This week on 13WMAZ Morning, we are sending out a ‘Salute to Service’ for all our military and veterans.
Three or four days a week you're sure to see a smiling face at the front desk of the Carl Vincent VA Medical Center.
Marion Owens volunteers to keep his dark demons at bay.
"You see your other brothers get killed," Owens said while recalling memories from Vietnam.
Owens admits he has PTSD, but then again, he's seen a lot of horror in many wars. He went into the Navy in 1974 and came out twenty years later.
"You may hear a car backfire and you convert all the way back like you're in a combat situation," Owens said.
He served in every conflict from Vietnam to Desert Storm, and that kind of a life will leave footprints.
"It's really hard and at first I thought it's just a bad dream, but the more I got into it [with] PTSD, I realized it was my whole life," Owens admitted.
Eight years ago he found a way to turn his life around.
Three or four days a week, you'll find Marion manning the front desk. It's a simple job -- give directions, help out, but it's a task that keeps him steady.
"One of the things they ask you around here is, 'Do you think of suicide? Do you think of harming other people?' It stays with you, but they help me to recognize and bring myself down a little bit," he said.
Bring himself down a bit with simple hellos and sometimes longer conversations with folks that understand.
"A veteran always likes to hear another veteran come up and say, 'Hey, how've you been,' or, 'You need anything,'" he said. "A vet can tell when another vet is getting stressed out just by the way he looks and the way he talks and that vet will listen to another vet before he'll listen to some guy off the street."
He calls the folks that come in the door his second family, the ones he continues to fight for and in a way they're fighting for him too, which makes this job invaluable.
"I'll do it until they tell me I can't do it anymore," he said.
