Updated 5/11: The military Mother’s Day story is now online, along with video interviews with four moms. Check it out here.

This week’s podcast is an interview with Patti-Jean Wollman of Mahopac, whose son James is serving with the Marines in Iraq.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve spent a lot of time talking to Wollman and other Lower Hudson Valley women whose children are stationed in Iraq. Some of their thoughts will appear in televised segments on RNN-TV between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. tonight, and in a Mother’s Day feature story running in this Sunday’s Journal News.

Like the others, Wollman talked about life as a worried military mom, and how her imagination runs wild as weeks pass between calls or e-mails from her 22-year-old son. Here’s one of the first e-mails she got from “Jaime,” on March 12:

Everything is going well, food is good, we could always use more sleep. no action yet, except for an IED we found the other day but we were able to blow it up before it blew us up.

You can imagine how worried, but proud, she and the other military moms are these days. It’s certainly going to be a bittersweet Mother’s Day for them and all the other women with children far from home, in harm’s way, this Sunday.

For more on Wollman’s story, click on the audio link at the end of this post, or download the podcast by using the iTunes button below.

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For this week’s podcast, I checked in with Howard Goldin, a Vietnam veteran and Spring Valley Rotary Club member who helped organize the humanitarian trip to Vietnam that my father and I joined up with last November.

Howard just got back from another return to Vietnam – his fourth time in the last three years – and talked to me about what he gets out of these journeys, both as a veteran seeking closure and as a Rotarian engaged in charitable projects. (Here’s a picture of him with Dien, an 18-year-old orphan he and his wife Doris are sponsoring to go to vocational school for the next two years.)

To hear the podcast, click on the audio link below or download it by clicking on the iTunes button next to the comments link at the bottom of this post.

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For this Friday’s At Ease! podcast, I interviewed Jim Murphy, an Air Force veteran who served in Vietnam. We sat down together in his South Nyack home yesterday, where he talked about his involvement in the Post Traumatic Press Writing Workshop for War Veterans and read one of the poems he wrote during last year’s workshop.

The next workshop, starting in a few weeks in White Plains, has 10 veterans signed up, including some who served in Iraq, Murphy said. Another workshop will be organized this fall, either in White Plains or Nyack, he added.

You can hear more about the program, and Murphy’s thoughts about the healing process of writing war poetry, by tuning into the podcast. (Click on the audio link below, or download it from iTunes by clicking on the iTunes icon on this page.)

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Rye High School students have a better sense of ancient (to them!) history now, thanks to a recent visit from local World War II veteran Jack Vier.

As I wrote in my story last week, Vier may be 90 years old, but he still sounds like a hell-raising young soldier.

His annual visit to Rye High teacher Bob Steel’s history classes included a lively mix of accents and “French” words. He also shared some sobering stories about the battlefield horrors that still fuel his post-traumatic stress disorder (as fellow World War II veteran Dominic Esposito also described in last week’s podcast).

You can hear some of Vier’s stories on this week’s At Ease! podcast. (Use the podcast button on our sidebar or the iTunes icon at the bottom of this post to download it. However, it can take a day or two for new podcasts to show up on iTunes, so for now, you can just listen live by clicking the audio link below.)

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You’ve probably heard a lot about post-traumatic stress disorder in Vietnam veterans, and now in troops returning from Iraq, but you may not realize the condition also plagues World War II veterans. Six decades after storming the beaches of Normandy, some of these men – now in their 80s and 90s – still suffer from nightmares, panic attacks, flashbacks, etc., on top of their age-related health problems.

Jack Vier, the Rye veteran sharing his memories with Rye High School students this week, has PTSD. So does Dominic Esposito, a Mohegan Lake veteran I recently interviewed for our first weekly At Ease! podcast, who also proudly serves as president of the local Combat Infantrymen’s Association. (Click on the picture to view a larger image. I’m told the podcast will be available for free download in iTunes sometime next week, but you can listen to it now at the end of this post.) Both get treated at VA clinics, but there’s really no cure.

Dr. Ronald Hanover of Briarcliff Manor, who runs a PTSD clinic at the VA Hospital in Manhattan, believes the condition is common in all combat veterans.

WWII vets did not speak of these things – they were of a generation that shut up, came home went to work and raised families … PTSD rarely if ever goes away. Therapy tries to help people with PTSD (and PTSD is certainly well known in civilian lives as well rape, motor accidents, natural disasters, robberies etc.) cope better with anxiety, rage, depression and isolation.

Click the audio link below to hear Dominic Esposito’s story.

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