My dad, a Field Artillery Forward Observer, served in Bosnia as part of a peacekeeping mission after the end of their civil war. His job was to collect and demilitarize the explosives from the assorted combatants. I was seven years old while he was gone. That assignment was the one that changed my relationship with my father for the next fifteen years. My dad, the funny, happy man who would make paper airplanes and rough house with me and my brothers, did not make it back. The shell of my father returned, filled with a man plagued by memories, but my dad died in Bosnia. It took a very long time to understand what had happened and why my dad’s personality had changed. My dad and consequently my family are just one example of the heroic victims of military service for the United States.
In 1995, my mom gave me an eight ball. I thought that it would tell the truth every time, for every whispered question. My dad was off serving in a country I could never remember the name of. We would periodically get letters from him. One summer night, I snuck out into the yard with my prized eight ball for it to work its prophetic power. “Dear eight ball; is my dad going to come home?” a vicious shake sent it on its journey into truth seeking. The small triangle flashed stripes of white as it swirled around in the murky unknown. The answer floated lazily into view, ‘No. Not Likely’. Fear erupted into tears as the eight ball landed in its grave in the compost pile. The eight ball had lowered its sentence with a death knell. Mom found me crying on the back step a few minutes later and soothed away with the knowledge that the eight ball had no prophetic powers at all. It was just a ball of plastic filled with colored water. The eight ball had been right though, my daddy didn’t come back from Bosnia.
My father returned to the United States during the fall. I can remember getting off the school bus and him standing on the front step. I didn’t recognize him. Gone was the sparkle in his eyes and he had grown the mustache which would symbolize his personality for the next decade and a half.
The next thirteen years were filled with memories of pain, paranoia, anger and bitterness. I thought that my father didn’t love me; that I wasn’t good enough, pretty enough, smart enough. He was an atomic bomb, which at any moment could self destruct and destroy whoever had the unlucky fortune of being in the general vicinity. He would find a job, then his paranoid belief that someone was trying to destroy him led to his firing. His unemployment and emotional instability lead to court hearings and possible jail sentences over unpaid child support. He remarried and then took that part of my family into the battlefields of divorce. I hated my father and stopped all contact with him. I thought my memories of happiness and playing were just mirages, but pictures proved me wrong. I wondered what I had done to lose the man who had called me princess.
Two years ago, I was helping my mom with her spring cleaning which only happens once every few years. As we were going through her filing cabinet, I found an old manila folder stuffed with opened envelopes. They were all the letters my father had sent home from Bosnia. I took them and reading them made me cringe at my own misunderstanding and cry at the horrors that filled my father’s memory.
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