An Army lieutenant returns from World War II, riven by PTSD. He wants to be an attorney, so he’s forced to keep his illness a secret. As far as he knows, there’s only one cure for the devastating nightmares that began during his command of an artillery company: Scotch whiskey, and lots of it.
Although Peter McBean could keep his secret safe from the world, he couldn’t keep his family from finding out. Often, when he was swept up by his nightmares, his wife and his only son provided a terrified audience. Later, his four daughters fell under the sway of his peculiar form of sadism during which he built tickling into a painful and brutal art form. Four of five children ended up exhibiting symptoms of secondary trauma: depression, anxiety, alcoholism and or drug abuse, inability to learn, and objective defiance disorder.

Fortunately, Lt. McBean wrote over 100 letters from the battlefield describing in horrible detail the stark reality he witnessed. His artillery unit, which landed in France about a month after D-day in 1944, fought its way inland, sweeping through France and into Germany. He survived the Battle of the Bulge, the Battle of Mortain, and the Battle of the Falaise Pocket before coming home to New York in September of 1945.

The letters allowed his son Bill to finally understand what happened to his father in Europe, and after he returned to war-weary America. They also served as a catalyst, allowing Bill to finally get his arms around how his own life had unfolded, as well as the lives of his four sisters. The journalist in him reemerged from retirement to write a memoir about his own life in the hope that today’s military families won’t need to suffer the way his did.