It was my twelfth birthday. I decided to wait up until midnight, hoping he would call. I wanted to give him every last pIt was my twelfth birthday. I decided to wait up until midnight, hoping he would call. I wanted to give him every last possible moment to remember. As the clock struck twelve, I sobbed.
Thirty-three years later, on my 45th birthday, I waited up again.
I had just celebrated with my dear friend Paulie, his amazing wife, and their two joyful sons. They bought me a cake, ordered my favorite Pittsburgh pizza, and sang to me with a love only the healthiest and happiest of humans can evoke. After arriving home that night, I noted that my dad had forgotten my birthday again. Over the years, he had missed many, so this was no surprise. The surprise was in my response.
There I was, a grown man, crying like a little boy.
Corporal Russell Paul Davies
My dad has his issues, but none so severe as the PTSD resulting from his service in Vietnam. When the draft was implemented, he was a rising senior at Augsburg University. A math major, at 6’ 3” and 235 pounds of muscle, he was also a wrestler poised to start at heavyweight. He had every right to dodge the draft and every reason to stay in school.
Proclaiming patriotism, my dad discarded it all and decided to enlist in the Marines.
Once in boot camp, his physicality was celebrated. He thrived and graduated first in his class. He passed on the opportunity to attend officer school, choosing immediate combat instead. He was offered a rare role in Recon where his duties were dominated by sneaking behind enemy lines in small groups and calling in coordinates for napalm and mortar attacks. Although he rarely shares, the bits and pieces of the stories offered are unsettling and scary. Timelines are blurred; details are dim. But the sentiment is always the same–an inebriated invincibility coupled with a tribal sense of belonging. My dad went into the Marines as just a boy, but emerged with a deeply internalized masculinity molded perfectly for jungle warfare but fundamentally flawed for civilian life.
Interestingly, my dad doesn’t bemoan his time in boot camp or combat. In fact, fighting in Vietnam as a Marine may have been the time in his life when he felt most alive. My dad didn’t just survive Vietnam. He thrived there.
It was the coming home that did so much damage.
Flying back from Vietnam in his dress blues, my dad believed he was a hero. His Marine masculinity was seared in his soul and manifested in his svelte body and crisp military regalia. He was proud. He had never felt like more of a man. He was waiting for his proverbial parade, not just for his service but also for the human he had become. I can see him sitting straight up proudly and innocently perceiving the other passengers’ gazes as positive. He was a winner awaiting his applause.
Then, a flight attendant chose to spit on him.
That drop of saliva on his lapel proved a bullet that pierced his soul and fissured for a lifetime his sense of self. Of all my dad experienced and endured during his tour, he returns to that moment on his plane ride home more than any other. It set him on a path that included never graduating from college, multiple marriages, a proclivity toward violence, suicide attempts, financial struggles, and strained relationships with his children.
His homecoming honeymoon lasted no more than a few hours. It’s been mostly hell for him ever since.
A victim of his time in the Marines, almost two decades ago, he was diagnosed by the Veterans Administration as 75% disabled due to PTSD and deemed 100% unemployable. Since then, with the help of medicine and his embrace of counseling, my dad has become a fantastic grandfather and great-grandfather, is soon to celebrate twenty years with Kathy, and his business ventures are thriving. Late in his seventies, he is becoming the best version of himself.
May we all be able to say the same.
A Christmas Miracle
Eight months after my 45th “boo-hoo” birthday, I had the opportunity to travel home to Minnesota for Christmas to surprise my siblings. It would be the first time we had all been together in the same place in well over a decade. It was a wonderful and rare reunion of brothers and sisters who had been spread all around the globe. While navigating our nieces and nephews’ post-gift opening euphoria, complete with inner-ear-rattling screams of delight and blood-sugar-induced mood swings, my younger sister suggested I surprise Dad the next day.
I hadn’t seen him in years, and as I drove to his house, I wasn’t bitter. I wasn’t excited. The visit was like a line item on my to-do list. With an unflattering sanctimoniousness, I saw it as charity. Father philanthropy. It felt like the right thing to do.
I knocked on the door, and when my dad opened it, he no longer towered over me. His 6’3” frame had shrunk to 6’1”. Quite the physical miracle—my brother believes he has consumed so much processed food that the preservatives inside him have made him immortal—he looked healthy. But he also appeared old, like a senior citizen I had not met before.
For the first time as an adult, I didn’t view my dad through a lens of criticism. I felt like such a failure at that time in my own life that I just didn’t have the energy to judge anyone else. Turns out that it’s tough to look down on others when you’re already flat on the floor yourself. I immediately viewed my dad not as a father who had fallen short, but rather as a fellow flawed human. Two imperfect people living imperfect lives. Turns out we are not so dissimilar in our struggles. The judgment was gone, and a grace took its place.
That’s what I saw when my dad opened the front door to my childhood home, but what really caught my attention was what I heard.
Almost two decades ago, only days after my buddy Craiger celebrated the birth of his daughter, I asked him what it was like to hold her for the first time. “Like everything just changed. Everything. Like nothing is any longer the same,” he shared with a calm conviction. Turns out his second-to-none love proves true even if you are an epic failure at remembering birthdays.
When I heard my dad exclaim my name with such joy, I felt his powerful, unequaled love for me. My sister caught it on video, and I trust that one day down the road when we lay him to rest, I’ll pour a bourbon or three and watch it and weep. I’ll mourn it all, but because of what is captured on film, I’ll never doubt my dad’s love for me.
I am his son.
Next, he came in for a hug. If there is one thing my dad is good at, it is hugging. He squeezes hard and is never the first to let go. I felt a peaceful resignation as I patted him on the back. My internal dialog sounded magnanimous and even lighthearted: Hey, he’s done his best. He’s still a hot mess. But so am I, and here we are. So let’s hug it out and then go split a frozen pizza.
And just like that, my daddy issues were gone. I hadn’t prayed for them to go away. I hadn’t done work with my counselor about them. They had just been there in a super heavy box that I had been dragging around for decades, compromising every aspect of my life. But, on that frigid front porch, upon seeing an old man reduced in stature, hearing my name in an octave of joy that only a parent could deliver, and being held as a little boy by a father who refused to let go, my daddy issues disappeared.
It was a Christmas miracle.
All forgiven? Not really; but I just don’t have the interest, time, or energy for all of that.
All forgotten? Not really; but I just don’t have the interest, time, or energy for all of that either.
Still, a miracle enough for me.
All is not perfect, of course. After all, my dad remains annoying to me on a nervous-system level. He talks as he chews with his mouth full of food, to the point that being at dinner with him feels like a Matrix movie. Instead of Neo dodging the sentinels’ bullets, it is my family and me avoiding barely chewed pieces of his Salisbury steak TV dinner being obliviously launched across the dinner table. A man who three times has confidently proclaimed that the collapse of our banking system was imminent, his politics are unnervingly anchored in conspiracy theories. Worst of all, he recently told me that my once athletic booty has disappeared. High crimes!
But, he ain’t all bad. The man can bench press like a boss, do mental math like a savant, and with ample food and ammunition at the ready, in case of a zombie apocalypse, he’s a good guy to know. Best of all for my siblings and me, he has an uncanny ability to convince wonderful women to love him.
He’s my dad.
From Slovenia to Vietnam
Fast forward another ten months after that surprise Christmas reunion.
To Slovenia.
I’ve known two people who have served in the special forces. The first was my father. The second is my Slovenian friend, Scott.
Scott is actually from Australia and served a full career in the SAS, or the Australian army’s special forces unit. Their Navy SEALS. Their Army Rangers.
What impresses me most about Scott is not his military résumé. It’s the inner work he has done. Scott has suffered life’s sucker punches like the rest of us, not least of which is his own enduring, ever-present PTSD. In response, he has looked inward to heal and grow. Now, both super tough and super tender, he has evolved into an extraordinary human. And he’d argue otherwise, which only further proves my point.
This is all to say, when Scott speaks, I am inclined to listen.
Considering my respect for him and his extensive combat experience, over a cold beer at the top of a Slovenian mountain, I asked Scott what my dad might have experienced in Vietnam. Scott calmly answered my questions and, in doing so, helped me better understand the complex emotions experienced during armed conflict and their long-term consequences. Scott understood my dad and also the dysfunction I described as present within our family. Through Scott’s eyes, I saw my dad then and my dad now with more clarity and compassion.
As our post-summit celebration drew to a close, I shared how my family and I had always dreamed of returning to Vietnam with my dad. We hoped, perhaps too idealistically, for a Hallmark moment where we could all come together in the power of place and stare in the face of that chapter of his life. We’d tell it to fuck off, and also forgive it. And then, we’d hug our dad until he let go first. We would hold both the 21-year-old little boy who went to Vietnam ready to die and the 75-year-old man who returned to lay that little boy to rest.
Scott took his last sip of Slovenian Lasko, set down his glass, and asked, “So, when are you going? And if not you to make it happen, then who?”
And just like that, on a Slovenian mountaintop, my family’s trip to Vietnam was set in motion.
Tomorrow we meet in Da Nang.
Da Nang’s airport code?
DAD.