It's still 1969

War is not what I know.   Foolish people try to write about what they haven’t experienced.

I do know war’s damage when a man comes home, secures a job, marries, and raises a family while he has Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and is not diagnosed with PTSD because in 1953, who the hell ever heard of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder?   It didn’t exist.   

Up to March 3rd, 2005, I saw that look in Dad’s face.   His face would settle into something convulsed with rage.   There is a white shine in a man’s eyes who feels the fear of years earlier in a jungle or in a ditch.   Dad had that look.   I asked him about it once.   I asked my father why he looked so scared.

Dad was standing in the garage behind his in-laws' house on Washington Avenue in Chatham, New Jersey, in 1968, and grinned widely.   Years later he told me he grinned at me when I asked him that question because he did not want me to be afraid.  

¨What’s the matter with you?¨  I had barked at him while I was holding some tools he used to fix his car.    It was a miserably hot summer day in small town New Jersey.

The answer to that question was not his answer.   It was a voice behind me.   

My maternal grandfather -- the love of my life with a pipe -- was speaking.

¨Nothing’s wrong with your Dad,¨ Eddie Gildea ruffled my long dark brown hair and poked my upper arms with his long fingers.   ¨Stop being a brat.¨

I leaned back on Eddie Gildea’s chest and felt him exhale heavily.   I smelled his pipe’s tobacco.   I heard his low, growling laugh.

Eddie Gildea wore the uniform of the United States Army in 1918 at the end of World War One, and Dad wore the uniform at the end of the Korean conflict in 1953. Both men bonded over harsh coffee and cheap cigars. Grampa -- Eddie Gildea to some, Grampa to me -- blew smoke rings for me on the front porch of his house for probably five years straight.

Eddie Gildea -- on a sunny afternoon when I know I was in 5th grade -- once rubbed my father’s forearm hard and told him to calm down.   They were both standing in the driveway of the home I lived in for many years -- a home in a well-to-do New Jersey town filled with men like my father. Veterans.

Dad died in 2005.   

Eddie died in 1971.  Eddie Gildea was a tall, lanky, lovely man who walked with a smooth stride, confident and proud.  He came from a long line of Irish-Americans hardily bred in Pennsylvania.  

He loved me because I was such a pain in the ass. He loved my older brother for being more intelligent than he was. He loved my younger sister for being independent.

Dad and Eddie raised me with patience and raised eyebrows and all the body language of absolute exasperation.  I ran to them at the Chatham train station -- Dad the commuter, and Eddie the Electrician.

I twist around in some nights, on my bed, aching to hear one of them yell at me the way they both used to yell at me.   I ran miles in my town, through the public school playground and across the Catholic School parking lot, to the public library, to the main street of stores, to the side street with the public pool.   I picked fights on those runs with ¨public school girls” who wanted to bend fists with ¨Catholic school girls.”  No one could know that I would convert to another faith in 1998.  All that mattered -- back then in the late 1960's -- was that men were behind me, and pushing me to be brave and loud and on top of a fight.   

Twice, in second grade, I walked home with bleeding lips.   Twice, in second grade, Dad and Eddie -- father and grandfather -- told me to stop complaining about being beaten up.  

Dad loved me and rolled his eyes at me.  Eddie Gildea laughed at me and hauled me back from a scuffle with his long, strong hands.  At least two times a year, sometimes three, Eddie’s son -- my Uncle Jack -- showed up to hang around for 2-3 weeks and tell far too many jokes.

I was raised by men.   More to the point, I was raised by men who expected me to make myself known to others standing around me.   Dad, Eddie, and Jack did not like wallflowers, and so, I was not a wallflower.

I do not think the 3 of them knew that I worshiped them.   That’s okay.   I kept them on their toes.

How impossible it is to raise girls now.   

In the 1960s, with the world screaming about and the country torn apart by a war in Vietnam,  my father, my grandfather, and my uncle sat in the living room of my childhood home one weekend day and talked about how they would send my brother to Canada.    I heard them all say ¨Canada¨ several times, with sadness in their voices.  With anger in their voices.  That afternoon, it was a lovely sunny day outside.  

All of them, veterans.  All of them knowing the truth about war.   The three of them not wanting my older brother to go ¨serve in a war that was not protecting our country.¨    I was 10 years old.  

My older brother never needed to face the plots of my older male relatives.   His age, a terrible childhood injury, and the end of conscription saved him from Vietnam.  

30 years later, my father had lost his older sister to an accidental death, and was fighting off a fresh hit of prostate cancer.

Life should be preserved when a war is not saving life.   Uncle Jack served in World War II and proudly knew that he and hundred of thousands of other men had saved the world.   

Dad came home -- chopped up and scarred -- knowing that it no longer mattered who ruled Korea when the front was hell on earth and young men next to him in a M.A.S.H. tent were screaming in pain.

I remember the glaze in my father’s eyes.   I wish that PTSD was a recognized condition in 1953.   It was not, and so I was not raised by a man who had support and love and patience about his suffering.  He did not have those emotions surrounding him from caring family because he fled family and did not tell them that he needed their support.  His siblings and cousins had no way of knowing that he was so damaged.   I knew that he saw a Chinese soldier’s head nearly severed from the neck, and that he shoved a young North Korean or Chinese teenager off his back as the kid tried to gouge his right eye out in the middle of the night in a muddy trench, and then promptly stabbed the teenager and killed him.

My father did horrible things to stay alive and come home and make me.

I don’t know if I can explain that to anyone.   So, I won’t try to explain.