Every now and then, I reach up to find the flag in its place of safety on the top shelf of our coat closet, and I ponder what little I know of its story.
I imagine my father standing on the deck of the U.S.S. Hoggatt Bay on the day his tour of duty ended. As he watches a fellow sailor lower the ship’s flag for the last time, he steps up and asks if he can keep it.
Perhaps they consulted the captain before Dad tucked it into his duffel. Perhaps his shipmate simply handed it to him without a word.
I’ll never know, because like many World War II Vets, Dad was mostly silent about his hitch in the Pacific. But he struggled to overcome its legacy for the rest of his life.
At 17, my father had needed his own mother’s signature to enlist in the Navy. Until that moment he’d never ventured more than a few miles away from the Salt Lake Valley. But like many Utah boys, he’d grown up hunting. He was an excellent shot who could break down and reassemble a rifle within minutes. So the brass sent him from base to base, testing and advancing him to ever-higher levels of gunnery training.
His last stop was Seattle, where my mother and her family lived. Just 19 then, she was also far from home, having followed a father who left his architecture practice in west Nebraska to build military bases in the Pacific Northwest as the war gained momentum.
The two met and married within days. Dad boarded the Hoggatt Bay and promised to write. Mom agreed to move to Salt Lake and live with his family while she waited for his safe return.
By the time Dad shipped out, he had amassed a wealth of gunnery expertise, yet he was still a shy, reticent boy who feared the men around him. They noticed the way he spoke and the music he liked and called him a queer. He took up smoking to make himself look tough. Alone at night, he began carving things for my mother, shaping the steel of a spare gun butt into a bracelet he tucked into a package that arrived one day when she was learning how to bake bread in her mother-in-law’s kitchen.
Like the smooth, tapering bracelet, stories like these feel like rare gifts to me. They came into my hands as my mother and I navigated the darker parts of my childhood years. In truth, I was far too young to hear these things. But she needed to be heard. Someone had to give voice to a past my father could not revisit, yet also never leave.
In a global conflict filled with giant aircraft carriers, the U.S.S. Hoggatt Bay was a minnow. Dad felt terror every time an airplane took off or landed because the ship’s runway was so short and the danger so great. Mom described the massive cable and hook the crew used to wrestle speeding airplanes to a halt, the only force that kept them from crashing into other structures on deck or skidding off the edge into the churning waves below.
Fingering medals and mementos kept in a small box, Mom would recount the suicide bombings my father had survived as the Japanese used deadly force against the invading fleet. Following her words, I saw through his eyes as men whose flesh had caught fire threw themselves into the sea. I saw one shipmate, ripped open by an explosion, run across the deck as his insides spilled out. I saw Dad lift a massive live bomb that had somehow hit the deck without detonating, heaving it into the sea before it could tear the Hoggatt Bay apart.
Discharged with honor before Hiroshima ended the war in Japan, my father returned home to a wife he barely knew. His fears triggered her own when, night after night he would jolt out of bed, shouting orders, diving to the floor seeking cover.
Back then, there was no research, no treatment, no vocabulary to even describe what we now recognize as PTSD. Shell shock and battle fatigue were the only terms the world seemed to know. They make the psychological aftereffects of war sound temporary, even mild. But as millions of ex-service members know, trauma is a vicious enemy that never gives up without a fight.
My father’s symptoms spread like a bone-chilling fog between him and my mother, growing so dense that neither could find the other. They had scarcely known each other before marrying and now, lost in anxiety and unspeakable grief, how could they build a life together? When Mom asked to visit her family, just to give herself time to think, he told her he would kill himself if she left. Seeing the fear in his eyes, she agreed to stay.
Dad developed a roiling ulcer that, by the late 1950s, forced surgeons to remove most of his stomach. By this time he was a valued member of the University of Utah’s cancer research team, creating one-of-a-kind scientific instruments for use in groundbreaking studies that led to new radiation treatments for bone cancer. But his poor health placed severe limits on his career.
Earlier, doctors had wanted to cut his vagus nerve to stem the production of stomach acids, a therapy Dad rejected. In light of discoveries that came decades later about vagal tone and mental health, I’m astonished by his foresight. But his choice didn’t lead to a healthy outcome. With a fraction of his stomach left, he dropped to a skeletal weight. His hands trembled from chronically low blood sugar. He never knew when his bowels would betray him, so he kept an extra set of clothes in his car.
As his physical well-being deteriorated, Dad struggled with politics at the cancer lab. He lacked the doctorate degrees most of the research staff held, finding it impossible to manage the trauma-driven anxiety that came over him whenever he thought about postgraduate writing and exams. He was brilliant, creative, and crucial to the lab’s progress, yet he felt a gnawing sense of fraudulence and self-doubt.
Still, as a young child watching him with my mother at home, I recall many moments of peace. There were quiet weekends when they lost themselves in yard work, cooking and artistic pursuits. I can see the two of them sipping tall gin and tonics from fine glass tumblers that glowed in the evening light. For a while, it seemed we’d reached a place of relative calm.
Bit by bit, though, my father was losing control over the alcohol that soothed his anxieties. As his addiction became more and more evident, Mom buried her fears in the hunt for a larger home with abundant space for his scientific equipment and books. She somehow believed that more quiet time alone would heal this desperately lonely man.
As she orchestrated our move, Dad fell deeper into the bottle. Mentors at the university tried to help him, but eventually he could no longer function in the lab. When his boss fired him at last, Dad fell into a deep, impenetrable depression, sleeping up to 20 hours a day.
Isolated by shame from nearly everyone who could have helped her, my mother poured out her resentments to me. I felt bound to listen, but in truth, I longed for a space of my own where I wouldn’t have to hear, see or feel anything at all.
Mom became a late-night admitting clerk at a local hospital to supplement the cash she borrowed from friends to cover our bills. She challenged me to learn to sew, since there was no money for new clothes. I was already flooded with responsibilities that don’t affect most 13-year-olds, driven by the desire to keep our house clean and lawns trim so no hint of our troubles would show.
One day I came home from school to find my father collapsed on the couch. His job search had failed and his application for disability payments had stalled. Meanwhile, my mother’s growing terror that we would lose our house had wormed its way inside my heart, and a sudden wave of anger came over me.
“You have to DO something!” I shouted at him. “You can’t just lie there while our whole lives fall apart!”
He struggled to his feet slowly and looked at me with empty eyes. “That’s it,” he said. “I am taking the last step.”
As he turned toward the back bedroom, a pit opened in my stomach. “Daddy, what are you doing? Where are you going? Talk to me!”
“The final step,” he said again in a voice that carried no emotion. He did not look back at me, but moved toward the bedroom closet where I knew he kept a small handgun.
When I try to see my adolescent self rushing after him, fighting to take back my ugly words, my memory fades to black. I don’t know what he said in reply, or how many minutes passed before he silently turned away, leaving the gun on the shelf.
I do know there were no hugs, no tears, no loving words shared. One of us simply retreated from the other, moving to another room in the dimming house. We never spoke of that day again.
I also can’t remember when I bought my first copy of Adult Children of Alcoholics. Or what I said during my first therapy session in my early 20s. Or the exact excuses I made for not visiting my parents after I graduated from college and moved to the East Coast with my new husband.
But on one point I feel clear. This is what unhealed trauma can do to families and the people who struggle to stay alive inside them.
Trauma can destroy our ability to feel, to love, to be vulnerable and grow. Under its command, we may feel so much fear that we reject even the smallest shred of goodness the world offers us. Terrible secrets take root in our pain, and over time a thorny, twisted cage can grow around our hearts.
Do we really believe this cage will protect us? Or, with treatment and support, can we open our eyes to see the emotional prison it truly represents -- one that alienates us from ourselves and the people we desperately want to love?
With the help of a caring psychiatrist, my father recovered slowly in the last decades of his life. He died peacefully in 1992, before trauma researchers like Bessel Van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score, broke open the secrets of PTSD and the ways it can thwart our lives.
As a mental health writer, I wish I could sit with Dad today and discuss these findings. I know he would share my sadness that, despite all our progress, millions of trauma survivors -- legions of Vets among them -- never find the integrated care they need to rebuild their lives.
We’re working on it, Daddy. You know how long it can take to envision a cure, to engage the medical community, to bring the science forward so people can actually benefit.
As I hold your ship’s flag in my hands, I see the colors have stayed true. And if I could revisit just one moment of our shared life, I’d go back to that afternoon when, with little compassion or support to anchor you, you somehow agreed to go on living.
I’d tell you that I understand more now than I ever could then. That I feel the weight of your story giving shape to my life. And that because of you, I know what courage really means.