My father died Sunday night

[VA_Jill]

92. So sorry for your loss

My dad was a WWII veteran (officer in the U.S. Navy) and a brilliant man who later became a university professor and taught several generations of students, retiring at last from the chairmanship of the Geography department at University of Tennessee. In his later years he suffered from dementia and it was tragic to see this brilliant man lose first his sense of humor and then his comprehension of his surroundings and the world about him. He died 4 years ago of congestive heart failure at the Veterans Home in Knoxville, which is a fantastic place as such places go. He rarely talked about the nitty-gritty of his military service, preferring instead to focus on the people he served with and the places he saw, but after his death my daughter and her husband found his flight log book with descriptions, including where he had flown over Hiroshima and Nagasaki days after the bombings. None of this was in the memoir he wrote and had privately published for family about 12 years before he died. It's pretty harrowing, I gather, though I have yet to see it. It's no wonder he did not talk about it.

Now my son is dealing, or in his case NOT dealing, with PTSD from 2 tours in Iraq. He was always a sensitive kid and I worried when he enlisted in the Army. He went the National Guard route and was doing fine until Shrub started the Iraq thing and he had to go. He even did reasonably well with his first tour, up in Kurd country where things were quiet and about as safe as they're going to get in a country at war. It was the second tour that got him. He either won't or can't talk about it, but he is getting worse instead of better. I am afraid that one day he will not come to the door.