Winning: From Walk-On to Captain, in Football and Life. Gary Brackett
away.
“See what I mean? Did you grab the paper?”
“No, sir.”
“All right, let’s try again.”
This time, he’d be a bit slower and I’d succeed.
“What did you just do?”
“I grabbed it, Dad!”
“That’s right, son. You grabbed it. Just remember. There’s no such thing as a try in life. Either you do something or you don’t. Don’t lean on tries.”
Dad knew all too well about reaching for things, as well as the costs of failing to reach to them. He probably knew well, though he didn’t often say this to his sons, that sometimes effort isn’t all that is required. He didn’t talk much about Vietnam. But his actions suggested a man haunted by his dreams, and sometimes in his waking hours, by things he had seen. Many veterans talk of the dumb luck of survival. To survive a war while your friends die alongside you is perhaps the cruelest form of luck. Movies and books have documented the horrors of the Vietnam War: the psychological torture of sleeping wet, covered in leeches, and fully aware that tomorrow could be your last day. It was a dirty and personal war where death loomed daily as a soldier’s most likely fate. Dad came home physically whole…but emotionally broken.
Officially diagnosed with schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Dad could be fine one minute and absolutely gone the next. People with those illnesses have a hard time distinguishing fiction from reality. For Dad, night was a particular enemy. He slept with one eye open, still not convinced even in the safety of his home that the world was at peace.
His constant vigilance—some would say paranoia—was one mode of protection. But he also had a rifle under the bed, loaded and ready. On the Fourth of July, when everyone else was enjoying the fireworks, Dad was already on edge and near that rifle. If we woke to the sound of sirens, we knew that if we went into the kitchen to get a glass of water, Dad would most likely be there with that rifle, sitting quietly at the table and staring off into the distance.
Sometimes, things grew a bit more violent. One night it was storming and Dad heard the drainpipe, which must have come loose during the previous winter, banging against the side of the house. As he reached the door, the wind picked up and the banging sound accelerated. Relying on instincts from a much darker time, he reacted swiftly, firing his gun at the first thing he saw that moved. Everyone in our house, plus some of the next-door neighbors, awoke to a deafening BOOM! The rattling stopped, and lights from our neighbors’ houses came on. When they emerged in pajamas sleepy-eyed, they found the front drainpipe lying on the ground, completely detached from the gutter by the force of the shotgun’s shell.
The danger that beleaguered Dad, which he introduced into our lives with his fearful outbursts, occasionally entered our lives even more directly. His ability, at times, to be a loving father suffered gravely due to his PTSD. Every parent eventually loses his or her patience with his or her kids. When a combat-trained Marine happens to do so, and when that loss of patience prompts a full-fledged flashback, things could get genuinely scary.
One such instance was particularly memorable. Our family went to church every Sunday, and generally Dad was in charge of rousing us from bed. On this Sunday, we dreaded going to church just as much as we hated being the only kids there. Every Sunday we protested, and every Sunday we lost the small battle to watch our morning cartoons. Instead, we got church. Grant and I were in a room across the hall, and we had an easier time waking than our elder brothers. On this morning, Greg was particularly sluggish.
Dad’s routine was to start with yelling down the stairs, “You all better be up and dressed when I get down there.” After this came another level of warning, where Dad knocked on our doors and occasionally came and pulled at our feet to wake us. After that last warning, Dad went upstairs to get dressed himself. On this particular morning, when Dad came back downstairs to the kitchen and found Greg wasn’t there, his anger rose. We had been whipped before, so we knew what was coming. Dad entered the room and stood above Greg. He raised his arm and prepared to bring it down hard as he shouted, “I told you to get up!” With the first blow, Greg flinched and picked up his feet. He kicked instinctively to protect himself; his legs somehow connected with Dad’s face. With that contact, something snapped. Grant and I stood and watched, horror-stricken for our brother, as Dad climbed on top of him in the bed. Neglecting his usual belt, with closed fists he rained down blow after blow. He hit him everywhere, but most of the punches connected with Greg’s chest and face. The screams that came from both of them were terrible and animalistic. Greg pleaded for someone to help him, but the entire family stood watching, helpless. Dad screamed things we did not understand, and he seemed nothing less than possessed.
Time during these kinds of traumatic moments moves differently, but the entire sequence seemed to have lasted about five minutes. It stopped as quickly as it began. Whether because he was tired or because he came back to reality, Dad suddenly stopped hitting Greg and then backed away from the bed. He took two deep breaths, looked around at all of us, went straight to the telephone and dialed 911.
“I need you to come here fast. I just had an out-of-body experience and have severely hurt my son.”
The police arrived quickly. After talking with Dad, they came back to the room to talk to Greg. He was in his boxers and told them to come back in a second after he was dressed. We were on the first floor of a two-story house and Greg leapt out the window, not to return for a couple weeks. That night, my other siblings and I heard something unusual coming from our parents’ bedroom. Mom tolerated Dad’s style of punishment, but after this episode, she drew a hard and fast line. She sided with Greg, her child. We heard them yelling as we lay in bed.
“What are you thinking? Have you gone crazy?”
“I don’t know. Something snapped. I felt like I wasn’t here anymore, that I was back in a foxhole fighting hand to hand.”
She may have been sympathetic to the illness that drove him to violence, but she demanded change,
“You are going to get help! I am not dealing with this anymore. Your pride has kept you from going to see a doctor, but if you want to keep this family together you are leaving here tomorrow morning and not coming back until you deal with this.”
I’d almost forgotten about the fight when I woke up the next morning, but there was a feeling in the house that something was just different. I didn’t smell the coffee brewing—Dad was the only one who drank it and so he made it—and the paper was still on the front doorstep. As I put together those puzzle pieces, I knew that I hadn’t dreamed Mom and Dad’s conversation. He was gone.
You deal with this! How were we kids supposed to interpret our father’s absence that next morning with those words ringing in our ears? We didn’t see him for months, and we wondered if he’d be gone forever.
For kids in the projects, there were two reasons that fathers disappeared: drugs and alcohol. Two-parent households go to single-parent really quick with one long bender strung out on drugs. Even friends would joke about the worst:
“Where’s your dad, man?”
“Shut up, I said.”
“Dude, you know what they say about getting strung out in those Camden alleys.”
When your father disappears after beating your brother so severely, and no explanation is offered, you really don’t have much to say in reply to such teasing. At night, we often asked Mom, “Where is Dad? When is he coming home?”
I don’t remember how she answered those questions, just that she essentially dodged them. How she must have been wondering the same thing. Hoping just like us for his return. She stayed solid, and though she didn’t answer these questions to which she did not know the answer, she did continually say, “Everything is going to be just fine. Don’t you all worry about it.”
After a couple of months, my mother received a letter in the