I Want My Country Back

I want my country back.

I am the daughter of a WWII veteran, the granddaughter of immigrants, and the cousin of a young Marine who died in the Korean conflict a week before I was born. I lived through the tumultuous Vietnam War years, seeing military troop carriers and hospital planes break through the sky as I waited for the school bus. I cringed as those massive metal carcasses landed at the air base just a couple miles from my home. Will never forget when a training plane lost altitude and hit a neighborhood home, killing one of my peers.

Throughout my childhood, I watched my troubled father deal with the fallout of his war, one which I didn’t fully comprehend. Or care to. Night after night, the blare of war movies on our console television lulled me to sleep. In the spring, my father often limped and complained about recurring flareups of the malaria he had gotten somewhere during the war. He was always cold, the result of the frostbite that took the top layer of the skin from his feet while he waited to be rescued from a plane crash in Iceland. The remnants of that incident were evident whenever my mother took out her tweezers and removed bits of shrapnel that had worked its way to the surface of Dad’s back and snagged on his t-shirt.

My father was a complicated man, born and raised in a complicated time. The only child of immigrants from Prussia…