Unity Army veteran: Talking helps war trauma survivors
Thomas Abraham knows intimately about the psychological costs of war.
As a young man, the Unity veteran led even younger men, many still in their teens, while serving as a captain in the Army’s 173rd Airborne Battalion in Vietnam.
After the West Point graduate was transferred within the battalion, “most of my former infantry platoon were killed in an ambush,” he said, “and my two successors also were killed.”
Now 75, he recalled those losses Monday as he delivered the keynote address at a Memorial Day service organized by the Greensburg Veterans of Foreign Wars post.
“I still miss them,” Abraham said of his fallen platoon members as he spoke at Westmoreland County Memorial Park in Hempfield. “No one goes to war without being touched by war. I was lucky, but I was touched also.”
Fellow Vietnam veteran and Greensburg VFW member Robert Krupey pointed out the average age of the 58,220 U.S. service members killed in action in that war was just over 23.
“War takes our young,” Krupey said. “We owe them a debt we cannot repay.”
Trauma — physical or emotional — can linger for many who have survived military combat. Abraham suggested sharing their experiences with loved ones can help those veterans, if the conversation occurs at the right time.
“They don’t want to talk about it when they come home, and you respect that,” he said. “They don’t want to go to their death without their family knowing what they went through. They want somebody to ask them what happened.”
For many Vietnam veterans, “it was 20, 30 years before we wanted to talk about anything. It’s a closure for all,” Abraham said.
Abraham is the founder of Veterans Angels, a nonprofit that seeks to help veterans who are suffering from the trauma of combat to connect with each other and with their spirituality. A nondenominational retreat for about a half-dozen veterans was held in February in Hempfield and another is planned for September.
“We want to give them hope and give them a direction to go,” Abraham said of the veterans. “That’s all we can do.”
More information about Abraham’s group is available at a-veteranangels.org.
Jeff Himler is a TribLive reporter covering Greater Latrobe, Ligonier Valley, Mt. Pleasant Area and Derry Area school districts and their communities. He also reports on transportation issues. A journalist for more than three decades, he enjoys delving into local history. He can be reached at jhimler@triblive.com.
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