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It ate you from the inside out.

Harold Bud Smith, US Air Force 1959 - 1962, talks about how he knew he had PTSD.

Transcript

I had a lot of talk with a psychiatrist, the psychiatrist

that I really liked, and we talked a lot.

He said, "A lot of guys come back from Vietnam,

World War Two, they became policemen

because you could carry a gun and you could be hypervigilant.

You could do all these things that PTSD manifests itself in

and it was like normal."

But it really wasn't because it ate you from the inside out.

Michael, God bless his soul, he kept having sections

of his stomach taken out.

He was one of my subordinates.

I was a Sergeant, a Patrol Supervisor.

I was having the same problems he was.

We'd go out on his boat and we'd talk about it.

We both know we had problems,

you just couldn't put a finger on what it was.

I don't think, I mean years ago they used

to call it combat fatigue or battle fatigue

or shell shock or whatever it was.

Michael, he took his own life.

Michael and I were really close friends and his family asked me

to be a pallbearer at his funeral.

He was a policeman and I was only the uniformed policeman

as pallbearer.

I know it was PTSD, but there were no such thing back then.

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