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[quote=Anonymous]OP here, we suspect that my father suffered from some sort of PTSD as a result of his combat experiences and that he handled this well while flying - maybe it was his coping mechanism.  The drink came on hard after that, and we kids were out of the house.  My mother struggled for years with it - until the day my Dad died.  She attended Al-Anon, and she has a hard time accepting that alcoholism is a disease.  However, despite this, she misses my father every day.  They shared a love of sports and football and it was a basis for conversations that she says are harder to have.  Every morning before he left the house, my father would leave a cartoon or other article that struck him with a note for my mother to read when she got up.  It is these little rituals that she misses.  We do not know what demons my father wrestled with.  As a younger man, he was involved in covert operations and the only thing he ever revealed about his experiences over Laos in 1968 - and this to my uncle - was that he went on a rescue mission and was too late, "they were all dead."

I remember two experiences with my father, one while he was alive and another after he died.  I attended his Naval Academy class reunion with him in the late 80s, and met a classmate of his - a USMC veteran - whom my father saved in Vietnam.  That man told me that if "it weren't for my father, I woudn't be here nor would my children."

After my father died, my mother received a condolence note from a classmate of my father.  The gentleman had been flying a VO-67 observation mission over Laos in February 1968 when his aircraft was hit by anti-aircraft fire and crashed in the jungle.  The writer noted that my father was the "pilot of the Jolly Green that plucked him out of the jungle in 1968."  My mother has said my father was a different man when he returned from Vietnam.  Perhaps it was the war that did get him in the end. [/quote]

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