Welcome to Veterans’ Children

As I was growing up in the 1960’s and 70’s, more than anything I yearned for my father to pay attention to me, to be with me, not just in body but in spirit.  Because even when he spent time with me, he wasn’t there.  His eyes always rested on some distant point on the horizon, some place I could not see when I looked out at the direction of his gaze.  “See me,” I cried silently. See me.

It wasn’t until I was a grown woman when I discovered the photographs in his Army trunk four days after his death that I began to understand what had kept his eyes entranced, his lips sealed together during dinner, his arms pressed against his torso as I hugged him hello and goodbye.

My father was a doctor during World War II, and while he mentioned landing at Utah Beach on D-Day right behind the first wave of troops, the push through France and into Germany, the brutal Battle of the Bulge, he never mentioned the slave labor camp outside the town of Nordhausen, the camp, I came to learn after he passed away at age 80, that he helped liberate in April 1945. As I held the black and white photographs I found buried at in his army trunk my first reaction was shock. My mind could not accept what the horrific images told me: that my father had witnessed the evil heart of the Holocaust.  It took me almost ten years to ask his last surviving sibling what she knew. After two weeks of treating survivors at the camp he suffered a “mental breakdown” and was sent to the Riviera for “R&R.”

Over the next few years, as I met and talked with other veterans who had liberated the camps, I realized my father’s silent distance and melancholy had been manifestations of his PTSD, which had, in turn, created the conditions that led to my depression. Today I understand that it was his PTSD that made it impossible for him to acknowledge my grief from losing my mother when I was five. Until his death he steadfastly refused to speak about her, to explain her sudden disappearance from our lives. For him, as is true for many people who suffer from PTSD, any emotion at all must have felt like a mortal danger.

We children of traumatized veterans grow up sensing something is wrong, yet we cannot grasp let alone disperse the thick haze that surrounds us. Only when we go out into the world, have children of our own, begin creating our lives separate from our parents’ do we begin to discover finally within ourselves signs of our parents’ wounds, wounds that have left imprints within our spirits.

For some of us, those imprints manifest themselves as being more comfortable with distance than with intimacy. For others it is not knowing the difference between the healthy expression of anger and explosive rage. And for others it is a shying away from all emotions as they might open up the pain of buried memories.

Each of us has struggled to create our own paths even while honoring our parents’ histories. But then if we are fortunate enough to meet another child of a veteran who shares our experiences, we experience a profound connection that validates and supports us, informs and directs us, sustains us, energizes us to reach out to others and connect back to and be present for our parents.   All this helps to heal us.

That is what this Web site seeks to be- a widening of the path to healing the wounds of war, for the child of the veteran and for the veteran.  Let us tell our stories to one another because in sharing, we learn, forgive, and understand and heal.  In sharing we heal ouselves and one another.