He’s on a new mission.

A Long Island veteran who fought in Vietnam has found a passion for painting to fight his own battles with PTSD — and is now teaching the artform to help heal other soldiers struggling with the affliction.

“I wasn’t only getting nightmares. I was getting daymares,” 78-year-old John Melillo, a former military police sergeant, told The Post of his trauma.

“ The Vietnam guys are tough … but I’ll hear from their relatives. A wife will say, ‘he’s talking now, he never talked about this stuff before.'”

Melillo’s methods are based on his own struggles, having witnessed horrific atrocities overseas once being drafted shortly after graduating from Cornell in the late 1960s.

The burning images seared into his mind from Saigon stayed with him once he returned to the US

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