| Over the next years, I routinely shut down my recruiting office in the early
afternoon and hit the bar on post and stayed until it closed for the night. At
her wit’s end, Rose Marie tried to talk to me, tried to get through to
me, but I wanted none of it. To this day, I don’t know how or why
she put up with me through thirty years of hell. My children had grown
up, and I barely knew them. I had been no part of their lives. I
am ashamed to say this, but years later, they told me when I came home from
work, they watched to determine my mood, and they checked how I parked the
car to see how much I’d drunk that night. They had learned by the
signals I gave whether to try to engage their father in meaningful conversation
or steer clear of a drunken, unpredictable hothead.
All through the 1980s, I
slept with weapons beside the bed and under my pillow, and nightmares haunted
me every night. Horrific terrors, they were always
violent but not always centered in Vietnam. I rarely saw faces, but I
always saw fighting. Many nights, too petrified to move, I lay still
and sneaked my eyes open, afraid whatever was out there would see me move and
kill me. Sometimes, I caught a dream just when it started and forced
myself awake. Then, I got up and walked around the house awhile, but
inevitably, when I lay back down, the dream started again, right where it had
ended. It was like being forced to watch a violent, bloody video game
with a hateful, malevolent operator at the controls.
- Posttraumatic stress disorder had reduced Sidney Lee, airborne ranger
and veteran of two bloody combat tours, to a man too afraid to open his eyes
in the safety of his own bed.
|
