CHAPTER 16

Veterans of Foreign Wars

Dad in Korea, about 1950

On Sunday nights after we moved to Hill Street, my dad and I had a standing date at the local VFW post in Davison. I looked forward to it all week. I could have Shirley Temples and eat all the free popcorn I wanted from the machine behind the bar in the post’s basement. The decor was midcentury cheap fishing lodge with faux wood paneling and Miller Lite neon signs. Above the small wood dance floor in the corner, someone hastily erected a mirror ball, a nod to the emerging disco craze.

We sat on the worn orange vinyl chairs at a table at the edge of the dance floor. Dad smoked his Kent cigarettes and drank Miller drafts. The draw on Sunday nights was discounted beer and a live band led by a guy who tried to sound like Elvis and who had a shaggy haircut that Dad referred to as “hippie hair.”

Sometimes my mom came and nursed a glass of Boone’s Farm red wine in between dances with Dad, while other nights one or both of my oldest brothers would join in. By the time I was seven, Milt and Doug were of legal drinking age in Michigan. I could stay until nine P.M., when state law required that kids had to be out of the bar. I wondered, what happened after nine P.M.? Some secret, deviant behavior, perhaps? In retrospect, it was probably wise to get me out of there before watching veterans who didn’t have day jobs get increasingly drunk.

My parents’ favorite song to dance to was “Release Me,” which made no sense when you listened to the lyrics, an impassioned plea to be allowed to leave a relationship to spend time with a true love. It was the theme song for lovers involved in an illicit tryst, not two longtime married types. Yet, they would dance to the song cheek to cheek, laughing and even kissing. Apparently, Dad just liked the melody, and thought the rhythmic beat perfect for their swaying kind of dancing. Sometimes he’d make up his own lyrics and softly sing them into my mother’s ear:

“Please, my darling, never let me go,

for I couldn’t love you any more.

My life with you is so much fun,

stay with me, my darling, till the end.”

The hippie-haired Elvis sang a lot of the King’s songs, invariably starting the first set with “Blue Suede Shoes.” They also played more contemporary songs, such as “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” by Jim Croce, “Turn the Page” by Bob Seger, and the full catalog of Charlie Rich. Invariably, the entire bar would sing along when they played “My Way” just before the nine o’clock break. Dad always considered it “his” song. A lot of other veterans felt the same way.

All of Dad’s brothers had been in the military. While his own father never served, the other Flint men had fought in wars going back to Hiram Flint, my great-great-grandfather, who fought for the Union with the 19th Ohio Infantry during the Civil War.

One Sunday night, Dad and I were sitting alone when a guy with a weathered face in a worn blue plaid shirt came by and sat at our table.

“Heard your wife was the sister of Clarence Henderson,” he said. Clarence was Mom’s older brother. “I was stationed with him in Korea. I lost track of him after the war. What’s he up to?”

Dad looked distressed. “Gosh, I hate to tell you, but he was hit by a car a few years ago,” he said, genuinely saddened. “But really, if I’m going to be honest, he died in Korea.”

The guy nodded thoughtfully. He didn’t seem surprised. “So sorry to hear that,” he replied solemnly. “He was a good guy.” He lifted his can of Pabst Blue Ribbon in the air in a quiet salute. Dad nodded and held his draft mug of Miller aloft as well, and the man moved on.

When Clarence was finishing high school, my mother once watched him let a fly out of the house rather than kill it. Somehow, this guy who literally couldn’t kill a fly ended up in the army infantry on the front lines in Korea, often referred to as the forgotten war.

The horrors of the war weighed heavily on Clarence. Mom, then in her teens, could see through his false bravado in his early letters home. When he wrote once that he felt lonely, she started to write him a letter every single day.

One of those letters saved his life.

Clarence was in a foxhole just south of the border with seven other soldiers when the mail call came. “Henderson! Mail!” a corporal snarled loudly.

The others in his foxhole looked up. It had been more than a week since anyone showered, and now they sat huddled in too-hot gear for the cool autumn weather. Another soldier yelled, “Anything for me?”

“No, only Henderson,” the soldier replied, looking down into the hole. “Well, move it, soldier!”

As Clarence readied to exit the hole, the other soldiers made catcalls. “What, you got a girl back home? You never say who is writing you,” one said.

Another said, “Aw, leave him alone. So what if he’s got a girl?”

“I’ll be right back,” Clarence assured them.

The ranking officer kept scouring the horizon with binoculars. “You bet you will,” he said without looking back. “Get going.”

Clarence scooted from the hole and hopped through a labyrinth of camouflage-draped tents to get to the mailbag. Just as he started back, someone shouted, “INCOMING!” He heard the whistle of the mortar and instinctively hit the dirt. The bomb crashed directly into the foxhole with Clarence’s squad. All seven men he’d left less than five minutes earlier had been blown apart. Clarence reported to my mother that there was nothing left of the men in his group, just blood and body parts.

After that incident, the tone of his letters changed. Clarence wrote to my mother about the difficulty of fighting an enemy that rarely wore uniforms. As in Vietnam, the bad guys looked identical to the “good” guys. Little children carried hand grenades that they would throw at the U.S. soldiers in public places. Clarence had seen more than a half dozen men blown apart by children with weapons. “But what do you do, shoot a kid?” he wrote to my mother.

When he returned from the war, Clarence was never the same. He suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder, but doctors didn’t understand much about the condition in those days. He had flashbacks to scenes from the war. Clarence would go days without sleeping just to avoid bad dreams. He spent eight months at a Veterans Administration hospital to deal with stress-related ulcers that so severely damaged his stomach that doctors cut portions out.

Clarence tried to keep it together once he left the hospital. He got married, had children, and held a steady job until the Eisenhower recession hit in 1958. In 1960, he went to California to investigate whether he should consider moving his family out west, and worked briefly in my parents’ start-up Italian restaurant. His wife decided she didn’t want to leave Michigan so they stayed put.

Over the next few years, to combat his nightmares and flashbacks, Clarence started drinking and slid into alcoholism. By the late 1960s, he’d lost everything—his home, his wife and children—and was living at a Salvation Army homeless shelter. One evening, he was going up to visit his parents at the Sanford Farm. Hitchhiking to the local train station, he crossed the street to reach someone who stopped to give him a ride. A young soldier home on leave from Vietnam didn’t see my uncle until a split second too late. The GI hit him, killing him instantly.

The coroner reported that Clarence was completely sober when he died.

After his funeral, Mom and Dad sat up late talking. “Your brother died in the war, honey,” Dad told her. “His body came home, but he wasn’t himself anymore. I see guys like that at the VFW. It’s a form of casualty no one counts.”

Days after the service, Grandpa answered a knock at the Sanford Farm to find a young man in an army uniform. “You won’t like me,” the soldier started. “I’m the one who killed your son.”

Grandpa responded by opening the door and embracing the stranger in his arms. The soldier cried on his shoulder. “I’m so sorry,” he sobbed. “I really didn’t see him.”

They led him into the house, where Grandma Inez fed him some lemon meringue pie. She talked to him gently and assured him that they knew it was an accident. As he left, she hugged him. Then she held him by both shoulders and looked him in the eye.

“Don’t carry this with you,” Grandma Inez urged him. “There are things you can control in your life, and this isn’t one of them.”

My cousin Diane was Clarence’s daughter. Mom took her in to live with us for a couple of years when Clarence was in the shelter and her mother couldn’t manage her kids and work full time. She was living with her older sister when she learned her father died.

Based on Clarence’s story and his own experiences in Korea, Dad was against any of his children signing up for the military. If any of his sons got drafted, Dad said he’d drive them over the border to Canada. One night, my eighteen-year-old brother Doug told my father that he was thinking of joining the marines after high school. It was 1974 and the war in Vietnam was still going on.

“Really? Well, that’s an interesting idea,” Dad said brightly. “Let’s go and have a beer to discuss it, son.” He grabbed Milt and Doug and they walked over to Madden’s Lounge, an old-school bar around the corner. Hours later, after the bar closed, they walked home. All three were completely drunk. I woke up to find Mom in her robe in the living room, trying to get Doug to drink some water.

Weaving back and forth on his feet, Doug announced that he’d decided against going into the service. He was going to college after all. “Don’t wanna be . . . not gonna end up . . . in a straitjacket,” he slurred, nearly spitting out the last word. Then he put a hand over his mouth and ran for the bathroom. Dad followed. Milt slinked off to sleep on a couch in the family room.

“Straitjacket?” I asked Mom. “What does that mean?”

She looked at me with a blank face. “Go back to bed,” was all she said.

When my dad was twenty-four, police arrived at a gas station and put him in a straitjacket. He thought the “gooks” were coming to get him. He spent three months in a military mental hospital.

Dad joined the 1st Marine Division in 1947. Just after World War II, it was a relatively peaceful period and Dad had little reason to think he’d see serious action.

He was immediately shipped to China, where battle continued after the war. He was among the marines who helped the last of the Allied refugees escape from China before it fell under Communist rule, perched atop a train car with his Browning Automatic Rifle.

In late June, he was among the first boots on the ground for the UN police action. When Seoul fell to North Korean forces, he was positioned again with his rifle on one of the last trains to leave the city.

On an unseasonably cold June day in 1951, Dad’s platoon was ambushed by Communist Chinese soldiers fighting on the part of North Korea at Hangnyong. The enemy forces had the advantage of surprise and higher ground, shooting down on his team, who started to drop like flies around him. Dad was hit in his left side by shrapnel from a hand grenade that exploded near him. Knocked to the ground and disoriented, he heard the exchange of gunfire above him. He’d fallen next to a slight rock shelf. He dragged himself under it for protection from the gunfire.

He held still and listened as the barrage slowed and finally stopped. An eerie quiet blanketed the area. Moments later, mud-heavy footsteps trudged toward him. He hoped it was fellow marines.

But the voices that he heard were speaking Chinese.

Next came the sickening sound of what he assumed was a bayonet piercing through flesh. As he instinctively twisted to reach for any weapon he might have, a sharp flash of pain erupted in his side. His hand found a slick of warm liquid that he realized was his own blood. Dad held his breath as he listened helplessly to the enemy soldiers walk among his fallen unit. The worst pain was the thought that there was nothing he could do to help them.

Then his hand came upon something else. Somehow he managed to pull the pin and hurl the grenade over the ledge toward the voices before falling unconscious.

He awoke later shivering. He was in enemy territory and completely alone, as far as he knew. He had no access to food, water, or a weapon, plus he was injured. His legs went numb, then his arms.

Silently, he thought: God, if I’m ever where it’s warm and no one is trying to kill me, I promise to be happy and never want more than that.

Then he heard the distant sound of a helicopter. It grew louder and landed not far away. A voice shouted out, “Marines!?”

Retrieving wounded comrades from the field of fire is a Marine Corps tradition more sacred than life. Dad yelled out, surprised to hear his voice crack. Marines from another unit in his platoon ran to him and lifted him out.

“We’ve got you, you’re going home,” a voice said.

Just then, he passed out.

He woke up in a field hospital. The shrapnel had been surgically removed from his side. Seriously injured, Dad had the option of being discharged early. Instead, once his wounds healed, he insisted on going back into combat. He was wounded once more before heading home.

When he came home from the war, Dad seemed well enough. He had bad dreams, but he accepted that they were a lasting souvenir of his time in Korea. His final injury was a head wound that left a soft area where a part of his skull had to be removed.

One day he stopped by a gas station and offered to help a friend fix a car up on a rack. Dad hit his head, prompting a complete sensory flashback to the war. He grabbed a long pry bar and held it like a gun, hiding behind the counter for cover. He kept talking about “the gooks,” the derogatory slang the marines used for the Communist Korean soldiers. His friend tried talking to him. Dad called him David, the name of a friend killed that day he lay injured.

Someone called the police. Dad confused them with armed enemy soldiers. He held the pry bar like a rifle. A trained marksman, Dad couldn’t figure out why they were still standing. “I shot you, gook!” he kept saying. “Why aren’t you falling!”

After some plotting, the police called the local mental hospital. Six officers stormed the gas station where Dad was holding out. One sprayed him with pepper spray, while the others secured him in a straitjacket. He spent months in the mental hospital recovering. He never had another incident, but the worry over an episode like that reoccurring never faded.

Dad told my mother about the gas station incident after he proposed. He wanted her to know that it had happened, and said he’d understand if she didn’t want to marry him once she knew. Mom had seen what the war did to Clarence. If anything, it drew her closer to my father.

“The only time I ever heard him talk about the war was when Uncle Clarence died,” Mom says. He earned several medals, including two Purple Hearts, yet he never displayed or talked about them. The medals stayed in a box at the bottom of his dresser. “He would never say that he was a hero, but that he was just trying to stay alive.”

In the end, I wonder if he thought a proverbial line in the sand was worth it. It’s not like they knocked communism out of Korea; they just contained it. Apparently, he told Doug and Milt more stories about the horrors of war the night he took them out drinking.

He liked the VFW, in part because the guys never talked about the war. They would chat about fishing or hunting or football. Yet they all quietly knew what soldiers in foreign wars had gone through. They were brothers who had visited a certain kind of hell and lived to talk about it, but they never did. Instead, they sat at the bar, ate popcorn, told jokes, and listened to a hippie-haired kid sing “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World.”

Dad loved one other thing about the VFW. He got to cook.

His primary contribution to the post harked back to his days working at That’s Amore and, later, The Roman Knight in San Francisco. When the post would host spaghetti dinners as fund-raisers in the post’s parking lot, Dad would be the one to do all the shopping, chopping, prepping, and cooking. He’d stand over the rented portable stove in the summer heat stirring big pots of spaghetti sauce.

“That’s some mighty fine spaghetti, Milt,” the men would say in praise.

Dad would say thanks. It was warm, no one was shooting at him, and people liked his food. Life couldn’t get any better.