Vet works to help others make healthy transition
GARY — The first time die-hard Marine Henry Hitchcock came under fire in Vietnam was during the showing of an Alfred Hitchcock movie.
Many decades later, the posttraumatic stress of the war mingled with Hitchcock’s disgust over the social indifference of Silicon Valley led him to Gary to start Veterans Life Changing Services.
The social service organization, which includes a 32-bed transitional housing facility, drug and alcohol groups, credit repair services and PTSD treatment, aims to fill what Hitchcock views as a void in transitional services for veterans.
“The 20 years I worked for the VA has not done anything for my PTSD,” said Hitchcock, who worked as a vocational rehabilitation specialist. He holds a master’s degree in psychology and a doctorate in human relations and organizational psychology, degrees earned after he became disenchanted with a lucrative career in Silicon Valley.
Hitchcock said his PTSD surfaced during those years in California when he began to get angry over what he refers to as “the grass-roots people” struggling to survive at the bottom of the chain.
“I would be sitting in meetings around these young phonies who didn’t have any understanding of humanity,” he said. “I had to get away from it.”
In August 1964, Hitchcock enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps at a time of great social and political unrest.
“The attitude toward people of color on the South Side of Chicago was just as intense as it was in rural Mississippi,” he said.
Even the Marines had some evolving to do, he said.
“It was integrated, but it was still segregated within its own ranks,” Hitchcock said. “One thing that was significant was that in a combat zone we were all integrated.”
Hitchcock was ambitious to move up the ranks, which required infantry service. He became a platoon leader specializing in rocket launchers and was assigned to Charlie 19, famously known as “The Walking Dead.” Charlie 19 was deployed as a guard attachment to the Danang Air Strip in March 1965.
“As a fully prepared fighting unit we could not even lock and load unless we were fired upon,” Hitchcock said, explaining that since Vietnam had never been declared a war these formal distinctions had to be followed. He earned a Purple Heart during his tour, he said.
Hitchcock saw what he felt was “pure communism,” or the Vietnamese people coming together to share resources to survive.
“They learned to appeal to or appease whatever group they were confronted with,” he said.
His unit was part of a pilot program by the U.S. government to get American forces to connect with the Vietnamese. For one month his unit was attached to a particular village and Hitchcock bonded deeply with one family.
It was service to that family, as well as later time viewing what he described as the other end of the spectrum of communism in Cuba, that helped form his vision of service to humanity.