There are pictures of grandchildren around 59-year-old Gerald Ekstrom's neat apartment in El Cerrito, and the word “smile” is posted on a closet door. But Ekstrom lives under seige in this seemingly inviting home, fearing the repercussions he’s received as a registered sex offender.

Teenagers have vandalized his car, and a neighbor stayed up all night watching a house the Ekstroms just moved into after he registered with the local police.

The Vietnam veteran says he is innocent but couldn't afford a good attorney to prove it.

"When I go to Vietnam, they send me to hell. When I come back, they keep me in hell," he said. 

Ekstrom was convicted of indecent exposure to a 3-year-old girl in 1979 and sentenced to three years in jail. He has been registered since 1992 as one of  about  90,000 sex offenders in California.

In each of the past 15 years, he has gone to a police station to renew his registration. His information has been open to anyone since the mid-90s under the California Megan's Law, which required the whereabouts of sex offenders to be public. But his name, photo and address have been posted on the Internet since a new law was passed in 2004.  He walks on crutches from a variety of  war injuries and a deep wound left after he mistakenly tripped on his own boobytrap.

The trap – a hidden wire on the ground between his kitchen and living room – was set to obstruct potential attackers. But he tripped on it while holding a foot-long knife in his hand in 2004. The knife lodged into his chest and nearly killed him.

“They took me in a helicopter to the hospital in Concord. I died on the helicopter,” Ekstrom said. “They spent six to seven hours in surgery, and they brought me back to life again. ”

Ekstrom has been on the edge of life before. He joined the Marine Corps after his graduation from high school in 1967 and turned 19 in Vietnam with rockets flying overhead.  

"My partner in the bunker said, 'Don't get scared. Those are your birthday cindles,' " Ekstrom recalled.

He fired his gun the first week he arrived and killed a teenage Vietnamese girl who was believed to be a suicide-bomber. Each Sunday morning he was assigned to take four truckloads of bags containing body parts to burial.

"Not a whole body. Maybe an arm, a boot with a leg and foot in it. Maybe a head, a torso,  part of a torso," he said as he put his face in his hands and cried. "How did God let something happen like that?" 

He  left Vietnam on the last day of 1967 with impaired hearing, injured kidneys, a broken hip, knee and ankle and nightmares of the war.

Ekstrom struggled to make a living by working on and off as a truck driver. When he ran out of pills from the Veteran's Affairs Office to suppress his seizures, he tried to steal some from a drugstore at night.  He was caught and convicted of burglary  in 1977, but was given a year’s probation.

He got married the next year and moved into a government-subsidized apartment building with his wife and her three children in El Sobrante. One September afternoon, Ekstrom saw a 3-year-old girl with black hair running towards him from behind the entrance of a building.

He instantly thought the girl was Vietnamese and that he was back on the battlefield.

"If I had a gun, I would have shot her, " Ekstrom said.

He remembers that the girl came to him, opened her hands and a dead grasshopper fell out. However, a jury believed things happened differently. Ekstrom took off his trousers and asked the girl to touch his penis, according to  a verdict issued in March 1979.

Ekstrom was arrested by police two weeks before his probation ended, so he stayed behind the bars for two of his three-year sentence.

He indugled himself in alcohol and heroin after he regained his freedom. Sobriety didn't come back to him until the 1990s, when he reunited with his ex-wife, who divorced him while he was in prison. The couple quit using alcohol and drugs and raised three children. 

"Even though our lives are so hard, and he gets on my nerves so bad, he is the kindest man I have ever known in my life, " said Linda Ekstrom, who takes care of her ailing husband.

The couple has lived in their current apartment for about 10 years and made friends with many neighbors. But one neighbor recently received an anonymous letter with a list of sex offenders that included Ekstrom’s name.

"We want to move away from here because it's getting really crazy around here," Linda Ekstrom said. But she is also afraid of living at a new place.  "He is on the Internet, and if we move to a place we don't know, all hell could break loose. "

Two neighbors interviewed said they’re not bothered by his conviction because it happened so long ago.

“It's a pretty long time,’’ said Kristen Ray, who lives in the same apartment complex with Ekstrom. “It’s as old as I am.’’

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