DAUGHTER OF A VIETNAM VET — Late-diagnosed PTSD and the year I learned my father's silence

My father was a Marine in Vietnam, 1968-1969. He came home, married my mother, finished college on the GI Bill, raised three kids, retired from a state government job, and died in 2023 at 76. He was diagnosed with PTSD at age 73. I am writing this as the adult child of a Vietnam veteran whose trauma went undiagnosed for fifty years and whose family lived inside the consequences without knowing what we were living inside. I am 49. I am a therapist now — which is not unrelated. I spent the last two years of his life having the conversations with him that we should have had when I was eight. He told me about a specific firefight outside Khe Sanh. He told me about what came home with him and what he had decided, alone, not to ever mention. He told me he had thought about going to a Vet Center in 1995 and had not gone because he was afraid of what would happen if he started talking. What I want any other adult child of a Vietnam veteran to know: the silence was not personal. The silence was the injury. The way it landed on you in childhood is real and it deserves its own treatment. The VA does not cover us. Community therapists do. Find one with military family experience. Use the language. It belongs to you too.