For 20 years, Wendell Affield, a Vietnam vet, didn’t know he had post traumatic stress disorder.

Why would he? He wasn’t alcoholic, he didn’t have fits of rage or anger. Instead, he was a quiet man whose daughters didn’t know he’d ever served in the military, much less served in Vietnam. He had a successful career in the food industry, and retired to Bemidji, Minn.

They never knew he’d once driven a patrol boat in the jungle Riverss of Vietnam, offloading platoons of Marines, or that he’d been caught in an ambush, injured, and evacuated out of the war zone. It was something he kept to himself.

“I was quiet,” Affield said. “I never talked about Vietnam. A lot of people never knew. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, being a Vietnam vet was synonymous with being nuts if you remember the movies of that era, of Vietnam vets ‘going postal.’”

In 1990, when the Veterans Administration (VA) was conducting an Agent Orange exposure study with Vietnam vets, Affield went to the Fargo, N.D., VA hospital to participate.

“I had this young doctor,” Affield said, during a recent phone interview. “He was surprised I was in the system, that I had been wounded in Vietnam. He saw my shrapnel scars and asked, ‘What happened?’

“I told him about the ambush, and I started crying,” Affield remembered. “I thought, ‘What the heck?’ The doctor asked me if I’d ever been checked for post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). I said no. He set me up with an appointment to see a psychologist, and I was diagnosed then. I thought, ‘So now I’m certifiably nuts?’

“Back in the 1990s, you carried a stigma (with PTSD),” Affield said. “But, thanks to the latest generation, it’s come out of the closet. When I do book readings now, there’s lots of conversations with the audience afterwards and PTSD comes up.”

Author and blogger

Affield, of Bemidji, has written a memoir about his time in Vietnam, “Muddy Jungle Riverss.” The book grew out of a series of memory stories he wrote for a writing program at Bemidji State University.

The Carver County Library is bringing Affield to Chanhassen and Waconia libraries in November, to read from and talk about his book; he will conduct a writing workshop for military veterans, to encourage them to write about their experiences and memories as part of their healing process.

Affield joined the U.S. Navy when he was 17 years old. He was sent to Vietnam just as he turned 20 years old, on the eve of the Tet Offensive. He ran a Rivers boat patrol with a crew of six others. Affield’s recollections capture the mud, heat, bugs, and odors of his time in country.

He captures the surreal experience of days of boredom, his boat captain napping in mid-morning, sleeping off his hangovers; the casual banter and bullying among the crew members. Then the sudden and chaotic eruptions of violence — gunfire from snipers, enduring friendly fire, and ambushes from civilians on passing sampans.

His prose is raw and effective, describing the horrors of seeing a helicopter crash and burn its crew to ashes, pulling a dead Marine’s body from the Rivers, it falling atop him in the boat, its putrid skin draping itself across his face, rancid water running into his mouth.

“I didn’t start, planning to write a book,” Affield said. “I’d started taking writing classes, just writing memory stories. They weren’t chronological. My strongest memory, my first story was pulling the body from the water. I’ve studied psychology and smell is one of our strongest memory triggers. That smell is just seared into my mind. The story of when I got wounded, I just pushed it away, and pushed it away … as these stories start to accumulate, lot of the students said, ‘You have to write a book.’”

It was during a summer writing workshop that a professor offered to edit Affield’s manuscript and write the forward of the book. Affield self-published the book and conducted a reading near his home in northern Minnesota. It was there he met Paul Ericsson, the branch library manager.

“Paul was instrumental in getting ‘Muddy Jungle Riverss’ off the ground,” Affield said. “An article was written in the local newspaper about library week. I presented my book on the last day and had the largest crowd of the week. It went really well.”

Since then, Ericsson relocated to the Carver County Library system. Ericsson is branch manager for the libraries in Waconia, Watertown, and Norwood Young America. “It was Paul’s idea to invite me to speak at the Chanhassen Library, and to do a writing workshop for vets in Waconia,” Affield said. “Writing is a very recognized therapy for PTSD. I know writing my story was cathartic. Taking my stories, putting them in chronological order, made it — not a collage of memories but a movie in my memory.

Today he speaks to veterans and their families about PTSD. In the spring of 2017, Affield will speak to students at Indiana University, South Bend, where ‘Muddy Jungle Rivers’ is used as a teaching tool.

Affield’s talk Nov. 18, and writing workshop for combat vets Nov 19, is co-sponsored by Carver County Library, Carver County Veteran Services, and local VFW and American Legion Posts.