San Diego (special) -- Dr. Jon Nachison and Phil Landis are Jewish veterans of the Vietnam War. Dr. Arnold Gass and Ilene Sherman are Jews who stayed at home and opposed that war.

Today, the four are allies in a derivative war. Together, they're fighting against the drug and alcohol abuse, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and homelessness that have overtaken the lives of many Vietnam veterans. And, they're calling on the Jewish community to send in reinforcements.

All four are involved with the Vietnam Veterans of San Diego, an organization known for the continuous recitation of the names of the Vietnam War dead on Memorial Day weekends as well as for its sponsorship each summer of an annual three-day "Stand Down" in Balboa Park. 

Nachison, a psychologist, was the co-founder a decade ago with Robert Van Keuren of the Stand Down, a program which since has been imitated in 90 other cities around the United States. It will be held in San Diego this year on Aug. 1-3, when once again homeless veterans will tent together, receive counseling and benefits, and for a brief time, at least, escape the streets.

Gass, a professor of medicine, an internist, and a Veterans Administration Hospital administrator, has been a volunteer since the first Stand Down in 1988. Each year, as part of that operation, he has run the medical tent where homeless veterans receive treatment for a variety of ailments including numerous foot and muscular-skeletal complaints caused by living on the streets.

The Vietnam Veterans of San Diego will be in the news again next week when the "Moving Wall," a replica of the famous Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C., will be set up April 18-20 in Balboa Park on the east side of Park Boulevard. The portable wall will be placed near the building that once served as the chapel of Naval Hospital and which serves today as the Veterans Memorial Center, a combination museum and meeting hall.

It is said that the Vietnam War Memorial is "a place of healing" -- a place where the United States government officially recognizes the contribution and sacrifice made by the soldiers in a war that had been rejected and despised by a large portion of the civilian populace. One idea behind the "Moving Wall" was to bring that healing to people who could not visit Washington D.C.

The wall lists the names of over 58,000 American men and women who were killed during the Vietnam War, not alphabetically but by the date on which they died. It is estimated that approximately one-half of one percent of those who died in the war were Jews --a percentage that is even less than the tiny Jewish percentage in the overall U.S. population. 

Phil Landis, a VVSD board member, believes that because comparatively few Jews were involved in the war, the Jewish community may feel even more disconnected than the rest of the American populace to Vietnam veterans and their problems.

Landis knows the power a memorial can have in a person's life. For him, it wasn't seeing the names of comrades on the wall that helped him begin to come to terms with memories of the times. It was attending a ceremony in Balboa Park last Memorial Day when San Diego's own Vietnam Peace Memorial was relocated from its former location in Old Town. 

As a second lieutenant, he had commanded a platoon on maneuvers through the central portion of Vietnam and witnessed his men being killed by sniper fire and booby traps. 

Compared to them, he said, he was only "lightly wounded" -- he was hospitalized by shrapnel that tore up his knee, chest and hand. Later, he was promoted to first lieutenant and became a company commander in the same theatre.

For more than 25 years since his "in-country" Vietnam experiences, "I had never been to a memorial service," Landis recalled. One day he struck up a conversation in a Rancho Bernardo juice bar with a man who still wore a POW/ MIA bracelet, prompting Landis to think more and more about the wa and bringing to the surface memories long suppressed. 

After reading a blurb in a newspaper about the upcoming relocation service for the memorial, "I went early because I wasn't planning on staying. I walked through the center and I was moved by that and I walked out where they were reading the names and I started to cry. I looked at the memorial and I couldn't stop crying. 

"So I walked off to the grassy area, to compose myself, and sat down, and sat through the service, and listened to the speakers and the presenters and listened to the people of the VVSD, and I got a sense of all this history that I had tuned out of my life," Landis said.

Formerly the owner of a securities firm and now a residential real estate broker, Landis offered to help in fundraising for the 84-bed residential treatment center operated by the VVSD on Pacific Coast Highway a few blocks south of Rosecrans Street in the Old Town area. 

Unlike the Moving Wall exhibit, or the Stand Down, the treatment facility is an ongoing, year-round activity of VVSD -- a place where veterans can fight their drug addictions and also deal with other issues in their lives, like PTSD.

Landis, who lives in the Rancho Bernardo area with his wife and four children, said he can emphasize--but not sympathize-- with the homeless veterans whose PTSD was so severe that they became unable to cope, and turned to drugs as a way to avoid their nightmares.

"My emotions went from being freeze dried to being an uncontrollable river," he said. "They were freeze dried for over a quarter of a century." 

After attending the rededication of the memorial, he said, "all this compounded to open up this stream of consciousness that had been suppressed for so long. 

"What it was like for me, what it is still like but less so, was as if every waking thought you had a mental image of some combat experience," Landis said. "If you would go for a hike around Lake Hodges and your eyes would search the ridge lines without thinking. You become hyper-vigilant. If you are on a meandering trail you might get a little bit cautious if you can't see around the bend. You can't sleep well. These images come unbidden. You don't ask for it, it just comes." 

In a manner similar to the way Holocaust survivors finally decided to start talking about their experiences, so that the world wouldn't forget, Landis is telling his story at high school assemblies. But it is a wrenching process, and there is much that he will not--or cannot--talk about. When students ask him if he ever killed anyone in Vietnam, he responds: "That is something between me and my God."

His "empathy" for the residents of the treatment center is because he recognizes that he easily could have been one of them, Landis said. But he doesn't have "sympathy" for them because feeling sorry for them is not what they need. Instead, he said, they have to reach down deep into themselves to find the strength to heal themselves. 

Stand Down originator Nachison, whose Vietnam War experience involved working as a hospital medic and as a human resource specialist "back in the rear with the beer and the gear," said "whenever someone is exposed to an event that is outside the range of normal human experience, when something so powerful, so unbelievable happens to them it almost permanently disrupts their homeostasis (maintenance of stability).

"Normally we are in a kind of balance," the psychologist added. "When something upsets us--we lose our parking space, or our Newsweek doesn't come on time-- we become upset, but we reestablish our balance. We all have this ability to cope, to stay on an even keel. But sometimes an event occurs in a person's life -- or a series of events--that is so overwhelming, so powerful, that they are unable to reestablish their equilibrium. That is trauma."

Nachison, who is an adjunct professor of psychology at San Diego State University and who also consults on trauma-related incidents with the San Diego Fire Department, said whereas many victims recover from a trauma within three months, others never seem to shake its effects. These are the victims of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

"There are three categories of symptoms," Nachison said. "One category are what I would call the intrusive symptoms. This is where the memory of the event is trying to break through into conscious awareness. It can occur with dreams of the event; nightmares; it can occur with flashbacks, where you momentarily feel like you are back and experiencing the trauma, and also it comes from just day-to-day memories of things that keeps you from being able to concentrate on other things.

"Then there is a set of symptoms that are about denial and avoidance," the psychologist said. "These symptoms include isolating, staying away from people 'so I don't have to deal with this'; avoiding 'anything that would remind me'; anything that would trigger memories of this event. Substance abuse is another way of avoiding, cutting off relationships with other people: there are various ways people are able to avoid. And what you see is that there is a war going on in the person, between the intrusive symptoms and the avoidance and denial symptoms."

The third set of PTSD symptoms "are physiological," Nachison said. "This is where you see the remarkable startle reflex that people have; the irritability, and sometimes what you see is a kind of explosive rage that people experience when they have post-traumatic stress disorder."

At the VVSD treatment center, besides 12-step programs for substance abusers, there is a course of therapy for PTSD. "In general terms, it is important for people to be able to work through, to be able to talk about and deal with the traumatic event," Nachison says. "It isn't so much telling the story; it is being able to reexperience the emotions, because it is the emotions that really get impacted. That is what is repressed by the person--whether it is tremendous fear, anger or frustration. Whatever they are experiencing at the time of the trauma, that is what gets stored and that is what needs to be released."

Once patients release those emotions, "the first thing I would want to see is some relief from those symptoms," the psychologist said. "The other is that trauma can have a profound effect on a person's behavior. When you go through a war, the likelihood is that you will come back with certain behaviors that you learned to survive in that war. Now you are using those behaviors in your daily life even though they are no longer necessary or no longer make sense. Hopefully what begins to happen is that as the person has a relief from his intrusive symptoms, there also is some realization that 'I no longer have to engage in the behaviors I engage in.'"

An example, Nachison said, "would be someone who avoids people, who doesn't have social contact... people who have learned to shut down their feelings because they have learned that if they start to cry they won't stop or if they get angry they won't be able to stop. Now, for that person it will be all right to cry; they can be more emotional, fully functioning persons."

The VVSD estimates that one third of the homeless men and women on San Diego's streets are Vietnam veterans, many of whom are suffering from PTSD. The organization strongly believes that solving the problems of the Vietnam veterans will take a big bite out of the problem of homelessness in our cities.

Ilene Sherman, who worked for many years in the Jewish Community Center movement before taking a job as coordinator of political and administrative activities for former U.S. Ambassador to Switzerland M. Larry Lawrence and Shelia Lawrence, recently became VVSD's vice president for external relations and business development. 

Sherman raises funds, networks with businesses, and, like the other Jews involved with VVSD, would like to see some permanent linkage between the Jewish community and the veterans organization.

Congregation Beth Israel takes responsibility for feeding of the homeless at St. Vincent de Paul every Sunday morning, and Temple Emanu-El participates each year in the Interfaith Shelter program to provide food and warm places of lodging during the month of December. But there are numerous other congregations and organizations in the Jewish community which Sherman, Nachison, Landis and Gass all hope will consider ongoing involvement with the veterans.

"I'd love to see them have food and clothing drop offs at their sites, and come down to this facility and deliver them," Sherman said. "Canned goods, paper goods, packages of Cool-Aid, Tang--those sorts of things- for use at our facilities for the veterans. Our food costs are tremendous. We get day-old food, milk that is about to hit its deadline but can be used here quickly. Canned food would help our food budget tremendously."

"Also clothing, particularly in the larger sizes, because we have lots of folks who could use the larger sizes, but don't get them," Sherman added. "It is so unbelievable (how nice the residents look) when our employment service sends someone out for an interview--I get so emotional because they come out and give a fellow a choice of ten ties, and a choice of pants; and it is all good clean clothing."

Perhaps, most importantly, said Sherman, the Jewish community can make jobs available to the veterans: Maimonides once ranked the giving of charity by degree, with the one at the very apex being helping someone to obtain the means of earning his own way, so future charity would be unnecessary.

Volunteers also are needed at each year's Stand Down, where as many as 2,000 people will staff different facilities and provide a variety of services during the three-day encampment in Balboa Park.

Dr. Arnold Gass recalls as someone who had protested the Vietnam War- participating in two giant marches on Washington--he at first was squeamish about rendering aid to the Vietnam War veterans, but "I went to one of the banquets they put on and I saw a sign on the back of a guy with a leather jacket and it said 'Fight War, Not The Warrior' and that is how I think.

"I think governments and leaders send people to war, which I still unalterably oppose, and unfortunately young men and women are forced to fight," Gass said. "They shouldn't be despised for fighting them or even volunteering. They should be acknowledged for going through an experience that no one should have to go through: facing life or death on a battlefield."