I have set myself three equally important, and in some ways conflicting, tasks in this book. My first goal is forThe Wars We Inheritto illuminate the relationship between the violence that we experience in our homes and the ways that we organize our culture. Why is it that one-third of felony assault charges in America are for crimes committed against family members? And why is it that an analysis of inmates convicted of family violence crimes in 1997 reveals that half the convictions were for sex offenses? And how do we explain the fact that, of these sex-offense...

I still haven’t figured out what to say to people when they ask me about my father. I’ve tried “he’s disappeared”; “he’s a casualty of war”; “he’s a bastard and I haven’t seen him since 1983”; “he’s a wounded soul, lost in this world.” Anything I say violates social etiquette. But he is my childhood, my adolescence, a presence shadowing me. If I hide him or lie about him, I hide parts of myself and lie about who I am. To find the words to speak about my father is to allow us both our integrity.

My search for a...

I spent six years running away from the life that broke open the summer of Frank and Sally—six years, exchanging army bases and campgrounds for the navy bases of married life. Running blind, away from my old life, I ended up recreating it. Lewis was a radiation technician on naval nuclear submarines. His entire psychic life was governed by rules, procedures, drills, training—and the constant, chronic fear of failing. Every action governed by fear and disorientation: Lewis’s fear of punishment for any infraction—being late, being unshaved, wearing unironed uniform, falling asleep on watch, forgetting log entries.

Fear...

I am haunted by things that happened before I was born, histories that are only partly my own. The ghosts hugging me cross generations, collapse time and space; they hold hands with my father, have their fingers threaded through my mother’s hair, are locked elbow-to-elbow with my brothers and sisters. Ghosts hid like crumbs in the seams of our car’s upholstery. When nobody is sitting down, the seams fold around crumbs too small to see. But, when the weight of a body presses the seams apart, the crumbs stick to sweaty thighs, grind into flesh, make you itch. All those...

People ask me about Frank, “What happened?”

What happened is the haunted house and my nightmares and the skin shudders and then calling my sisters. What happened is birth to age eighteen living inside incomprehensible cycles of drinking, fighting, yelling, crying, hurting, longing. What happened is the chronic work of forgetting helped along by alarm clocks and work and school and getting dinner ready. What happened is Frank and Sally and then six years of running away from the incomprehensible mess trailing me.

In psychoanalytic terms, I had to go back and encounter a past that had remained unencountered. To...

It seems to me now that, when Zane hinted at the trial, she was trying to tell me about Frank, to ask me if anything had happened to me. But she couldn’t do it directly. We had to go slowly, circling the edges of the pasts we’d been living as secrets. Encounter the shock of what our sideways looking revealed and then fall back, regroup, and readjust. Get up and start tracing, again, the secret center of our family. Our re-membering was a spiral dance, a complicated tapping between the here-and-now and the there-and-then.

The night the haunted house opened...

Fear and shame lived in my family, deep inside our bodies, deep inside our psyches. Governing every feeling, thought, action. Every relation. A primal thing. Teresa Brennan inThe Transmission of Affectargues that the evolutionary task in front of us is to learn how to connect our conscious world to our unconscious bodily processes. To trace, for example, how we think and act to the force our emotions exert on us. It is a task for which we are, at present, vastly underequipped. As Brennan puts it, “We only have a rudimentary language for connecting sensations, affects, and words,...

When the haunted house busted our ghosts out, Georgia became my lifeline: the one I could call when I awoke at three in the morning with dreams of Frank trying to kill me, the one who had concrete memories, the one who let me know I was not crazy. For years and years, I dreamed constantly, always the same thing: that somebody was trying to kill me, to shoot me because I had told. In the dreams, what I had “told” was never clear. But, morning after morning, I awoke terrified that I would be shot. I awoke in the...

Dori Laub, a psychoanalyst who has spent his career working with survivors of the Holocaust, argues that our inability to find the language to speak about the histories possessing us leaves us helpless subjects in the hands of the tyrant past. Past events “become more and more distorted in their silent retention and pervasively invade and contaminate the survivor’s daily life. The longer the story remains untold, the more distorted it becomes in the survivor’s conception of it” (1992, 79). To tell the stories of our pasts allows us to repossess our histories, to reclaim ownership of our own life...

When Frank got back from Vietnam, he was obsessed with getting away from “civilization” and “back to the land.” He requested a transfer to Fort Greely, Alaska, where he could live out his dream of hunting and fishing in an uncontaminated wilderness. For over two years, we left the lower forty-eight behind; we moved to an isolated subarctic army base with no family history, nothing to hold or sustain memories. No witnesses. Alaska was Frank’s last duty station. When he retired from the army, he moved us to Satsuma, Florida, a small town where Lily and Margaret were living. When...

This is the uncanny return. We are all familiar with the traumatic repetitions of old, destructive patterns. Choosing an alcoholic spouse when our parents were alcoholics. Staying in physically abusive relationships when we come from homes marked by domestic violence. But some repetitions of traumas seem to be almost random, do not show on the surface the signs of repeating old patterns. Dori Laub notes this particularly in the Holocaust survivors with whom he has worked. Martin Gray, for example, lost his entire family “in the flames of Warsaw and Treblinka” (1992, 65). Years later, after remarrying, establishing a home...

Simon, Sandra, and Marnie did not see Margaret again until 1992, and, when they did, it was at Jenny’s memorial service.

Jenny’s life and death still haunt me. When I left for New York in the summer of’82—the summer of Frank and Sally—Jenny was ten years old, living in a campground not far from us. Lily was in the Good Samaritan nursing home, where Margaret worked as a floor nurse. I loved Jenny. Fiercely. Devotedly. In the abstract. I was never out of crisis long enough to give Jenny concrete love. The summer I was fleeing with a...

Standing in the O’Hare airport, tears dripping down my chin, onto my shirt, can’t stop them. Surrounded by teenagers, eighteen- and nineteen-year-old naval recruits, just out of basic training at the Naval Training Center in Chicago. They’re in their dress blues, bent under the weight of their duffle bags. Pimples. They look scared. Confused. How many of these kids are poor, from small towns? Kids who enlisted in the navy because it looked like a way “out”? Out of poverty, out of dead-end small towns with no jobs for them? How many of them are trading three years of their...

If you are exposed to violence, you become violent. And this is a fact of life, not a fact solely of war. The war may come to a formal end, but all those people who have learned violence—learned to solve their problems, and conflicts, and confusions with violence—will continue to use it. They will be more violent with their families, with their friends, in their work. They will see violence as the appropriate response to any political contest…. Violence lives in the belly of the person and ruins society, unless peace is taught to the violent. And peace...

A man hates his enemy because he hates his own hate. He says to himself: this fellow, my enemy, has made me capable of hate. I hate him not because he is my enemy, not because he hates me, but because he arouses me to hate. (Wiesel 1982, 198)

On the first day of classes in August 2005, Maria was waiting for me outside the door to my Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies class. I didn’t recognize her. I could tell, by the way she was looking at me, that she was hoping for something from me—a sign...

If we are to get out of destructive cycles of war and violence, we have to change our mental representations of our selves as well as of others. (Volkan 1988, 76)

There can be no such thing as “peace” unless we change our gender relations. (Connell 2007, 38)

If we want to choose a future of life, love, and hope, we have to change the way we think. About who is “us” and who is “them,” about who “we” are and who the “other” is. About what it means to be a “man” or a “woman.” We have to rethink...

The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. (Adorno 1978, 153)

If love is divine, it is not because it is alien or separated from us. Love, born from critical reinterpretation, is the affirmation of our relationship to the world and other people. (Oliver 2001, 221)

In 1999, I went to the annual Women’s Studies Conference at Southern Connecticut State University. The theme that year was Women’s Rights and Human Rights. It was an amazing conference. Rigoberta Menchú,...

Nineteen years after Frank left, I went to his childhood home in Lowell, Massachusetts, looking for something that could help me understand him. I wanted to find people who had known Frank so I could find out who he was to them. I wanted to learn something about the childhood he lived and the world he grew up in. I went looking for the stories that could help me understand the battles he fought with himself, the war he waged in his private world.

I started with an Internet search for the one person I could remember, Frank’s brother, Thomas....