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My dad wouldn’t talk much about Korea either. He had PTSD and was glad when they finally gave a name to what we all went through with him. He was a radio guy on the front lines so he didn’t have to kill anybody. But he saw and smelled the bodies.

Toward the end of his life he wanted to tell his story so I recorded hours of him telling about his life. My sister and I are planning to transcribe and edit it for the book that he wanted to write.

He wanted to convey the war in its ugliness but there were really only two parts that fit that goal. One was the time he went to the site that was known as having a bloodbath. That is where he saw and smelled the dead bodies. The other was a story he repeated many times - of a North Korean farmer out seeding the rice fields. That, I think, was what gave him the PTSD. My dad recognized what the guy was doing and that the “communist enemy” that Dad’s government was forcing our men to try to shoot was really just a farmer trying to feed his family. Which is what my Dad always was: a farmer trying to feed his family.

I think the enemy Dad saw over there was not North Korean. Once when I asked him what it was like over there he said, “I was over there so you would never have to know what it was like.” In the last 10 years or so, when I was learning just how corrupt and evil the Deep State is, my Dad was afraid for me. I think he knew that I was staring down the same enemy that the North Korean farmer in the rice field forced him to see for himself. I think he knew that this enemy had no care about human life destroyed or lost in its own pursuit of power, and he knew that they would kill me and my family if I kept trying to expose them.

That is the hell he wanted us all to understand. And I do understand it now.

I watched my husband die from the heavy metal poisoning I believe they did on him. And now I’m praying with all my heart that my 24-year-old daughter who was presumably accidentally exposed to the same poisoning will not have to go through the same dementia that he did. She is really struggling with cognitive decline now and it’s a vicious circle that is scaring her to death.

I’ve never been in the military but I have engaged in war and I have casualties in my life I am still trying to deal with. I have no ability to explain to anybody else what I have been through and I do deal with PTSD-type symptoms. My extended family will never understand what I’m dealing with because they’ve never seen this war for what it is.

I don’t know exactly what our vets have been through but my experiences give me some inkling of how deep those wounds can be. Especially the guilt. Survivor’s guilt. Innocence lost because there was no way to stay innocent.

All I can say to anybody who has been through the Hell of war is “Thank you. I will try my very best to make sure your sacrifice was not in vain.”