He was only 62, but his spirit was older from his life experiences. In 1964, when he was 23, he joined the Navy and volunteered to go to Vietnam. Twice.

I am a combat veteran's daughter, and this story is about his experience, mostly after combat.

We are again at war. And as in wars of the past, combat veterans are having experiences similar to my father's.

I feel I need to give voice to that experience - post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) - and where it took him and my family.

I am not a psychiatrist. I am a 36-year-old daughter of a quiet man with a broken heart and broken spirit.

I bring the perspective of one who has just looked into the deepest recesses of her father's mind, and some things I found there need to be said.

PTSD is a psychiatric disorder that occurs when a person is exposed to a traumatic or life-threatening event such as war. Symptoms include panic attacks, nightmares, insomnia, hypervigilance, flashbacks, outbursts of anger and irritability, concentration and attention problems and an inability to relax.

War trauma is unique because, in combat, stress is created by many experiences - the fear of death, the stress of being unable to trust the civilians around you, watching and hearing the terror of death, seeing your friends and allies hurt or killed, the guilt of survival and, finally, the feelings associated with being ordered to kill others, even though they are the enemy.

My father joined the Navy right after he graduated from Georgetown University. He was a lieutenant junior grade on his first tour in Vietnam. He signed up for a second tour, this time with the Special Forces.

He met my mother while training in the counterinsurgency. They were married before he was sent back to Vietnam.

He came home a year later and immediately started a family and career. He tried to put his warrior past behind him. However, it would not go away. He didn't talk about it, and this was his downfall. I grew up knowing my father drank to excess, but I never understood why.

A couple of years ago, he told me: "I know now that I drink to numb my feelings."

The more he tried to numb the traumatic experiences of Vietnam, the more he became emotionally distant from his growing family. Even though I remember him as a kind man and a good father, 15 years after his war experience, he and my mother separated.

After the painful divorce, the relationship between him and his children was, in many ways, severed.

I re-established intermittent contact with him 10 years ago, and it was apparent that alcohol had consumed him.

Two years ago, after not seeing him for quite some time, I found my father alone in his apartment in Portland, Ore. He looked horrible - an old man, way before his time. He was in the worst condition I had ever seen him.

I insisted on taking him to the VA's alcohol diversion program. There, I watched my father as he sat across from a substance abuse counselor.

Immediately, this man began talking to him about Vietnam, saying things like, "I know how you feel. You can't sleep, and you feel guilty, right?"

The dumbfounded look on my father's face said so much. Thirty years after his war experience, and after a couple of alcohol diversion programs, he still felt his problems were only his failings, that he was "weak" and just couldn't "handle it."

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