Behavior: Postwar Wounds

It was a quiet Sunday morning in early August when Viet Nam Veteran John Gabron, 22, went on his last patrol. Wearing an Army helmet liner and field jacket and carrying a telescopic rifle, he climbed a sagebrush-covered hill in Los Angeles' Griffith Park. When two park rangers approached in a pickup truck, Gabron captured them at rifle point. As one of the rangers told it later, Gabron explained that "he had lived by the gun and wanted to die by the gun."

He did not, and fortunately, neither did his captives. After a long...