Many of the American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are children of Vietnam veterans, and the Vietnam vets are children of World War II and Korea vets, and the WWII vets were and are children of World War I vets, who were children of Civil War vets who were grandchildren of veterans of the Revolution. Our history wraps around many wars that connect us all. Yet when I search the web for blogs and websites on the legacy our veteran parents have bequeathed to us, I find much about growing up in the shadow of Vietnam and little about WWII. Is this because the term PTSD first came to be during the Vietnam War? I don’t think so. The spiritual wounding of a soldier has always been recognized, only given different names: “soldier’s heart” during the Civil War, “battle fatigue” during WWI and WWII.

I think we have needed the sense of a good war, a just war to serve as a touchstone for our making the case for going to war at all. And if any war was just, it was World War II, when the Nazis sought to erase all Jewish people, enslave peoples of many nations, and take over the entire world. And it seems that when we deem a war just and unavoidable, it becomes difficult to acknowledge the spiritual and emotional damage that followed it. Only in the last couple of years have we begun to admit that the “greatest generation” suffered terribly from fighting the Nazis and the Japanese, that no one came away free of scars. It seems the casualties of Vietnam were easier to admit because we never had the chance to idealize that war. So the children of Vietnam vets have had a longer time in which to become honest about the war’s toll on them.

I think my generation is much slower to recognize the toll a popular war, a glorified war, took on their childhoods and continues to have on their adult lives. This seems ironic, given that as young adults we redefined rebellion and then normalized therapy. But this was long before we could begin to see what was working deep under the surface of our suburban families. Now, in our 50’s and 60’s, having raised our children, perhaps we have too much invested in the world view we have held all these years to begin reconsidering the family dynamics, that what we always attributed to a parent’s intolerance of alcohol or an inability to manage anger or a deficit of love might actually have been war’s ghosts sucking the vitality out of the house.

We can learn from the brave children of Vietnam vets who are summoning up the courage to ask their parents, to travel to Vietnam, to look into their own wounds and speak the truth to the rest of us. I recommend to you www.unitedchildrenof veterans, dovv.blogspot.com- a blog for Daughters of Vietnam Veterans, vietnamjourney09.blogspot.com- a blog written by a Vietnam vet’s daughter during her trip to Vietnam, and the Facebook group discussion for Children of Vietnam Veterans.

The Multigenerational Ripple of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)