his time and his spirit. If you met him in line at the grocery store or the post office, you’d never guess that he spent a year in Vietnam performing the most unimaginable surgeries on young men with the most unspeakable injuries. His book, Welcome Home from Vietnam, Finally, chronicles his experience revealing and exploring along the way the anger he lives with to this day. Stick around. From the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, founders of the wall. This is Echoes of the Vietnam War. I’m your host, Michael Croan, bringing you stories of service, sacrifice, and healing from people who still feel the impact of that conflict more than 50 years later. This is episode 59, Gus Kappler Is Still Angry. This episode contains vivid descriptions of battlefield injuries. It might not be appropriate for every listener. Gus Kappler arrived in Vietnam in September of 1970, beginning a yearlong tour as a trauma surgeon at the 85th Evacuation Hospital in Phu Bai, where he witnessed the devastating effects of war on the bodies, minds and souls of hundreds of very young men. Many years would pass before he finally understood the effect the Vietnam War had on him personally. His book, Welcome Home from Vietnam, Finally explores PTSD, the effects of Agent Orange, and what is still wrong with the way we welcome our fighting men and women home from war. Gus joined me via zoom from his home in Amsterdam, New York.

[00:02:12] (Gus Kapler) I grew up on Long Island, New York, graduated from Port Jefferson High School in 1957.

[00:02:22] (Host) Did you already know that med school was where you were headed?

[00:02:26] (Gus) Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I went to Cornell because my dad went there, and he was a hell of an athlete. He was captain of soccer, captain of baseball. I joined a jock house, and the thing is, I made the freshman basketball team, and I said, and basically because I wanted to. And secondly, because it would make him proud. But I didn’t know it, but I had dyslexia and it took me forever to read and to write and what have you. And I realized I couldn’t do a college sport and study at the same time. The hardest phone call I ever made was calling my dad and saying, I can’t do both. I can’t study, make it to medical school, and, do what I should be doing on the basketball team. And he understood. He was he was very good about that, major in chemistry, because it was all memory. I didn’t know I had dyslexia. I was accepted at Cornell Medical School in New York City, which is New York Hospital on 68th Street and York Avenue. Did pretty well there, I had to study hard, but did pretty well and wanted to be a surgeon. And they tried to encourage me to stay at New York Hospital, which was very much of a white tower, and you didn’t get to operate for a couple of years. But friends of mine had gone to the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond, and they operated the first day.

[00:04:12] (Host) The first day. Wow.

[00:04:12] (Gus) Oh, yeah. Yeah. So I went to the Medical College of Virginia, and I did operate the first day. I did burr holes with a drill on a poor gentleman in an emergency room who had a subdural hematoma. Uh.

[00:04:27] (Host) What year? What year did you get to, Medical College of Virginia?

[00:04:33] (Gus) 1965. That’s in Richmond.

[00:04:34] (Host) Yeah. So I’m just wondering, because I know, Hal Kushner also went to that school, and I wonder if you guys were there around the same time.

[00:04:41] (Gus) We were there about the same time, I knew of him, and I knew his story. Yes. And when I started my internship, we were all drafted and we were first lieutenants. You either went to Vietnam right after your internship, or you’re lucky enough to get a deferment so that you could finish your surgery training because they needed fully trained surgeons. So I said simple math, 65, 70. Vietnam, be all over with, well, it wasn’t. So after my residency and I left my wife and my two children, my four year old daughter and my six month old son, and within a month of finishing my residency, we’re at Fort Sam Houston going through Basic Training, which was really a joke. Uh, and then by September 7th, I landed in Vietnam.

[00:05:49] (Host) September, 7th of 1970.

[00:05:51] And 1970. Yes.

[00:05:53] (Host) Yeah. So when you say Basic Training was a joke, what do you mean?

[00:05:57] (Gus) Well, they taught us how to march. We all were doctors, dentists and veterinarians and nurses. Okay. And, uh.

[00:06:06] (Host) And soldiers.

[00:06:08] (Gus) They told us how to brush our teeth, and they told us about VD, and they taught us how to march. Uh, they told us about the chain of command. They tried to teach us how to use a compass, which I knew how to do anyway. And we got bored. So we bribed one of the enlisted men to get some beer out to the point of where we’re supposed to go to. And then we found out that two cans of beer fit perfectly in the canteen cup in the canteen you wear on the web belt. So by the time we got to where we were supposed to do, most of us got there, but we’re a little bit inebriated. And they said, what are you going to do? They’re going to send me to Vietnam. I said, I’m I was going anyway, you know.

[00:07:03] (Host) Right, right.

[00:07:04] (Gus) And that’s the attitude, that’s sort of the attitude I took it was a survival attitude. And actually, before I joined the service, my wife and I and my sister and her husband went to see the movie M*A*S*H* with Donald Sutherland. And he is my absolute hero. I, I would kiss his feet if he walked in the room.

[00:07:32] (Host) Donald Sutherland?

[00:07:35] (Gus) Donald Sutherland, because he was Hawkeye in the movie M*A*S*H*.

[00:07:37] (Host) So. So Hawkeye is your hero.

[00:07:41] (Gus) Well, Donald Sutherland played Hawkeye.

[00:07:45] (Host) Right, right, right.

[00:07:47] (Gus) Whatever. Yeah. And I said, I’m going to act just like that. I’ll get through it and what have you. And I acted just like that and got through it.

[00:07:53] (Host) Let me ask you, was there any sort of weapons training at your basic?

[00:08:00] (Gus) The weapons training was the most dangerous part of my two year military experience. It was more dangerous than Vietnam because you had people totally unfamiliar with weapons waving around, loaded, chambered 45s and M14s without any idea of what was going on. Uh, they trained us with the M14, which I hunted a lot, so I knew all about the weapons. But the thing is, by then they were using the M16, so. And we were not supposed to, uh, have weapons physicians in Vietnam. Uh, we’re just not supposed to have them. But as a casualties would come in the emergency room, we grabbed the weapons and we were armed to the teeth.

[00:08:53] (Host) Mm. So you said September of 70. You arrive in Vietnam.

[00:09:00] (Gus) September 7th.Yeah.

[00:09:02] (Host) And what are your first impressions?

[00:09:07] (Gus) I said, oh, my God, I’m here. And like most people say, it’s quite hot. I was an officer, so I went to Benoit and I stayed in a billet with another major, but he was going home. You know, it was like a horror show. Why did they put two people like that together? One poor guy is coming. The other guy is going home. And in the middle of the night, there was small arms fire, and I stood up to see what was going on. He was on the floor. That was my first lesson of what to do in the combat zone.

[00:09:41] (Host) So you said that, you had assumed, you know, years earlier, before your internship, that the conflict in Vietnam would be over by then. But of course, what happened in the meantime was the Tet Offensive. The beginning of the turning of the tide of American sentiment about the war. All of that happened while you were doing your internship. So you landed in Vietnam. You landed in a very different Vietnam than the one you had considered.

[00:10:12] (Gus) Yes. There are two Vietnams. Exactly. It was two different wars. If you talk to the veterans before Tet, they were dedicated. They were regimented. They had purpose. And after Tet, the fabric fell apart. And a friend of mine I met going to meetings, where I was trying to study post-traumatic stress and, suicide, is a psychiatrist. His name is Norman Camp. He was a psychiatrist in Da Nang, which was a half hour by chopper below us in Vietnam. And he wrote a very distinctive text on the disintegration of the military during that time. And he witnessed it because he saw it happen. Uh, now, you couldn’t blame these kids, you know? Our country has given up. Why are we here? And why do we have to kill people? And what happens with basic training is that you take young people. Then it was men. Young men, 18, 19, 20, 21. And they have lived under the moral code of peace their whole life. He might have gotten into some bar fights and played football and what have you, but their life was peace. That was a moral code. They’re trained by the military to kill without hesitation, and then all of a sudden they’re existing under the moral code of war. And I describe it as being in a moral limbo. These young people, even now, these young people, are never totally within one moral situation. It’s a blend. And they conflict. And when you’re not in a firefight, you remember the killing you’ve done and all of a sudden you say, should I have done that? You know, is it right to kill another human being? People ask me, how did you how did you exist, seeing all that, all the destruction in blood and guts and how did you cut arms and legs off and, had people die or bleed to death in the operating. How did you live with that? We sort of just ignored it, and we never discussed it, but we partied a lot. Okay. We drank a lot and there was some pot involved. But it’s only the past year and a half I realized we weren’t partying. We were self-medicating.

[00:13:15] (Host) Mhm.

[00:13:15] And that’s the truth. And that’s what the soldiers did in Vietnam. It was pushed into our subconscious. I never, ever sat and said except for one page except for a couple patients that I’ll describe. I never, ever sat and said, oh my God, this is horrible. War is horrible. Those wounds were horrible. I feel bad for that kid. We never did that. We just did our jobs, took care of them. We couldn’t allow ourselves to vocalize that it would have been self-destructive. Okay, so pushing our subconscious. But it was still there. Maybe not in our conscious, but we were drinking and partying to keep it down there.

[00:14:08] (Host) So before we get a little bit more into doing the work and what that all what all that entails, I want to go back to something you said earlier about, Hawkeye Pierce being sort of your, your template for how to get through it. Can you talk a little bit more about what attributes you took from him, whether it was your attitude or your appearance? Like in what ways did that did that manifest itself?

[00:14:33] My appearance. I would walk around. I never wore very few times that I ever wore my wear my fatigues in Vietnam. Okay. I wore tie-dyed Bermudas and often a tie- dyed muscle shirt. I wore a chain with a teardrop, a broken teardrop peace sign. And once the nurses and the recovery room ICU realized you were a good surgeon, they made you love beads. So I wore love beads. And we just wore that, you know? And we never, we got by, being, I can’t think of that, disingenuous of the of the of the military discipline. No one saluted. No one wore a hat. We all were on a first name basis. We drank too much. We busted chops that the CO never came to the operating room, never bothered as long as we did a good job, which we did. We acted instead of acting as a 30 year old, he became 19 or 20 again. And so you sort of develop your own lifestyle and you develop a love for the people you’re working with. I’m asked, well, didn’t you learn a lot of surgery over there? No, I didn’t, I knew most I knew the surgery before I got to the. The big lesson was the difference between damage from a high velocity weapon than in parts between 4000 and 6000 horsepower of energy versus the a weapon with the, you know, slower velocity, like a .38 or .22. It’s a big difference there. But, otherwise probably 75% of my learning experience was social. Learning to appreciate the people I worked with, learning to get along with all these different personalities, learning that I’m not that important. Okay. Especially, I’m not that important because I could be dead tomorrow. Right. And learning that I really depend on the people who are supporting me. Like the medics who are scrubbing, the medics who are changing the linens. I learned the power of women, the nurses. Every nurse in Vietnam volunteered to go, every one of them, and they were all 21, 22. They finished their training, and within six months they were in Vietnam. And you interviewed one of those nurses, Carol and her husband, Mike. And Mike was an OJT anesthesiologist with us at the 85th. But they sort of assumed this role, not an official military role, but they assumed this role of having the authority of your mother, like if you started acting out or being a jerk, they tell you, right? Or they’d say, you know, they’d call you from the ICU and they wouldn’t say, maybe you should come over here, they’d say, get your ass over here. And they were our interns and residents. That was my biggest lesson, you know, and to treat everybody in in our social hierarchy the same because they all deserve to be treated the same.

[00:18:33] (Host) You paint an interesting picture, right? With the love beads, which I guess were sort of a Good Housekeeping seal of approval from the nursing staff. The bermuda shorts, the, and the drinking and the partying. But, I mean, let’s be honest, you did an awful lot of hard work, uh, while you were there. I wonder if you could…

[00:18:54] (Gus) If you made it, if you made it alive to our hospital, you had a 96% chance of survival. We were good.

[00:19:04] (Host) Can you talk about sort of the triage process? I mean in a combat zone, you have to make some really hard decisions and you have to make them fast. What was your, how did you guys organize your thoughts around triage and prioritization?

[00:19:18] (Gus) Well, you get a notice, you’d hear chatter on the on the radio that something was going on. And then you get a notice from the Dustoff pilot and they give you three numbers. One is the KIA you have on board. The others are seriously injured. The others are walking wounded. So you had an idea, you know, if they were like two KIA’s and five walking wounded, you knew that you weren’t going to have a major rush for blood and treatment. But if you had an idea there were like 2 or 3 seriously injured coming in on a couple aircraft, plus walking wounded, then you had to think about resources. How many operating rooms did you have? How many anesthesiologists were available? How many surgeons were available? How much blood did you have? How much IV fluids, antibiotics, what have you. How much space did we have? So before all this came to fruition and people started coming in when we had when we developed an 18 hour backlog, meaning that we’d have to operate for 18 hours to take care of all those that we accepted as patients. We’d have those choppers over-fly and go to Da Nang because that was a bigger hospital. So as the patients come in, they will land on a helipad, and often you could tell how seriously the patients were wounded by how close the Dustoff pilot landed to near the hospital.

[00:21:01] (Host) Meaning if if they were seriously wounded, he would he would land closer to the door?

[00:21:06] (Gus) Closer to the door. Exactly.

[00:21:07] (Host) Wow. Okay.

[00:21:09] (Gus) And so the patients would come in, and you could tell right away those in shock, those agonal, those who are going to die. But the major, gut-wrenching decision was who do you not take care of? And how could you say you’re not going to take care of someone? Well, there was a classification of patients called expectant. They had so much injury. They were so close to death. They would require so much resource of blood and time, effort that if they if that one patient were taken to the operating room, treated, resuscitated, taken to the operating room, you could probably take care of maybe 3 or 4 seriously wounded. All right. So that patient was put in a corner behind a screen given a lot of morphine, had a nurse sit with him and was allowed to die with dignity. And that patient was sacrificed to allow the bulk of the other patients to be treated in a timely fashion. And then there were a group of patients that we knew had to go to the operating room right away. They were basically on the basis of hemorrhage. And then those patients who maybe lost a foot or lost a hand or had some minor frag wounds here or there, they could wait two, three, four, five hours to be taken care of. So that’s called triage. But the difficult part was being the one, and that was my role for about eight months. I was chief of surgery and I would make those decisions.

[00:23:28] (Host) Correct me if I’m wrong, but none of your surgery training prepared you for that moment where you have to decide that someone is expectant.

[00:23:35] (Gus) No, no. But you didn’t think about it again. It was just something that had to be done.

[00:23:45] (Host) Mhm.

[00:23:45] (Gus) If you allowed yourself to dwell on it. This is, this is how my post-traumatic stress developed. I buried these things. Okay. But they were still active in my subconscious. My limbic system was still firing.

[00:24:05] (Host) Yeah.

[00:24:06] (Gus) And what I realized when I got home, I started telling stories. And the way I handled my post-traumatic stress was the story tell, and that’s a common way of doing it. And my wife would cook this beautiful spaghetti dinner and we’d have all these people over we just met and they would say, you know, we love your spaghetti dinner, but if we have to watch those bloody slides again, we’re not coming over. Right. But what I realized again, because now I’m involved in directly involved in veterans in their in their psychology at Homeward Bound Adirondacks and campfires I have here on my farm. I just realized maybe six months ago, I was telling stories because I wanted someone to tell me, oh, you did that, boy, that was good, because they never told me and they never told any of the soldiers coming back from Vietnam, oh my goodness, you did something worthwhile. You did something that supported the country. You did your duty. So we never were recognized. And again, no matter what your level of education, your sophistication, what you do for a living, we were all stripped naked and we all were subject to the same stresses. But I know you can’t believe I didn’t dwell on putting a young man in a corner, but it’s a scale you deal with, you know, what’s the cost benefit. Okay. And the nurses would sit with him and they’d say, I want to write my last letter home, or am I going to? I’m going to live, aren’t I? And she’d say, yes, and he quietly would die. And I give the nurses a lot of credit for being able to do that. But honest to God, psychologically, we did not dwell on it, but it did affect us acutely, but we didn’t know it.

[00:26:15] (Host) The rest of my conversation with Gus Kapler after a short break, stick around.

[00:29:13] (Host) Can you describe some of the types of wounds or injuries or ailments that you would deal with, whether they were caused by weapons or the environment or whatever, and just give a sense of, uh, you know, the range of things that you had to that you had.

[00:29:29] (Gus) The VC, Vietcong, were ingenious. And they collect all our unexploded ordnance. The hand grenades, the this, that and the other thing, and they were experts at booby traps. Now, the worst ones were those booby traps created with explosives. Now they had punji sticks. They had the logs would come out of the tree with the spikes on it, and all those things, they would take our plastic syringes that were discarded, and they use a trigger, make it into a trigger mechanism. They run a copper wire up through the barrel of the syringe and then put another copper wire on a plunger with two copper wires hit the circuit would be completed, and it would trigger an explosive. The majority of injuries were booby trap injuries. The majority of injuries were blown off legs, blown off arms, mostly legs. I’ve got photographs where you can tell that the soldier stepped on a booby trap with a certain foot, and the other leg was coming forward because all the blast is in the front of that. But again, it’s all booby trapped. Most people say that’s not like being shot, but it is because they are also high velocity wounds, and by definition, most people say high velocity is greater than 2600ft per second, the missile traveling, where in a shock wave is developed and there’s a shock wave. The shock wave is a compression of the air molecules in front of the missile as it travels through the air and before the missile even hits. Now it’s, you know, fractions of a second. That shock wave goes through the tissue, dissociates muscle, molecules and this, that and the other thing. And then when the missile hits it, the kinetic energy is just explodes the tissue. We’re in a hole about 27 times the size of the permanent hole develops. And when that hole develops 27 times, it creates a negative pressure. And because of the negative pressure, atmospheric pressure pushes debris into the wound. Grass and stones and clothes and what have you. And the body’s tissue is essentially water so when that missile hits, a ballistic shock wave develops. Okay. The sort of the sound wave shockwave goes through first. Missile hits. Energy is deposited, and then shock waves go through the tissue and the shock waves. I have a photograph where the bullet did not hit the long bone, the femur in the thigh, but the shock wave fractured it. The shock wave can tear the inside of blood vessels. The shock wave can destroy lung tissue so that it becomes nonfunctional. So it’s a major. The shock wave is the thing that we discuss in TBI, traumatic brain injury. That’s the shock wave. The same shock wave we’re talking about. So and muscle is with fragment wounds of the leg, sometimes its fillet the entire leg open and you take forceps and pinch the muscle. If the muscle contracted, it was alive. If it didn’t contract, it was dead. So you started to chop it out. And that’s where the term meatball surgery comes from. You wind up with a pile of debris and muscle, but with all this open tissue these patients would get 30, 40, 50, 60 units of blood after just a couple of units of blood your clotting factors deplete, your platelets deplete. Uh, the different things that were used to preserve the blood are in the system. If the anesthesiologist isn’t watching things, ours did. But the patient’s urinary output can drop. They become acidotic. And the insult to the body is just horrendous with the adrenaline and the cortisol. And the key thing the anesthesiologist had to do is keep the patient out of irreversible shock, keep his temperature up, keep the urinary output up. What have you. Now don’t you run out of blood. Yeah, we can run out of blood. But we had thousands of the 101st across the road. Across highway one. They come up and line up and stick their arm out. And there’s nothing what’s worth more than platinum and gold is what we call fresh walking donor blood. This blood is warm. It’s coming right from a live 18 year old and going in to an 18 year old that’s in the operating room.

[00:35:05] (Gus) You mentioned that you have suffered from PTSD. I know that you also have suffered from some Agent Orange related illnesses. Um, do you want to talk about any of that?

[00:35:19] (Gus) Oh. Why not? Absolutely. My major problem is that I’m angry. Not because I had to go to Vietnam. I’m proud of that. I did it. It’s the most influential year in my life. It made me a better person. But I’m angry at the slaughter, at the lies, the fabrication. You know, you read Dereliction of Duty. You read Vietnam, the tragic. whatever. And it’s written by two different authors, but the message is the same. People were, Kennedy loved toys. That’s why we had our Agent Orange sprayed all over us and the government knew. The chemists knew that it caused debilitating disease. And in their naivete they said, well, we’re just going to spray it on the enemy. And if it gets sprayed on our troops our government will take care of them. Okay. Agent Orange actually was about four or five different colors. The vicious chemical was 2,4,5-T, and in the production of that, there was a predictable, predictable occurrence of a byproduct called dioxins, and dioxin is probably the most vicious chemical known to man. It causes birth defects. It causes genetic damage. It can skip generations. It’s still in the soil in Vietnam, and deformed children are still being born. And they sprayed it on us and they sprayed it on me. They sprayed 54,000 gallons on the Phu Bai area before I got there. It was in the dust in the water. Okay. Okay. That’s one thing to be angry, but the other anger is allowing these young kids to be slaughtered when they’re going to get out of there for no reason. They could have gotten out of there faster. But the thing is, what was at stake was the president’s legacy. It was a senator’s legacy, was a general’s legacy. Too much ego is involved in the people who govern us. It’s sickening. And it just makes me very, very, very angry. Then you take these nice, wholesome young people, turn them into killers and do nothing. Do absolutely nothing to rehabilitate them so they can reintegrate into a peaceful society. You’re sent home to sink or swim. We were. And they still are. I talked to them. They still are. Actually, the United States Air Force has a program in Ramstein, Germany, called the Deployment Transition Center, and there they actually bring to fruition what I’ve been pushing for. I call it a therapeutic timeout. They send airmen to Ramstein, Germany with no record keeping. Why is that important? Because it eliminates the threat of stigmatization. If you’re not keeping records, then there’s no evidence to use to stigmatize you. Okay. Because stigmatization is the bane of society in the military. Stigmatization keeps everybody in line. Okay. So they can drink what they want. They wander around. They get into groups. They begin to trust. They begin to admit what they saw. And did they realize I’m not crazy. They’re reacting the same way I reacted, and it goes on for a while. They have found over 40% decrease in PTSD symptomatology in these airmen, and a greater than 30% decrease in substance abuse, cigarette smoking, and other parameters of post-traumatic stress. It works. And you know, at our at Homeward Bound campfires after the veterans who don’t know each other before they get there, some do, had spent a day socializing, kayaking, hiking, forest bathing together, developing a trust and trusting me because I’m one of them. They open up. Being in a group is powerful. It’s absolutely powerful, and trust is most important, and lack of stigmatization is extremely important.

[00:40:56] (Host) The 85th Evac Hospital in Phu Bai, uh, was there to serve, I believe, for the most part, the 101st, The Screaming Eagles.

[00:41:06] (Gus) Exactly. Yes. Yes.

[00:41:09] (Gus) Um, is there anything you’d like to say about those men?

[00:41:13] They were extraordinary and extraordinary. And they were tough. Christmas Eve, we had a huge major, mass casualty. Those whose surgeries were delayed were laying on a gurneys with their heads up. One had lost a foot, one had lost something else, and their smile and their joking and their happy. And I finally realized they’re happy because their war is over and they’re going home alive. Yeah, maybe without a foot, but they’re going home alive. They were tough young men, and they loved each other. They were buddies. They took care of each other. You took care of the guy next. And, we had some Filipinos, we had Blacks, Latinos, you know, we played softball, basketball, football, volleyball. You know, it was a melting pot. Like it like it should have been.

[00:42:20] (Host) You had two children when you left for Vietnam. And you know, I know that you suffered some when you came back and how important has your family been? Are you still married to the same girl?

[00:42:34] (Gus) We just had our 60th anniversary. Yeah.

[00:42:37] (Host) How many?

[00:42:38] (Gus) 60 years.

[00:42:40] (Host) 60th. Wow. Congratulations.

[00:42:41] (Gus) We’ve been together since 1957. We started dating in high school. I tried to run away and go to college free, but she caught me. But she, Robin, Robin is the driving force of the family. You know, she never told me you’re different. After I came home. My mother did. It was funny. She had a party for me, and we arrived. And she says, you’ve changed. And I didn’t say anything. But no. No one. They thought you went to a country club for a year. They thought you went on a sabbatical for a year. No one ever thought about what was going on. You know, that the empathy was totally absent. Absent. It was. It was amazing. It was like you didn’t exist. That part of your life never existed. It was ignored. It was it was upsetting. But the thing is, with me, I had to be straight, okay? At Fort Carson, Colorado, all of us drank a fair amount, but we all realized we’re going to go home. We’re going to start practice pretty soon. But to straighten out, we were a group, you know, we took care of things. I had no problems with substance abuse or alcohol, a we got home, you know, we got loaded every once in a while, like everybody does. But I didn’t think I had a problem. But speaking to Robin recently, when she hears me talking to some of these veterans on the phone, she says, oh my God, you were something at times, you know? So it did change. But a lot of times you don’t realize you’ve changed.

[00:45:10] (Host) Gus has been advocating for veterans in one way or another since his discharge in 1972. He also lectures on battlefield trauma and the origins and possible prevention of PTSD, substance abuse, and suicide in active-duty military and veterans. His book, Welcome Home from Vietnam, Finally is available at Amazon and at guskappler.com. We’ll be back in two weeks with more stories of service, sacrifice and healing. See you then.

Full Interview with Gus Kappler