My father did not turn out to be a good man.
He was a brilliant child. He got fabulous grades, could play the guitar by ear and, by the time he went to high school, he was a champion runner. However, somewhere between his horrific childhood home life and his time serving as a Corpsman during the Vietnam War, he did not, as I said, turn out to be a good man.
With a false glee, my dad used to tell the story of how, coming home one day after a high school track meet—that he won and that none of his family attended—he found his family had moved without him. At sixteen, he wandered the desert streets of California’s “Inland Empire” for six days looking for them. When he finally found them—his raging alcoholic father, his promiscuous mother and all eight of his siblings squatting in some rathole by the tracks in Fontana—they laughed at him and told him he must have been very stupid to have taken so long.
My mother tells the story of my dad enlisting in the Navy and, in the process of getting all his papers together, he found the last name on his birth certificate did not match the last name of the abusive alcoholic he had grown up thinking was his father. When he confronted his mother about this, she acted nonchalant and said, “Oh yeah, your real father’s last name was Wyss—he worked at some tire plant, I think.”
Then, in the Navy during the Vietnam War, my dad served as Corpsman, traveling with the Marines seeing to the wounded and dying. Once, when I was thirteen, he dug his duffel out of the garage and showed me his gas mask, his boots and, most proudly, his white tunic still stained with the blood of some Marine or other whose name, face and fatal injuries he had long since forgotten.
All of this is to say that my dad had every right in this and any other world to be completely and totally screwed up—and he was. His depression kept him from ever holding a steady job. His anxiety led him to a devastating Valium addiction. His outwardly acted, self-hating, power-needy PTSD led him to violence, degradations and the alienation of both his daughters. All of these things together led him to die alone on March 1, 2009.
My dad was a brilliant, strong, heroic young man who valiantly served his country and the many, many young soldiers to whom he attended. I tell this story not to detract from the honorable things he did, because they are many. I tell it to make a plea to the Gods of war and healing, and to any of you who may know and/or love a similarly brilliant but tormented young soldier, that you may help them to heal, that their brilliance and honor may not turn into madness and ignominy.
And for those, like my father, who have already passed, send your prayers with them that, in whatever afterlife there may be, they will be welcomed as the heroes they are and given the courage they need to fight one more battle in that place—the battle to reclaim themselves from the terror they knew and had become.
-M.
*I originally wrote this piece several years ago and, ever since, have made a habit of revising and reposting it every Memorial and Veterans' Day so that it remains a living work and refreshes the prayers in my own heart.
