By MARK ARSENAULT

Journal Staff Writer

Marilyn Campbell took an audiotape from her husband's dresser and learned the secret that had threatened their marriage for 25 years.

The sound quality was poor; a humming obscured the voice. But she could hear her husband, John, speaking in group therapy about a warm Saturday morning near the end of the 22 months he served in the Vietnam War.

Marilyn knew little about John Campbell's two tours in the war. Campbell did not speak about Vietnam at home in West Warwick. Marilyn and their two daughters learned not to bring up the war. They tiptoed around his hair-trigger temper. John got mad a lot. He threw chairs sometimes.

Marilyn learned from the tape that John had guard duty in a sandbag bunker early on that Saturday morning, June 14, 1969, on the lip of the A Shau Valley, Republic of Vietnam.

Marilyn listened as John recalled on the tape a silhouette coming toward him.

I said, 'Halt, who's there?'

John struggled to speak on the tape. That surprised his wife. John never shared any emotion toward the war; she never knew it bothered him.

The tape spun for half-an-hour. The words tumbled out of John.

He described a burst of violence so primal it had echoed within him for three decades.

It was hard for Marilyn to listen. She cried along with him.

Now Marilyn knew why John got drunk four or five times a week, why his nightmares left him thrashing in bed and why he obsessively drew blinds and shut off lights. He kept their home dark, like a bunker.

And she learned that her husband suffered from what he had done that warm Saturday morning.

What he had done with his own hands.

Two large hands grip the steering wheel of a black Chevy pickup. The fingers on John Campbell's big paws are thick and round. A gold wedding band pinches his ring finger.

It's June 14, 2000, 31 years to the day after that warm Saturday morning in Vietnam.

Campbell's thinning, silvery hair is slicked back, as it is in his wedding photo taken 28 years ago. Time has since widened his waistline and softened his big shoulders. He's 51 now, a clerk at the West Warwick post office. As a soldier in 1969, Specialist-4 John W. Campbell was like a rock at 6 feet and 190 pounds. He was 19.

He's driving to his Post Traumatic Stress Disorder support group, part of a treatment program he entered two years ago. He says it saved his family, and perhaps his life.

He pulls the truck into the Veterans Administration Regional Medical Center in Providence and parks near Building 14, the PTSD clinic.

"I never thought I'd be here on this night," he says.

For the past 30 years, he has bivouacked in a bar each June 14. Not this year, not this anniversary.

He's facing June 14 sober for the first time since 1969.

CAMPBELL HAD VOLUNTEERED in Vietnam for a security platoon in the 101st Army Airborne Division. He was assigned to a colonel at Fire Base Berchtesgaden, a U.S. artillery position.

Campbell lived in bunkers dug into a hill. He wrote letters, took his turn standing guard and slept on sandbags. It was not a bad assignment.

Friday night, June 13, 1969, had been routine. A few white flares — wired to burn if something tripped them — fired about 8:30 p.m., far down the hill. Campbell shot a few grenade rounds into the woods nearby, to be safe.

It was 3:30 a.m. Saturday when a single figure ran along the trail to Campbell's bunker. Campbell recognized the American GI.

He ordered the soldier to halt and give the password, following procedure.

And (the soldier) said, 'To hell with that, there's sappers all over Bunker 12.'

Sappers. GIs knew them as well-trained enemy soldiers. They wore nothing but sandals and shorts, and sometimes nothing at all. One rumor said they got so stoned before battle, they had no fear.

Campbell grabbed his rifle and ran with the American soldier through the darkness toward Bunker 12, around a bend in the hill, maybe 75 yards away.

Silhouettes dashed ahead of him. He saw muzzle flashes and tracer bullets.

A man stood by the bunker cradling an AK-47, a Russian assault rifle that makes a distinct crackle. A bayonet with three prongs was fixed to the barrel. The man was barely five feet tall, and rail thin, maybe 100 pounds. He was nude.

The man whirled and the soldier next to Campbell fell.

I didn't realize he was dead. I thought maybe he stumbled because it happened so quick.

The man pointed the gun inside the bunker. The weapon spit fire.

Campbell screamed. Not words, just noise. He didn't think to shoot the man. He dropped his rifle and lunged.

On the tape, Campbell described the encounter haltingly at first, but then picked up speed, like he was rolling down a hill.

By the time he seen me and heard me screaming I was on him. We fell to the ground. I remember just punching, just punching and punching and punching. He had an expression on his face that was like total shock. I seen his eyes and his face. And the teeth.

Oh yeah, I can feel - I can feel it now. I know I have to stop him because if I stop he's going to kill me. . . . I can feel my hands hitting his face and I can feel his jaw moving. . . . It seemed all my energy was in my hands, all my strength. Don't look back, don't look forward, just keep concentrating on what you're doing.

Campbell beat the man to death with his hands.

And then he beat the corpse.

Another GI finally pulled Campbell up. That's enough, he said, this guy's dead.

Campbell wanted to shoot the man to make sure. He didn't trust him. He was confused and nervous.

I figured I was going to be in trouble because I killed somebody. My hands — I wanted to get rid of the blood.

He wiped his hands on his shirt, and cried.

An American sergeant appeared on the bunker. He fired a few rifle shots down range, then vanished in a booming white flash. John felt the heat on his face.

It was instantaneous. (The sergeant) appeared and he disappeared. I don't know who's left. I was feeling scared, lonely. I don't know what direction to shoot.... I fired down range. I was so confused. If I had stones I would have thrown stones. Where's my command? Where's somebody to tell me what to do?

Campbell lost track of time. When daybreak neared, the enemy pulled back, leaving a smoking hill, dead men and pieces of men.

A GI burned by an explosion shivered despite the heat.

He had pieces of flesh hanging from his face. And I seen that, and it was like. . . . I just kinda lost it.

Campbell hugged two sandbags and squeezed them out of shape. He emptied his lungs, screaming for his mother.

After the battle, word came to pick up the dead.

We were picking up body parts, literally body parts. We put all the gooks on this chopper pad, (on) this big net. I remember a Huey (helicopter) coming down and hooking up to it and lifting up that net. And it flew up the valley. And it got up the valley so far. And all of a sudden it just opened up the net.

Army records say about 100 North Vietnamese soldiers attacked the fire base that morning, and 33 of them died in the battle. Eleven Americans died and 47 were wounded, including John Campbell. During the day his foot started burning. He noticed a hole in his boot. He was shot through a toe and didn't know it.

THE WOUND ended his tour a few weeks early. Campbell came home a few days later.

He stayed briefly at Fort Devens, Mass., then moved back with his parents in Johnston.

His mother soon noticed something wrong with her son. He hardly slept. When he did sleep, he'd yell and thrash in bed. She'd wake him from the nightmares, until one time John's flailing fist nearly socked her. After that, John's father would wake him with a broomstick.

During daytime, everyday sights, such as an airplane or a child behind a hedge, triggered Campbell's vivid and disturbing flashbacks.

He drank to control his nightmares. He kept a gallon of whiskey in his car and sipped it warm from the bottle. The drinking led to frequent fistfights.

Campbell and some buddies showed up drunk at the Coventry Men's Club one night late in 1969. The bar's staff sent them away. Campbell was enraged. He wanted to blow up the bar. In his right hand he felt a cold metal fragmentation grenade with a waffle-patterned surface. He tossed it up lightly, gauging its heft for the throw.

His friends were laughing at him.

He had a pine cone.

JOHN AND MARILYN met at a wedding rehearsal in 1971. He was an usher, she was a bridesmaid.

Marilyn grew up in a conservative family — her parents weren't drinkers and they rarely went out. John was exciting for her, always ready for a party. They married within six months.

John got a shop job at Electric Boat. He and Marilyn had two daughters: Erin, now 23, and Kerri, 21.

Campbell binged on liquor every weekend and about three nights a week for most of the marriage. John and Marilyn slept in separate rooms because John's thrashing in bed was dangerous to her. Campbell had lots of drinking buddies, but no friends when he was sober, he says.

He hounded his daughters at home over turning off lights. They thought he was irked by the electric bill, until he broke down, maybe five years ago, and begged them to stay away from the windows. He was afraid of snipers.

Marilyn stuck by John because she loved him, she says, and she knew he had tried to clean up, many times. He wanted to be a good father, she thought.

He was a good provider for the children. And when he was sober, he was perfect — so funny and kind, she says.

Marilyn would sit with her girls and cry sometimes.

John and Marilyn had an awful argument about four years ago, when their younger daughter was around 16. John had been drinking.

Marilyn felt too old to be so miserable. She was in her forties, and successful in her own day-care business. Success gave her self-confidence.

She gave John an ultimatum: From now on, you live your life and I'll live mine, she told him. And if you don't straighten up by the time Kerri is 18, I'm gone.

Campbell tried Alcoholics Anonymous, but didn't identify with the people there. He turned to the church. That didn't work, either. Then a stranger across a bar told Campbell to try the veterans' hospital.

He started treatment in the PTSD clinic in November 1998.

PTSD IS a biological disorder, a change in the brain that never goes away, says Dr. Aminadav Zakai at the PTSD clinic.

The brain records memories of trauma more deeply and completely than normal events, he says. Each aspect of the trauma may be recorded in detail — the sights, sounds, smells and even the emotions.

"The memories are recalled as a whole," he says. The trauma memory of a rape victim, for example, could cause her to feel the weight of her attacker upon her, he says. Vets having flashbacks may smell gunpowder, or feel the heat of explosions.

Nightmares, flashbacks and irritability are common in PTSD patients. They're always on guard. They rev much too high.

Most anybody can get PTSD, but young people seem more susceptible, Zakai says. The Vietnam War was fought by very young men. The average age of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam was 19, about six years younger than in World War II, he says.

Campbell was diagnosed with moderate to severe PTSD. Doctors placed him on a mix of anti-depressant drugs, and Campbell entered therapy. The drugs level out his moods, he says.

PTSD therapy first aims to help veterans get their lives together and stop drinking. Most vets with PTSD abuse alcohol, Zakai says.

Then they are encouraged to tell their traumatic stories. "This helps them process the trauma," Zakai says. "They tell the same story again and again until it gets boring for everyone. We're trying to artificially do what a normal brain would have done long ago."

Campbell has improved over the past two years. "It's not because his PTSD went away," Zakai says. "It's because he learned more skills."

Campbell calls them "coping skills." He has embraced the relaxation and breathing techniques he learned. In addition to group therapy, he sees either a case worker or a doctor every week.

Kathy Neill is the psychotherapist who leads Campbell's weekly PTSD support group. She's tough and curt. Campbell admits he's afraid to fib to her.

Neill led the group on John's anniversary, June 14.

The five other veterans there that night sat around a table like high-stakes poker players — stiff, silent and stone-faced. Wrinkles were deep around their eyes. One wore a shirt that says, "I gave proudly."

"I've been living with this 31 years," Campbell tells them. "Every year since, I've always had my own anniversary — drinking, whatever I could do."

"What happened this year?" Neill says. "You're sick of getting drunk and not dealing with it.

"You've taken your (Vietnam) experience and you reframed it. Now you're looking at things differently. You're getting your feelings back. Pretty scary, eh?"

CAMPBELL'S FLASHBACKS don't haunt him so much anymore.

Three Southeast Asian customers came to Campbell's post office several weeks ago to mail a package. They were wearing sandals.

For an instant, Campbell saw them in uniform. They were South Vietnamese soldiers — allies, supposedly, though he, like many American GIs, held them in suspicion.

Then it was gone. They were just customers. Campbell says he laughed it off. No need to get belligerent, as he would have two years ago.

Campbell rarely drinks now, and fights less with Marilyn. He's a little closer with his daughters, too, he says. He may take the family on vacation sometime, maybe to California, before his daughters are married.

"I don't have a guilt complex, but I want the girls to know their dad's behind them 100-percent," Campbell says. "I'm not just some drunk. I'm going to be here for them."

He sleeps well, most nights.

Campbell earned the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star in Vietnam. He had the paperwork to prove it, but never pursued the actual medals until he started treatment for PTSD.

The medals arrived by mail last spring.

Getting his medals, and facing June 14 sober, were good signs, he says. "I'm confident I turned a corner."

Then he tells the story again, as he often does in therapy.

Guard duty. . . a lone figure on the trail. . . crackling AK-47. . . punching and punching. . . .

Campbell can picture the face of the man he beat only for a second, before the face turns to blood and dirt in his mind.

As he speaks, he's wiping his big hands on his shirt. He doesn't realize he's doing it.