Like some of you, I am an adult child of a combat veteran. My combat-veteran father has severe, debilitating PTSD. His war devastated him, and subsequently, our family. His experience in Vietnam nearly forty years ago, when I was nary a twinkle in his eye, helped shape the person I am today, and for a long time, I have wanted to know and feel the things that did this to him, and to me. I had gathered bits of puzzling information here and there over the years, but as I got older and achieved a truer understanding of the impact of his war on him and our family, I realized that I needed to hear his story in its entirety, that I needed to hear the unmentioned details that would meld the story into a complete whole.
One night, a few months ago, my dad was at my house. We were speaking of politics and current events, and I realized that I had a perfect opportunity to ask him about his experience. The asking was difficult, because I knew that should he choose to recount his story, it was likely that he would suffer even more disturbed sleep than usual and more than a few troubled days. My need to know prevailed, however, and I timidly asked him a very basic, child-like question – “What happened to you?” He seemed startled by my inquisitiveness, and I told him that if it made him feel bad to tell me, he didn’t have to. He then said something that surprised me – he told me that I had caught him off guard, that he was pleased that I wanted to know, that he thought I should know, and that no one in the family had ever asked him like that before. And so began his tale.
He and I stayed up through the night talking, and then continued our discussion through another night a few weeks later. He was forthright and honest, and the vividness with which he remembered things was startling. He shared with me truths about war that no father is anxious to share with his daughter – truths about existing in a state of sustained fear, the horror of invoking death, what a person is capable of doing in order to preserve one’s life and the lives of others – all truths that set the course of his life, and mine, forever. It’s a detailed and convoluted story, horrible and ugly, and more than anything, infuriating to the core.
All of the details of his experience are too much to share in this forum, but I can tell you this: my dad was sent to Vietnam in 1967. He was nineteen years old. Six months into his tour, my teen-aged father, ill-equipped to handle killing and dying, snapped, in the field, and was sent for psychological evaluation. Three days later, he was back with his unit and forced back into combat. Nine months into his tour, he snapped again, this time for good, and he left Vietnam, medicated into submission and wearing a straightjacket, headed for the psychiatric ward at Yokosuka Naval Hospital. After two months there, he did a few months in the psychiatric ward of Bethesda Naval Hospital, and for many years after that, he was on his own. No follow up, no disability, no help. Nothing.
What else did I learn from our discussions? Well, I learned that, in war, my father was disposable; that my father was valued only as a killing machine; that living daily in an environment that all but guaranteed his eventual death threatened, and yes, even compromised, my father’s moral center. I learned that the first time my father was forced to kill, he threw up, and that the vomiting continued until, after only three months in, he had lost fifty pounds. I learned that my mother (who was only sixteen years old at the time) visited my father at Bethesda Naval Hospital, and met a man she had never seen before, a man whose eyes were glazed over, a man who was so medicated that he was incoherent and drooling. I learned that when my father was finally discharged and returned home, he met my mother at the airport with as much excitement as his still-medicated body could muster, while at the same time looking around the airport and telling his now twenty-year-old self, “I’m fucked.”
I also learned why my father had twenty-seven jobs in twenty-two years, and why a loud noise or an unexpected tap on the shoulder could send him into a whirlwind of rage and chaos. I learned why going out in public was so difficult for him, and why, when we went to a restaurant, he had to have his back to the wall and his eyes on the door, and why, if such positioning was impossible to achieve, we left. I learned why my mom once found him wandering our neighborhood in the middle of the night, wearing only his underwear, and why I knew intuitively as a child to never, EVER, startle him when he was sleeping. I learned what drove him to attempt suicide, not once, not twice, but three times, with the third (pills, vodka, pistol) maiming him forever, and I learned that all three of those attempts occurred on or near the same day in the same month that he first snapped in Vietnam. I learned why my father sought out volatile situations from which he would be forced to extract himself, and how constant hyperawareness and subsequent adrenaline dumps damaged his organs. I learned why my father never had more than three uninterrupted hours of sleep per night in thirty-plus years, why he would be awake for days at a time, and how devastating the effects of perpetual sleeplessness can be on a body and mind. I learned why my hyper-vigilant father stopped driving the family car with us in it, and eventually just stopped going pretty much anywhere. I learned that when my father finally received his disability, twenty-three years after the fact, he saw the money as “blood money” and wanted nothing to do with it. I learned how he hated even endorsing the checks, and how relieved he was when the government implemented direct deposit, for that meant he would never have to touch those checks again.
The most important thing I learned, however, is that we who have not experienced it cannot effectively imagine the horrors of war. It is impossible to imagine or understand the power of the sounds, the smells, the sights, the fear, and the devastation of war. We can never really know the full impact of such trauma on one’s mind and the havoc it can create, nor can we ever completely comprehend the soul-destroying things that war might make one do. Though we would like to believe that we are above such things, that our morals and good, solid upbringing would act as shiny beacons leading us away from such depravity, the truth is, we just don’t know how we might act or what we might do if emboldened by fear, anger, and the desire to stay alive in a war zone, and we should consider ourselves lucky that we will likely never know.
Though such things may disgust, sadden and enrage me, I have learned that I can never be so presumptuous as to judge the actions of a lowly grunt in the field. I must leave that to others, for if I do not, I would find myself forced to pass judgment on my father, and, knowing what I know of him, that is something I would never do. Those unfortunate enough to experience the unthinkable in war don’t need my condemnation, for theirs has been created for them.
