It wasn't that he would come home and complain or speak badly about anybody, but it was obvious that he was troubled by what he was seeing. I occasionally heard him talking to my mother when they thought I was out of earshot, wondering what the heck, was going on, and why people were so insistent upon saying things they knew were not the truth. In those days, it was common practice for a man to come home from a day at the office and sit down to a cocktail or two; it was more a ritual than anything else, I think-a silent declaration that the workday had ended, flowing naturally into the time for family, friends, and recreation. As time went on, I began to notice that the ritual cocktail or two became three, and then four, all before dinner. My parents' frequent bridge and bingo nights at the Officers' Club were all enhanced by copious amounts of liquid refreshment. The tension weighed on my mother as well, and she began drinking more heavily too.
I guess it would not be stretching things to say that my parents became alcoholics, though the word was never used in our home. The pressure they felt was clear, even to a child, and it got to the point that just about the only times I saw them acting as a loving, happy couple was after they had downed a few drinks. Eventually, even the reprieve they got from drinking began to diminish, and after my father finally left the military, alcohol seemed only to enhance their unhappiness, rather than mask it. As a child, I certainly didn't understand what had created the cloud that seemed to hang over them. All I knew was that my mother and father were no longer the happy couple I remembered.
In later years, that cloud seemed to grow even more impenetrable. My dad seemed to see people in a more negative light than he had previously. He would sometimes catch himself being overly critical of people he had revered in the past, and then the father I knew would reemerge for a time, reminding himself out loud that he wasn't being fair to them, even when his anger was probably more fair than his forgiveness. Eventually, even his actions toward my mother began to come under that cynical cloud. They didn't argue or fight, but it was obvious that there was a wall building between them, and their drinking-especially my mother's-became heavier and heavier as the years passed. Sadly, for the last 15 or 20 years of my mother's life, she suffered from a form of dementia common to people who drank heavily for many years.
Sometimes I wondered whether I might be to blame for some of their growing distance from each other, and I tried harder to be a good son to compensate. I even wondered whether my dad might have grown angry with me for some reason, because he didn't seem to enjoy doing things with me as much. For many years, I figured that the distance between us was supposed to be there; a product of my growing up. It took many years to figure out, but I eventually realized that it wasn't I who was coming between my parents, and that the distance that seemed to be growing between my dad and me had nothing to do with growing up, or with anything I had done. Rather, it was my father's reaction to his deep and growing disillusionment with his beloved military, the sense that he had devoted so much of his life to something, only to be spit out when he became "inconvenient." He was also affected by the growing clamor of those who felt the need to belittle everything for which he stood and for which he had worked so hard throughout his adult life.
To his dying day, he would never come out and actually condemn the military, and I have to believe that even his long-enduring sense of loyalty only added to his bitterness. The closest he ever came to that condemnation was when I was about 14 years old, just about the time the Korean War was beginning. He came home one night and proclaimed, "I'm getting out of this! I'm tired of taking orders!" That was one of the few times I ever got angry at my father, and I told him-with all the moral authority of a 14-year-old-that he couldn't quit during a war. He just looked at me for a second, shook his head, and went into the other room. Without his speaking another word, that look told me that there were things I just didn't understand, and he hoped I never would. It was many years before I was able to completely comprehend the volumes he had spoken in that silent moment. I wish there was a way for me to let him know that I finally got it. It took my own service in another war-this one in the desert of Iraq, a mission in which I firmly believe-before I could truly understand the changes he went through.
I believe I can speak with some authority on what he was going through, because I have endured much of the same kind of feelings and experiences in my own life. The biggest difference is that I learned early on that upping the number of after-hours cocktails doesn't make things better, and that the one true remedy for disillusionment is found in the time spent with the people I love. My father taught me, even if unknowingly, to hold tightly to truth and to those people who valued me for what I am, rather than where I stood on any given issue. It is because of him that I am able to stand up and tell what I know — and have always known — to be true, realizing that there will always be someone who will try to discredit what I say, and, by extension, me.
Not surprisingly, the legacy of Roswell-the story as well as the doubts and the emotional strain that comes with those doubts-has carried on through three generations in my family. That it affected my parents and me should come as no surprise to anyone. That it has had such a profound effect upon my own children, however, caught even me by surprise.
Crowing up in a home where the reality of alien visitation is accepted as fact can be very frightening to a child. It wasn't that we sat around the dinner table every night talking about creatures from outer space, but rather that Linda's and my attitude toward the whole idea was pretty blase. As a matter of fact, the topic of UFOs rarely ever came up during family discussions. We weren't members of the tinfoil hat group, who sat around contemplating when the next visit would occur, and when we saw something on television or in the paper about people who claimed to have been abducted or to be in contact with alien visitors, we probably laughed at their stories as much as anyone else.
When we had friends over, however, and especially when we entertained people who were active in UFO research, the children would naturally overhear our conversations. Lacking the sense of security that usually comes with adulthood, the children's perception was that of a danger to themselves and us that we adults simply never considered. Perhaps it would have been better for them if I had insulated them from the subject when they were little, but given that most of the people we luiew were aware that I was the guy who had actually handled pieces of a "flying saucer," keeping the children in the dark would have been awfully hard-if not impossible-to do. So, for better or for worse, the children found themselves pretty much in the middle of the whole UFO controversy, especially where the incident at Roswell was concerned.
Linda and I have talked with the children-who are all adults now-on numerous occasions about UFOs and what they had thought and felt about the subject while they were growing up. They were, at various times and depending upon the particular child, frightened, embarrassed, bored, or indifferent.
As far as their relationship with the man who started it all, I have to say that none of our kids was ever very close to my dad. He lived in Louisiana and we lived in Montana, and visits were rare. I spoke to my mom and dad every Sunday, but the kids rarely did. Even after my father passed away and my mom came to live with Linda and me, the kids never became very close to their grandmother. Nevertheless, Roswell was part of their lives.