Well, since everyone else is sharing their stories, I suppose it's no harm if I share mine.
My dad was a door gunner in Vietnam. For that job you had to be, as he put it, "Crazy enough to do it, but smart enough to not fuck up." He's never talked about it with me, and everything I know is from eavesdropping or second-hand. He'd pull out his photo album from the war and tell his friends all sorts of stories, but he'd never look at me while doing it. That really hit me recently. He finally went to counseling for vets, and he's a lot more willing to talk about his experiences now. The last time I saw him (he lives in Hawaii and I live on the mainland, so we've only seen each other a handful of times over the past 8 years) he told my husband all sorts of stories, even some really gory stuff, and he did this while I was sitting right next to my husband, but not once did my dad look at me while talking about Vietnam. As soon as the subject changed, or even during a long pause, he'd look at me again. It was very strange how he switched like that.
He's always told me he was drafted, but my aunt, his sister, recently told me that not only did he enlist, but he was underage when he did so and lied about his age so they'd let him in. He hates the military and it's pretty clear he regrets fighting in Vietnam (though he's never directly stated it), and I wonder if he's always lied because he's ashamed. He also left all of his medals and his uniform in the bathroom at the base, and skipped out on final formation. It wasn't until about 30 years later, and at my urging, that he finally asked the government for his medals.
As for PTSD, it's my understanding that when he got with my mom, which was... 15ish years after the war, he would still always sleep with his gun next to the bed, and regularly woke up thinking the Viet Cong were busting through the door. I don't know when those nightmares stopped, because he really doesn't like talking about them, and almost all of what I know is second-hand from my mom.
Straight out of the war, he married a woman whom he divorced 9 months after they met. He got a woman knocked up when he was 26 and walked out on them. He did enough coke in the 80s to burn a hole through is septum. My mom was a woman he was dealing to, got her knocked up, and married her a year after I was born because he concluded she was insane and he wanted to make it harder for her to run off with me. They hated each other. He choked her unconscious pretty regularly, but I don't really blame him. I'm surprised he never killed her. They split when I was 11, and haven't finalized the divorce in the 11 years since then. My dad now says he won't divorce her, so he can be in charge of her remains when she dies. He's going to dump her ashes into the toilet and shit on them. Yeah...
He was invited to join the Hell's Angels, and turned them down because he doesn't like riding with a group (take that as you will). He smokes a lot of pot. A LOT. He's self-destructive. He hates authority. He's picked me up by the throat a few times because I skipped school so often. He's always been very cold, and lashes out at those he loves. Back when I was born, my mom would always tell me that she didn't love me because I wasn't a boy. One day, my dad shoved his gun in her mouth and told her he'd blow her brains out if she ever again told me she didn't love me or wished I was a boy. I'm severely bipolar, but didn't get help until I was 19, and rarely admit I'm sick or cry, because my dad always would tell me to suck it up and get over it because he'd gotten over his problems (which was bullshit, and he didn't admit it until he was in his late 50s). He's broken, but he tries, he really does. I know all of this looks really bad, but I know he loves me, but he's so broken. That said, it's great that I hardly see him, because he's always wonderful when he knows he'll only see me for a few days and won't see me again for a few years probably.
And he considers veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq to be pussies and despises veterans that came out more messed up than him. He quit his PTSD counseling group because there were guys in there drinking themselves to death, who had molested their kids and blamed the war, that kind of shit, and he would start screaming at them. He got sick of being told to be quiet.
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