Throughout my childhood I would catch bits and pieces of information about the war in Vietnam. Thankfully I am young enough that I was born after the war had ceased and there was no one in my immediate family who had to serve there, with the exception of a distant uncle. My family seemed to escape that particular nightmare.

But as the years have gone by my morbid fascination with the war has grown. So spending the past week with an ex-marine who served a tour, I was certainly all ears.

My father-in-law served in Vietnam starting at the end of 1969. Although physically he made it out with just a few scars (from where a bullet grazed his shoulder) you can still see the turmoil that war caused in his everyday existence.

My husband was only a baby when he enlisted so he has no memories of what his father was like before Vietnam. The father he has known has been the post-war dad who stayed with us this week.

Although he’s a loving dad and grandfather, the war forever changed his way of life.

The stories I did hear growing up about Vietnam were often full of conflicting emotions, most of them based on the frustration and fury of losing so many of our nations young men and women to a war that just didn’t make any sense. I picked up on a couple tales of veterans who came back ”˜stateside’ and failed to thrive in a world that stopped making sense to them.

What I was totally naïve to was the seemingly endless numbers of vets who did their patriotic duty and came home to try and fall in where they left off, but just couldn’t shake the nightmare of their tour to pull it off. They were the silent casualties of war, because although they survived and made it home they were all but gone to their families and friends.

Now with the millions of American soldiers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan rotating back to the so-called real world, it appears as though history is repeating itself. Even though more than four decades have passed since the end of the Vietnamese war, it still seems as though this country has learned nothing from the countless lives an unneeded war annihilates.

Although I certainly understand why we attacked Afghanistan after 9/11 I cannot to this day tell you how or why Iraq got lumped into the war on terrorism more than a year and a half later. Yes, I remember George W. Bush’s speech telling the nation they believed Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction. However after seven years and exactly zero bombs exposed the war there the lives it’s destroying seem to be at too high of a cost.

Even after more than 40 years since he left the bush, my father-in-law is still haunted, every day, by what he saw and did in Vietnam. Until recently he would tell my husband next to nothing about what happened there, only bits and pieces on rare occasions. Otherwise, nothing.

This week he allowed himself to open up much more with his son, telling his stories of the life of a Marine back then. Although talking about his past may be a new step in his healing, nothing will ever completely erase the hell he had to live through over there, and the subsequent failing of his country to help him when he got home.

With the numbers of troops who have served in the desert swelling nearly to that who served in Vietnam I’m hoping our government and civilians alike will step up to the plate and take good care of them when they return for as long as they need it.

Most of these soldiers go to war as just kids of 18 or 19 years old. To expect them to cope with all they have to see and process in a war is asinine. They’re put on the front lines with license to kill then shipped back home and expected to rejoin society and follow all our rules.

Maybe the time has come for us to step up to the plate and do our duty, and serve and protect the very ones who have earned us our freedom.

”“ Elizabeth Reilly can be reached at elizabethreilly1@yahoo.com.