A Different Twist on Veterans Day

No, dear brothers and sisters, I have not achieved it, but I focus on this one thing: Forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies ahead, I press on to reach the end of the race and receive the heavenly prize for which God, through Christ Jesus, is calling us.

Philippians 3:13-14 NLT

I did not write this, my sister - our youngest sibling - wrote it, and she asked me to share it. It's dark, as memories of war usually are, but there's a light at the end of the darkness... the Light of the world.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about Veterans Day today, seeing many posts on social media to thank veterans for their service, lots of flags, pics of them together.  It’s wonderful that so many people care enough about the men and women who serve and who have served our great country for our freedom.

Let’s talk about the forgotten veterans, the ones who were spat on in the 70’s, drafted into a war they did not ask to fight, who saw their buddies killed, the ones who had to make a choice to be killed or kill the one younger than they who was holding a machine gun pointed back at them. The ones who came back… but were never the same. I didn’t see any posts about them. I didn’t see any posts about the ones suffering from PTSD or the ones living on the street. They served, too, but I didn’t see anyone mention them today. How I wish they would have cared enough to think about them, too. They served. They left their families, too. Please, God, let them not stay forgotten.

Let’s talk about the ones like my dad, the POWs tortured in enemy camps. My father was a POW for 19 months during WWII in a Japanese prison camp on the island of Luzon in the Philippines. He never came back the same, either.  As the child of a former POW, you live their nightmares with them… He can’t sleep and you can’t sleep, either, through his screams because of the memories that haunt him when he closes his eyes.  Then there would be those times he couldn’t sleep at all and would stay up for 3 or 4 nights in a row and no one could rest. There could be much more said about his torment but that would not be the point of this story.

You might think that as a child I would have felt proud of my dad, for his service, for making it home, and for being a hero, but I didn’t. I wanted him to be like everyone else’s dad, but he wasn’t. He never would be, but as a child, you don’t understand that. You just keep hoping he’ll change. He would get himself in trouble with law enforcement, and get into physical fights because he had to prove that no one would ever get the best of him again. He couldn’t hold down a job. I only knew my dad to work 2 jobs when I was growing up, 2 weeks at a tile store and 1 night at a 7-11 and it was robbed that same night. 

Between the summer of my 6^th & 7^th year of school, my dad decided he couldn’t deal with the responsibilities of married life and children, so he left.  I didn’t even cry when he left. So much of our lives were in turmoil caused by him that I was actually glad to see him go. He came back into our lives about 3 years later - a different man - but still not one I could trust to be a “daddy”. 

As he aged, his moods were much more erratic and there came a time when my brother and I had to commit him to a VA psychiatric hospital because he had hit his wife and knocked her down. There seemed to be nothing worse to me at that time than to have to visit my father there and hear him make threats to kill me for making that decision. Thankfully, after 4 months of treatment, they found a regimen of meds that kept him at an even keel, and he lived out his life without any more violent episodes. I grew to accept him for who he was until he passed away at the age of 80.   

I didn’t cry when I got the call that he had passed; I just felt a huge emptiness, the kind that makes you sick to your stomach.  I knew he was no longer being tormented in his mind, and I was very thankful for that. I thanked God for it as I was sitting in the VA chapel for his service.  I was fine until they played Taps, and then I felt the hot tears flowing down my face because of “that war” that stripped me of a father, stripped my mother of a good husband who should have loved her unconditionally, who should have provided for her and made her feel safe.  He just wasn’t able to do that because of all he had been through…

In this past year, God has done a healing in me about my father. I don’t know if it’s because I’m older and wiser or that God finally broke down the walls that have surrounded me regarding all my hidden feelings about my dad….all those things we’re not supposed to talk about.  God has shown me that my father did the best he could with all that he had going on in his mind.  Honestly, when you stop and think about it, the fact that he could function for as long as he did is absolutely miraculous. I look forward to seeing him in Heaven, complete and whole, and I can’t wait to hug him and thank him for being my dad and to tell him I love him and that I am proud of his service to our country. He is safe now; his mind is at peace.

God made a way for this miraculous, healing change in me. My prayer is that you will reach out to Him and let Him help you through your life struggles, as only He can.