My father was a hero in the war.
He was a flier and he got a medal.
He lost his stomach to an ulcer fifteen years later.
That didn’t kill him either.
That was when I was thirteen.
I remember his cries and screams in his sleep no matter how much he drank to try to silence them.
That was when I was twenty-one or so, a quarter century after the war.
He used to wake me when I was home from college.
I am almost forty now.
Last night I went to bed late.
He doesn’t scream anymore.
Now he only mutters and groans.
But I can still tell that he is dreaming of Messerschmitts and nightmare bursts of flak that were a part of his daily life in war.
As a child he told me all about it. I learned all about it at my fathers’ knee.
He flew in B-24’s. No one knows what they are anymore.
I didn’t fight in Viet Nam.
I had learned at an early age that war makes madmen, cripples, addicts, and corpses.
My father was a hero in the war.
I wasn’t.
I hope my son understands.
Fall 1987