Veteran's Heart Georgia Blog

“The experience of being in war alters a person’s way of being in the world. The specific lived story that takes place within each individual [and in each family] then becomes both the tale of trauma and the source of healing.” -Michael Meade

Please join Veterans Heart Georgia, and others everywhere in telling your stories of growing up in a family during a war or in a family in which a member was a war veteran. Narrative, or story-telling, is age-old and has been known to provide and nurture healing down through the ages. Read the rest of this entry »

I am the first son of a Korean vet. My dad always told us he was a clerk at “Headquarters” and never saw combat. After he drank himself to death, I learned that wasn’t true. My uncle told me he had been a ground pounder on the front lines. They had slept in 3 man tents, and my dad happened to be in the middle one morning… when he awoke to find his tent mates on either side had had their throats cut during the night. My uncle said he was never the same after that.

He married my mom after the war – and I came along less than 9 months later. He couldn’t stand to hear me cry and shoveled abuse upon my mom until I was 4 months old…then he started in on me too. When I cried I got hit, spanked, and yelled at until finally, he would leave. By the time I was one, I could spell my name and count 10 pennies; because if I didn’t get it right, I’d get slapped. He was determined to make me “tough” – and “smart” – “even if it kills him”. The first thoughts I can recall from my childhood was that I wanted to die. Infractions or weakness were beaten out me then until I was 12, but I’d learned at 9 they were shorter if I didn’t cry, so I stopped. My mom left him when I was 12 too, however the consequences didn’t leave, they were a part of me.

I was 18 the first time I attempted suicide, and attempted many more times in the next 13 years, until I quit drinking myself and started to make amends. I had become him. In therapy, I learned that I acted out the survivor’s suicidal rage he had manifest as violence directed outward in his denial, yet he finally attained the unconscious, denied goal of self destruction when his liver stopped working. He never allowed himself to know his demons.

I still struggle with depression at 55, and relationships are a challenge for me as I sometimes slip back into my old mindset when I’m under stress. I’m convinced I developed fibromyalgia from a lifetime of muscle tension that attacked the nerves in my myofacia, and I am further disabled from losing my right arm in my last attempt in 2004.

I’m encouraged to have found this website, and see an organized effort to help all of the wounded souls cut by wars and social misunderstanding of the consequences. Perhaps humanity will finally decide the cost of war is too great to bear any longer, and those of us with the unseen disease will stop passing on the sins of our fathers.

The first 17 years of my life were lived as a member of the Army “family” – a fact that I have spent much of my adult life trying to hide and disclaim.  I was born in 1963 and my first continuous childhood memories are of my father being in Viet Nam.  My mother was very proud of my father for his service and faithfully imparted this pride to me & my siblings.   We were raised knowing that our actions must always be considered in the context of how they might reflect upon our father.  We were always ready for inspection and in all ways we strove to do nothing to dishonor my father and the U.S. Army.  This was part of the glue that held us together and it also caused much inner turmoil for me as I grew up and yearned to extricate myself from my role and create an authentic path.  In recent years, I have been in a phase of re-visiting my childhood and my father’s service and have been seeing my life through a new lens, one that is refined with an adult’s heart and understanding.  As I have re-lived my and my family’s experiences with particular focus on the painful ones, I have found a treasure on the other side: a surprising lightness of being has come with seeing things more clearly as they really were and are.  My relationship with my family is closer than it has been in years – I feel like I can finally come home.

In the ten years since I discovered photographs my father took during his time in the European Theatre of WWII, I have been on a mission to understand how his service shaped my childhood. The ice cold, deafening silence about traumas I suffered as a very young child had created deep depression, negativity, and melancholy that was beginning to infect my young children. Read the rest of this entry »

Something has been very interesting to me over the last several years & that is how the effects of PTSD seem to be generational. I realize that there are several articles and a few studies studying this phenomena, but when it hits home that is what makes it interesting to me. I suppose that returning to Viet Nam in 2001 brought the light of knowledge to my life and how PTSD was acting like a cancer in my life, my families life & my professional life. So, I discovered that I had PTSD from the traumas in Viet Nam. My reaction was anger and distrust. I tried to drink my way to health for a while, but found it difficult to function that way so I stopped. Read the rest of this entry »

I was a war baby. My father enlisted shortly after Pearl Harbor, as did all of his friends and family.  My parents were married in May of 1942, a small home wedding, with my father in his uniform, my mother in a blue suit. I was conceived about 18 months later, probably in Cambridge, MA, where my father had been sent to teach something in the War College at Harvard. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t really remember my dad before the war. My first memory of him was at the grave of my great aunt. He was really close to her. I must have been 4 years old. I remember him kneeling at her grave crying, and when I stepped on her grave that’s when I saw the monster. After Vietnam, he was stationed in Japan, and we moved there to be with him. These are my first memories of him. He was my hero. He was a monster. He was drunk a lot of the time. After about nine months, my mom had had enough, and moved us back to Kentucky. Read the rest of this entry »