When Return From a Foreign War Brings Home Domestic Loss : Homecomings: Two Americans who lost their fathers in the Vietnam War find a bond from the conflict in the Persian Gulf.

Our hearts run with them as they dash across the tarmac, into the arms of the people who missed them most. As we watch these soldiers running back into the lives they left behind, we rejoice in that fact that their war is over.

Homecomings bring irresistible gladness, unless you love someone who never came home, or if you come home to no one to love.

Jack is a friend whose father died in Vietnam. I called him on the first day of the cease-fire to see how he was handling it all. He was 4 years old when his father’s B-52 bomber was shot down over Vietnam. I remember how, when we first met, he poignantly explained that even though it had been 25 years, he felt like he was losing his father all over again. Jack was about to live longer than his father ever had and thus would no longer be able to imagine what his Dad was like at his age. Time was forcing him to surrender the only father he had left.

Not surprisingly, Jack said the war had made him think about his Dad a lot. “But do you want to know what really brought the war right into my living room?” he asked. It wasn’t CNN, it was Carol.

Carol had been given Jack’s number by someone who knew he’d lost his father in the war and who felt he might be a sympathetic listener. Carol told Jack that when she turned 21, she asked her adopted parents about her biological father. She was told he died in Vietnam when she was a month old. Carol was about to be sent to the Gulf as a reservist and she was traumatized by the thought of being killed in a war, just like her Dad. She thought Jack would understand, and reached out to him, a stranger living a thousand miles away.

Jack tried to reassure her and said to call if she ever needed to talk. She did. Carol told Jack when she got her orders, she called her family to say goodby. Her mother cried. Her adopted father, who had sexually abused her, said, “I hope you die a miserable death in the Gulf.”

A few days before she left for Saudi Arabia, Carol slit her wrists. Someone rescued her in time and, still planning to leave with her unit, she called Jack with one last request. Could she list him as her next-of-kin?

Jack said of course. But from that moment on, he could not watch the war on television without wondering if a green car was going to pull up in front of his house again. “I knew I couldn’t handle it a second time,” he said. “I didn’t tell her that, but I knew I would just lose it if I ever saw that car again.” He never did. Carol survived her official war.

It is easy, in the jubilation of the moment, to forget about the darkest wars of all, the wars that CNN can’t cover. These wars always begin in a surprise and savage attack, because the enemy was someone pledged to love, protect and nurture his victim. Family members can be the deadliest of biological weapons.

These wars of sexual abuse and physical violence are fought behind closed doors by soldiers who are untrained, unarmed and terrified. It would be ridiculous to ask if women are ever in combat.

Carol’s other war made me think of the troops whose only mail was addressed to “Any soldier in the Gulf.” Carol’s other war made me think of the thousands who would flee their own homes as immediately as Iraqi soldiers fled the battlefield if only there was a place to run to.

Or if they were old enough to walk. Half the 1,237 children who died from abuse and neglect in 1989 were less than a year old, according to the National Committee for the Prevention of Child Abuse. Of the rest, the majority were under five. From 1985 to 1989, abuse fatalities in the United States rose by 40%.

Many, like Carol, survive. In 1989, there were 2.4 million reported cases of child abuse nationwide. Because these wars are so often secret, the real number of cases is undoubtedly higher. Even so, at 2.4 million, the army of children and teenagers that survives this physical and sexual abuse each year is more than four times larger than the one coming home from the Gulf. They are caught between a rock and a horrifying place. Carol was a combat veteran long before she got to the Gulf.

Carol has made me decide to do something I wouldn’t ordinarily do, which is stand and cheer at a “Welcome Home” parade. I want to stand up and be counted for those warriors who have to rely on strangers to be their next-of-kin and who know, in their heart of hearts, that all those yellow ribbons were meant for someone else.