When I stepped over the rocky ridge onto the top of the small Italian mountain where my father’s first big battle took place in World War II, I expected to feel closer to him. Instead, a gulf opened.

The hike up Monte la Difensa, on a warm weekend that would mark Memorial Day back in the United States, was an attempt to get inside the head of my long dead father. I hoped to expand my understanding of this man who had been a commando in an elite Army unit and then returned to farm in North Dakota as a disabled veteran and to begin a family.

Dad was the first child born to his Norwegian immigrant parents in their homesteading cabin near Williston, on the western edge of the state. I was one of a gaggle of children surrounding my parents through the postwar decades in that same farm valley. The family eked out a simple existence, always in want but mostly happy. But beneath the bustle of life, we grappled with the presence of Dad’s struggles. Along with permanent leg damage that restricted his abilities, my father dealt with unvoiced mental suffering, and the combination of maladies stressed his life and ours.

My father’s youngest son, I was just a kid when he died in 1969. For the past few years I have crossed continents and studied battles to understand who Staff Sergeant Erick G. Thorness had become after that fateful service in war 80 years ago, and perhaps get a glimpse of who he was before he answered the draft and reported for service at Fort Snelling on May 25, 1942. He was 30, much older than the average recruit. No doubt the sucker punch of Pearl Harbor, not yet six months past, steeled his determination.

My attempt at clarity and redemption of Dad would take years of walking, seeking connections and combing through history, and would result in my book “All Roads Lead to Rome: Searching for the End of My Father’s War,” to be released this fall by Potomac Books.

I would travel back to our farming valley in western North Dakota and to the hills and plains south of Italy’s capital, Rome.

I would also travel into the too-shadowy world of mental health problems suffered by some veterans. This, perhaps more than putting my boots on the ground of Dad’s battlefields, was where my most profound education began.

Treating only the wounds we could see

Soldiers returned from battle to a society that focused mostly on the physical wounds and scars. The psychological effects of war were labeled “shell shock” or “battle fatigue” or simply “exhaustion,” and I imagine most people expected the problem to clear up once the soldier returned to the safety and quiet of home life. Meanwhile, the unspoken message to the all-male combat force was “suck it up” and “be a man.” The effects of war did not end when my dad got home, but instead slowly worsened. He would chase his demons with alcohol, blowing off steam and seeking relief in the local tavern.

Growing up, I would see veterans waving from cars in a parade and watch soldiers’ exploits in Hollywood productions that glorified their bravery. My father’s unit, in fact, was the source of one such treatment, the 1968 film “The Devil’s Brigade,” starring William Holden. It told the triumphant story of his outfit, the First Special Service Force, scaling the face of that Italian mountain where I now stood and routing the German troops in a daring overnight assault. The attack made “the Force” famous, and it led me to return to that high field of battle to  glimpse what Dad had gone through. What had he faced? How had it changed him?

In one of the few service stories my father shared with my older siblings, his memory of the Difensa battle included losing the soldiers on each side of him, comrades and friends, during that firefight. And then he and the rest of the troops went on to win that battle and many others. In a later battle, he was wounded with shrapnel in his back and legs and evacuated the day before his unit led the triumphant liberation of Rome. He carried home with him, along with one nerve-shredded leg and bum foot, memories that would disturb his sleep.

Consider the full cost of war

Dad’s employer, the U.S. Army, failed its soldiers by not addressing this inevitable, predictable and, in fact, well-documented effect of war. Instead of placing value on the whole person they had conscripted to defend his country, they patched up only the physical wounds. I’ve been searching, too, for the cause of this failure.

In a recent book, “Psychiatric Casualties: How and Why the Military Ignores the Full Cost of War” (Columbia University Press, 2021),  authors Mark C. Russell and Charles Figley comb history for clues. They cite a 1945 Washington Post article that referred to concerns over acute shortages of psychiatric services and other factors that had “contributed to a military mental health crisis.”

Military leaders, wrote the authors, attributed “chronic war-stress injury to preexisting weakness, personality disorder, or malingering, all of which exacerbated stigma and barriers to seeking care.”

Carving a new path was psychiatrist John W. Appel, who was tasked with studying the problem in the field. He spent six weeks near the front lines in Italy, during the Monte Cassino and Anzio campaigns. My father was in the ranks for those two battles as well. In the resulting report to the U.S. Surgeon General, Appel argued that the cumulative effect of war trauma would break down any man, writing “psychiatric casualties are just as inevitable as gunshot or shrapnel wounds in warfare.”

I learned that the Army seemed unwilling to address the blind spot in its own history. Changes to deployment cycles and treatments had been recommended after World War I.

The pattern continued. The noted film director John Huston, who enlisted in 1942, made a documentary, “Let There Be Light,” about combat veterans in treatment for so-called battle fatigue at an Army psychiatric facility after World War II. Just as it was to make its premiere, the Army shelved it, labeling it classified. It would not become accessible until 2012.

Treating war-related trauma apparently did not change measurably for many years after my father’s war.

During college in the early 1980s, about the time the condition was renamed post-traumatic stress disorder, I began to notice distressed Vietnam veterans, identifiable by their unit patches on fatigue jackets and hats. A physical disability would be obvious, but less visible was mental illness and, sadly, that malady seemed primarily addressed through substance abuse. Drug use had reached epic proportions during that war, with significant percentages of soldiers using cannabis and even heroin. After returning, many spiraled out of control. In 1988 the National Vietnam Veteran Readjustment Study estimated that 40 percent of the nation’s homeless people were Vietnam vets.

Too many of us have, literally and figuratively, given this problem wide berth as we go about our lives. The authors of “Psychological Casualties” assert that the situation has continued with veterans of more recent wars, and that it must change. Their work was brought to video in the 2022 documentary “Stranger at Home: Healing the Psychological Effects of War,” available for viewing on PBS.

To be sure, there have been some improvements. In 1989, Congress mandated that the Veterans Administration create the National Center for PTSD, which has multiple programs underway.

The advocacy group National Alliance on Mental Illness cites a major 2020 bill passed in Congress that, among other things, expanded rural mental health services for veterans. And, says NAMI, there are three bills currently before Congress that would offer more help.

The debt we owe

I wondered about my father’s return to his rural life as I stood on Monte la Difensa on that May day a few years ago, considering the battle. After two years in and out of Army hospitals, he went back to the farm in 1946. He had to travel all the way across North Dakota to Fargo for further VA medical care. There is no record of him ever seeking mental health care.

Being atop that mountain on Memorial Day weekend made the holiday more meaningful to me than it ever had been, and I considered whether Dad ever celebrated it. I know his uniform gathered dust in the back of his closet.

Where is the celebration of achievement for a soldier? How does a person come to grips with participating in the death, destruction and horror of war? I could not get inside my father’s head on that, whether standing on his battlefield or on the hill overlooking our farm. He pretty much went it alone, a stoic Norwegian American, another member of the Greatest Generation who never talked about it. That avoidance, it turns out, is also a symptom of PTSD.

We have always owed our soldiers more. In the memory of those who lost their lives, as well as those who survived and now soldier on, we should pay attention. We must hold our nation to standards that respect the great sacrifice a person undertakes to defend our country. Seeking to know my father better, I recalibrated my own gauge of a person who fought hard in battle and then continued that fight back home.

Bill Thorness is a Seattle writer with five previous books. His memoir “All Roads Lead to Rome: Searching for the End of My Father’s War,” will be released in December. See more of his work and a link to preorder the book at billthorness.com.