Published: Oct. 12, 2017
Seeking closure in Washington
Vietnam vet going on Honor Flight on
Saturday is hoping to heal old wounds
ndettmann@conleynet.com
262-306-5043
It didn’t dawn him until his sister, Mari,
said it.
When it did, in a way, West Bend’s Mike Orban
felt guilty, a bit selfish.
Thus, when Orban joins 12 fellow Washington
County veterans on Saturday’s Stripes and Stripes Honor Flight in Washington,
D.C., it’ll have a new meaning, a new purpose.
“I’ve been to Washington, D.C., many times,”
Orban said from his West Bend home Tuesday morning. “I’ve seen the (Vietnam)
Wall quite a few times and I do a lot of public speaking, but my sister
mentioned several weeks ago, she made a statement. She said, ‘Mike, your family
has to heal, too.’ That really sank in for me that this would be an opportunity,
because I have so many brothers and sisters, an opportunity for my family to
heal as well.
“I’m grateful and almost apologetic for not
having thought about that for almost 50 years.”
In addition to Orban, also going on Saturday’s
Honor Flight from the county are: Mark Cayner (Kewaskum, Vietnam War, Army),
John Fenton (Jackson, Vietnam War, Army), Tom Landvatter (West Bend, Korean
War, Army), Ronald Pollpeter (Germantown, Korean War, Navy), Ronald Pritchard
(Germantown, Vietnam War, Marine Corps), Donald Pryor (Jackson, Korean War,
Army), Hilda Rasmussen (West Bend,
Korean War, Army), Procopio “Nick” Sandoval
(West Bend, Korean War, Army), Charles Sawyer (Germantown, Korean War, Marine
Corps), Richard Schilter (West Bend, World War II, Marine Corps), Norman Toll
(Slinger, Korean War, Marine Corps) and Anthony Wolf (Allenton, Vietnam, Army).
One of Orban’s sisters, Peg Knaus, who sat at
his dining room table with her brother Tuesday, said the day promises to be
emotional, likely with tears.
Orban served in the Army from 1969-72,
including in Vietnam with the 1st Air Cavalry Division. He was awarded the
Bronze Star and the Air Medal.
“I’m so looking forward to it,” Knaus said of
Saturday.
The Orban family needs the honorary day.
“We never had closure of the war,” Knaus said.
“When Mike came home to all this mess at home. We never welcomed him properly
or thanked him properly for what he went through. We didn’t have any idea of
what he went through.”
When Mike was drafted in 1969 and went away to
Vietnam, his family was starting to fall apart. His parents were already
divorced and Dad, as Mike described it, disappeared, left the family to marry a
secretary, several siblings either dropped out of school — some before the end
of grade school — or were kicked out, succumbed to a string of drug and alcohol
abuse by the age of 12 or landed in prison or all of the above. A brother also
committed suicide.
When Mike returned home, he came home to a
family in shambles, a group of friends who weren’t the same people anymore and
a country not the way he remembered it.
“To say it was catastrophic is not even fair,”
Mike said. “It was bad.”
Mike was in Vietnam for “11 months, 18 days and
I used to know the hours,” he said.
“It was starting to go downhill,” Mike said
about his home life before being sent to Vietnam, “but it was nowhere near what
it was when I came home.”
It was almost like he was in another foreign
country.
“My mother didn’t have a drinking problem when
I left,” Mike said. “She was a great person, but was just overwhelmed.”
He was overwhelmed, too.
He lived in Knaus’ basement for years as PTSD
started to kick in for Mike. Knaus said Mike often spent hours in the basement
drinking and depressed.
Mike later fled to Africa to live in the jungle
for nearly a decade. He joined the Peace Corps, but only did that as a disguise
for what he was really doing.
“I had such a difficult time being here in
America,” Mike said.
He added, “This made me look good to my family
joining the Peace Corps, but I was going to isolate, just to hide.”
Had it been not for a war breaking out in
Rwanda, Mike doesn’t know when or if he would’ve returned to the U.S. — alive
or dead.
“I felt like I was in a foreign country here in
America,” Mike said, adding he was surrounded by no sense of love or joy for
anybody or anything.
The only reason he didn’t commit suicide was
because he saw the devastation it caused the family when his brother did it.
“I was running from myself,” Mike said.
The siblings, despite all that happened, were close.
Knaus said had it not been for Mike, she doesn’t know, or fears to think about,
how different her life would’ve played out.
As for Mike, it was a similar sentiment, but he
also gave credit to the staff at the Tomah VA hospital.
“Tomah saved my life,” Mike said.
At Tomah, he was given a sheet of paper listing
21 common responses to trauma — including anger, rage, guilt, panic attacks and
nightmares.
“This was the crap that was floating around in
here,” he said, pointing to his head. “I can’t pull out the anger because as
soon as I pull out the anger, I go to the guilt. When I pull out the guilt, it
goes to the shame.
“When they showed me the piece of paper, I
could go to the rage and go, ‘What is the rage about? What is the shame
about?’” He cited the overwhelming guilt for killing civilians by mistake.
“How does a 20-year-old get over that sort of
thing?” Mike said.
When he saw the list, Mike said he was furious
— not because the hospital gave it to him, but because he didn’t see it the day
he left the service in 1972.
“When I came home, as an infantry soldier ... I
was emotionally shut down,” Mike said. “The only way to survive as an infantry
soldier is to numb yourself to what you’re doing.
“When I came home, I thought I was going to a
home what it was before. I thought I was going home to my wife to my friends
playing softball,
going to the bar on Friday night, restoring old
antique cars.
“To this day, none of those things hold any
interest to me. I was overwhelmed by these events. I lost a sense of who I
was.”
In 2007, Orban released a book detailing his
service and his bout with PTSD, “Souled Out: A Memoir of War and Inner Peace.”
Since then, it has been revised twice, most
recently in 2014. That was an eyeopener for the family.
“Now that after reading his book, all this
coming out about this terrible disease, we want to now appreciate, let him know
how much we appreciate him and what he went through,” Knaus said. “We should’ve
been there for him and we weren’t.
“Now we need to be there for him. This flight
kind of gives us a chance to welcome him home like we should’ve done 50 years
ago.”
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