My Own Vietnam War Wounds

Wartime heroics look good on a uniform, but inside, the toll they inflict on the man and on his family may impact generations. Don't claim them unless you want a helping of all that comes with it.

I don’t look down on people who never wore a military uniform or heard a shot fired in anger.  I know plenty of veterans who do, and I don’t agree with their sentiment, nor do I believe it is fair or desirable to expect everyone to serve.  In fact, I described the very unique conundrum of honoring the gallantry of military service while simultaneously recognizing that most military service over the past 79 years has taken place under the guise of national defense, fueled by the powerful forces of patriotic fervor in my recent Memorial Day article.  Free men with independent minds can honor those who fell in combat believing they were standing in the gap while reflecting constructively on leadership failures from those who know better, and in fact, the effective voicing of these divergent thoughts makes for an impressive and well-established position for future generations to learn from.

Sometimes veterans tend to treat civilians, even if inadvertently, like soldiers in a formation.  They expect them to be ultra-punctual, to jump when told to jump, and to be fit, orderly, and disciplined.  It takes some time to back down from the ledge of military living, and given enough time, most veterans reestablish some degree of order in their lives, even if they must restrain their emotions and inclinations in George Washington-like fashion.  And then there are the veterans who make it back, but never really make it back.

I was a staff officer.  My job was not to engage the enemy in direct combat, although I was prepared to do so in the event my element came under attack.  My war wounds from Afghanistan are not on par with those of many of my friends who were involved in route clearance (bomb hunting), deliberate assaults, sniper operations, or daily patrolling and door kicking.  My father, on the other hand, was an infantry officer with three tours in Vietnam, including one during the height of the fighting in the Tet Offensive.

Dad was never struck by a bullet, fragged with shrapnel, or the recipient of any physical wound that would qualify him for the Purple Heart, although he qualifies as fortunate, not sheltered from enemy fire.  He was a frontline company grade officer for all his combat time except for that in the very end, when he was promoted to Major.  He is decorated with the Vietnam Service Medal, Air Medal, two Bronze Stars, and the Combat Infantryman Badge, along with Vietnamese decorations authorized for wear.  Dad’s war was ten times deadlier than our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.

He came home for the last time in 1972, right before combat forces were pulled out in March 1973.  But he never really came back.  He lived another 38 years, more than half of his life, stuck somewhere between here and there, a world of chaos, horror, and personal tribulation.  He struggled with God all the way to the end, when he found peace with Him, and knew a darkness I can’t grasp.

Once, when I was promoted to First Lieutenant in 2009, Dad came out to Fort Hood, Texas, to watch the promotion.  He didn’t know at the time he had only nine months left to live.  He knew as well as I did the promotion to First Lieutenant (the first promotion for an officer, in most conditions) was damn near automatic, and an officer had to be a wife beater, drunk driver, or too fat to pass a fitness test to miss the promotion.  Once it became clear I couldn’t deter him from driving 400 miles to watch the ceremony, I tried to shrug off its insignificance, citing the point above.  The old man didn’t miss a beat and told me:

Son, I knew a lot of Second Lieutenants in Vietnam who didn’t live long enough to make First Lieutenant.

And that was that.  Dad watched my brigade commander pin that new bar on my uniform, and we celebrated that night.  I have never failed to recognize seemingly trivial accomplishments, for they may be the last accomplishment of an uncertain lifetime.  Here is a photo from that day, November 30, 2009:

In those last few years of his life, I know Dad was proud of me, and I believe he looks down on me from Heaven with pride today.  But that wasn’t always the case, and in my own life failures, I’ve managed to grow closer to my father.  My mother doesn’t understand why I lionize him, but he has stamped me in both good and bad and has helped mold me into the man I have become – good and bad.  I am writing this article through tears, feeling zealous for the cause of defending veterans, and reflecting on the wounds from my father – my own Vietnam War wounds passed down in the hands of time.

My siblings understood these wounds even more intensely than I do today.  Not long after he came back from that last tour, my brother Jonathon, all of 5’8” today (still calls me little brother) and a very small little boy of 3 years old in 1973, managed to get stuck in a muddy creek bed behind my grandparents’ Pennsylvania home, but was pulled to safety by his two older guardian angel siblings that accompanied him there.  The cost was a pair of brand-new rubber boots left behind, but the salvation of it all was that Jon made it out alive.

Half a century later, tales of the beating they all received on that screened-in porch are vividly seared into each of their minds.  Stripped down out of their muddy clothing, belted, struck – beaten in a terrible way.  So much so that Grandpa Keshel, who spoke German at home and was a staunch anti-Communist who immigrated with his parents as a young boy from Austria-Hungary in 1909, had to step in and stop it for the sake of the kids.

Those were their wounds, not mine.  Dad went through a terrible divorce that wound up leaving Jon and my sister Jennifer behind in the late 1970s before he met my mother.  The divorce practically destroyed his career advancement, when he had been on track with a below-the-zone promotion to Major at 29 years old to become a star – a general in waiting.  Divorce is an ugly thing, but his wounds played a major role in bringing that to fruition.  They brought about the abuse of alcohol, womanizing behavior, a lifelong addiction to gambling, and other thrill-seeking distractions from reality that bring about the death of relationships, including marriages.

By the time I came around, in 1984 and with a different mother than my four siblings, Dad had mellowed a bit.  A backhand was never far off, but the beatings gradually transformed into verbal ones, and by the time I was 4 and Jon went off to college, I was the only kid there to receive them.  To say that expectations were off the charts for me would be an understatement.  The old man went far beyond demanding my best and hoping for excellence – it was a vicarious living arrangement with pressure that made it difficult to succeed, which manifested the destruction of my confidence for many years to come, as memories of the jungle haunted him.

My mind has always been my most powerful tool, and grades came easy for me early on.  All A’s were the norm for me for most of elementary school, but the A minuses were always pointed out and focused on as areas for improvement once that manilla envelope was opened up, and around fourth grade, I dragged home my first B.  It was a,B plus, but that didn’t matter.  It was less than A, and that is exactly when I began to struggle with confidence, which extended itself into my athletic performance and how I felt about myself, a boy the same age as my son now.

With time and growth, I struggled to fit in with the other kids and put on awkward middle school weight.  My grades were fine by my standards, mostly A’s and the occasional B plus, but I discovered newfound pressure to be a great baseball player.  Baseball was something Dad and I always enjoyed together, and in his last letter to me, which I received in Afghanistan after his death, he reminded me to take my children to baseball games, and of all the life lessons and values the sport teaches – patience, persistence, strategy, precision.  The only problem was, I was terrible at it.  Fouling a pitch back to the screen was success to me in those days. Grounding out to the pitcher was great because it meant I didn’t strike out.  A seeing-eye single that snuck between the second and first basemen was the defining moment of an entire season.  I lacked the confidence necessary to find the footing to succeed in the game I loved, and I know this now because I have found that confidence, and am stronger physically than I’ve ever been, even more so than the kids who made fun of my appearance when I was younger – when I didn’t want to go swimming without a T-shirt, or ask a girl to dance.  Dad’s words cut me deep one day in middle school when he commented on my flabby appearance, and how I should be embarrassed about how I looked.

Baseball, at least in a playing sense, concluded for me when it was still the 20^th century.  In my eighth-grade year, I was playing Pony League ball, standing 6’1” and weighing in at nearly 200 pounds.  That school year was the year Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa surpassed Roger Maris’s single season home run record, and McGwire went on to set a new record of 70, beaten just three seasons later by another artificially enhanced slugger named Barry Bonds.  Dad took me to St. Louis to watch McGwire set the record, and naturally, I chose his number 25 as my own jersey number.  After all, I was a kid.  I didn’t think success meant I had to actually hit like McGwire.  My season went as all others had, full of failures, strikeouts, botched grounders in the field, and walk after walk after walk if I was given access to the mound.

One day, while I was still wearing my uniform after a game, Dad drove over to the pharmacy to pick up cigarettes.  He went into serious mode, and expressed succinctly how embarrassing it was to be the father of a boy so big, wearing Mark McGwire’s jersey number, who was one of the easiest outs on the team.  What he didn’t know was that I desired very deeply to be a great baseball player because that was what I thought it would take to make my father proud of me.  I didn’t want to strike out every at bat.  I wanted to strike fear into the opposing pitcher and watch the ball sail over the fence in deep left center field.  I just couldn’t.  I already knew I struggled with coordination thanks to a lifetime of inner ear issues and was so tall that it was difficult to coordinate the long levers of my body to play a game that requires fine motor skills to play well.

That turned out to be the last season I would ever play baseball.  I tried out in high school, but my team was a powerhouse that was nationally ranked my senior year, and I couldn’t cut it.  The coach there, now a lifelong friend, altered the course of my life by allowing me to be part of that team and use my mind for statistics and analysis.  Paul Wyczawski is largely responsible for putting me on the pathway to work as an Army intelligence officer, to believe in myself, and to strive to be better.  That developed my mind in a way that made me able to stand and fight on a worldwide stage for the things I believe in, and for what you probably know me for.

Being a huge kid, I played four years of football.  I can bench press almost 300 pounds today, but back then I couldn’t handle half my body weight.  I was big enough to get in the way (block) and started games here and there, but I was, more often than not, the huge kid that spent too much time on the sidelines, and I wasn’t good enough to play basketball, even though I was the tallest kid in school.  Football is another game about which I was reminded of my failures by my father.  And yes, the pressure kept on about my work in school, even though I was popular thanks to being part of sports teams and was the president of my junior class.  All hell broke loose when I finally brought home a C – even though it was in Honors Trigonometry.  I was pushed and pushed to continue taking the ACT, even when I got a 27 – well above average.  Once I dropped back down to 25, the old man relented.

Dad killed a lot of time and haunting memories by seeking distractions, something I’ve become familiar with on my own.  Vicksburg was less than an hour from home, and it had a Harrah’s, Ameristar, and Isle of Capri Casino stationed on the Mississippi River.  Dad preferred the Beau Rivage on the Gulf Coast, and somehow managed to have business trips booked up only in places with casinos.  We would get word at home that it was going to be a “tight month,” which was code for “Dad lost his ass at the casino and doesn’t want to say how much.”  This continued until death, and my father would intercept mail to conceal his hidden credit card all the way to the point he could no longer crawl out of bed and was too far into death’s door to be angry with.  He left Mom behind with almost no cash.

Friends remember Dad going off in the morning to “get a pack of smokes,” and then coming back after sunset, many hours later, having been down at the American Legion drinking and talking about the old times.  I lost many hours with Dad to the Legion and to many people who didn’t know the man, or that I craved his approval.

I, on the other hand, continued to press forward to earn it.  I slimmed up in 9^th and 10^th grade, and gradually thickened back up trying to “bulk up” to play offensive line in football but knew nothing about nutrition and didn’t think I could cut it in the gym, so I half-assed it.  After high school graduation, I knocked out English Composition I at a local junior college, where I met one of my best friends to this day.  I wound up with the highest grade in the class, something my Dad monitored with every weekly update, and something no one has ever asked me about, because ultimately it, like all grades or test scores, doesn’t matter.  I told him I was feeling the heat from the guy behind me in second place, and our conversation went immediately into a debate about why I never wanted to be the best.  I was 18 years old, nearly 6’6” tall, and 220 pounds, and I received a backhand across the face.  Dad and I wound up on the floor, and I was finally strong enough to restrain him.  Getting into it physically with my day-drinking Dad over grades is a dark memory in my life.

Things began to change halfway through college, at Ole Miss, where, you guessed it, expectations were high. He had convinced me I was in line to become the next great sports agent, like Scott Boras.  That would require a pristine college performance, then law school, and then the formation necessary connections and schmoozing to get a big client base.  I was working for the baseball team, on which I made lifelong friends, but the pressure was intense for grades, even though they were high my freshman year, and over 3.0 the first semester of my sophomore year.  That pressure ended by my own hand when I simply stopped caring and dragged home a 2.3 that fourth semester in college.  Subpar grades continued until I joined Army ROTC in my fourth year in school, and started to climb back up once I decided I wanted the best possible duties once I joined the service and didn’t want to wind up pushing paper in Fort Irwin.  The old man mailed it in on grades because joining the pipeline to become an Army officer made him remember the good times when he was making his own name for himself.

I believe Dad realized his own mortality at this point and began trying to make things right and be at peace with those in his life.  He became proud of me, and even though it was inspired by something conditional, it still meant the world to me, because I had spent 22 years hoping for his affirmation and approval.  In fact, it meant everything to me to have my Dad pin those gold bars on me in Oxford, Mississippi, May 9, 2008, the day I swore the Oath of Office and became a Second Lieutenant – the same oath Dad took on November 6, 1963, at Fort Benning, Georgia.  It was Dad who saved my career when it was threatened by a medical board investigating my severe hearing loss just a few months later.  I survived that board by a 3-2 vote and went on to have a successful career in which I obtained the rank of Captain, served in combat, and gained valuable life experience and resilience.

Upon returning, I carried the wounds of two wars.  Mine, and my father’s.  I didn’t know it then and couldn’t understand why I would be marred by a war that had been wrapped up for four decades, but I found it out firsthand.  I have faith in God and ultimately know that all approval comes from Him, because He thinks we are good enough – even worth the cost of his own Son to redeem.  We have value, and in fact, the fact that we are made in God’s image is the very foundation for the freedoms we Americans hold dear.

I battle these wounds daily because I am now aware of them and have had no choice but to confront them as I’ve become someone with a loud voice in a hostile world.  I have been forced to develop a thicker skin and not respond in anger every time someone has it out for me, and in my lowest moments, have found a connection with my father.  By failing, I have been able to understand his frame of mind, and how his harmful actions weren’t ones he wished to inflict on those he loved but was simply unable to restrain.  I understood why he hated the holidays, because they reminded him of the men who had been lost that year, who were memorialized around that time.  I have shared his lifelong depression around Christmas time.

I know this all too well and have paid the price for my own foolishness and failure to lead.  I referenced my own divorce last fall, which was hard for me to do because not only is it a deeply personal thing that hurts children, too, it is an admission of a failure to lead, having held too much pride to repair damage when it could have possibly been remedied, and an acknowledgement of troubles created through many self-inflicted wounds stemming from a desire for approval that I was left starving for as a very young man.  Those are the wounds of the father, and in going through hell, I understood him better, and forgave him, and truly, I had no more room to judge him when I found myself at rock bottom.  And God forgave me, too, and is busy restoring me.  Here is a very recent photo:

That is why I love and admire, and even lionize, my Dad so much.  His failures remind me of my own need to dig deep and not pass these shortcomings down the line, and his journey to peace at the end of his life serves as a reminder that we need not be chained to war wounds, or any wounds of the past.

War wounds are nothing to take lightly.  Ribbons, badges, decorations, and other awards are not the only thing combat veterans bring home with them.  They bring home pain, injuries, wounds of the physical and mental varieties, loneliness even when surrounded by a crowd, despair, depression, PTSD, and if not noticed, a string of thrill-seeking behaviors that destroys love, life, and relationships.  I will never forget when my father told me he engaged in his post-Vietnam lifestyle because without it, there was nothing that could replicate the thrill and adrenaline rush of kill or be killed that went on under those jungle canopies every single day in Vietnam.

In closing, thank you to those who have escalated this discussion about stolen valor in your ill-advised retaliatory attacks.  If you wish to claim honor, valor, gallantry, and the decorations of a war you never served in, any war - and I don’t care who you are, then please help yourself to the ailments, torments, psychological changes, and trauma that comes with it.  I judge no man who can acknowledge these realities and turn away from his destructive tendencies, but if you dishonor my father or any of our nation’s veterans and their sincere service to their brothers in arms, then I will invest every ounce of my energy in showing the world exactly who you are.