"I've been in combat too long"

Former Sen. Max Cleland blasts the "total folly" of Iraq -- and says he still hasn't gotten over the GOP smears that ended his political career.

Editor's note: In this second excerpt from "Patriots Act: Voices of Dissent and the Risk of Speaking Out," Max Cleland, a triple-amputee Vietnam War veteran and former U.S. senator, talks about hitting bottom in 1969, the "total folly" of Iraq, his bitterness at the scurrilous Republican campaign that cost him his Senate seat in 2002 and the agony of knowing what today's terribly wounded veterans will have to live through.

By Bill Katovsky

Read more: Books, U.S. Senate, Veterans, Vietnam, Books Features, Iraq War

Photo by AP/Jennifer Graylock

Max Cleland

April 3, 2006 | Max Cleland grew up in Lithonia, Georgia. After graduating from college he entered the Army as a signal officer and was given a desk job, but requested a transfer to Vietnam. During the siege of Khe Sanh, after surviving five days of point-blank rocket attacks on his hillside position, Cleland boarded a Chinook helicopter to set up a new communications post. Upon leaving the aircraft, he saw a grenade at his feet. Thinking that it was his, he reached down to pick up the grenade. It exploded. It was April 8, 1968.

"When that grenade went off, I was totally conscious. Totally," Cleland recalled. "Saw the bone sticking out from my right arm. Body was on fire, filled with hot shrapnel. The flash burns seared my flesh and was the only reason I didn't burn to death right there. I was bleeding to death. Three men ran to me after the smoke cleared. I was burning. I was literally smoking, dying, and bleeding to death. They staunched the bleeding. Called in a chopper. Put me on the chopper and medevac'd me 50 miles to a hospital. A Quonset hut. I was just about to pass out by then. I said, 'Do what you can to save my leg.'"

"Every time I think about the incident," Cleland writes in his autobiography, "Strong at the Broken Places," "I blamed myself for getting wounded, for not coming back from the war whole, for somehow 'screwing up.' For thirty-two years, I had carried around the weight of that uncertainty. When I was having a bad night, the lingering self-doubt could keep me awake for hours."

In 1999, Cleland received a phone call from a former Marine who had just watched a History Channel show on combat medics in which Max was interviewed. The caller, David Lloyd, had been in the helicopter with Max. He was also the first to come to his aid, tying off the bleeding on one of his legs with a tourniquet fashioned from strips from Max's uniform and web belt. Lloyd then attended to a young soldier who was wounded by the blast. The soldier kept crying, "It's all my fault!" Fresh out of basic training and only in-country for several days, he had foolishly straightened out the pins of his grenades for quick access. That made them live grenades. When one fell loose from his pack, it exploded.

Lloyd's call changed Cleland's life. "David had given me an invaluable gift, the gift of peace of mind," Cleland said. "Finally, I can say, 'It was not my fault.' That is a great burden off my shoulders. It makes all the other burdens in my life seem less significant and more manageable."

Facing life as a triple amputee, Cleland sunk into despair. Politics pulled him out. At 28, he became the youngest member of the Georgia State Senate. Picked by President Jimmy Carter to head the Veterans Administration, Cleland created veterans' centers across the country and worked to create the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, a revolution in veterans' health care. He ran successfully for the U.S. Senate in 1996.

In 2002, what Cleland calls "the second big grenade in my life" blew up in his face. Running for reelection to the Senate, he was confronted by a Republican challenger, Saxby Chambliss, who used the George Bush/Karl Rove playbook to smear him as a weakling on national security. Chambliss (who sat out the Vietnam war with a bad knee) ran a commercial that depicted Cleland's face morphing into that of Osama bin Laden. Cleland lost the election, a blow from which he says he still hasn't recovered.

Since then, Cleland has thrown himself into working for Iraq veterans. He campaigned on behalf of Tammi Duckworth, who recently won the Democratic nomination for an Illinois Congressional seat. Duckworth is an Iraq war vet who lost her legs in 2004 when a rocket-propelled grenade downed the helicopter she was flying.

Asked by NPR what it was in Duckworth that reminded him of himself, Cleland said, "Her sense of having been blown to Hell and back. And that, coming back to this country, you know that you're not going to sit on your rear end. You're not just going to collect a retirement or a pension. You're going to fight like hell for a new life, a new job, a new career and one in public service."

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I find myself today, going on sixty-four, a washed-up, dried-up prune of a military veteran who has been thrown on the scrap heap of time and looking back wistfully and saying, "I wished I'd done more to prevent the current disaster in Iraq that's exactly mocking the first disaster in Vietnam that I was personally a part of."

I go to Walter Reed Hospital now for trauma counseling. For my own self. Because it never ends. I've got post-traumatic stress disorder. Didn't know I had it. Anxiety and fear and all that crap. And it never goes away. But you can submerge it into a higher cause like politics.

So here I am, back at Walter Reed, thirty-seven years later, dealing with the trauma of Vietnam. I never got the counseling back then. But I look down the hall, and it's still 1968. Seeing all these young Iraq War veterans blown up, missing arms and legs and eyes, I just can't stand it. It triggers all of my stuff from Vietnam. And these young men had the same grit and courage that we had going off to war. You go up to 'em, and say, "How ya doing, son?" "Fine, sir!" they answer. But years later, it will take its toll. They just don't know yet.

I'm seeing the full circle of the Vietnam experience. What's happening today is that a certain number of young Marines and Army guys are doomed to get killed and blown up and have missing arms and legs and eyes, and maybe they'll be on the phone twenty to thirty years later talking to some guy writing a book about them. I have seen this movie before. I'm terrified that I'm seeing Vietnam all over again in my lifetime.

Next page: From "No future. No hope. No job. No income. No apartment. No car" to a life of public service