Transcript
I was very nervous for the first treatment session
because they put us into a room with,
it started with 12 guys sitting around facing each other,
and none of us wanted to be there,
none of us wanted to talk.
We didn't know the therapist, although they were
trying their best and they were friendly.
We broke the ice one day, probably the second session,
as I recall, we had to talk to one of the other Veterans about,
I think it was about our combat experience.
We couldn't tell it out loud to the rest of the guys
sitting there, but we could only relate it to one other guy.
Nobody wanted to do it, absolutely not.
Well, we probably sat there five or 10 minutes,
everybody sitting on their hands and not volunteering.
I finally did, I was the only ex-officer in the group,
the rest of them were EMs, and I says,
"OK, if nobody else is going to do it, I'll start."
And I says, "Alberto, come over here,
and we're going to go over here in the corner
and we're going to talk about this."
So we did, we went over and talked for probably 15 minutes,
and that broke the ice, and the other guys
eventually broke up and started talking to each other.
That got guys starting to realize that
we weren't all individuals, we had all experienced
pretty much the same thing in PTSD,
in combat, mostly, because most of the guys there
were Vietnam Veterans, there was one from
Panama and Grenada, and I think,
oh, there was one from the Iraq War.