Leo Ouellette’s family told him it was time.

“I’d wake up during the night. Sweating. All wet. I was right there again,” he says, staring straight ahead. Seven other men seated around him have been doing the same. “My daughter says, look, you can’t live this way Dad.”

This was about one year ago for Ouellette, 82. World War II ravaged his body – he’s lost a kidney, two-thirds of a lung, and his head is sutured from skin cancer stemming from exposure to radioactivity – but the damage to his mind went untreated for approximately 60 years.

As Ouellette speaks, he’s encircled in a tiny room in Lewiston’s Vet Center by others like him. Al Dagneau landed on Omaha Beach in Normandy on D-Day. Rolland Madore and Ted Thibeau live with memories of the red blood spilled on the black sands of Iwo Jima. Ray Cyr is a proud veteran of the Battle of the Bulge. Mike, who declined to give his surname, bleached his birth certificate to fight in World War II, and served in Korea and Vietnam.

For most of their lives, public mental health services for veterans were unavailable. “(Mental health) programs were not available to anyone but Vietnam-era vets until 1991,” says Roy Driver, team leader at the center. “Now every veteran that’s served in a combat zone is eligible.”

World War II veterans – children of the Great Depression – instead readjusted to civilian life by suffering in silence, he adds.

“They come from a generation where there’s a uniqueness in their experience by living through the Depression,” says Driver. “They have a lot of pride, a lot of self-determination, and the attitude that you had to pull yourself up by the bootstraps. They had difficulty asking for help.”

Today, about a dozen World War II veterans come to the vet center each week to talk. Group counseling helps them shed the weight of a war that has earned them the moniker “The Greatest Generation.”

‘I’ve never seen anything like it’

Ouellette and Gil Devoe, 84, both of Lewiston, fought on Iwo Jima, are brothers-in-law and attend group counseling at the vet center. With Madore, 80, of Lewiston, and Thibeau, 84, of Jay, they paint four unique portraits of the spit of land they simply call Iwo.

Devoe’s eyes are baubles behind his bifocals as he talks. He and a photographer from Life Magazine had driven onto Iwo in Devoe’s half-track; he was ordered to stop, but the photographer, eager for battle, asked to jump to another half-track heading inland, driven by a soldier named Osbourne.

“I have no command over you. You can go if you want,” Devoe told the photographer. “But I says, there’s danger down there. (Osbourne’s) taking an awful chance.” Ten minutes later, boom.

“The biggest explosion I’ve ever seen in my life,” remembers Devoe. “They backed into a 500-pounder (bomb), and it demolished that half-track. We couldn’t even find the bodies. Just bones and fragments.”

Devoe and Thibeau were in the same outfit in the Army, but Thibeau never knew it until he started counseling in Lewiston. A shipyard welder, Thibeau declined a worker’s deferment to get “his greetings from President Roosevelt.” He went to Iwo as part of the invasion’s third wave.

“The thing that hit you the most was seeing your own kids, floating in the water,” remembers Thibeau, 84, choking on the words. “I have some bad memories.”

So does Dagneau. He remembers shaking in a foxhole in Normandy, and being ordered to get medical help. Doctors were holed up inside a barn at the end of a cobblestone street. Bullets ricocheted off the road. Soldiers yelled at him to take cover. But Dagneau walked upright, transfixed on the barn. He made it.

Soon after, he was out of the Army for good.

His hands and voice still tremble when speaking about crossing Omaha Beach. “The mess they left behind,” Dagneau, 81, of Sabattus, says today. “My God … I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Coping with the stress

Like favoring a ginger ankle, humans also find ways to cope with trauma. Some drink heavily or engage in other self-destructive behavior. Others, like Dagneau, find solace elsewhere. His therapy was building a Chris Craft kit boat to cruise Sabattus Lake; with reverence he passes around dog-eared photos of the maroon-and-white beauty to the group.

There are two World War II groups, one Korean War group and five Vietnam War groups that meet for counseling at the Lewiston Vet Center. An Iraq group, Driver says, is in the “throes” of organizing, as counseling is now required for Maine National Guard troops when they return from duty.

The sooner conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder are diagnosed, the easier they are to treat, according to Driver. Unfortunately, this also means veterans from World War II and Korea can be harder to help.

“What they look for is support and camaraderie with each other,” Driver says about World War II groups. “For them to know there are others like them, when for so many years they’ve been all alone.”

The goal, he adds, is for veterans to understand symptoms of PTSD. “Stress today will trigger memories,” says Driver. “The (Iraq) war is bringing people, especially Vietnam veterans, to the door. It’s too close to where they live.”

Along with today’s news coverage of the Iraq war, World War II veterans are also flooded by history, as generations of movies and documentaries have purported, or sometimes distorted, their exploits.

‘I used to watch war movies’

Madore, who was profiled in the Sun Journal prior to the opening of “Flags of Our Fathers,” about the battle of Iwo Jima, dislikes the film. “I noticed from right off the bat, the lack of understanding,” he says.

“Of course, (director) Clint Eastwood had to dramatize it, but to dramatize a war, you have to lessen it,” he adds. “In reality, the explosions were all around you, it never stopped. War is war. It’s completely, totally different.”

“I was hoping (my family) would see what I went through. You can’t explain, because they don’t relate to it.”

Devoe also watched the film, and says it turned him off for an opposite reason. “There was too much gore,” he says, “too much killing and suffering at the base of (Mt. Suribachi). They overdone it.”

Madore, who survived that bloody first wave on Iwo to watch the flag fly on Mt. Suribachi, gently disagrees.

“It was underdone,” he whispers.

Most, though, just don’t watch.

“I don’t watch war movies,” says Cyr, 81, of Lewiston, grasping a cane in his gnarled fingers. “I’ve seen too many things.”

“I watched war movies,” adds Mike. “Until I came (to counseling). Then I found out I was doing the wrong thing.”

Getting help

The right thing, for Mike, is counseling. “I came here and I got so much help here at the vet center,” he says. “It changed my whole life. I try not to miss any sessions here.”

Mike is the veteran of the veterans’ group, having been in counseling for a decade. Others, like Cyr, Thibeau and Dagneau, have been coming to counseling sessions between three and five years.

Ouellette is the newbie with a year’s tenure. As a young Marine on the island of Saipan, he watched Japanese women and children leap from oceanside cliffs in fear of American soldiers. Their bodies, he recalls, would sway with the tide on the coral reefs below.

Later, Ouellette removed bomb debris from bridge pilings in the Urakami River in Nagasaki, after the atomic bombing. A heavy machine operator, he was ordered to scoop it out with a crane so it could be burned.

“The stuff I was taking out of that river,” Ouellette says. “It was probably 30 feet away from me. And that stink … oh Jesus, it stunk. I worked there two weeks, not realizing there was atomic (material).” His hand drifts onto the sutures of his head while he speaks.

“When I started coming here, I thought I was going crazy,” he adds. “I don’t know where I’d be today if I hadn’t gotten this help.”

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