They came back different, if they came back at all

My father was wounded in April of 1945 just a few weeks before the war in Europe ended. He hid in an abandoned farmhouse for two days until he was found by American troops. While he was being evacuated his ambulance was strafed by enemy aircraft fire, while the ambulance was being strafed the driver and the medic jumped out of the ambulance and sought cover in a ditch, leaving my father alone in the ambulance while the enemy aircraft made a few more strafing passes.
My father spent some time in an army hospital in Europe before he was evacuated first by ship and then by train to an army hospital in Iowa.
My father recovered fairly quickly from his wounds, shrapnel wounds, and was released from the hospital and then medically discharged from the army.
This next part is the hard part to write.
My father was discharged from the hospital too soon. He was suffering from what was then called battle fatigue and what they now call post traumatic stress syndrome.
This all happened before I was born, so I can only tell you what happened by second hand accounts from my mother and other relatives, none of this was told to me by my father, he never talked about this, ever.
My father would wake up in the middle of the night and just get up and leave and he would wander the streets of Detroit in a daze until he was found, or until he made his way back home on his own.
The family doctor told my mother that my father should be admitted to an army psychiatric hospital for treatment, but my mother knew, and I think rightly so, that the shame this would have caused my father, and this was 1945 and there would have been shame, would have caused my father more harm than good.
My mother said that she never saw my father drunk before the war, this too changed. My father wasn't a good drunk, he couldn't hold his booze. After a couple of beers he was out of control. My father was a mean drunk, not physically but verbally. You couldn't talk to my father when he had been drinking. He would disagree with anything you said. If you said black, he'd say white. If you said up, he'd say down. That is just how he was.
As the years passed my father got better. The battle fatigue was a temporary thing, his drinking was a different matter. That was a lot harder demon for him to handle, but he did handle it. My father wasn't an alcoholic or a drunk, he was just a guy who had a few too many beers maybe ten times a year, and at these times he wasn't a very pleasant guy to be around. I remember when I was growing up if my father came home drunk you just never confronted him, you just went to your bedroom, or went out, and he would go to bed and sleep it off.
My father never learned to handle his booze, but as he got older his drinking became less and less of a problem, and I doubt if he had a drink the last twenty years of his life.
My father was a good man. He had a wife and three kids, and he worked hard all his life to provide for us.
My father was a good man who went to war, like so many of his generation, and when he came back he came back different. The horrors of war changed him, it changed all of them.
I think my father came back a flawed man, but a strong man, and I guess that's just what happens to men in war.
My father was a good man, a strong man, a hard working man, a loving man, and a humble man, and any good man-like traits that I have are directly attributable to him.