A Father’s Wartime PTSD Explored in New Graphic Novel Memoir
Portland author’s story carries parallels with my own
By Bill Thorness
The headline caught my eye, because it was a son writing about his father: “He Couldn’t Admit That He Was Hurt.” The story, in the New York Times “Modern Love” column, resonated with me. It told of life with a father and former soldier who has PTSD.
Written by a fellow Northwesterner, Carl Sciacchitano, who turned the topic into a book, the story contained parallels with my own exploration of my soldier’s father’s path, also the theme of my new book.
Another connection caught my eye when the writer mentioned a trip to Vietnam he was taking with his father: “I wanted to see the country for myself, to see what he saw.”
This was a primary impetus for my trips to Italy, my plan to hike my father’s World War II battlefields and finish the walk he never completed, setting foot into a liberated Rome. Unfortunately for me, my dad was on my trek only in spirit.
In “The Heart That Fed: A Father, A Son, and the Long Shadow of War” (Gallery 13/Simon & Schuster, 2024) Sciacchitano—a Portland writer and illustrator who creates comics for multiple clients, pens a graphic-novel style memoir that shows how he learned more about his father, came to understand him better, and has become closer to him. I was moved by the story and impressed by the skill in its telling.
The story spans more than half a century, from the time his father, Dave, entered the war in 1965 to their return trip to Vietnam in 2020. It moves back and forth in time, interspersing Dave’s war years with family scenes from the author’s childhood to present day.
The author’s drawing talents keep the story moving and, periodically, exploding when he fills a page with violence from the war or situations that trigger remembered trauma.
In the medium of comics, transitions from one time-period to another can be smooth and effective. So too can emotions and action. An entire page of repeated panels of the character’s eyes, or block capital letters pushed to the margins when a bomb bursts, work as well here as they do in superhero comics.
Dave’s path into war begins the story. He enlists before he gets drafted so he can have some control over his service. He enters the U.S. Air Force and becomes an airplane mechanic. Even though such work would be well behind the front lines, Dave is sent to Vietnam and thrust into battle scenes, where he experiences up close the horror of the fighting. He wields a machine gun to defend their compound. He runs into a minefield at the site of a plane crash to help guide the crew to safety.
Later, after Dave has done his tour of duty and pursued Asian Studies in college, he returns to Vietnam with the State Department for work at the embassy. He will be “issuing visas, helping out Americans who come by, that sort of thing,” explains his new boss.
But it is 1975 and soon they hear shelling near the embassy and realize they need to evacuate. The war is finally ending. The staff boards a boat to escape downriver but comes under attack. A soldier on their boat tries to respond but wrestles with a jammed gun. Although it’s been years since his active service, Dave steps in, clears the jam and blasts away at the shore. As they finally float to safety, his boss commends his action and says “you might have been the last American to shoot a gun in that place”.
The author’s own side of the story is poignant, showing scenes of him navigating a relationship with his volatile father, whose unpredictable anger is rooted in remembered war trauma.
As a college student and then a young man accompanying his father on a trip to Vietnam, the author shows how the two maintain a relationship that gives space to that side of the father who is scarred by PTSD and the memories of the son who has long endured the mercurial temper brought on by the war-induced mental condition.
Scenes offer insight into a traumatized soldier’s plight. Friends back home beg Dave for stories and he tells one he finds hilarious, but a silent room makes clear the incident’s graphic nature was horrific to his friends. That might be good reason for a combat veteran to “never talk about it,” but such situations further isolate former soldiers. When a few college kids get together to watch fireworks and the explosions begin, Dave and two other guys dive for cover, and only then do they admit to each other that yes, they were in the war.
His father did eventually get care for the condition and got into therapy with other veterans.
Perhaps this story echoes so strongly for me due to multiple similarities to the story I’m telling in “All Roads Lead to Rome.” I could certainly relate to his fascination about wartime letters Dave sent to his sister, excerpts of which are reproduced in the book and cause Sciacchitano to imagine a younger version of his father. That was the driving force that started my odyssey.
But even if you’re not writing a book about your own family’s experiences, many readers will be able to relate to “The Heart That Fed.” His story, my story, and possibly yours, offer consistent, painful, undeniable evidence that war and its aftereffects are embedded as deeply as annual fireworks shows in the psyche of an American.
Thank you to author Carl Sciacchitano for permission to use the pages above from his book.
Thanks Jack. How do you share such things? That's a central exploration in my book.
I wonder if you've read All over but the shoutin' by Rick Bragg. He captured horrors of the Korean war, both dynamic and as a setting. I've heard a few direct accounts of various wars, most powerfully my uncle's description of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He said they were a bunch of terrified kids scrambling around trying to respond. The first wave of bombers had passed over, before they were able to get a single shot off. Other worldly confusion seems to be a big part of a young soldiers experience. I suppose the vast majority of those experiences were never shared, or at least not effectively. Thanks for bringing these stories forward for us.