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Originally Posted by SykkBoy
I might check it out just for that
my father-in-law's whole body (insides and out) are rotting away from the effects of Agent Orange...
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He's now playing the songs they listened to back then.
Few things made my father get "that" facial expression like the one he had when he talked about "they had this stuff they dropped on the jungle...that stripped every tree, everything green..." (When he was walking across the living room and his arm just split open and started to bleed and I freaked, he merely looked down, shrugged and said "jungle rot. That happens." The man wasn't given to astounded facial expressions.)
I will always believe that Vietnam killed my father. It just waited to do it. He died of multiple cancers, internally and externally. He was a classic delayed stress syndrome. Fifteen years after he came back the second time, he finally told me a story that had something exploding. (Of course, it was his unit blowing up their own equipment so the enemy couldn't use it, one of his friends cutting the primer cord too short and learning to fly. Hard landing, though.) He began to degrade phsychologically. My mother used to wait until he was out of the house to show off his medals. He couldn't stand to look at them.
One of my most treasured, irreplaceable posessions is a small, black and white photograph of a "half-track" that my father stenciled my name on.