Christal’s Story

I am a survivor of Vietnam, although born in 1978, three years after the end of the war.  My father was drafted when he was 18, the same year as the Tet Offensive.  He served in the United States Army for two years, and was in Vietnam for one of those years.

My father was diagnosed with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in 1986, when I was ten.  He had to stop working soon thereafter.  His nerves couldn’t take being around people.  His hands shook too much to hold onto a welder’s torch.  He spent my childhood locked in his bedroom for days at a time, curled up like a baby, his eyes big and wild. I locked myself in my bedroom too, and took refuge in a dark closet.  I read by the light of a Glowworm he had given me for my birthday.

I was not allowed to mention the war, though it lingered all around me.  On the few occasions when my family did go out to restaurants, I prayed no one would drop a spoon.  Any little sound, and my father went berserk.  Every day, I was afraid for my life because of his uncontrollable rage.  He constantly threatened to take his own life too.

“It’s not his fault.  Not his fault.  Not his fault,” my mother whispered over and over, as if she could convince herself the more she said it.  Then she whispered the unspeakable:  “It’s Vietnam.”

As time passed, I spoke to my father less and less.  I left home for good the minute I could, and didn’t look back.

I soon found that I had not only inherited my father’s deep brown eyes and wrinkled forehead, but also his nervous energy and anti-social behavior.  I felt alone in the world.  There was no one else out there like me.  Or was there?

After years of therapy, prescription drugs, and older men to fill the gaps—twenty years after my father received his own diagnosis of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder—my doctor acknowledged that I too was experiencing symptoms of PTSD.  I was 31 years old, and had never been to war.  Yet there was a war within me.

It was time to confront my demons.  But to do that, I would have to confront my father.  I could no longer hide from a war that ended before I was born, or from the aging man I called my father but whom I barely knew.

In November of 2009, I persuaded my father to talk to me for thirty days.  I would ask him about his past, his fears, and the anxiety he carried with him.  I would ask him about Vietnam.  He could ask me questions too.  For the first time in my life, I would finally try to know and understand my father, and in doing so, understand myself.  My forthcoming memoir, Soldier’s Heart: Thirty Days with My Father, is the story of those thirty days.

More than anything, I hope that my family’s experiences can help others to heal, and that this blog can heighten public awareness about intergenerational PTSD.