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I Was His “Get Out of Jail Free” Card. And I Was Her Meal Ticket

When you finally figure out what’s going on with the family dynamics.

Terry L. Cooper
5 min readJul 2, 2021
Image by Andreas Wohlfahrt from Pixabay

Dear old dad will tell anyone who will listen, and chase down those who don’t, that he was in the military.

Good for you.

He sat for 6-years on a military base stateside. Not exactly that generation’s version of Afghanistan. He had one deployment where he sat for 30 days on an aircraft carrier in the middle of an ocean on standby. That’s it.

But every other minute of every single day I have to listen to him tell perfect strangers he was in the military.

He says he got out in 1955 just before the Vietnam War began. I heard him say recently that he wished he never got out, and that he had made a career out of it. That got me to thinking.

If he had done that, I would have never been born.

So he regrets getting married and having kids, does he? I wonder how long that’s been rolling around in that head of his that he probably should have taken with him to his grave.

The Vietnam War, also known as the Second Indochina War, was a conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975.-Wikipedia

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