I stood in a Brooklyn post office renewing my teenage son’s passport, hoping to board a plane by summertime. When I paid with a USAA check, the postal worker thanked me for my service. I deflected as usual: “Oh no, I didn’t serve, my father served.” I have USAA imposter syndrome; I know I didn’t earn that no-fee checking.

But she pressed on, asking me to thank him for his service, “If he is still with us,” which I batted away again: Oh, it was only a year overseas, he was only a doctor, and it was before I was born.

Just as I was adding that this measly year took place before I was born, I paused and remembered. Then I murmured, “It’s possible he died of an illness sustained there, so thank you.” My son stared as I flooded with tears. What the hell was happening?

My father, Gary Hartman, was a pediatric oncologist known for his compassion. He listened to the visions of terminally ill kids, pioneered hypnosis for pain management, and sat with families through their worst hours (upon leaving his practice, he was replaced by a social worker and a doctor). He cried at a good commercial and taught his bird to whistle Vivaldi’s Spring.

A Jewish-Buddhist vegetarian, my dad held to the ethical principle of Ahimsa (non-harm). When mice colonized the garage, he bought a humane trap so he could drive them to a nearby field and release them. He was a Make Love, Not War kind of guy who raised four arty adults, including me.

He was also an Army surgeon for the 52nd Artillery Group in Pleiku, Vietnam, in the late 1960s. He said he was essentially drafted, though technically, a commissioned officer can’t be drafted. He always claimed it was easier for him because he was older (26), married, and already a doctor, unlike the young guys who had it much worse—the teenagers, the real soldiers.

My father earned a Bronze Star but made that sound like a fluke, too. He had to perform surgery under fire but didn’t feel brave about it. He survived, started a medical practice, had two kids, divorced, remarried, had two more kids, then quit patient care to work for the State of California as a disability claims analyst.

In 2002, he contracted a rare cancer at age 56 and died at 60. I was 31; my siblings were 29, 19, and 17. His loss broke and reshaped each of us, and our family, forever.

We didn’t speculate about why he got sick. A man who chose to specialize in childhood cancer, he did not ask why about his patients, and he did not ask why about himself.

The Vietnam War officially joined my family’s identity in 2026—23 years after my dad died, 57 years after he served, and one year into a gnarled claims process steered by my sister and stepmother, when VA recognized his death by liposarcoma as a “service-related disability” due to Agent Orange exposure.

He was poisoned the whole time, my whole life.

I first suspected Agent Orange caused his illness about 10 years ago when a colleague posted about her mother’s quest to obtain survivor benefits for a similar cancer. I kept that hunch to myself, hesitating to even tell one brother about it. The idea made medical sense, but it didn’t square with who I thought we were: doctor’s kids, not military kids.

That private suspicion did not change my identity, nor did it awaken my curiosity about the Vietnam War or my father’s bout in the military.

But the letter with the VA seal affirms that my dad died a belated casualty of war, just like hundreds of thousands of others. Does this make my siblings and me some version of Gold Star kids, who lost a parent in the line of duty? That feels like an overreach far beyond my USAA imposter syndrome.

My dad gave his health and his life for that war, and he didn’t even know it. That’s not a footnote. It’s a whole chapter.

The Vietnam War caused my father’s illness, his pain, his inability to digest food when the man loved to eat. It is the reason he didn’t meet his grandchildren, dance at my siblings’ weddings, or really know us as adults. My son, niece, and nephew missed the kind of grandpa who, seated next to a crying toddler on an airplane, made a puppet out of a sickness bag to amuse a stranger’s child. It is a grief that endures and spreads.

The loss brings me into a community of military families. What does that mean, at this stage of my life? What does it mean in terms of honoring my father?

Maybe I—a bicoastal, bisexual, Brooklyn-based playwright for whom “war” and “anti” go together like “grilled” and “cheese”—thought of vets as separate from my father: macho, angry, burly, fundamentalist, and violent people who wore ‘Nam medals. Maybe I thought military families were Republican, straight, Midwestern, suburban, and sports-oriented hawks.

But as more and more casualties of that war are identified long after it ended, I increasingly see that military families are us. Even my father’s deflection was typical, not exceptional. My dad spoke freely about death and dying, even shared his own illness in an early blog, “The Cancer Dance Chronicles,” but stayed quiet about the war.

I’ve been working on a musical, Alice Bliss (based on Laura Harrington’s moving novel), in which a father in the reserves is called to serve in Iraq, during the Surge of 2007. Part of the mother character’s misplaced refusal to find community is a mindset that holds, “We are not a military family,” which adds isolation to anxiety when her husband goes missing. Little did I know when I began the project a decade ago that I, too, would shift my identity.

As kids, my dad let my brother and me play dress-up in his Army fatigues. I always remembered that as a goofy game, suggesting his casual, even irreverent, attitude about the war. But now I think: He kept those uniforms. My father didn’t talk much about his service, but he took hundreds of slides overseas. He made reel-to-reel audiotapes of his experience as a company surgeon, a kid from Ohio out of the country for the first time, a wry, un-warlike Army captain.

When his cancer was in remission, he joined a meditation retreat for veterans, became friends with a poet, then got uncomfortable when the poet started wearing dog tags and a pith helmet everywhere. I see now that those Vietnam vets wearing their “Still in ʼNam” gear, mumbling or shouting about a war that was over (these guys were everywhere in San Diego in the 1980s), were making something visible that everyone else agreed to keep invisible. Including my family.

My father was not “still in ʼNam.” But ʼNam was still in him. Like so many, he paid for that war with his health, his life, and his family’s happiness.

Now that VA has acknowledged the cause of death, my next step is to get my father’s name onto the Honor Roll of the “In Memory” program, commemorating those who served in Vietnam and later died of causes related to the war.

I hope my siblings, stepmother, and our kids can all make it to the ceremony in 2027. I expect to check out the other people attending, some who return every year and some who might be there for the first time. People with USAA bank accounts and gaps in their hearts. People who’ve gone decades tracing the void of a spouse, a parent, a grandparent, a beloved relative or friend. People whose lives got derailed before they even got started. People defined by a war they thought had very little to do with them.

People who loved the people who gave everything, whether or not they believed in the war or ever fired a gun, whether they were hunters or vegetarians, VFW barflies or gentle trappers of mice.

People like my father, Capt. Gary Arnold Hartman, 52nd Artillery Group, and the people who needed them and lost them.

People like me.

This War Horse Reflection was edited by Kim Vo, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mollie Turnbull. Kim Vo wrote the headlines.