"Letters To Helene" relates his descent into PTSD, hitting bottom and his salvation. Gus Kappler decided as a sophomore at Port Jefferson High School on Long Island, New York, in 1955 to become a surgeon. The treadmill of excelling academically then began and lasted seventeen years. Gus and Robin Viverito started their life together with a first date on Friday, April 13, 1957, and are still going strong. In 1970, at the completion of the surgical residency at the Medical College of Virginia, one major previously unanticipated hurdle, loomed ahead of Robin and Gus-Vietnam. The army drafted me as an intern in 1965, and I was given a five-year deferment. We thought the Vietnam War would have ended by then. Robin and I had two children: Kim, four, and Chris, six months of age. We had planned our survival strategy, and I departed for a year's duty as a trauma surgeon at the 85th Evacuation Hospital, Phu Bai, Vietnam, arriving there on September 7, 1970. Upon my return, we were not the same thirty-year-old kids who had said good-bye in Dallas, Texas, one year earlier. We had lived two disparate lives, literally worlds apart with only short contacts interspersed. I was still trying to rationalize my actions in Vietnam, some of which were immoral by the stateside moral code of peace, and to overcome my training of hatred and dehumanization of the Vietnamese. Time did soften my war-zone feelings. A chance meeting a few years ago with a brilliant Vietnamese medical student completed my exoneration. Today, I'm finally home. Not welcomed by our ungrateful citizens but by the steadfastness of Robin's support and my self-generated efforts to become resurrected from my mental morass.
