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An identity missing in action

From a distance, my father’s history is blurred. It doesn’t take shape until you draw closer and see that he’s experienced war and that it’s left his body disabled. It’s not until you hear his stories you begin to understand what war has done to him.

At the age of 16, curiosity and teenage rebellion drew me into a search for my father’s history. He was never the typical peewee-coaching, go-get-’em-tiger father. Yet his identity as a veteran helped form my identity.

I knew the songs on the radio that reminded him of the war. I knew bullets would pull apart skin and leave long pink lines with staple-pocked edges. I knew the dark was something worth fearing.

I wanted to know where he’d been, where he’d served. I mounted an online search, throwing his name to an Internet reunion group and hoped for a response.

It wasn’t the war I was searching for. I was searching for my father at a different time and place. By finding those who knew him before, the man he had become could be reconciled with his losses.

It turns out even I couldn’t anticipate the response.

A battle action report steeped in technical language arrived with a cryptic note attached warning me of a “can of worms,” if I searched too far. I was stunned, and though the document was official, it offered no names, just an official report of where, when and how.

It wasn’t until a month later that a man from Texas found me and sent me an e-mail.

“I was in Ft. Hood and Vietnam with your father, we were in the same company.”

A lump developed in my throat.

“I was wounded on the same day your dad was wounded. He was wounded so bad and some how found the courage to make it back to safety, most people would have given up. I was on the med evac with him, he couldn’t even talk and I asked him how he was doing, all he could do was give me the thumbs up.”

At the dinner table that night, I considered telling him. I actually wanted to yell across the table that I had found his missing link. I had found the people he’d never searched for himself. I had made the connection for him.

I held back and planned for a better time. Perhaps tomorrow. Perhaps at Christmas. Perhaps as an adult, when I could trust my own words and be strong enough to ask direct questions.

As it turns out, the same man who e-mailed me saved me from planning for a better time. He had been searching for my father, too.

My mother answered and put the phone in my father’s hands.

He sat unmoving at the edge of his bed. In between the occasional yes and no, words of the war were spoken in a way even my mother had never heard.

My father was known as much for his dry sense of humor as he is now. He was known as the “old man” because he was in his late 20s when he was drafted into a company of 18- year-olds. He would pop out his dentures to make people laugh, which was the same trick he used to entertain his children.

My father would not be who he is without war, but his identity is not the war. He won’t allow himself to be identified that way.

No one wants to be defined by their most frightening moments, because it’s the survival that follows that is the most important. Forty years later, my father is still a story of survival.