WWW.USVETERANSMAGAZINE.COM U.S. VETERANS MAGAZINE 15

FEATURE

made it didnt we? He looks at me; his eyes are like two big pies, and he cant talk. I said, Hey, come on, whats going on here? He had PTSD; he had something. He was shaking and could not talk. I was doing pretty good, but I did spend a few months in Army hospitals. During my last couple weeks in the Army hospital, I helped the new guys come in. It was very interesting because I got to meet guys - most had been shot in the shoulder or the forearm and could recover and then be sent back to the jungle to fight the North Vietnamese. I got to meet so many of them, and it was really a pleasure and an honor. So thats the background to your question. PTSD was not recognized, but I knew there was something there. I was just an average stupid kid from Bowie, Maryland and never even dreamed I would end up going to college, but I went to American University, and I took a course on the Psychology of Death. Well, it turned out to be a really important course for me; you know death is a pretty common experience; were all going to be dead at one point. I did this questionnaire for research, and I asked Nam Veterans about their overall mental health. Have you been arrested? Have you been divorced? The people who saw the most extreme type of combat tended to have a higher divorce rate and a lower trust in people. There was enough there. I got it published in Military Medicine, and they asked me to testify in a Senate sub-committee on veterans affairs. I told them, As my research shows, theres obviously a problem with Vietnam veterans, at least the ones who saw combat in readjusting, and thats why a lot of them are having these issues. Lets get back to your [question] about The Deer Hunter . I do all of this work and become a minor sort of expert on PTSD, and my wife and I went to see this movie, The Deer Hunter, with Robert DeNiro. You know, going to war is like playing Russian Roulette - back to the 38 revolver again. You spin the wheel, the cylinder on a gun, and you have a 1 in 6 chance of blowing your brain out. Going to war, its kind of the same thing. This movie affected me, and I stayed up all night. The next morning, I told my wife what I wanted to do, and she kind of laughed. We were living in Columbia, Maryland, and we had just gotten our first little townhouse, and I was a GS-7 at the Department of Labor. But I said, heres what Im going to do; Im going to build a national memorial in Washington, D.C. But its going to have all of these names on it, of the casualties from Vietnam - of the American military who died. USVM: The fundraising campaign for the memorial was challenging, but that didnt deter you. How did you overcome adversity in bringing this amazing memorial to life? Scruggs: The fundraising for this memorial was pretty damn easy; heres how we raised most of the money. Do you remember Bob Hope, the comedian? He signed these letters for us, and we hired a direct mail firm. To do direct mail, you have to lose money for several years, but we didnt have several years. We automatically started making a profit. And we were going to be able to raise the money for this memorial, and that became almost a given. A couple of people gave us significant donations. The American Legion gave us a million dollars. That was the easy part. The hard part was the politics and controversy were challenging. The thing that saved this project was we had four or five guys who not only graduated from West Point but also graduated from Harvard Business School.

COURTESY OF JAN SCRUGGS BETTMANN

Jan Scruggs doing a name rubbing for a visitor at The Wall in 2022. Jan Scruggs, Yale architecture student, Maya Ying Lin and Project Director Bob Doubek display the final design for the memorial.