Ripples of Wartime: Ruth Clare

Our dad was a veteran of Vietnam and I have never been to war but I know what it is like to face the enemy every day. The difference is I'm not facing an enemy who is a stranger, my enemy is someone I love.

My first memory was of my dad hitting me and it was when I was three years old and I stuck a Tic Tac label off a box of Tic Tacs to a wall and dad started hitting me again and again and again and I kept trying to run away and get away from him and eventually my mum in that circumstance came up and said, stop it you're going to kill those kids one of these days and that's what it felt like sometimes when he lost control is that he was just going to pound you and pound you until there was nothing left.

I always knew that it was not fair, the way that he treated us was not fair and actually the way that I understood that better was because when I was at school I was a straight A student, every teacher told me that my behaviour was amazing, I got A's for everything you could possibly get.

I tried that hard at home and even trying that hard I kept failing and failing and failing and failing and I could never figure out what he wanted from me and I always got it wrong.

And that really broke my heart but at the same time I would think you are an arsehole, you are an absolute arsehole for treating me that way so those were the two things going on.

I remember mum said to me one day I wish you'd known your dad before he went to Vietnam and that was the first time I kind of went was he different before and I didn't know what the war was or the impact that might have had on him but they were engaged before he went over there and she told me subsequently that she knew straight away that he was different.

I've spoken to a lot of wives in that same situation who had the same experience of knowing straight away that it was a different person that came back.

What I understand from the veterans I've spoken to about their war experience, one of the most, the biggest hangovers from that experience is this hyper-vigilance.

You learn to watch looking for an enemy that might shoot from a tree, you tiptoe around not wanting to make a sound and my entire experience growing up was that exactly.

I would have to watch myself, second-guess my behaviour, one day I might do something and that would be completely fine and the next day I would do the same thing and it would set dad off and he would start hitting us and so that meant that my whole childhood was spent just watching my dad.

I feel really sad for my dad, I feel really sad that because he died so young he never got a lot of these men their PTSD or their awareness of the fact that they actually have got something psychologically going on that is not normal.

That often happens 30 years after the event and dad never quite reached that tipping point and so I think that he would have actually been interested in that process.

I do feel sad and I feel sad that he never got to experience how much his kids loved him. Well certainly for me if it mattered to him at all I wanted him to know that I hated him more than I wanted him to know that I loved him because I didn't want him to feel like he had any power over me and I think it's really sad that we never got to have that relationship.

I think that the impact of war on families of veterans is definitely a secret history and I don't quite know why that is.

I think part of it is out of not wanting to cause further pain but I think we've got to open up the story so that we can be more generous and I don't think that you can talk about the costs of war unless you talk about the costs to family and then the transgenerational impact of that ad infinitum.