The dead waved from the ditches in Korea. The arms of the soldiers reached out from bodies half in, half out of the frozen mud, as if begging for help even after their hearts had cooled and the ice had glazed their eyes. They had been shot to rags by machine guns and frozen by a subzero wind, leaving olive-drab statues in the killing, numbing cold in the mountains in the north. The young Marine from Alabama trudged past them as he fought the North Koreans and Red Chinese at places with great strategic military importance for a second or two in time. Of all the tales he told that day, more than twenty years ago, the image of dead men reaching to him from the roadside still won’t lie still in my head.
The dead have the decency to lie flat in Calhoun County. In my father’s time they still laid them out in the parlors and in their own bedrooms, with pennies on their eyes. The women and the very old would take turns sitting up with the dead, because to leave them alone would be disrespectful, and because the very oldest ones still believed that the soul lingered until the final benediction, until the first handful of dirt, and Satan might fly in through a window and snatch it away if someone didn’t watch close. Even the littlest children would be led in to stare, to hide their face in the skirts of their momma or the pants leg of their daddy, while the young men stood sentry most of the night on the front porch, smoking, sipping black coffee. It was all about respect, about ceremony, as if by making the dying of a woman or man an event, a happening, it somehow made up for the fact that there was so goddamn little nicety in living. That, for my daddy, was what was wrong with Korea. He just glanced at the dead, and left them where they lay.
Like most other Southern boys who grew up far from the Big House, the ones who fought and died and fought and lived in every armed conflict since Cemetery Ridge, his world had been narrow, and the only way to see the rest of it was to enlist. His father worked for dusty, stifling decades in the cotton mill. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with his life, but anything that would keep him out of the mills was fine with him. He happened to come of age in one of those eras when America was in the market for rough-as-a-cob country boys who could shoot bumblebees off dandelions with a BB gun. They could knock gray squirrels out of the tops of trees with a .22 rifle, and could bring down quail and even doves on the fly with no. 9 birdshot. It would be like hitting a bear in the ass with a bucket of sand, to shoot a man.
Boot camp had been like a party for him, or at least what he figured a party was like. The Marines, balanced against the harsh world of home, dripped with life, with experiences. He got plenty to eat and unlimited milk to drink. He got weekends off to chase women. He would drink beer with his newfound friends until they were tighter than Dick’s hatband and even the fat girls started to look good. They would fight anyone who looked at them funny until the MPs came, then they’d fight them. He got a pure silver cigarette lighter, a gold-plated ink pen and a five-dollar camera, so that he could take all his experiences back to Alabama after they vanquished the communist horde and defended democracy, or whatever it was they were supposed to do.
He rode in a plane, the first in his family to ever do that, and he rode on a boat on the ocean, far, far out on that ocean, the first to ever do that. He had no problem with the notion of killing. He had never seen an Asian man, not in his whole life. I got the impression that because the Chinese and North Koreans were so different, so alien to him, they were somehow less human and therefore easier to kill. I asked him, because I was a boy and dying was a remote thing to me then, how many he killed. He said a few, maybe. All but one, he killed from a distance.
I knew we were getting to the good part now. I had pictured my father in war, a merciless, indestructible warrior, not in olive drab but in faded gray or butternut brown. I pictured him striding through wildflowers and dead Yankees with a saber in one hand, a six-shot revolver in the other and a bayonet wound in his side, his horse shot out from under him. I pictured him that way much as I had sometimes pictured him as taking me places, doing things with me. One daydream was just as silly, as far from truth, as the other. I definitely did not picture him hollow-eyed and shivering, huddled around a portable stove, in this war and country I could not even adequately imagine.
For my father in Korea, there were no grand charges, no standup fights over open ground. The fighting was mostly mean, drawn-out, duck-and-shoot battles fought around bends in the roads and over frozen streams and up the sides of a hundred hills, which the officers ordered them to “take” in the teeth of machine guns and snipers, as if they were going to plant a flag and grow turnips on it or some such, instead of just walking back down it again, fewer than before.
But the violence of it was almost welcome, because for a while he forgot about being cold. He had never been cold. Oh, once or twice a year back home it got cold enough to freeze the ducks on the pond or to dust the ground with snow. This was something else, something as alien as the words the enemy screamed at him as they hurled themselves again and again at the dug-in Americans. This was cold that burned like red-hot needles.
Men were sent home blown to pieces by mines and pocked with bullet holes, but more often with frozen feet, fingers, ears, noses. The ones who were shot were shot through five layers of clothes, so that sometimes the hurt and blood didn’t show. It looked like whole platoons of men had just gotten weary, and lain down to sleep.
They did much of their moving through trenches, where every step cracked through the ice underfoot, so that his feet were not just half-frozen but wet, so that the ice collected between his toes.
He reasoned he was there when it came spring and summer, too, but for the life of him it seemed like it was winter all the time. He wandered through a nightmare maze of mine-laden trenches, trails and roads, afraid that every step would rip his legs out from under him and send him home to Alabama a cripple. He even had a dream that it did happen and he had to sit in a wheelchair outside the courthouse. For some reason that only makes sense in dreams, he had to shake the hand of every single person who went in to get married or pay their taxes or get their license renewed, so that they could all see him sitting there like that. He said he dreamed about it more than once, even after he came home whole, or mostly so. It was what he feared, more than dying: losing part of himself.
He was quiet for a little while after that, I remember, maybe because he was remembering, and it made me nervous, sitting quiet with him like that, as if we had reached a point in the story that I wasn’t allowed to see. “I hated them mines,” he finally said, and I believe he tried to take another swig from that now dead bottle.
Sometimes it seemed like the country itself was just playing with them. Sometimes the ground was so hard that men walked over the mines and did not trip the trigger, and later in the day, when it had warmed a few degrees and the ground turned to mud again, one soldier would walk down a path that a thousand men had already tramped and have his feet ripped out from under him. So you never walked safe, you never walked free. Mortars would come whistling down from the sky and he was sure he was dead, but although men around him died he seemed to dance between the snowflakes of shrapnel, waiting for the next one, and the next. On warmer days the shells would just sink into the mud.
He said he was bound up in so many clothes that he could not effectively run or efficiently fight, that his mind was always thick, sluggish, because he was always tired. He did not talk about the politics of it, or at least if he did it did not register with me then. He did not rail against officers or badmouth MacArthur’s insane push into the north that brought the Chinese swarming onto them. He did not talk about things like honor, because while honor is a big thing to the gentility, it is not a word you hear much on the lips of poor whites. It is not that we do not know what it is, or have it, it is just one of those fifty-dollar words you don’t hear much. To my daddy, the war was an adventure gone bad, not a family heirloom.
I remember that I asked him then why he had never talked about this war with my momma, and he said he had, but just one time. It was when he was fresh back from it, when the memories were still hot in his mind, and he tried to unburden himself to a new bride. He told her just one story, the worst of it, but if she ever shared the story with her sons I could not remember it. He said she probably thought we were just too little, that we would be scared. Maybe, he said, she was afraid it would give us bad dreams.
I told him I was old enough to hear it now.
He remembered there was a moon that night, one of those winter nights when the sky was clear and mean and bright. He remembered it, because it was easy to get shot dead if you showed your silhouette on a night like that. They had heated rations and ate them mechanically, with spoons out of mess kits, like overgrown children. It was nice to think of home, on nights like that. At home in Alabama, his family would be sitting around the long table, the men pulling a little every now and then on a jug of whiskey as they waited for the cornbread to brown. He would have crawled home on his knees to smell that smell, even though he had been a picky eater and disdained such “country food.” He liked a good sandwich, what we called café food. But not having it made it taste good in his mind.
The cold was worse on the clear nights. They camped on a flat place beside a river, almost within sight of the enemy on the other side. As wretched as the days were because of the cold and the fear and the sickness, the night was terror. The rivers froze, and at night the Chinese or North Koreans would inch their way across it, one or two at a time, and do their killing with knives. It was legend, those killings, designed to terrify.
That night, or maybe it was morning, an assassin crept into his group, as he slept, and killed a man just inches away. My daddy reached out to shake him, maybe to shake him awake, and felt the blood that had leaked from his neck.
He scrambled out of the shelter and into the biting cold, and saw him, the killer, on the ice.
The man lay flat on his belly, to keep the ice from breaking, and slithered and squirmed like some kind of slow-moving reptile, just a few feet from the bank. My daddy ran down to the river’s edge and, unthinkingly, straight out onto the ice, slipping down hard on his hands and knees, hearing the ice crack. But he lunged forward and grabbed the man. They fought, frantic, crazy. My daddy must have lost his rifle because he never mentioned using it, and if he pulled his knife he never said. He knew the other man had a knife, had to have one, but my daddy did not see it. Maybe, in his rage, his terror, he did see it and didn’t care.
Finally he fought to his knees and pushed himself on top of the man, and the ice popped and cracked again. The other man clawed at my daddy’s face, screaming, and finally fought free. He tried to do the impossible, to walk on that thin ice, and plunged straight through it.
The man rose up, his hands clutching the edge, and although he didn’t know it, he was already dead. The cold, that unbearable cold, would take him even if he could get out of the water. My daddy could have left him that way, could have let the ice have him. Instead, he reached down into the water and put both hands on top of the man’s head, and pushed him down, again and again, till there was no need anymore.
When the thing was done, my daddy, freezing, crawled back to where he guessed dry ground was, to the shelter, peeled off his wet, freezing gloves and shoved both hands between his legs to warm the numbness away.
If there was satisfaction in what he had done, he didn’t say.
“I remember he had big eyes,” my daddy said of the man he killed. “A little feller, but big ol’ eyes.”
He was done talking then. I left him with his empty bottle and never saw him again, alive or dead.
I don’t know anything about wars. I don’t think even the most erudite scholars do. I think you have to fight one, to know it.
But I have little doubt that, in that narrow space of time, his life shifted, tumbled off balance. I do not know, not for dead certain, that I can blame his meanness and cruelties, his abandonment of us, my momma, on something as distant as the war. It might be that he was just a flawed man, a man without conscience, who let his wife and children suffer and just didn’t care. It might even be that, as he sat dying, he would have told me anything if it would have made me think better of him. Even a legacy of a lie is better than hate.
I choose not to believe that. I believe instead that there, in that wretched place where the ground blows up under your feet and dead men motion to you from the sidelines of war, a boy with thin blood was rearranged. I believe it. I want to. I have to.
I asked Momma, not long ago, to tell me stories about my daddy’s war.
“He did some killin’, but he only told me about one time,” my momma said. “He didn’t even talk about it with men, just me, that one time. That one man. That’s all I know,” and I could tell it was something she would rather not remember. It is a mean thing to do, for a son to ask his momma to remember things like that. Still, I had to know.
I asked her how my daddy killed him. “He killed him a little bit at a time,” she said. Then, to show me how, my gentle mother put her hands together with her palms turned toward the floor, and made a pushing motion, again and again and again …
He came home from the war to marry my momma. I guess, in the end, he did what we all do when we suffer. He came home, to try and heal. But in a way, he was dying, failing, even before I was born. My momma’s life with him, my life, Sam’s and Mark’s lives, may have given him some joy, some peace. It might be that we distracted him from his devils. It is the only reason I can come up with, for why he wanted us at all.
He called once, maybe twice more before he died. In the final few weeks he said he could still see the angel on his footboard, just waiting. I could not tell if he was drunk or not, but that is the way drunk people talk. I told him it was just a dream.