Returning Home: Wounds Seen and Unseen

---

When my father returned home from Vietnam, I'm told he didn’t come back as the same man who had left. No one does, they say. Combat changes people.

He didn’t talk about these things.
He simply carried them.

I’m certain my father would not approve of me writing this story. He never wanted attention, never wanted his experiences pulled apart, and certainly never wanted anyone making assumptions about what he carried inside. Yet everything I’ve written comes from a lifetime of watching him, trying to understand him, and—later in my own life—studying the human behaviors and emotional scars they say that wars leave behind. While on the outside he used humor as his main method of communicating, those that knew him understood he was a soldier in a world that was different from where he came form.

For most of my life, I couldn’t connect with him. I loved him deeply, but I often asked myself why—because he wasn’t able to give much back. His distance, his silence, his temper, and his emotional walls shaped our relationship more than any words ever did. It took decades of growing up, learning, maturing, and confronting my own patterns before I could see the man behind all of that.

The complexity of who he was became the starting point for my fascination with human nature. For nearly twenty years I have studied people—emotional intelligence, trauma, communication, and how to view the world from someone else’s perspective. That work changed my life. It helped me lead, parent, build companies, and—most importantly—understand my father in a way I never could as a younger man.

Even now, I’m not sure if writing about how he felt is arrogant, unjustified, or simply the closest anyone can get to honoring him. He never explained himself. But I believe he would want his story preserved—even if he wouldn’t want the spotlight—because his life mattered, and his sacrifices shaped everyone who came after him.

In his final weeks, we didn’t talk about the war. We didn’t talk about medals, missions, or anything found in these chapters. What we did talk about, briefly and unexpectedly, was us. Before the surgery he feared he might not survive, he asked me to come back to the hospital. He had his last rights given to him by the priest, he made good with god and he wanted to tell me he loved me. He said he was sorry, he knew he was hard on me, that his temper was a fault he knew, he wasn’t always there for me and always wanted to do better. He wasn’t looking for forgiveness, he just didn’t want it left unsaid—not for any specific action, but for the things he knew, deep down, were never his intentions. As far as I can remember, my father said “I love you” twice in his life—both near the end.

He made his peace.
And I think I found mine.

The man I never had a strong connection with was the person I always wanted to live up to. He never pushed me to join the military. I never knew why. He was a proud soldier, but it was a subject we never discussed. Only now, with years of perspective, do I think I understand: he didn’t want his son walking the same hard road he had walked. Silence was his way of protecting me. Whatever regrets, demons or sorrows he had are gone now, he is resting in peace.

This book is not written to judge him. It is written to understand him—finally, fully, and honestly—and to honor the man he became despite everything he carried.

The most visible wound—the one the Army documented—was his blown eardrum, the result of a landmine explosion. One of his men stepped on a mine, and the blast wave tore through his head and internal structures instantly. His hearing was damaged for the rest of his life.

It changed how he interacted with the world.

He struggled to hear conversations.
He misread tones and cues.

He often seemed distant, not because he was uninterested, but because sound simply no longer reached him the same way.

To others, it looked like emotional distance.

To him, it was a daily reminder of the blast that could have killed him.

He never complained. He tried to use humor to mask challenges.

He also carried chronic pain, stiffness, shoulder surgeries and nerve issues from the physical strain of Vietnam—long patrols, improper sleep, carrying heavy gear, riding in vibrating helicopter frames, and the toll of repeated concussive blasts. But he never presented these as injuries. He treated them as normal.

That was how his generation lived:
If you were breathing, you were fine. I remember he was never hot, never cold, never tired and food was never bad. You ate what was put in front of you, you never left a light on, there was a standard operating procedure and sequence for everything and if you weren’t 10 mins early you were 15 minutes late. Lying was punishable by the hand, telling the truth was handled the same way. There was right, there was wrong and he served as judge, jury and executioner based on years of harsh military justice served in the field not by a JAG officer or command.

I remember my sister and I having to man a post at the entrance of our bedrooms if he caught a light left on. If we said we didn’t know who turned it on we had to stand our post to ensure no one turned it back on.

In the famous words of Col Nathan Jessup in “a Few Good Men” son we live in a world that has walls, And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a child who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it.

I’m over dramatising the words of my father but I have heard years of speeches that sum up to those of Col. Jessup.

One story he did tell me was about walking into a barracks, yelling at his men, and dragging them outside to show them a single cigarette butt on the ground. He wanted to know exactly how the $%&@ a cigarette butt died in the field outside his barracks. They were going to give it a proper, respectful burial. He made them dig a grave—six feet by six feet by six feet, with clean, straight walls—and they buried that butt in a proper military manner. No one enjoyed it, and no one forgot it.

The next day he walked back in carrying a headstone. He asked which direction that cigarette’s “head” faced. The men froze. Confused and scared, they pointed in different directions. Wrong answer. They spent the entire day digging and sifting through the six-by-six-by-six grave until they found the cigarette butt. Then they prepared the site again for inspection then reburied it the way he demanded.

Lessons from him were never subtle. Work ethic, respect for time, and a hard line between right and wrong were drilled into me the same way. I’m not perfect, but there are lessons I've never forgotten, and they shaped a large part of my life good or bad.

If you understand where it comes from you learn to respect it. He was right in his view on the reality of the world we live in, especially today.

They say war doesn’t leave you when you return home.
It follows you.

Into marriages.
Into parenting.
Into daily routine.
Into every relationship.

My father struggled to connect at home because emotional vulnerability was a luxury Vietnam never allowed him. He raised children the way he lived in combat—direct, tough, practical, mission-focused. There were no soft edges, because softness in the jungle got men killed.

But discipline doesn’t translate cleanly from a warzone to a household. The world he lived in after the war was one of small interactions—conversations, relationships, emotions—and none of it resembled the world he had just left.

He wasn’t cruel.
He wasn’t cold.
He was wounded in ways the era refused to acknowledge.

His marriages struggled under the weight of it.
His sense of purpose was fractured.
His ability to express love came in forceful, structured forms rather than tenderness.
He was not raised for softness.
He was raised for war.

It took me decades to understand that his distance was not a lack of love.
It was the only way he knew how to function through the noise and silence left behind by combat.

Later in life, the war returned in a different form:
MDS — Myelodysplastic Syndrome.

A rare blood cancer.

A slow decay of the bone marrow.

A disease strongly linked to Agent Orange, explosive residue, and prolonged exposure to the toxins of war.

It was the final act of a war he fought decades earlier. His service followed him into the one battlefield he could not fight his way out of.

Not once.

Not about the pain.
Not about the disease.
Not about the discomfort of his environment.
Not about the hardships of raising a family.

To him, life after the military wasn’t difficult.
Not compared to what he had already survived.
Not compared to the men who didn’t come home.

While plenty of veterans cursed the VA, my father never did. He loved the VA. Those were his people. They understood rank, honor, and war. In his final years, what frustrated him most was that ambulances wouldn’t take him there. They took him to local hospitals instead. He’d end up spending weeks, sometimes months, surrounded by people who didn’t understand him at all.

The staff had tattoos, pink hair, piercings. They didn’t say “sir.” They got irritated when he couldn’t hear them and directed everything to his wife. She took excellent care of him, but he needed more than care. He needed to be treated like a man, an officer, and a veteran by people who spoke the same language of service and wore the same uniform as he did.

He handled it the way he handled everything—one task at a time, one day at a time, stoic to the end.

His silence wasn’t a void.

It was armor.
It was discipline.
It was the price of survival.

The war shaped his life, and in turn, it shaped mine.