 |
| What we carried all those years ago. |
I've been living with lumbar spondylosis for fifty-two years now, and have become accustomed to the adjustments necessary.
The most recent being having to sell my pride and joy because getting in and out of it was becoming (literally) a pain.
The damage was done in the first half of 1970, when we were patrolling in the far north of Phuoc Tuy province searching for the elusive Viet Cong, whom by this time, had been cleaned out of most areas in the south and east of the province.
To do this, we had to move through the scrub with about a third of our body weight on our backs, and a heavy weapon in our hands. Back then, it was acknowledged that soldiers were for hanging things on. In the dry, we had to carry a comprehensive supply of water, sufficient to last the three to five days between resupplies, unless we happened upon a flowing stream.
Flowing streams weren't around between March and July in that part of the world.
The other back damage was done when we jumped out of choppers upon insertion into a new AO*, as the machine didn't always actually land to let us out. Sometimes they hovered about a metre from the ground, and we had to do the magic leap, hopefully landing on our feet before fanning out from the LZ#.
I've been lucky, not needing back surgery, as a couple of ex section mates have. One is into a routine of admissions to hospital many times annually, when the degenerating spine plays up. Age is exacerbating the problem for all of us.
The reason I didn't get to this stage was an early diagnosis, and a regime of back care, regular strengthening exercises, and the discipline of avoiding injury. It is indeed a discipline, as you have to maintain your mindfulness, and not get carried away when lifting is necessary. This is why it took two months to move from one home to another when we downsized earlier this year.
The downside to this was ownership of two homes at once (one more than we needed) and a delay in the sale of the older larger one. Fingers crossed... we have a contract of sale signed.
 |
Historically, a complicating factor in my case was my chosen occupation. I went immediately into special education after discharge in 1971, which meant I was working with kids with physical disabilities. This was OK when I was in a big school with plenty of ancillary staff, but when, in 1980, I was posted to my first principalship of a small school with two female teacher aides, it meant that much of the manual handling of the larger boys fell to me. Two of them were actually heavier than I was, and after a year of the daily routine of lifting and transferring them, back pain sent me to my GP.
He referred me to an orthopaedic specialist who breezilly told me that if I continued to do what I had been doing, I'd be in a wheelchair within five years. Fortunately, an appointment to a non-teaching principalship in a larger school happened at exactly the right time, and I soldiered on. I had, as they say in the classics, been given a "heads up", so was very careful after that.
After retirement, I submitted a claim to DVA, but was initially told that my back injury was a result of my teaching career and the claim rejected. A persistent advocate (who went to the lengths of accessing military records to prove what my unit was doing at the time) eventually got the claim recognised, and I received a small pension. Gold card arrived at seventy, and now my treatment is free, and DVA gym sessions are helpful.
The lesson in this is that pretty much anyone who has spent time on operational service in infantry has a damaged spine (and probably knees and ankles as well). We weren't built to lug all our worldly possessions on our backs for weeks at a time.
I'm not sure whether the situation has improved for modern infantry. Somehow I doubt it, as these days they wear body armour. The closest we got to that was an occasional issue of flak jackets, if mines were considered a possibility, and we were aboard APCs. These jackets were heavy and uncomfortable in the Vietnamese humidity.
*Area of operations.
#Landing zone.
Comments closed.
