Gilbert Eugene Wyatt

photo by Thais Boise	photo courtesy of Gilbert Wyatt
Gilbert "Gene" Wyatt at his home in Missoula, Mont. Almost 60 years after his war ended, Wyatt still suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.	Wyatt at age 17, seaman first class, taken at Signal School in Indianapolis.

Veteran still suffers trauma of war

by Peter Coyle
Veterans History Project

Gilbert Wyatt has not been able to sleep in a bed since 1988. He sleeps in short bursts on his couch now for perhaps two hours at a time.

Wyatt, now 79, joined the Navy in 1941 at 16, right after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He left behind a troubled home and an abusive father and spent his formative years growing up on the forefront of World War II. By the time the war ended in 1945, Wyatt had served as a Navy Signalman in both European and Pacific theaters and participated in some of the most storied invasions of U.S. military history.

photo by Thais Boise

Wyatt has plenty of stories to tell, but has told only a few.

The effects of his military service, a struggle with alcohol and a continuing struggle with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome fill his life today. He sees similarities in what he went through almost 60 years ago with what today’s troops are facing in the battlefields of Iraq.

Wyatt’s first taste of combat came with the United States’ entry into the war. His transport was torpedoed out from under him during the invasion of French Morocco. He was just going over the side to his boat when the torpedoes struck

“Luckily, I had a boat assigned to me, and in that boat I went!” he said. With the destruction of his transport, Wyatt was stationed in a signal tower in Casablanca. The German bombers used this tower as a marker. They left the tower alone, and Wyatt had a ringside view of the bombings of the city.

He would spend the rest of the war aboard ships. Aboard the minesweeper YMS-29, he helped lead the invasions of Salerno, Palermo, and southern France. In the Pacific, he helped land U.S. Marines behind enemy lines at Okinawa while aboard the destroyer the USS Kinzer.

In both theaters, he would see firsthand the horrible carnage that would claim the lives of more than 400,000 U.S. personnel before it ended. In the invasions of Italy, Allied forces would first attack Palermo on the island of Sicily and then Salerno on the Italian mainland.

Wyatt’s wartime memories are painful. He remembers his ship steaming through waters filled with bodies after the invasion of Salerno. As he talked about it, his voice cracked and his eyes watered.

“It still affects me,” he said. “Driving through those bodies — you can’t do anything about it.”

He remembers, too, the death of U.S. paratroopers at Palermo caused by their own Navy.

“Paratroopers were jumping out and all the ships in the harbor opened up on those paratroopers,” he said. “It turned out to be our own guys.”He struggles to regain his composure: “I still feel guilty about that.”

Wyatt had his own close calls in the Mediterranean when a German plane dropped five bombs alongside his ship.

“I wasn’t at the time very much of a religious believer, but there are no atheists in combat,” he said.

Wyatt watched his best friend die when his minesweeper hit a mine and exploded. But tragedy struck closest to home in the Pacific.

photo courtesy of Gilbert Wyatt

Gilbert (left) and brother Donald, at home on leave before Donald was killed by a kamikaze attack in 1945.

courtesy of Gilbert Wyatt

The message from his brother's shipmates

He was stationed aboard the destroyer USS Kinzer; the mission was to drop Marines at night into Okinawa. The Japanese held the island, and the battle to take it would be one of the deadliest of the war. The Marines from Wyatt’s ship captured prisoners and scouted in advance of the invasion. While re-supplying at sea, his ship pulled alongside his younger brother’s vessel. It was Wyatt’s birthday, and his captain let him cross over to his brother’s ship and spend the day with him.

Later, the Marines on Wyatt’s ship were ordered to conduct raids behind enemy lines. His brother’s ship sailed in front to protect them from the increasing suicide flights that the Japanese were launching.

“The Japs sent a 200-plane raid down,” he said. “My brother’s ship opened fire and I watched this Jap plane follow the tracers down and hit his ship. There was a big explosion and then everything got real quiet.”

Several days later, when Wyatt’s ship pulled into port, his brother’s ship was docked there, anchored by the stern.

“The whole bow was gone all the way up to the bridge,” he said. His brother had lived for three days and had died the day they pulled into port.

“The captain said that he would give me a boat, a crewman and a ship’s camera to take pictures of where my brother was buried, so I did,” Wyatt said.

Wyatt’s ship faced several kamikaze attacks as well. One of them he remembers in particular.

“He had us dead on” he said of the Japanese plane. “We all lay down on the deck. We thought we had had it.” Just before the plane struck, a shell from the ship exploded underneath it and lifted it up just enough. The plane went between the stack and the radio antennas and splashed into the water on the other side.

After the atomic bomb ended the war in 1945, Wyatt tried to find a life outside of the military. He struggled to hold down a civilian job but ended up returning to the military, this time with the U.S. Coast Guard. He would stay with the Coast Guard for another 17 and a half years.

He battled alcohol throughout his time in the Coast Guard. It was his way, he said, of coping with the battle stress. During the war, he once had a 60-day leave home. He stayed drunk the entire time and spent $3,000 doing it, he said

photo by Thais Boise

"War is hell," says Wyatt.

“I didn’t realize how sick I was,” he said. “I was covering up what was bothering me with booze.”

He stopped drinking in 1988 and has been sober ever since. That’s when he began attending AA meetings and was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, also known as shell shock. When he sobered up in 1988, he found sleeping in a bed was impossible.

“I couldn’t sleep with covers, I couldn’t sleep horizontal, and I had to have something going on in the room,” Wyatt said. The couch is now his bed, with the lights and television as his companion.

Today, he attends meetings with other combat veterans to help heal the scars inflicted so long ago. He worries about the soldiers in Iraq.

“They’re going to have a lot of trouble when these guys from Iraq come home, a lot of trouble,” he said. “I feel sorry for them.”

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