Inside a trailer in Honaker, Virginia, is a 5-year-old girl who loves lemon-lime slush. She sleeps in a room with a quilted bedspread and matching purple curtains. She adores her cat Tiger, dogs Smoky and Rusty and a black, pop-eyed goldfish.

Her family is poor, and she is eating potted meat, blowing away cracker crumbs that fall into her lap.

"Daddy," she whispers when her father, a welder, comes home. He does not respond. His eyes are wild. He collapses into a rocking chair, his hands trembling, his breathing labored.

She doesn't understand her father's strange behavior. It's as though he's in the grip of the devil.

She hides behind the couch, her knees press against the shag carpeting.

Later, she will remember this moment as the first time she was afraid of her father.

A hole in her soul

Christal Presley, 34, held her breath for two seemingly endless days in mid-October. In Honaker, more than 300 miles away from her home in Atlanta, her father had just received a package in the mail. It contained an early copy of Christal's new book. On the cover: a sepia-tone snapshot of Delmer Presley holding his rifle in Vietnam.

Christal had staked her whole life on words crafted from love and pain. But what would they mean to her father?

Would they offer comfort like the conversations that resulted in the book? Or would they act as another trigger point for a man who never left war behind?

"Thirty Days With My Father" is a gritty memoir written by a woman haunted by what some psychologists describe as second-generation post-traumatic stress disorder.

The trauma began in Vietnam, affected Delmer and then, Christal, says psychiatrist Frank Ochberg, a trauma expert who served on the committee that defined PTSD in the post-Vietnam era.

Christal, he says, suffered profound injury. And it stayed with her.

Outwardly, her life appeared successful: She settled in Atlanta, owned a house, worked as an educator.

But she always felt a hole in her soul. She didn't know her father -- or herself.

How was it, she wondered, that a war that ended before her birth had marred her life in so many ways?

The book became Christal's salvation -- "my last resort to find happiness," she says.

But she worried about how her father would feel seeing his troubled life exposed to the entire world. Encourage him to read the ending first, she told her mom. That way, he will understand: It's not just an ugly portrait of pain. It's a book about healing.

Wishing for normal

Christal was only 5, but she remembers clearly that day when her family came undone. Her father, on his way home from work, had come upon ans accident on the highway. His friend, Josh Coleman, was dead.

It was the first time Delmer had seen a body since he returned from his yearlong tour of duty. Thirteen years had passed, but instantly, his mind reeled back to Vietnam: to underground tunnels brimming with snakes and booby traps laced with sharp punji sticks that skewered his buddies like meat.

Christal never knew normal again.

Gone was the man who gave her piggyback rides, ate mud pies and smiled as he watched her play an angel in a school play.

Delmer vacillated between depression, silence and sheer rage.

He locked himself in the bedroom his wife had decorated with shadow boxes filled with Delmer's medals, Army boots, hats, dog tags and a worn pocket-size military-issue Bible. The room screamed war, Christal says. She was scared to enter.

At Christmas, Delmer never watched Christal open presents. She could hear him playing music in his room.

She learned to resent the guitar her father loved so much. She wished he would spend time with her, speak to her, seek solace in her.

When a truck backfired or Christal dropped a plate by accident, her father leaped up and went into soldier-at-war mode. Christal hated going out to eat at noisy restaurants -- everyone just stared.

The worst moments came when he picked up his shotgun and left the house for Little River, announcing to Christal and her mother, Judy, that he was going to kill himself.

As time passed, Christal forgot the daddy she'd once known.

Judy, a Pentecostal Christian, believed you had to be perfect to reach heaven and kept the family's struggles secret.

Christal pretended to the outside world that their life was normal.

Once when she was 6, she stole a neighbor's photo of a family trip to the beach. She cut the family's smiling faces out and replaced them with pictures of herself and her mom and dad. She showed the doctored photo off in class, describing for her classmates what a great time they'd had.

Leaving a war zone

Ironically, it was Delmer's trauma that enabled Christal to escape her parents' home.

Until then, every birthday had not been a celebration as much as it was a countdown to the day she'd turn 18 and be able to leave.

The federal government paid for her schooling at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. That's because by then, the Army had declared her father 100% disabled.

When Delmer returned from Vietnam in 1970, psychiatrists were just starting to recognize PTSD as an impairment. The first diagnosis for Vietnam veterans did not occur until 1980 when Christal was 2.

Veterans weren't encouraged to seek help, like they are these days. "My dad just thought he was going crazy."

As frightening as it was for Christal to leave Honaker and be alone for the first time, she felt liberated.