My friend Carol Schultz Vento and I started this website with the idea that there seems to be
some unspoken connection that the children of WWII veterans shared and are just now beginning
to recognize and question. It seemed clear to us that these men must have returned home from
war in a traumatized state and it was something that no one was prepared to deal with at that time.
The effects of combat were not widely discussed in the late 40’s and throughout the 1950’s.
Post Traumatic Stress (PTSD) wasn’t even recognized until after the Vietnam War. When we
spoke with other women we found a very similar pattern woven into all of our stories; much of
which we think has to do with that untreated trauma.
While we are not therapists, we suspect that we're onto something. We also found a certain
sense of resonance among the children of veterans in recognizing what we didn’t understand
about what our fathers went through and how profoundly it affected them.
Certainly these young men who went home after WW2 to raise families and live the American
dream needed more support than they were given. Recognizing them as heroes was great and
appropriate but probably not enough since as a society we weren't prepared to address and treat
them for the pain of their emotional trauma. The fact that the war was a “good war” couldn’t have and
didn’t lessen the effects of combat on these young men. In some cases they were little more than boys.
The great wound that these men, our fathers, carried home with them is mirrored in the collective
unconscious wound that we, as their adult children now need to confront. We never understood the
depth of what they experienced, and now, when so many of them are gone, we can’t even ask for
help in trying to get our minds around it.
We are inching towards addressing this issue but for right now we’d like to work on our stories- collecting
and presenting them. What we are trying to do is to present good stories that touch a nerve for our
generation about the fathers that we loved and didn’t understand.
This is a labor of love that is evolving by the minute and so please keep in touch with your comments,
ideas, and hopefully, your stories. If you know of anyone else, son or daughter who might want to share
stories, please feel free to give them the website address or our email.
-Ilene Baker
Our Fathers
