He didn't talk about it for years. Now he wants people to listen.
Ernest Willie, who is from Charleston, was about 20 years old when he served in the U.S. Army in Vietnam.
"It's funny how one year can change your whole life," he said.
When he got back, he would crash through stoplights. He talked loud and he drank himself into oblivion. He didn't care if he lived or died.
"Would you tell your wife?" he said. "Would you tell your kids what you've done?"
Willie has been going to the Charleston Vet Center for 17 years. He felt comfortable enough in 2005 to start talking about his own experiences in Vietnam.
"This is not a cure," he said. "But it's a way that you got to deal with it. I would have been dead or in jail if this hadn't been here."
The Charleston Vet Center recently moved from a 2,800-square-foot, older facility on Central Avenue in Charleston to a 4,100 square feet new building at 200 Tracy Way. A ribbon cutting is planned for July 19.
The building has more light and more space. It's modern. There is more parking.
"We try to create an environment that's warm and welcoming for people," said Gary Jarrell, a licensed social worker who leads the center.
"In this building, I think we give veterans the service they deserve," he said.
The building also has more room for group therapy, and a space for providers to offer telehealth services.
All services are free. They see veterans who served in combat zones, are survivors of military sexual trauma, family of people killed in action, drone pilots, those who provided mortuary services and veterans who worked in mental health.
About 330 vet centers operate nationwide, Jarrell said.
Jarrell had planned to pursue engineering after serving as a staff sergeant in Iraq, but changed his mind during a work study helping other veterans.
"I fell in love with what they do," he said.
The Vet Center doesn't have a waiting list of people who couldn't be served in the previous location. But Jarrell said he knows, based on the number of veterans living in the area, that many are not being served. In the new building, he hopes to be able to expand marriage and family services, and PTSD counseling.
Some veterans circle the parking lot, but never take that first step inside.
Willie had pulled the plugs on all the clocks in the house. People asked if the ticking sound bothered him.
"No," he told them. The ticking sound - that means everything is normal, he said.
"It's when it stops," he said. "You're constantly alert, and that's why you can't sleep."
The children would be five minutes late to leave the house, and he'd rage.
"Five minutes in Vietnam would get you killed," he said.
One time someone asked him why he couldn't keep the gun in a chest of drawers, instead of in his bed.
"I said, 'click,' " he said.
He worked for the postal service, but he couldn't work inside. He had to carry.
He didn't figure out why until he started coming to the Vet Center.
"I'm boxed in," he said.
Eventually, they began to talk about how there were words for his symptoms - anxiety. Post-traumatic stress disorder.
Willie recently sat in Jarrell's office and he gestured to a tree a few feet outside the window.
In Vietnam, people would die for those few feet of ground.
"Tomorrow, you'd have to take that tree back again," he said.
"This place here allows you to go back there," he said.
When he came back, people called him a "baby-killer." They threw bananas at him.
"What did we prove?" he said. "We proved we couldn't fit in."
The last four years, he started wearing a hat with a Vietnam veteran emblem.
Now, he and his wife will get in a fight, and she'll say "about time to go up there to the meeting, isn't it?"
He never talked about the day he saw butterflies, flying off a field of bodies.
"It took me 17 years to realize a butterfly's a butterfly," he said.
His grandbabies don't know that story. They'll point them out and say how pretty they are.
"I don't want to see no butterfly," he said, "but through the Vet Center, I say, 'Yes honey, it looks pretty.'"
For more information on the Vet Center, call 304-343-3825.