His Living Room’s a Jungle

When an inquisitive son pushes his reticent father to open up about the horrors of ’Nam, he unleashes a Pandora’s box of post-traumatic stress.

Illustrations by Vanessa Davis

We knew there’d be a storm today. Perhaps another hurricane. Without a word said, we both decided to sit in our living room and just watch. This is not an uncommon event in our home, but one that’s grown more frequent as my father and I age, as his silence slowly cracks and my role in that silence feels increasingly dark. We all live in storms of varying strength and speed, with moments that bring intense pain, and at times, vital cleansing. In our case, my father’s internal storms nearly wrecked my family.

Right now we sit apart, silently watching the start of the external storm. Rain spatters, slowly tapping at an even pace as the day grows gray and the leaves whip outside our living room window, which is so large that it may as well be a wall unto itself. The scene is like some strange diorama, a mess of trees and a gravel driveway pelted with rain, rain, more rain. The tapping is heavy and chaotic, like gunfire. The wind howls around our house, long wa…