I always had a difficult relationship with my father. As a child, I would wander through stores at the local mall with my older sister, trying desperately to find something that he would truly appreciate (which was always an exercise in futility). In retrospect, I think my childish attempts to find a way to please him were symptomatic of a far deeper problem…my inability to understand him and the things he did.
My father was career military. He joined the United States Army at a shockingly young age, lying about his date of birth to be accepted. He spent more than 23 years serving his country, starting out in Texas working on trucks and training military dogs, serving in the Military Police and attending college to become an officer and moveup into the Criminal Investigation Division (CID). He served in both Korea and Vietnam, eventually returning to the United States and working at various bases aross the country with us in tow…from Georgia to Maryland to Alaska to Massachusetts, with other states in between. We went to a new school every couple of years, until we finally ended up in the Midwest, where he went to work in Campus Security for one of the state universities when he retired.
During his time in Vietnam, my mother took us back to her country…the Netherlands. I was 3 at the time, and I remember my older sister pretending to call him on a wooden block set she made look like a phone receiver. At the time, I thought he was her father and not mine, because I no longer had any memory of him. The only contact I had with him was the toys he sent me during my frequent trips to the hospital for childhood ailments.
When he came back into our lives, I had a difficult time adjusting. My mother told me that each morning I would run into their bedroom and attack him in a rage for being there (which I have absolutely no memory of). I do recall that I was frightened of him…this tall man with his stony exterior and his occasional outbursts of anger. I still didn’t feel as if he were my dad.
Our difficulties persisted inro my high school years. To his outrage, he now had a daughter who answered him back…and had dramatically different opinions than his own, especially regarding the United States of America and its involvement in the civil war in Vietnam. He was convinced that the U.S. had acted in the best interests of the people. I was convinced it had not. We had violent arguments, one of which ended with his throwing his medals away in a fit of anger. He was convinced that the war in Vietnam was making the world a safer place for his children…and I was too young to understand why.
I had no idea, of course, of how Americans greeted the surviving soldiers on their return from Vietnam. According to my mother, people had sworn at them and spit on them. I had no idea that celebrities had gone to Vietnam and denounced their own countrymen for participating in the Vietnam War (in spite of the fact that the majority of them were drafted). After reading about the Vietnam War as an adult, my opinions radically changed. Yet I never had the chance to tell him this, because he died of a brain tumor (probably linked to the Agent Orange that was sprayed on the vegetation during military operations) when I was a young woman.
I wish now he had pointed me in the direction of other sources than the radical writings I perused, but we were never good at communicating with one another. He never liked to talk about the war, either, releasing only tidbits of information that remain puzzles to this day.
If I could speak to him now, I would apologize for my adolescent thoughtlessness…and have more respect for his loyalty to the only institution that ever took care of him…the United States Army. After learning what I have about his childhood from his only brother, I think it would be easier for me to understand his anger, as well. I would appreciate the struggles he must have endured to raise a family at a very young age and take care of his wife to the end of his life…especially when his own parents’ marriage had been such a short and miserable failure, and their parenting had been so poor. He really never had a role model to base his fatherhood on. Maybe I could finally give him something he would really like for Father’s Day…an appreciation of everything he did for us and his country, in spite of the tremendous challenges he faced in a life that ended too soon.
Woman In The Middle 
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