The Unseen Circle
The bonds veterans carry and the stories families may never fully know.
IImage created with ChatGPT (OpenAI), drawing inspiration from historical military photographs.
A Veterans Day Reflection
As Veterans Day approaches, I find myself reflecting on the friendships formed through military service, the bonds within families, and the experiences people carry long after their service has ended.
My father was a Vietnam veteran.
Growing up, I witnessed struggles I didn’t always understand. My father battled alcoholism, and although he continued working, raising a family, and fulfilling his responsibilities, it wasn’t easy to watch. Over the years, his drinking worsened, and there was a sense of self hatred that I could never fully explain.
My mother used to tell me about the nights he would wake up screaming. Sometimes, still caught in what appeared to be memories of Vietnam, he would physically react and unintentionally hurt her. She believed that, in those moments, he was back in the jungles where he had served.
It may sound like something you’ve heard in a movie, but for our family, it was real.
As I’ve grown older, I’ve read more about post traumatic stress disorder and how trauma can affect people long after their experiences have ended. Much of what I witnessed resembles symptoms associated with PTSD, although I cannot say with certainty what my father was experiencing.
What I do know is that he struggled, and our family struggled alongside him.
The Weight We Cannot Always See
Despite his difficulties, my father continued to provide for our family, including helping raise my autistic brother. I believe my brother gave him a particular sense of purpose, just as I believe he found purpose in the rest of us.
But I also watched his drinking become progressively worse. Looking back, I sometimes wonder whether I was witnessing a slow form of self destruction.
I have wondered what his life might have looked like without the responsibilities and relationships that gave him purpose. Would things have been different?
I cannot answer that question.
I can only speak from what I witnessed as his daughter.
Conversations That Changed My Perspective
Over the years, I’ve had opportunities to speak with veterans about their experiences, their friendships, and the people they’ve lost.
One of those veterans is my friend and collaborator, Atticus Kooser.
Through our conversations, Atticus has shared experiences of losing friends, including a recent loss to suicide and others that occurred before it.
Those conversations stayed with me because they brought me back to memories of my father.
I knew he had lost friends, including some to suicide, although he rarely discussed those experiences. I sometimes wonder what those losses meant to him and whether there were things he carried that he simply couldn’t put into words.
As a child, I saw the effects of his struggles without understanding their possible origins. As an adult, listening to other veterans has helped me consider those experiences from a different perspective.
It hasn’t given me all the answers, but it has given me a deeper appreciation for what some veterans experience and what their families may witness.
The Circle We May Never Fully Know
I would like to imagine that my father had his own circle of friends, much like the veterans I’ve spoken with over the years.
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Friends who understood things about him that perhaps we, as his family, never could. People who shared experiences, memories, and moments that didn’t require explanation.
Did he have someone he could turn to when things became difficult? Did they talk about their experiences, or did they simply find comfort in being around someone who understood?
I don’t know.
But through conversations with veterans, I’ve come to appreciate how meaningful those connections can be.
I imagine circles of friends coming together after years apart, sometimes under the saddest circumstances, to remember someone they served beside. Sharing stories, laughing at old memories, grieving together, and quietly looking after one another.
Perhaps my father experienced some of those same moments.
I would like to believe he did.
As his daughter, I knew him as my father. But before he was my father, he was a young man with friends, experiences, hopes, and struggles of his own.
There were parts of his life I never knew, and parts I may never understand.
Finding Understanding Without All the Answers
As an adult, I look back on my father’s life differently than I did as a child.
I remember the struggles, the alcoholism, and the difficult moments our family experienced. But I also remember that he continued moving forward, raising his family and fulfilling responsibilities despite what he may have been carrying internally.
Through conversations with veterans, I’ve begun to see aspects of his life through a different lens.
Not because those conversations explain everything about him. They don’t.
But they have helped me develop greater understanding and compassion for experiences I couldn’t fully comprehend when I was younger.
I can appreciate his struggles without excusing the harm those struggles sometimes caused. Both realities can exist together.
I also recognize that families and friends cannot always take away another person’s pain. We can offer compassion, listen, and be present, but we may never fully understand everything another person is experiencing.
Perhaps that is part of what growing older teaches us: that people are often more complicated than we understood them to be when we were children.
A Reflection for Veterans Day
This Veterans Day, I want to acknowledge the veterans who returned home and continued carrying experiences that shaped their lives, sometimes in ways their families could not fully understand.
I also want to recognize the families who stood beside them, who witnessed their struggles, and who sometimes carried burdens of their own.
And I want to remember the friends who are no longer here.
I would like to believe that somewhere along the way, when my father could no longer carry everything alone, there was someone in his circle who helped carry a little of the weight.
Writing this gives me some closure, but there are still so many unanswered questions. Perhaps there always will be.
What has changed is not that I have found all the answers, but that I have begun to see my father’s experiences through a different lens with greater understanding, compassion, and appreciation.
And for now, that is enough.
A Note on Collaboration and Writing
This essay grew from my personal experiences, reflections, and conversations with veterans, including Atticus Kooser, whose perspectives and collaboration helped develop its themes of friendship, resilience, and shared support.
