Santa Maria Times from Santa Maria, California • 24

C-8-Sunday, September 19, 1993 Santa Maria Timet TRENDS ind. solace, help in prison By Julia Cass Knight-Ridder Newspapers "No matter how much you were trained, you would never expect to see anything like that. It was like, you would go on a picnic and go swimming and leave your cake on the table- Then when you come back, there's a swarm of ants all over it. That's how the 1 Viet Cong were on us. There was constant fire, constant battle.

It was so bad you would hear people screaming and hollering and you couldn't do nothing for them. It was my best friends getting killed. "We. were moving (the wounded) from crater to crater to hopefully, try to save them. It was raining so hard you couldn't see your hand in front of you.

It seemed like we was fighting all the elements, the rain, the trees, the people, the ants, the leeches." A book on the campaign in the la Drang Valley called it one of the "most savage" of the war, leaving 230 U.S. soldiers dead and 240 wounded. Glass came out of that battle hating Vietnam and its people. A short time later, he said, he went on patrol in a village with four friends; the group picked up four prostitutes. When one made a move toward one of his friends that Glass interpreted as threatening, he said, he stabbed her to death.

He said he and his friends then killed the other women and didn't tell anybody. He returned to the United States after 13 months in Vietnam. On leave in Philadelphia, he couldn't stand the noise of the city and once rolled to the curb when he heard a car backfire. Nobody wanted to hear about or commend his war service: "In the black community, people were saying, 'Why did you go fight over there for them? They don't give a damn about He wasn't comfortable in the Army either. Assigned to a series of U.S.

bases, he had no respect for especially officers who hadn't been in Vietnam. He'd get into arguments, refuse orders. Finally, a military psychiatrist recommended he get a general discharge. By then, he'd thrown away his combat medals. Back in Philadelphia, he broke drug abuse, crippling flashbacks and violent crime.

It is an image that groups such as the VVA once were at pains to downplay. All the more remarkable, then, that the group would honor men such as Ganter and Glass, who met at Graterford after passing through similar, separate, violent hells. Their stories are but two of many such postwar histories hidden inside prison walls. No one knows precisely how many Vietnam vets are incarcerated; some don't tell officials they are vets. In Pennsylvania, a thousand or so of the inmates are known Vietnam-era vets.

Hall, the criminologist who is writing a book based on oral histories of incarcerated vets, said most Vietnam vets had no history of trouble with the law before they went to war. Some veterans came back addicted to drugs and many (about 30 percent, according to a federal study) suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, which the American Psychiatric Association defines as a psychologically disabling reaction to an event that is "beyond the range of usual human experience, often involving a serious threat." What Ganter and Glass went through in Vietnam, and what they did after coming home, was well beyond the range of usual human experience. ul Ganter is white and grew up in Reading; Glass is black and is from West Philadelphia. Ganter joined the Marines after graduating from high school in 1967. Glass enlisted in the Army after his graduation from John Bartram High in 1964, volunteering to go to Vietnam with the First Cavalry.

He arrived there in August 1965 and operated a grenade launcher with a search-and-destroy unit. One day in fall 1965, Glass' unit was dropped out of helicopters into the la Drang Valley to rescue units ambushed by the Viet Cong. They were fired on before they hit the ground. Glass described the next 20 days: PHILAbELPHIA At night, Jerry Ganter would awaken and grimly pace the perimeter of his 9-by-12 prison cell, just as he had the boundaries of his fire base near the DMZ. During the day, he would keep his distance from the other inmates inside the crowded State Correctional Institution at Grater-ford.

In his mind echoed the barked commands of his Army training: "Stay 12 feet apart! One grenade can get you all!" All he asked of his shrunken world was: Leave me alone. Commer Glass wouldn't. Glass, a fellow Vietnam vet who, like Ganter, is serving a life sentence for murder, kept going by Ganter's cell, beginning in 1985. Again and again, for more than a year, Glass would urge Ganter to go to the meetings of Vietnam veterans he was organizing at Graterford. Again and again, Ganter would tell Glass to leave him alone.

"It's a good thing he didn't," Ganter says today. "I might have cut my wrists by now." Today, Ganter is president and Glass vice president of Post 466 of the Vietnam Veterans of America, one of three "incarcerated" posts in the state. Last year, the VVA named Post 466 whose members include men convicted of murder, rape, robbery and other crimes the top Vietnam veterans post in the land. The honor recognized the hard work Ganter, Glass and others have done to heal the psychic wounds of war that still afflict imprisoned Vietnam vets. Those wounds are many.

These are the veterans whom Julia Hall, a criminologist at Drexel University, calls "forgotten men." The belated honor and gratitude that a guilty nation has bestowed on many Vietnam vets has not been extended to them. They embody the negative stereotype of the returned Vietnam soldier emotionally numbed and psychologically scarred by the horrors of the war, prone to sink Mountains. took pills and drank. "I didn't care about anything other than getting myself through the day." The 1977 murder that sent ter to prison for life drew so much public attention that the trial was held in Lebanon County, rather than in Berks County, where the killing took place. According to newspaper accounts of the trial, Ganter and a friend, a Vietnam veteran named Ronald Grim, spent the evening drinking heavily, then kidnapped a couple with the intent of rohbing them.

Ganter and Grim raped the woman, drove the couple around for hours, then stopped near a bridge over a creek. The couples' hands were taped. Grim stabbed the woman and pushed her over the bridge. Ganter pushed the man over. The woman managed to swim ashore but the man, Joseph Galak, drowned.

The woman later was able to identify Grim but not Ganter. Grim confessed and fingered Ganter as the one who had planned the crime. Ganter said he was not the ringleader "I wasn't capable of leading anybody." He said he pushed Galak when Galak lunged at him, and that he thought Galak would swim to safety as the woman did. At the time, Ganter pleaded not guilty. His attitude during his arrest and trial was that HE was the victim.

"I had no character witnesses, no nothing." Ganter's father died shortly after his arrest. His mother disowned him. Ganter, in prison, was utterly alone. And that, he thought pacing about his cell, was how he wanted it. But nightmares and flashbacks wouldn't leave him alone.

He might have killed himself, he said, if not for Commer Glass. "What got me out of my cell and my shell wasn't only Commer's perseverance but his friendliness and his kindness." One of the great victories won by the Graterford veterans group was getting the state to agree, in a 1986 settlement of a lawsuit they had brought on behalf of all veterans in state prison, to provide counseling on post-traumatic stress disorder. Since then, according to state records, 120 Vietnam veterans at Graterford have undergone the counseling two years of individual and group therapy. Ganter and Glass went through the program and have been certified as suffering from PTSD. up with his wife, lost jobs through arguing or absenteeism, got in bar fights, spent whole days alone in a dark basement room with his two, dogs.

His relief was methamphet-amine. 5 "As long as I was high, I could deal with things, or I thought I was dealing with things," he said. And he liked the impersonality of the drug world, where people got high together, then moved on: "I got to use some of the skills of survival I learned in Vietnam. I'm talking about wit and ingenuity. The drug world is a jungle, too, and I felt comfortable in it." For a while, he lived with a woman named Billie Ann Morris, who also used drugs, according to testimony at the trial.

After they broke up, they still got high together on occasion. The night of Oct. 12, 1975, he ran into Morris at a friend's house. Later, out on the street, he said, they argued and she made a gesture. Then, he said, the next thing he remembers is seeing her on the ground, bleeding from a stab wound.

He took her to Ger-mantown Hospital, made sure she got care, then went home. When the police came, he told them he'd found her wounded at her house. At the time, he said, he thought that was what had happened. Today, Glass concedes, "I must have killed her because there wasn't anybody else there." Glass was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison, which in Pennsylvania really means life in prison. During the trial, Glass' lawyer did not mention Glass' war experience or postwar behavior.

Glass' defense was that the case against him was circumstantial. Glass, made jittery by the noise and crowding at Graterford, kept to himself for years. Then a prison psychologist learned that Glass had been in Vietnam and encouraged him to get together with other vets there. "Come to find out," Glass said, "our experiences were very similar. We were from good families, on our way to being productive citizens.

We went to Vietnam and then came back with nightmares, angry, drugs, acting crazy sometimes, then we end up in jail." Glass said that he and about a dozen other prisoners who had been in Vietnam began to meet regularly in the early 1980s. "We had arguments about Vietnam. We cried. It was heavy." From the psychologist, they learned about post-traumatic stress disorder and began to push for a trained PTSD counselor to work with them. They also began to seek out other veterans at Graterford.

Glass sought out Ganter, uJ Ll ll Ganter's unit First Battalion, Third Marine Division roamed the DMZ from Cambodia to the ocean, moving across bug-infested, hot, soggy terrain. Sometimes they went into enemy territory to rescue downed pilots. Ganter became a squad leader, promoted to sergeant. He was wounded three times, and saw many comrades killed. "I had a man in my squad who shouldn't have been in Vietnam.

He just wasn't cut out for combat duty, didn't have the mind-set for it. He was new to the country, maybe three, four months. When you're short of manpower you have to use people. I sent this guy out with a lookout patrol of four men. I figured no harm could come to him, but he tripped on a bouncing Betty mine.

I was one of the first there. Me and another guy, we saw his legs blown off, arms blown off, laying there moaning. We were trying to patch him up, keep him calm. He didn't make it. That's just one man I sent out I wish I could take back.

At least 20 of 'em, I sent to their deaths. "It became where you didn't care. You just did your job and that was it. You didn't want to make friends because sooner or later they would get killed or you would get killed. It was, 'Hey, you do your job.

I'll do mine. Just leave me When Ganter returned home, anti-war protesters spit on him. Like Glass, Ganter had a problem taking orders from officers who hadn't been in battle. He also had a problem being an officer himself. He didn't want to lead anybody.

He ended up leaving the Army as a private. He, too, threw away his medals, including two Silver Stars, two Bronze Stars and three Purple Hearts. Back home in Reading, he had flashbacks and nightmares of scenes from Vietnam. He couldn't take orders from a boss, couldn't hold a job. When he argued with his wife, he'd either "fly out the door or clam up.

I wouldn't talk. I started hitting her. One night, I woke up with my hands around her throat. I was having a nightmare. We'd get in an argument and something would remind me of Vietnam and, bingo, I'd be there but I wouldn't be there." His wife divorced him.

He remarried and had a daughter. He couldn't take the baby's crying. "Shut the kid up!" Fearful, he said, that he might hurt the child, he bought a camper and retreated for weeks at a time to the Never- --nit Messrs sift Klooni Presenting KCOY TV's News at Noon, the first noontime newscast for the Central and South coasts. Join anchors Michele Kane and Lee Cowan for breaking news stories, health and lifestyle reports, and weather from around the world and right here at home KCOY TV's News at Noon. Stay on top of the news that's close to home.

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