I’ve watched you for a hundred years,
reap the saddness of the pain you feel,
I’ve stood in the dark corners of the room,
longing to hold you and go back in time,
I was only 5, or 8, or 10 or 15,
but I saw worlds beyond this one,
all clinging to your shoulders and back,
keeping you small as though you didn’t belong,
as though you were permanently stuck
trying to make something right,
and i know, i know, i know what you saw,
left behind on orders,
when your brothers fell from the sky
and then where were they?
where was your family in the jungle?
suddenly you were naked and alone,
the blood draining from your face
as you received the news,
the only remaining member of a team,
we were a fucking team weren’t we?
where the fuck did you go? why was i spared?
and now, fourty years later,
i see you looking off past my eyes,
remembering for a moment the pain
that no one was there to help you hold,
you a fucking boy,
you demanding to be a fucking man,
and here’s your wake up call bobby,
now get cracking, this is war.

me alone on my mountain,
fighting the ghosts of my self loathing,
you, nearby, fingers curved around a rifle,
and your footsteps,
silent in the jungle…

My father and his pain will always be with me. His anger, desperation, and love will also remain deep in my heart. Growing up with a veteran of Viet Nam was never easy. Even at thirty-two I struggle with his pain. The military taught soldiers strength and told them to protect their brothers and so they did. Some died trying and some lived without really knowing if they helped their brothers. My dad protects his brothers even today. Those that were lost to the war from his squad are engraved in his flesh, to always be remember and will never be forgotten.

As a child I didn’t understand why my daddy never cried. When he lost family members, he never cried. I now believe it was the strength the military taught him that makes him so solid. The war and protecting his brothers are truly what taught him this strength. Growing up with such a rock solid man was tough. I didn’t understand why he didn’t cry. He has two sides that he shows. One side seems hard and cold. The other side shows there are deep hidden scars that no human can mend and he covers them up with his great sense of humor.

Viet Nam Veteran came home to a very cold country. One they loved. Today after being at war we welcome our soldiers home with tears of joy, new babies in the arms of their mother’s, parades, music, we tie ribbons on trees, we watch the children run to see their parent that has come home, and there are great overwhelming emotions that overflow when they return. You see it wasn’t like that in Viet Nam. The soldiers knew what they had to do but no one taught the America people how to respond when they returned. I know this because my dad came home and was out with some friends in on a date, I believe, and because he had been to Viet Nam people looked him in a way that would humiliate any person but these soldiers had to keep moving forward because America was not waiting for them. People even today shun these men.

How do you move forward when at night in the stillness you can still hear the screams of your brothers? How do you move forward knowing you were behind the gun and choose someone else’s fate? How do you move forward when Viet Nam took such a chunk of your life away and is still holding it in it’s cold hard grips? One thing the military was good at teaching was to keep going. There was no time for emotions. When bullets are coming at you, when your brothers were being killed. Keep going and show nothing and so today they keep going but the weight of that will always be with them. It won’t only stay with them but it will remain in the minds of their children and grandchildren and many generations to come.

People want to know now what went on and how it must have felt but we are a little to late, don’t you think? The damage is already there. War happens and people are screaming for peace. They hold signs of hate up but want peace. I am reminded of my dad when I see these signs. The hippies wanted peace but didn’t show to much love to the Viet Nam Soldier. At least not in my mind. They didn’t wait at the airports or bases showing love or support for anyone. So I say if you still hate Viet Nam ,that is OK, but don’t pretend it didn’t happen because then I have to pretend my dad is O.K.. It will never be OK for my dad. His thoughts are always there about what he did or didn’t do. These are his secrets and he will carry them beyond his grave.

The American people back then didn’t practice forgiveness but wanted our Viet Nam Veterans to forgive. The government covered many things up and are still trying to hide the side effects of war but the side effects will be carried on for many years. Many of these men hide their tears in bottles of whiskey or other kinds of drugs. This is their armor so they can move forward but pieces of their souls will remain open and scared in the war the war zone of Viet Nam.

My dads soul was scared there. Sometimes the wound seems to healing but then the screams in the night open them back up. The pictures that flash before them flood their mind with the hell they lived and died in. So many of these men have fallen through the cracks of America and then I’m angered at the men who want to use Viet Nam to gain a position in government. As though they were hero’s of a war that had many but were treated as scum. It’s wrong because the ones lost in this war gain no position because they are still there. I remember my dad’s fiftieth birthday. The party was great and we celebrated his life but when the party was over and the music could be heard, the celebration was over. He went back to the hell he lived in. That hell where a part of him will always be. I won’t ever forget that night. The tape in the radio played music that took you back twenty years or more. The burn barrel was lit and so was my dad. He had a piece of cane pole and be the side of the barrel yelling things in Vietnamese. My stepbrother said to me, you can go. I told him no, of course because this was my dad and I would stand in this small period of hell with him. That is a picture that will remain with me forever. An event I had no control over and it would pain me for a lifetime.

Their words will never come close to taking us to this hell they lived in or the hell they brought back home. No one , maybe not even them can describe what causes such pain. Do I feel sorry for my dad? No, never! I feel sorry for the American people who didn’t support him, who walked on him and who treated him as though he was to blame. Even though he lives in this hell he brought back, he still went forward. He brought two children into the world and he used his combat skills to raise us. People didn’t understand why a person could be so strict, but today I know he just remained in combat mode and protected us as he had protected his brothers and his country that would now treat him more like the enemy than a hero.

As a child you want to be everything to your parents and my dad made us feel like we were everything. I’m sure people thought he needed to loosen up but I’m glad he didn’t because I wouldn’t be the person I am today, had my dad been any other way. You see if my dad put down his gun in the war, he would have been killed and when he left the war that cold hard shell had to remain. It protects him, like a security blanket does a child. Without the blanket a child might go insane. Well trust me from my point that is why the soldier is covering up with his own blanket. The difference is though that these men do not get comfort from their blanket. What they would give to be a child again and gain that comfort you get from a blanket.

There are soldiers that walk around in this world that we turn our noses up at. That people pull their children in close because they are scared of them. Don’t pull your children ,have them reach out and say thank you. As a young girl, my dad became a member of a Viet Nam Veteran motorcycle club. There were many stories there, ones that no person could ever write about because the nightmares would keep you awake for the rest of your life. There are many of these stories floating around the world. Nothing makes them any different than these. They protected each other and each others secrets. These were fathers and brothers, men that never cried. They new how to reach out though and protect those they cared for. Their love and shoulders are very strong. Although their hearts are weak and brittle. I am saddened that there are so many of these men walking around our country. Then there are those men that walk around and seem to be OK. Maybe their belief in the Lord helps them. Maybe they put a block on this area of their brain. One person can’t say why or how. But I understand and that is what most soldiers are looking for. Not a bunch of what happened over there, tell me now kind of thing. Some men consider it to be a weakness to cry. Some men can’t cry. The American Soldier chooses not to cry. So when you watch a movie that describes how bad things were and you shed a tear, make that one for the American Soldier who chooses not to cry. When your paths cross with one of these great men, please say thank you and have your children smile. They fought not only for their country, not only with their brothers but they fought for you and me. Thanks Dad!!!

Not only did I share his name but also his legacy of mental-emotional pain. My mother said he suffered from guilt over the death of the enemy soldier–very likely it was more than that. It is one thing to see the death of strangers by the score but to see your fellow war fighters dying, to see the results of the inhumane treatment by the enemy of those he liberated took their toll.

Yes, he was a man of faith, provided materially for his family, served small congregations as pastor, and did much, much more but as some of you will know, inside the walls of our home there was another life lived–a life of fear, of outbursts, of reacting instead of interacting, etc.

One expression of his pain was when I, in the USAF, deployed for Desert Storm, I flew through a city less then 40 from where he was and he would not come to see me. Little did I understand that the hero was in his own eyes, not a hero but in fact a broken soldier. Now older and more introspective, I do.

You see there were two elephants in our family that were allowed to roam freely. First was the alcoholism (he did not drink but was an ACOA). The first set the stage for the disastrous effects of the second. Number two was battle fatigue.

My commitment, as late as it is since our children are grown and gone, is that both of those elephants will not longer be allowed to roam freely in the relationships of our family. My commitment is that both be killed in my generation! Though as a previous post said, “The war…will never be over for me” my prayer and hope is that it will be for our children.

He never once talked about his experiences in South America, except in reference to my mother’s family (my mother had been his secretary in Chile). My mother kept a stricter silence than he did, and even at the end of her life, when we knew she was dying, would not speak about the war. A military researcher I spoke with once told me that some in the intelligence community took their oath of silence too seriously. So it was with my parents.

My father’s world must have been a terrible one, because he was a violent, abusive alcoholic all the years I knew him. We all suffered from it, but we never talked about the causes, one of which was whatever he saw during the war, whatever he knew, whatever he took to heart. I know that he trusted no one and was incapable of living what we consider a normal life. He was, in the worst sense of the word, a shell of a man.

We were always poor because my father could never find a decent job–how can you be hired when you can’t tell anyone what you did for many years?–except during the Korean War, when the government found him a job overseeing elderly security guards in a shipyard. Ultimately his alcoholism kept him from working, and I think for some years we survived on the kindness of a few men who knew something of my father’s story and pitied us. The rest of the time we were on puble welfare.

All I have left of my father are a handful of photos, including one with the group of intelligence officers he supported; his copy, ironically enough, of Mein Kampf; and the legacy of our unhappy family, which followed me for so many years. It is safe to say that as a child I hated him. In later life I have learned to forgive and to be sad for him, because I know he suffered, though I don’t know the details. I wish I did, not just for myself but because he, too, fought the war in his own way, and he was nevered remembered or honored for his service.

As far as I know, everyone associated with that group of intelligence officers is dead now. They took their secrets with them to the grave, it seems, and that to me is a tragedy.

Thanks for listening.