Sebastopol veteran's novel, 'In the Mouth of the Wolf,' tells painful homecoming tale

For more than 35 years, Sebastopol psychologist Bill McCausland listened to people’s stories of trauma. Now he has explored a decades-old trauma of his own.

In his newly published, semi-autobiographical novel, “In the Mouth of the Wolf,” McCausland reconnects with his painful return from Vietnam 46 years ago, using his clinical understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder to inform the stories of three buddies who come back from war.

“There are so many books written about actual war, and I wanted to write one about homecoming,” McCausland said. “I felt it was a book that needed to be written.”

As a substance abuse counselor at the Sonoma County Health Department and later a clinical psychologist at Kaiser Permanente in Santa Rosa, McCausland helped people address the root causes of their addictions or self-destructive behaviors by facing the pain they were often trying to escape.

His insight that chemical dependency is often rooted in trauma helped him counsel a wide variety of patients, but during his years at Kaiser, he also became the go-to guy whenever patients who were veterans sought help for substance abuse, he said.

Throughout those years, McCausland thought he had expunged his own traumas of war, but then something happened that put him back in touch with that painful period in his life.

The 68-year-old cyclist was riding south of Valley Ford six years ago when he caught an edge and went down hard, breaking his clavicle and several ribs. The injury jolted him back to the suffering he witnessed during the war, when he helped manage an Army joint military-civilian counterinsurgency program. Like the characater Memo in his book, McCauslin spent much of his service in the relative safety of a military office in Saigon, but was regularly pulled into firefights when he went into the field to keep commanders apprised of the status of their forces on the ground.

Though never injured, he witnessed plenty of brutality that continued to haunt him once he returned home to Bonita (San Diego).

He couldn’t talk about what he had seen and done, much of it highly classified at the time. Instead, he bottled it up, became moody, angry and self-destructive, and ruined his marriage in the process.

“I was just a nut case when I got back, and I think that’s very common,” McCausland said. “I just basically destroyed the relationship.”

He largely put that part of his life behind him while pursuing his career and learning how to treat patients with PTSD, including training with specialists at the Veteran’s Administration’s National Center for PTSD in Palo Alto.

After his cycling accident, McCausland started thinking about and eventually writing about Vietnam. In the process, he reconnected with Medal of Honor recipient 1st Sgt. David McNerney, with whom he trained recruits in California before his deployment.

He and McNerney had been friends, and it gave him his first insight into the ways soldiers covered up the traumas of war. Like the character Chet in McCausland’s book, McNerney was decorated for taking command of his unit after all its senior officers were killed in an ambush, and was regularly abusing alcohol.

The culture of the Army at that time wasn’t geared to help soldiers like McNerney deal with their wartime experiences, and many sought to blot out their recurring memories with alcohol and other drugs, McCausland said.

He saw the pattern time and time again during his career as a psychologist, with vets left ill-equipped to deal with the recurrent and involuntary thoughts and memories that invade their consciousness.

“They’re isolated. They’re alienated. And it comes out sideways,” he said.

Upon McCausland’s return, he was unable to communicate with his wife or process his anger led to a rapid deterioration of the relationship. A year and a half later, the couple divorced.

“I was messed up,” he said. “I was not a very good character.”

McCausland moved to Sonoma County for graduate studies humanistic psychology at Sonoma State University. He received his masters degree in clinical psychology from Lone Mountain College in San Francisco, later earning his doctorate degree from Professional School of Psychology.

After years of helping others through their issues, McCausland turned to writing to work through his own, including by the guilt he carried over the way he treated his first wife.

A fan of writers like Tom O’Brien and Cormack McCarthy, McCausland said he found some catharsis in the writing process, which he does in the studio in the shady backyard of the rural Sebastopol home. He shares the home with his second wife, Zilda McCausland, a Santa Rosa family law attorney.

He retired from Kaiser three years ago and recently completed his master of fine arts in creative writing from Goddard College in Port Townsend, Wash.

He hopes that by reading his novel, returning veterans from all wars will see that there is no shame in PTSD and that relief is possible.

It’s a common condition the military has gotten much better at acknowledging and treating, he said, but too many soldiers don’t take advantage of services through the military or the Veteran’s Administration because they don’t know how to ask for help.

“A lot of times people are shut down, isolated and alienated, and it’s hard for them to reach out,” he said.

You can reach Staff Writer Kevin McCallum at 521-5207 or kevin.mccallum@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @srcitybeat.