It's so easy to use the phrase 'twisted life' rather than accept the fact that what you're dad was experiencing was the normal life one would expect from a "Korean War Recon killer...without his privilege to string yellow ears on sinew and wear it as regalia?"

The picture you portray, almost too terrible to imagine, both for your dad, and for you as a child of witness, tells us a tale of the soul-damaging ravages war shatters its participants with.

Like using the word "inhuman' to escape the charge that real human beings act in such a way as to deserve the adjective; that the being acting in such a way surely can't be human, must be a mutation, we use words like 'twisted' to keep from owning up to the fact that the behavior warriors exhibit after suffering the ordeal of war is normal, the behavior one should expect, or not be surprised at, as we slowly and painfully evolve toward a civilization in which war as a method of resolving differences is too far back in the recesses of the mind to be considered.

As for that handbasket we're in, I wonder who it is that's carrying it. And shouldn't we increase the dimensions of our transportation mode to a size seen only through the eye of a telescope.