Quote:
|
Originally Posted by MorganGrayson
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.
|
My father-in-law got the skip the jungle rot, but his insides are basically melting...he often talks of "I was killed in Vietnam, my body just isn't quite aware of it yet". My father was "lucky" in that he managed to avoid being in the affcted areas, but his tradeoff was the Tet Offensive....
My father-in-law is going through the mental degradation stages as well. It's getting harder and harder to be out in pubhlis with him and little things set him off and not in that stereotypical Crazy Vietnam Vet way either...it's getting tougher and tougher to deal with as the years go by. Even with my divorce nearly final, my inlaws are great people who will always have my respect, especially my mother-in-law who's endured dealing with this for so many years.