 Paula Elvick |
My dad was a real GI Joe. He wore his fatigues around the house all the time,
and he had a military strictness. You didn't obey the rules, you got put
in the brig. He was a lifer, a patriot, and we were brought up to "love your
country."
I don't think he would have chosen to go to Vietnam. He was a veteran of
the war in Korea. He was thirty-nine, an old guy, when they told him to go
to Vietnam. He went where they told him to go. He spoke a little Vietnamese
and lived in a Vietnamese home, so he got to know some of them pretty well.
I remember he wrote that he was sorry to be there in such a hard time because
it was such a beautiful country and such a beautiful culture. Those are the
kinds of things he wrote about. I think he was trying to protect us from
the rest.
When he came home, in 1968, we were stationed at Travis Air Force Base in
California. Everybody could see he'd changed. He was going through-I'm sure
they were stress attacks, but I don't know. They were like nightmares. He
would wake everybody up screaming. One of them was really scary. I found
him crawling in the hall. He was talking to me in another language, I guess
Vietnamese. At first I wasn't frightened, just curious what he was doing.
I thought he was awake. But then I realized that he wasn't, and I got my
mother.
He started going out to bars a lot around that time. It was extremely stressful
for all of us to see a person who used to be outgoing, boastful-you know,
happy-come back withdrawn, negative, mean, abusive, with us never understanding
why. It came to a point where I hated him and I absolutely blamed the war.
When I was twenty-eight, I moved to New York to go to law school. My father
called me the night he shot himself. He told me he missed me. He wanted to
drive to New York and get me. I told him I'd be coming home at the end of
the summer. To this day, I look back at the conversation. I didn't hear
desperation. If I had known anything about suicide at that time, I would
probably have caught some of the things he was talking about. "Did you know,"
he said, "that when you were a baby I took out an insurance policy for you
and your brother?" That was as clear as could be, but I didn't hear it. Then
I got a phone call at five in the morning saying that he was dead.
When my dad died, my mother was very ill. I had to pull the funeral together.
I went to the VA to ask for help to bury him. I took my father's briefcase
full of his commendations and his medals and stuff like that, but when I
told them he died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, they said, "The VA
won't pay for that." I was so devastated. I had to go to a private funeral
home. The day of the burial, the VA called me and said they'd made a terrible
mistake. They offered to bury him in a military cemetery with a color guard,
which is the twenty-one-gun salute and the flag and all that. I said it was
too late, I'd already paid for the plot. But I took the color guard because
I wanted him to have a military funeral.
The VA didn't give us anything. They told me that when he killed himself,
his pension died with him. It's been a hard thing for me to forgive. My baby
brother wasn't even fifteen.
I finished my law degree, but then I got suspended. That's a different story,
but I drank myself out of it. I knew I was in real trouble. My middle brother,
Pete, said he was going to be away and I could have his place in Mendocino
while he was gone to work things out. I went home to pack my things and was
all ready to come, when I got another five-in-the-morning phone call. Pete
had driven his car off a cliff. I didn't see it coming at all. He had a daughter
and a son, and he loved his kids so much.
I hit bottom about two months after that, and finally got some help. I still
go to AA meetings at the VA. My brothers and sister are all sober now too-well,
except one. He's the baby. We're working on him. Sometimes when I get together
with my sister and brothers, we go through old pictures and try to figure
out when things changed, when things started. We try to understand what they
went through, and why it was so bad that they had to take themselves away
from us. And then, what happened to us?
Vietnam-that's what happened. Before that we were a family. When my father
came back, everything fell apart.