A Veteran’s Affairs

SAN FRANCISCO — It was one of those Butterfield & Butterfield auctions where the priceless has a price and history goes to the highest bidder.

This time, this month, the 240-year past of the Army’s elite Rangers went on the block--literally, its flint locks, gun stocks and rifle barrels. Also its fighting vehicles, automatic weapons, decorations, patches, uniforms and battle flags bloodied from the Indian Wars to Somalia.

One ranger was not there.

Arthur “Bud” Bresciani, the splendidly decorated yet troubled Vietnam veteran who spent two years and $1.2 million buying and assembling the 8,000-item collection, had no time for its disassembly.

He stayed south of here, mini-vacationing where the ocean paws at the mountains of Big Sur, and where Bresciani often measures his confusion against inner growth. And where, on this latest pilgrimage, with the hidden and mystical Post Ranch Inn his monastery, he felt no great sadness.

Just anger.

The collection “was a mistake . . . it was a failure for me and for the veterans’ community,” Bresciani said last week. “It started as an impetuous reaction to feelings I had, to make myself feel better. It was a distraction from PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder], but also an attempt to understand the feelings and cope with them.

“But it was an inadequate response.”

His Army Ranger Museum, housed in a warehouse in New York City, had remained an essentially private collection. Because of security concerns for its high-value items--not to mention weaponry--it never was opened to the public.

“So I packed it up, sent it across the country, and sold it off. A military museum that wound up in boxes being shipped to an auction house. Yeah, it was a failure.”

Then the auction results were announced, and Bresciani’s anger became a quiet rage.

He had originally decided that the auction profits would go to the Mental Health Department at the University of Massachusetts Medical School--because it specializes in veterans’ ills.

The total sale came only to $358,000. “Fifteen percent commission [to Butterfield & Butterfield] comes off from that, so I net about $300,000. This was about helping others. So $300,000 is a big disappointment It sucks.”

Yet within all this failure, the tall, brooding 50-year-old still may find success. Plumbing his own considerable savings and investments, Bresciani hopes to form a movement patterned on Alcoholics Anonymous, heavy on restoring self-confidence through spirituality and group support. He wants to help veterans of all wars and military branches, whether alcoholic or drug addicted or sick or homeless or suffering the flashbacks and panic of PTSD.

He will bring Native Americans into his fold because “I can’t turn my back on the veteran, or on Native Americans. . . . They are basically the most disenfranchised groups in America today.

“Not even the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, with its annual budget of $41 billion and the biggest hospital network there is, can give the kind of spiritual ministry necessary for recovery. They dispense a lot of drugs to stabilize the mentally ill, but they can’t dispense spiritual assistance.”

*

He sat talking the day beforehim, a cabin that had become a confessional.

“Sure, after feeding from the collector’s rush, this shopping binge, it’s an irony that I won’t watch the sale,” he said. “It’s all being sold, even my own Ranger uniforms, the motorcycles, the Mercedes, the Hummer, and with no reserves. About the only thing I’m keeping is my medal box and some photographs.

“And I have relief that it will be gone tomorrow. Because it represents a closing of the chapter, putting the emotional stopper back on the PTSD. And that, right now, is as close as it gets to recovery from the mental illness that I have.”

This, however, is much more than another hoary story of a GI warped by blood spilled and friends killed in Vietnam.

That stereotype had to do with reluctant noncommissioned draftees or enlistees straight from high school. Or a magistrate’s court. Or a ghetto. Few wanted to be in Vietnam. Fewer were wealthy professionals from Ivy League families with comfortable futures.

Except Bresciani.

He is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate in philosophy from Fordham University who served as a first lieutenant with the 75th Rangers. He volunteered for the military, for airborne ranger training, and for Vietnam, where this genuine American hero received the Silver Star, Bronze Star with V (for valor), two Purple Hearts for combat wounds and an Army Commendation Medal with V.

He came home to a seat with the family business, a real estate firm that in 1966 was the first in the world to convert apartment buildings into all-suite hotels. The business owns nine, all in Manhattan.

Bud married Julianne, a psychologist, and became a millionaire with homes in Manhattan, at the beach and in the mountains.

Then it all groaned and crumbled.

Vietnam was part of it. Bresciani, working the infamous Fish Hook Section of Tay Ninh Province in 1970, close to and often across the Cambodian border, had led long-range reconnaissance patrols on missions that included ambush, assassination or CIA escort.

He killed, and comrades died. He remembers blood squirting three feet in the air from a buddy’s severed artery. He was shot in the side for one Purple Heart. He lost two fingers in a rocket attack for his second.

“But I didn’t find Vietnam that horrific, in terms of what I was exposed to,” he remembers. In fact, he seemed to feed from the exhilaration of combat. “Because it was what I was trained for. And at times, there was a great rush, almost orgasmic.”

Bresciani was fascinated by the adaptability of the human mind, how it conditioned a man to deny life and death, fear and pain.

“Even when my fingers were blown off when I was on the ground, calling in artillery, this sense of denial came into play. OK, I told myself, the fingers are off, it’s painful, but I don’t want to be overrun, don’t want to be a prisoner,” he explained. “So you call the artillery in closer.”

Or, he knew--no question about it--he would pull the pin of the grenade on his chest and choose suicide rather than follow friends into capture and be skinned alive by the Viet Cong.

“Meanwhile,” he continued, “the adrenaline is pumping, total denial is at work, and this incredible defense mechanism just takes over.”

Still, he gathered demons. He hated the Vietnam environment--the heat, rain and humidity that kept his side wound festering for months. The triple-canopy jungle was claustrophobic and the evil palpable. He says he smelled it in decaying vegetation and could feel it in the calm.

He learned to lie easily when falsifying body counts to please his military superiors. Now he was part of a moral decay.

“But if anything sucked, it was the news coming back from the United States that we were being held in contempt. There had been no training for that.”

Drugs were Bresciani’s cushion.

“I smoked marijuana, sometimes sprinkled with heroin. But only when I couldn’t get enough to drink. Because I was an alcoholic at that time, and had been since high school.”

He does not blame his private turmoils on the war. The present, he believes, was formed and set within an Italian American family that remained intact, was enormously successful at business, but “was not close-knit . . . we lived more like co-tenants in a boarding home.”

He grew up a compulsive, undisciplined loner in New York City. There was drinking at Xavier High School that got out of hand and fun wildness that could have terminated in juvenile hall. Bresciani did apply himself at Fordham, wanted to continue his philosophy studies, and was one of six finalists for a Marshall Scholarship to Oxford.

“I didn’t get it. Within a week I had enlisted at the 88th Street recruiting station in Manhattan and volunteered for Ranger and airborne training.

“The college switch went off. The military switch turned on. That’s me, an on and off type, and let’s do it right now.”

He sees that impulsive mind-set as background to an unhealthy portion of his subsequent difficulties. But only one piece in a series of negatives--including the moral erosion of American business.

“I don’t consider myself a victim of alcoholism, family dysfunction, the United States Army or Vietnam,” he insists. “I do see myself as a casualty of the goddamned 20th century, and business expectations of enough not being enough, and always having to have more.”

More cars, another home. When you have made $1 million, go for two. And the more deceit one exercises in business, he says, the better the hallowed bottom line.

Therefore, Bresciani sees PTSD as “the result of an overwhelming stress, or event, coming right after a succession of other negative events.”

*

Through psychological and psychiatric counseling, through group therapies, through veterans’ encounters, Bresciani has compiled a harsh and probably unpopular profile of PTSD sufferers. Vietnam may have been their catalyst, the final trigger. But look for a conjunction of chronic, unaddressed, deep-seated background elements.

“I would say of those claiming to have PTSD, maybe only between 5% or 10% have it from the true, ‘Apocalypse Now’ horrors they saw in Vietnam,” he suggests. “The overwhelming majority are choosing to be out there, they want to be noticed, to wear their Vietnam paraphernalia. . . . Some [are] even pretending to be Vietnam vets.

“For the rest, [PTSD] is a way of giving meaning to an otherwise unfathomable experience, a way of glorifying it, of giving some framework to this amorphous event called the Vietnam Experience.”

Bresciani places himself with that population. He has been acting out, he says, attempting to find meaning, yet discovering none. Should veterans criticize his opinions, “my only defense is that I am of their generation.

“My money and family didn’t insulate me. I’m as emotionally and socially depressed as they are . . . a Lone Ranger who went into the Army because it gave me a sense of family. Being among blacks, Native Americans, Asians and Hispanics was very alluring and gave me a sense of family.”

Bresciani also believes veterans’ problems have been exacerbated by memoirs and mea culpas and more than two decades of post-mortems deciding our time in Vietnam was an American tragedy.

“I’ve heard it said that the government blamed the military for Vietnam, and the military brass blamed the fighting man, and the fighting man blamed himself,” Bresciani said. “So, in addition to feeling guilt that we hadn’t done good, now we were being told we really hadn’t done good.”

Bresciani says that at first he wasn’t unmanageable in civilian life, or in the family’s real estate business. His only recurring nightmare of Vietnam was little more than a nagging dream about being ordered back. But he certainly was off-kilter, and drinking heavily in spurts.

And collecting wine. Compulsively, fastidiously, following writings of the connoisseurs, he built a 4,000-bottle cellar. It included 36 vintages of Chateau Lafite-Rothschild, many from 1858 and 1865.

Michael Davis, an assistant vice president of Christie’s, applauded Bresciani as a wine expert of high passion “who made literally no mistakes in the collection.”

The only mistake: Bresciani’s wine cellar became his private foxhole and hellhole.

“It would be 55 degrees in the wine room, and I’d sit there in my old field jacket and patrol hat,” he recalls, “sometimes drinking three bottles of wine at a sitting. I’d also be carrying a Walther PPK [pistol] and contemplating suicide.”

In the end, he ended the collection as impulsively as he started it. It sold at Christie’s for more than $1 million.

*

Then, in 1990, came the Gulf War, and Bresciani’s PTSD went public.

“I began to get truly agitated. Kept thinking: I shouldn’t be sitting here on my ass while there are 500,000 troops over there. I put on my uniform for the first time since the Vietnam War and marched in the ticker tape parade for Persian Gulf veterans.”

He started skydiving again, riding motorcycles in a POW-MIA parade with a Mohawk toupee glued to his bald head. He fed on excitement and even in business was “taking a lot of risks that went way beyond prudent development.”

In October 1993, American Rangers were deployed to Somalia. In one vicious engagement, 100 were surrounded at Mogadishu, six killed and 80 wounded. Dead GIs were dragged through the streets. Including Sgt. Nick Pilla of the 75th Rangers, Bresciani’s old regiment.

“I saw how the best of our fighting men were thrown to the wolves, without armor, without air, when they had only been sent there to set up a chow line.”

Bresciani still has trouble with the images. “Then I found out about Pilla . . . and that when his body was sent home to his parents in Vineland, N.J., somebody stole his medals.”

Pilla, 21 when he died, became Bresciani’s totem for all that is glorious in the American soldier--and all that is often disregarded. And so, on yet another impulse, he began buying collections, haunting auctions and antique stores--and wherever there were Ranger artifacts, there was Bresciani.

The prize of this one-man, unvisited Ranger Museum was a letter written in 1760 by Maj. Robert Rogers, commander of Rogers’ Rangers during the Indian Wars. Exhibits also included green berets and bayonets, canteens and a Thompson submachine gun, a Willys Jeep--and the 1942 Harley-Davidson motorcycle and sidecar Bresciani had ridden at the POW-MIA demonstration.

Again, it was a diversionary action that failed.

Two years after starting the collection, Bresciani closed it. Now, he says, he is only interested in collecting his blessings. His wife, Julianne, and their daughter, Alessandra, 23, stayed at his side during the grimmest years. He is clean and sober. Having lost motivation--and, he says, his partners’ patience--he has resigned from the real-estate business.

As he recovers, Bresciani is studying major religions and fundamental beliefs--in particular, Native Americans and their culture based on great spirits.

“I’m recovering, definitely, but let me tell you, I’m no paradigm of speedy recovery,” he said, and laughed. “But I have learned that the best way to find peace, to build a recovery, is to make the contribution of helping others.”

Bresciani has wealth and is using it well. He has donated a total of $500,000 to a shelter in New England for homeless veterans, the American Ranger Assn., a Hasidic organization in New York and a Navajo war memorial at Window Rock, Ariz.

“I like the ignored people,” he says. “I’m no Mother Teresa, but when I see someone out there nobody wants to deal with, I’m attracted.”

He is thinking about selling his homes--his 1992 Mercedes-Benz 500SL went as part of the Ranger auction--and moving near some college that may be interested in a program to counsel American veterans.

He has done all this in months.

Bresciani doesn’t miss the significance of haste.

“It’s my usual all or nothing bull.”