Screams in the Night

It was the story I didn’t want to hear, but I’m so grateful that I did.

As the years go by, I keep learning things about my late parents that amaze me. Of course, it’s not terribly surprising, since as kids we tend to worship our parents.

We learn more about our folks as we move into adulthood and realize that they were just people, not superbeings who never knew fear or doubt, but mere mortals who were doing the best they could.

A few years ago, my aunt told me that my mother had seen Frank Sinatra at the Paramount Theater in the 1940s.

I always knew that she was a fan of Ol’ Blue Eyes, but I had no idea she had been a bobby soxer, the name of Sinatra’s virtual army of teen-aged fangirls who were known to wear the ankle high hosiery.

It’s hard to imagine my mom shrieking “Frankie!” along with an auditorium full of her swooning contemporaries, but she wasn’t my mother yet. She wasn’t even an adult, so she had every right to enjoy this moment.

I got such a kick out of this story and I’m glad my aunt shared it with me.

However, these discovers can take a darker turn, as I learned on Thanksgiving Day.

We were having dinner at a restaurant in Manhattan this year and on my way to the subway station, I called my brother in Denver to wish a happy holiday.

The conversation weaved all over the place and somehow, we started talking about father, who had fought in Europe in World War II.

We talked about the trauma that invariably results from being in combat, as you watch your friends die all around you and wonder if you’re going to be next.

Toughing it out

There was limited understanding of trauma at this time, and long-term support for returning soldiers was largely nonexistent. War-scarred veterans heard useless cliches like “bite the bullet” and “make the best of it” instead of getting help.

And during our conversation, my brother told me something about my father and two uncles I had never heard before.

All three of them had served overseas and they had moved back into the family apartment in Upper Manhattan when they returned home.

And all three of them suffered such terrible nightmares in those early days that they would wake up screaming.

On one level, it’s not at all surprising. They’d all been through the absolute worst kind of hell, so you can’t expect anyone to shrug those experiences off like they’d never happened.

But it breaks my heart to think of my father suffering like this and receiving little or nothing in the way of help.

As a kid I thought my father was some kind of superman but as I grew older, we butted heads over a lot of things. Hearing this story now, I feel so selfish and ungrateful. If I had known that he had suffered so much, I would like to think I would’ve been more understanding.

But then I don’t know what war is. I’ve seen the movies, read the historical accounts, but I have no idea what it’s really like.

This country is becoming more warlike every day, with the current adiministration going so far as to resurect the old "War Department" handle and blasting speedboats out of extistence.

I have special contempt for the people I like call The We Brigade—that clique of loudmouths who bravely send other people into battle while sitting on their asses in front of their computers or shoving their faces on TV to bloviate about how “we” need to fight.

I heard it during the Vietnam War and again during the fiasco known as the War in Iraq.

And now we’re hearing rumblings about a possible invasion of Venezuela…or Greenland…or Canada…or the Gaza Strip.

If that happens, you can be sure The We Brigade will be out in full force, thousands of miles away from the fighting.

And you can also be sure that when those soldiers come home, there'll be a lot of screaming in the night.