Through The Eyes

War is something that you read about in textbooks, not something that you will ever have to experience first hand. This was the belief of a young man from Long Island, until the United States Army drafted him in the year 1969.

He was faced with the decision of whether to go to a country thousands of miles away from his newlywed wife or to dodge the draft by going to Canada. Opting not to move to Canada and not wanting to go to war, he deliberately tried to fail his physical seven different ways, none of which worked. Out of the seven guys he hung out with, six of them, including himself, were sent to a country called Vietnam.

How do I answer a question like that? It totally caught me off guard and I did not want to say the wrong thing. That was the most profound question I have ever been asked and I learned more about my father with that one question than some people learn about theirs in a lifetime.

As most children of Vietnam Veterans will tell you, there is, or at least was, a general awkwardness about discussing the war. It was a subject that we were all aware of but rarely discussed. I saw first hand the effects of the war at an early age but I was too young to understand the deep psychological wound that was still near the surface.