I was on leave from the hospital. It was in- I think it was Memorial Day 1970. We had gone to a parade and then old high school friends of mine took me to a carnival. I was still carrying a cane. I wasn't in good shape. I was still recuperating from the wounds. In the carnival there were different games, there were booths, there were rides. I didn't go on any of the rides. I was just hanging around watching this carnival, which I hadn't seen anything like in so long, and I kept flinching from the sound of the shooting gallery. Every time someone would fire, I?d flinch. My friends tried to get me to relax and I couldn't because I kept hearing of popping of the rifle fire. So they said, why don't you just go shoot? I didn't want to. I didn't want to fire a rifle. But they kept saying, the only way you're going to get over this is to shoot. So I went over to the shooting gallery and I picked up a rifle. But I couldn't aim it the way the other people were aiming it. It felt strange and I got nervous. I put the rifle down, I picked it up, I put it down. Finally I picked it up and I fired and I hit everything, dead center. I went to the next rifle and I did it again. I became so absorbed in it that I couldn't miss. My friends were cheering me on, but I didn't feel good about it because in order to shoot the way I was doing I had to think like a soldier ? that the little ducks were my enemy. I felt like I was still a soldier in a strange shooting gallery where targets kept popping up and I kept shooting them down. I was firing at shooting gallery targets and hitting them as if I was shooting at enemy soldiers and hitting them. I put as much effort into hitting those targets as I did into keeping myself alive in Viet Nam. There's where the impossibility of my missing a target lay! It made me nervous and I put the rifle down and I walked away from it. That was the first rifle I had picked up since the war.

I didn't understand it at the time. All I knew was there was a transformation when I began to fire the rifle. It wasn't conscious. I just began to shoot and in shooting the mixture of adrenaline and memory produced some very efficient shooting patterns. And there were cheers! There were people standing around cheering each shot, each hit, laughing and not understanding. I'm sure they didn't understand because I was in civilian clothes. No one knew I was still in the Service and was wounded in the war.

I was quite shaken by it. Something was happening and I was unable to control it. I was home and I was happy to be home and I thought the war was over. I didn't realize I still had a combat mentality. I thought that I would leave that in Viet Nam when I was wounded. I thought that that would go way because I always dreamed of coming home and having a great time, picking up where I left off. Instead I got home and things were not the same.

When I got back the whole country seemed to be a carnival! There were bright new cars, there was money, there was free love, there were flower children. It seemed that all the people I had gone to school with had new cars, and they had jobs. Everything seemed bright and colorful and happy and carefree and no one seemed to realize that there was a war going on.

I didn't try to forget about Viet Nam. I was trying to integrate. I was trying to observe everything I could about being home, trying to fit right back in. But nothing ever clicked. In the two years I was gone the country had changed. When I came back I didn't understand what was happening and I didn't understand what had happened to me. I thought I was the same, not even thinking or even pausing to think about what a war could do to a person.

-- Steve Piscitell, December 8, 1987