Two wars — and two homecomings 
My dad, a Vietnam vet, was one of the first to line up near the Brook Park Recreation Center on Oct. 7. Tears filled his eyes as he welcomed home the troops, including his nephew, Cpl. Michael Mauk, from Iraq. Mauk raised his arms in victory as he stepped off the bus, then double-stepped into formation before anyone in his battalion caught him clowning around.
His homecoming was completely different from my dad's. Army Staff Sgt. Bill Mauk returned to Cleveland alone and shamed.
Both men fought in unpopular wars. Prevailing attitudes toward troops shaped each veteran's psychological adjustment.
"If people didn't support the war, they supported us," my cousin Michael said. "And it really kept me going."
He proudly talked about Marines training Iraqi army units and equipping hospitals. At his homecoming party, he wore fatigues. My dad, on the other hand, felt angry after fighting a battle most soldiers in 1970 knew they couldn't win. He left Terminal Tower for Vietnam 36 years ago with a group of other soldiers in uniform. Protesters spit on them and called them "baby-killers." When he returned, he kept a low profile.
"You did not want to let people know you were back from Vietnam," he said. "It was, 'Get that uniform off and act like a civilian.' I didn't want anything to do with Vietnam. That particular two-year block of my life is over, but it never went away."
My dad was the only man in our family's three generations of veterans who returned home to resentment. My grandfather started a family in Bedford after coming back a war hero from the Pacific theater of World War II; he had been wounded while flying a B-25 bomber. My cousin was one of the lucky ones in Iraq. He survived, but his Marine battalion lost 48 members. 
"It was amazing when we came home," he said. "It's just a shame the Vietnam vets didn't have that. I can't even imagine what it was like for Uncle Bill to be there and not get the support we did."
Strangers sent food, magazines, toiletries and phone cards to troops in Iraq. When my cousin was upset, he usually could place a half-hour phone call to his family within a week. He e-mailed regularly. During the Vietnam War, mail took two or three days to arrive, and soldiers waited days to make a five- or 10-minute phone call twice a year. Back then, psychologists didn't understand post-traumatic stress disorder. The military didn't prepare men to return home. No one warned my dad that his 15-month-old daughter would scream when he hugged her because she didn't recognize him.
These days, debriefing doesn't prevent veterans from coming home jumpy, but at least it normalizes their reactions. My cousin knows he has to remind himself when he's driving that he's hit a pothole — not a landmine like the one that killed his buddy. Support groups help families.
My dad never said a word about Vietnam or why he hated camping, crowds and airports. He just silently watched war movies. Later, when more Vietnam movies emerged, he occasionally mentioned details, such as how hiking the same trail in and out meant risking booby traps.
Without support groups, he found ways to heal – mainly by hiring Thai people at a manufacturing plant he managed. 
"I felt an obligation to Asian people because we treated them so poorly and left them to their own devices. I thought, 'This is what I can do to make up for what I personally did wrong,'" he said.
More healing occurred on Oct. 7 when he watched a gray-haired sergeant who served in Iraq step off the bus and hug a stranger who was standing in the crowd and wearing a Vietnam vet hat.
"I was there too," the sergeant told the vet.
This time around, the old sergeant received an enthusiastic welcome home from the war. My dad stood behind the two men, silently accepting the sergeant's acknowledgment of Vietnam vets.
"It was one of the things that got to me," my dad said. "When that old sergeant got off the bus and hugged that guy, it was like, 'Wow, he kind of got a welcome home.' And this old sergeant did get his welcome home, but it took many years."
Just like it took many years for us to learn about supporting troops, no matter how we feel about war.

---

Deep Rumble
​The other night, that California mountain loomed large in my dreams. Its long, deep lines have haunted me ever since, like an ex-lover I once studied every nook and cranny of – its changing dispositions, from penetrating spring heat that enticed me to strip down to my thinnest layers to the cutting wind and blinding snow that forced me to hide every quarter inch of my skin.It has been almost a decade since I dedicated an entire season of my life to this mountain. The first time we met, I knew its steep interiors had infused my veins with an obsession that would not cease until I fully lived it. So I did the only thing I could: I dropped everything – all the responsibilities I had collected throughout my 10 years in Colorado, and succumbed to Mammoth Mountain’s power. It wasn’t an easy transition. I lived with my husband and dog in a closet – literally. Most of the money we made teaching 4-year-olds how to wedge went to an older man with the only available condo association willing to accept a dog. Only a single mattress fit into our “room.” We had to walk through the man’s bedroom to get to the condo’s one bathroom – or anywhere else in the 550-square-foot shit hole, like the kitchen, living room and front door. He didn’t allow us to turn the heat past 60, and if we watched television, it had to be “The Dating Game.” We all lived there full time, and by mid-winter, the man and I somehow became embroiled in a silent, twisted power play regarding toilet paper. Yes, toilet paper. I actually reduced myself to hoarding my own roll, tucking only the pieces I needed into my bra and taking them to every bathroom trip I made. Our shared bathroom remained without toilet paper for 47 days, until I decided I’d rather become a homeless vagabond for the last three weeks of the ski season.
Meanwhile, turn after turn, I carved my frustrations into Mammoth Mountain’s strong spine. Week after week, it renewed itself with virgin snow, just waiting for me to sink into. And day after day, its narrow lines kicked my ass. I would never have believed in the mountain’s seductive force before that defining day, when my husband took me to Mammoth for the first time, and I fell in love. For 10 years before our spontaneous “Screw it, we’re almost 30; let’s go skiing” decision, my husband raved about Mammoth. Having lived and loved Summit County, Colorado, since I was 19, I figured he was full of crap – just another California-breed-boy pumping up his native state’s ski area. I had heard about Sierra cement, and I wasn’t about to trade in Colorado champagne powder for it. But then I skied chair 23 at Mammoth and realized not everyone must hike for their steep and deep turns. This triple chair, met atop by a protective tunnel because it’s so damn windy, delivered more snow-tumbling vertical than any terrain in Summit County. Even when it hadn’t snowed for a week, my skis cut into the surface, like a hot knife into butter, because that crazy wind loaded the slope with Styrofoam softness. And perhaps the best thing about the mountain: It actually came through when weather channels promised storms. I could rely on this mountain. It wasn’t fickle. It produced dumps that reduced parked cars to a series of indistinguishable lumps in a lot. I had grown accustomed to 6 or 8 inches of excitement in Colorado, but Mammoth tickled my entire body. One powder day, we videoed my snowy orgasm as I floated below chair 5. “It’s tit deep!” I exclaimed into the camera. When I first met my husband, he could hardly finish a sentence without dropping the F-bomb, but since he had transformed into a schoolteacher, he insisted we edit the “profanity” out of our video, lest we have children down the road. We never did (have kids), and I never
have skied tit-deep powder since that 2000-01 season. Now, in this new decade, Mammoth calls out to me again. It creeps into my dreams. It floods my memory as I look out my Silverthorne window, see 1 inch on my deck railing in February, and picture the five nights in a row that so much snow fell in the Sierra, by the fifth day of waist deep powder, I begged it not to snow anymore, lest my leg muscles completely give out.
At almost 40, I’m supposed to know better. I’m supposed to be settled with my first love: the mountains of Summit County. I’m not supposed to be longing for another. I’m supposed to have learned that going for the adrenaline rush isn’t the only goal. I’m not supposed to compare 7 inches to 34 and ache, with every cell in my body, for more. I’m old enough and experienced enough to know that the fantasy is always better than the reality. After all, I recall crouching under a jagged rock, in the middle of an abandoned Mammoth tree run, crying and wishing we didn’t have two more weeks until the ski season ended, so I could stop couch surfing and return home to my friends and the familiarity of Colorado. I remember my nose turning whiter than I’d ever seen it, despite the facemask and neck gator I wore to protect myself from the biting wind. But I also remember that same wind, which blew in mammoth-sized storms and loaded steep faces and hidden tree runs, over and over again, all in the same day.
​And so that volcanic mountain, scarred with a gaping fracture that swallowed up earth at its base, continues to rumble deep within me, threatening, once again, to shake up my stable Summit County life, in pursuit of the steeper and deeper.

---