The Vietnam War shaped my life before I was even born. A few years ago, I had been given Ken Burn's boxed set The Vietnam War. I have never brought myself to watch it. My father had signed up for the army and entered the conflict at 18. He paid the ultimate price for the freedoms that we have today. He never expressed hatred for our government, he endured the hate speech coming home. He respected the protestors' rights to assemble, individual freedoms were what he believed in.
My father suffered within his soul and heart with the things he did in the war and what he saw. Throughout my childhood, I was taught to speak his name if he was sleeping when I entered the room. My father had what was then called Vietnam syndrome. It is known called PSTD. Vietnam veterans had higher rates of PSTD because of a lack of decompression between tours. Our family experienced secondary traumatization because my father would have war flashbacks routinely. The only thing that would quiet his demons was large amounts of alcohol. Today he would have been given treatments that could less his symptoms. He would have been given medication, talk therapy, and EMDR.
My father completed 4 tours in Vietnam. I read his files years ago. I am going to send for the records again. The first time I read them was when I was 18 years old. There were many paragraphs redacted in the records. My father was not a model soldier he had many citations on his record. My father did have language interpreting in his records. He came home a very broken man. There is family lore he served an extra tour because my memere' asked him to do so. I have not been able to verify the truth of that.
Ken Burns did an excellent job documenting the Vietnam war. After watching the entire series, I am certain that my father witnessed and committed horrible acts of war. I can understand why my father couldn't stand the sound of crying babies. We watched the footage of the battles.
Ironically, I am at peace with who my father was, and our complex 16-year father/daughter relationship. The healing began when I lived life, and sought higher education. We were at war with each other. As my father was finishing his life's journey, I didn't have the grace or the courage to listen or forgive him. I was so angry with him when he was dying for some many reasons. He had put us all through hell along side him particularly myself. My father and I were always in combat. My mother elected to stay with him and I leave the blame at her doorstep. There are things that she allowed there isn't redemption for. I was collateral damage as a result of her inability to take action and living through a veil of denial. Maybe in a decade or two, I will be able to come to peace with her too. I was never quiet about the rage I felt toward him. He knew it. He felt it. I think as he made his soberity journey my rage toward him was his penitence for his actions toward me and maybe his actions in Vietnam.
In the end, my father tried to impart many life lessons to me. Lessons of core values, redemption, and Our last conversation created such rage and grief within that I carried for many years, He told me that he was wsn't worried about me, I would always. He was worried about my mom and sibling. I took it as a solid truth that he really didn't love me. Yet, today, I know he was right. I had survived a childhood with him and didn't allow him to shape the parent I am. No matter what he did he could not break me. Honestly, my experiences with my father primed the pump for me to have a relationship where a man would abuse me, it also created a force within me to survive.
The song The Sound of Silence is symbolic of my relationship with my father, We could never communicate with each other. In the silence, I can remember him, ponder who he was before the war, and wonder what tour broke him. My father was broken, clever, brilliant, sharp-witted, Roman Catholic, cruel, generous, and an incredibly flawed human being. It is quite easy to damn the dead, forgive the dead, and sometimes even harder to come to peace with the dead. It was a quiet, unassuming journey to come to a quiet peace.
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