by Brewster Moose

Created on: September 27, 2009

...and I'm Still Depressed!....when I got home from Nam, I wasn't scared anymore but, I had brought back a raging case of PTSD. I also got spit on at the San Francisco airport by some skinny probably stoned hippie chick who wasn't satisfied with screaming in my face that I was some sort "Baby Killer". Getting spit on is REALLY depressing. When I finally got HOME home, I faced another conundrum. My parents were rabid leftists...nee Liberal Democrats...and rejected Nixon's War whole heartedly. My mother even went so far as to swear that, and I quote..." I would sooner go to Federal Prison for life than I would have one of my two boys in Viet Nam!"...So you can imagine how warm my welcome was at home.Depressing. ( My parents had no idea that I was in South East Asia the first 6 months I was gone. They thought I had run off to some hippy commune up in Mendocino county. I wish I had.) The final arrangement was that my service or the war itself were NEVER EVER to be brought up in my parents company. 40 years gone by and that injunction still exists.

...like a lot of vets, I decided to go to college, as much for the education as it was to get the Hell outta Dodge. I took the first acceptance I got and off I went to San Jose State University; and unbeknownst to me, a hot bed of radical anti-war activity. I had been there about a week when it suddenly occurred to me that if I wanted to hang with the "Hip Folk" once again, this here tiger was gonna hafta change it's stripes. ( Thank God I had let my hair grow out.) And so as far as any new people I met were concerned. I had indeed been in a commune; for two years. Nobody called me "out" on it and so I switched horses in mid race and became fervently ANTI-WAR ! believe me, living a lie is very depressing.

... I ended up marrying the first girl I had slept with since high school and fading into suburbia. I had screaming sweating covers kicking nightmares but I told my wife they were from my childhood traumas. ( I had a couple of doozies!) That went on for 14 years until she got tired of the screaming and the yelling of the arguments we had over my inability to keep a job and my subsequentalcohol addiction. Her solution to these problems was to rip me off in a very ugly divorce. I didn't care. She could be and was very depressing at times( Smoking pot and snorting cocaine didn't help either.)

....cutting to the chase, after failed marriage #2, and a second daughter, I went back East from whence I had come 22 years before

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