Commentary : Dear Dad: Where Do We Go From Here? : Vietnam: A daughter ponders the war’s unspoken specter over her family.

In my family, Armistice Day is April 23--the day the Vietnam War officially ended. My father returned to our home in Indiana five years before the war’s end in 1975, but President Ford’s declaration from New Orleans that April promised a desperately needed peace for us.

My father would no longer have to watch the news gripping his chair while his knuckles turned white. He wouldn’t have to sit alone on the back porch staring out into the fields. My mother would have no more need to make excuses for his strange behavior.

But in the 19 years since the war ended, remarkably little has changed in our house. Peace didn’t bring relief to my father, nor did it help me to understand him. There was even a time when I became one of his accusers.

When I saw a movie like “Platoon” or “Deer Hunter,” I made sure my father didn’t know I had. Did those films tell his story, I wondered? In the wake of Dad’s silence about the war, I became convinced that he must have done something horrible. By the time I was 12, I was sure his refusal to discuss Vietnam was an admission of guilt.

As reports detailing the crimes of the war reached our small town, North Manchester, my father and the other 16 surviving local veterans became social pariahs. When the subject of Vietnam came up in class, my teacher asked if I would like to be excused. He and my classmates assumed that my father’s presence in Vietnam deserved blame, and that I would be uneasy about the war.

I failed to understand then that my father’s distance from my life was intentional. He kept his past away from me because he was afraid of hindering my future. I decided that if I were going to have a relationship with my father, I would have to play by his rules.

Daily, we went through the motions of being father and daughter. We ate dinner together every evening, then watched “All In the Family.” Our relationship hinted at closeness only late at night, when Dad would wake me up to eat French toast and fried-egg sandwiches with him. But even then, our conversations did not involve anything pertaining to our lives. We talked about cars, mainly the antique Studebaker Avanti he had his heart set on buying.

Missing from our relationship was real conflict. There was so much that went unsaid that there was no room--or perhaps too much room--for conflict. One disagreement would have brought our whole relationship tumbling down. We went about our lives with a benign tolerance of each other.

It wasn’t until I left for college that I finally recognized the self-destructive circle that our relationship had become. I began to understand the possibility that my father’s only crime was to have been in Vietnam in the first place. Even if he had not seen one day of combat, his mere association with the war was enough to leave him stigmatized.

In his recent book, “Daddy’s Gone to War,” William Tuttle documents how World War II affected the family lives of the veterans. He maintains that a terrible distance often emerged between the veterans and their families because the families had learned to live without them. Sometimes, though, it was what the soldier had seen while “in country” that made life so difficult. Tuttle observes these problems in veterans who came home as heroes.

With Vietnam, it was as if the soldiers were coming home after a prison term. Public opinion said they ought to be ashamed of the time they had served. They came home without the ticker-tape greetings, and, more disastrously, without social services to help them readjust.

In recent years, the government has begun to deal with the distress suffered by the Vietnam veteran. But what many don’t see is that within the families of veterans, the war is still being fought and still taking casualties. As the government and the Veterans of Foreign Wars have come to see the necessity of making amends with Vietnam vets, they have shown us--their children--our responsibility. Today, we must acknowledge the role we played in making things worse for our fathers.

In my grade-school diary, I ended every entry by writing “I love Dad and I know he loves me.” I believed that if anything happened to me, my dad would ultimately be assured that he was a good father and I was a devoted daughter.

In high school, I tried to be more explicit about showing my feelings. One day, I donned the army fatigue jacket that he kept buried in the basement under a pile of old books. I wanted him to see that his baby daughter was now big enough to wear his old fatigues and that the war was so far behind us that it had lost whatever symbolism it had.

When I call home from college, I try to avoid speaking to my father, unless there is a problem with my car. It is too painful to ask “So, what’s going on?” and end up with small talk. I believe that if my father had not been in Vietnam, things would be different. I’m sure that he knows how to be a good parent, but he can’t find a way to break 23 years of silence. Neither of us knows what the next step is, but we both want to take it.