The Italian medic served as unofficial platoon cook. At the end of the month, he’d put the men’s leftover C-rations together in a big steaming pot and cook it on an open fire. He had a bag of spices swung around his neck over his dog tags. He’d reach in with his left hand as he stirred the pot with his right, and toss in a handful of spices. This made the C-rations decent.
*
In winter, returned from maneuvers in the freezing dark, my father stretched his legs by the fire. When the blood came back it was like knocking a crowbar across your shins. They boiled water over the open fire and my father drank coffee for the first time, for warmth. He never stopped, even when in the scrag-grove of midlife his heart caught and struck offbeats and he was made to switch to decaf. By the open fire he also smoked cheap cigarettes for the first time, for warmth. He kept this practice, too, long into life, ameliorating his habit from the continual rise-and-fall of a cigarette, to the slow core roll of a cigar, to the deep lowset burn of a pipe, all the while fatal masses bloomed in his lungs, vital and full as flowering azaleas, white as bone, red as flame. At this time, in this strange land by the flickering halo of the fire, he fed scraps to loose wandering dogs straying in and out of camp. Most were jindos, wheat-blond or brindle, with wiry hair, and rail-thin, as if their bones would fall to dust if petted. They still had decent teeth.
*
Before the Army, my father worked in a textile mill, called Beaumont Mills, in the hill country of South Carolina. He unwaveringly insisted this was the worst job he ever held. On breaks, workers would go outside and cough out the lint from their lungs. Even the work of death, too distant and too close on the live battlefield in Korea, was not as shitty an endeavor as working for Beaumont Mills. Worked like dogs.
*
Down at Fort Rucker, Alabama, where my father was sent for basic training, the jukeboxes in the local joints were filled almost to capacity with the music of their native son from Mount Olive. Typically it’d be nothing but Hank Williams on the box, save maybe one slot for a gospel record by another singer. From this abundance would come, decades onward, the rising cadence of my father’s dress shoes each morning on the hardwood floors outside my bedroom door when I was a boy—him whistling and singing out old Saint Hank, waking with the sun and waking us children in the process. Being tone-deaf, my father did not carry the tune so much as drag it bumping emphatically behind him. His joy in the song outstripped dearth of talent. One of his favorites was “Move It On Over,” a song with lyrics featuring a wide array of dogs moving it on over to make room in the doghouse for poor Hank: little dog, big dog, skinny dog, fat dog, old dog, new dog, nice dog, mad dog, good dog, bad dog, cold dog, hot dog.
*
At Fort Rucker, they stuck my father in with a platoon from Utah—twenty-five Mormons, plus him. Of long-standing Scots Presbyterian stock, the Turners had recently slid over to Methodism. A long way from Mormonism still. There was a lot of in-groupness going on amongst the other twenty-five within the platoon.
Are you Christian?
Yes.
Are you sure you’re Christian?
I said yes.
This on the edge of knowing he was heading into active combat, highly active combat, in the very immediate future.
You’re absolutely certain you’re Christian?
You Goddam right, I’m Christian!
This response more or less curtailed their interest in my father’s particular salvation.
*
After Fort Rucker, my father, aged twenty four, was commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant in command of a tank platoon as part of the 45th Infantry, or Thunderbirds. He was thin, with a compact frame, but had broad shoulders and taut, worked muscles carrying a wiry strength. His hair rolled back in dark waves with auburn currents, a vestige of his Scots-Irish heritage. He seemed older than he was, his hairline already receding and high, sharp cheekbones shadowing sunken cheeks that held a five o’clock shadow by ten o’clock in the morning. He looked something like Humphrey Bogart, just with winking blue eyes and a crooked smile. He shipped out to Korea in December 1952, where he saw his lot of the brute untidiness of combat shock and death.
*
He was welcomed at the warfront by his jeep driver, a man named, oddly, Driver. Driver, who was African American, drove my father to base camp. A whistle tore the air. My father leapt from the jeep to the dirt. The sound passed. He looked puzzled. Driver pointed through the windshield: Outgoing. Rookie mistake. My father learned, quickly, to distinguish between incoming and outgoing shells. He appreciated Driver, battle-tested, not making much of this leap of fear. After that, my father got his feet under him. He wrote palimony letters home in support of Driver, attesting to good service. After the war, my father lost track of him, as he did almost everyone. Last he heard, Driver was back in Alabama, breeding Rottweilers.
*
For sleeping in the field, if they had time, Dad and his platoon would set up hoochies. They’d dig into the backside of the hill, collect the loose dirt into sandbags, then build a log hut using the dirt backside as one of the walls. Once done, they’d throw the sandbags on the outside, which would give them decent protection against incoming mortars. Some nights, they’d wake to North Korean military propaganda bristling over loudspeakers: Welcome, Thunderbirds! Enjoy your stay! Other nights, they woke to gunshots. There were so many rats, they’d rustle inside the hut. A soldier would rise with their service pistol, blow it in two. Sometimes it took two or three rounds. The rats were the size of small dogs.
*
The Army gave the men a brief introduction to the culture of the Korean people. Koreans had a five-thousand-year-old alphabet. Also, they were a freedom-loving people who believed in the open market. In a separate briefing, an Army general called enemy Koreans low-rate Chinese gangsters. He also called them dog-eaters.
*
My father said the South Korean soldiers would hang a silk stocking filled with rice around their neck. They’d live off that and water for a week.
*
Between battles, some men killed downtime with turkey shoots. They used the roaming, starving dogs for targets. They were decent shots and got a lot of dogs. My father told his platoon to stop: You’ll need the ammo for something real. The sound the dogs made yelping when they were hit but not killed was almost human.
*
In summers in the 1930s and 1940s, my father returned from his native Georgia to the family farm in the south Virginia mountains. The Old Ross Place had drawn down to a small place run by Uncle Guy, confirmed bachelor. When he got old enough, my father worked the farm. One time, he overfed the pigs—like goldfish, they just eat and eat and eat—until two or three bloated up and plunked over in the slop, dead. Uncle Guy arrived to the scene and was not happy. They were land rich and dirt poor, as the saying went. He had his two big farm dogs with him, two German shepherds. Normally stoic, they pawed wildly at the fence and made sounds like horses whinnying. Uncle Guy shook his head, It’ll do. It’ll have to. He told the dogs to settle down.
*
The place was beset by strings of raw Korean teenagers begging for food from military convoys, hovering near-starved by the train tracks like packs of wild dogs, the CO said. Once, a group of native boys got hold of an officer, a lieutenant like my father. They grabbed his money clip and were beating him. Other Americans, not officers, watched. My father jumped into the circle of Korean boys and swung wide, a sheathed combat knife in his fist. This drove them off. The U.S. Army considered this an event of meritorious service. What my father remembered from the scuffle with the Korean boys was how their arms were wiry, rail-thin. They felt like they were starving.
*
The CO, who came from Pennsylvania, told my father he was transferring a soldier to his platoon. The soldier was worthless, malingering. He’d been to see medics repeatedly with vague complaints. Recurring headaches, so forth. Being from the South, the CO said, my father would know how to handle this soldier, an African American. My father signed the transfer papers.
Hey, Looo-ten-ant, what’s black and yellow all over?
Silence.
All these cowardly Goddam niggers everywhere thinking they running the place.
Silence.
They gonna be red all over, too, next time I catch em loafing again.
The CO swung up a balled fist and shook it with threat. He accompanied himself with a laugh that wasn’t one.
*
As it turned out, the CO said Goddam nigger a lot. There was nothing wrong with the soldier in question in his conduct. As it turned out, the soldier in question had terminal brain cancer. He died on the floor of the tank on maneuvers.
*
When a solider under his command died, my father wrote the letter home. Inside the letter, he enclosed the dead soldier’s dog tags.
*
As it turned out, the CO said Goddam nigger one too many times, such that my father responded in kind: If that Goddam word comes out of your Goddam mouth one more time, your Goddam teeth will be coming out with it. Making it clear which word my father found objectionable. This had a sobering effect. The CO complained my father had said this in front of the men, including the African Americans.
*
One morning on the Old Ross Place a stray—one blue eye the color of the fall sky—came to the porch wagging happily. My father took him in, against Uncle Guy’s misgivings: There something aint right in im, Son. How he come to be here, and aint nobody askin for im.
Looks right friendly. Can I keep him?
For now. Till the wrong shows isself.
It did. My father had taken in an egg-sucker. An untenable thing on a farm stocked with chickens. Uncle Guy knelt and put his arm on his nephew’s tender shoulder: Aint but one way cure a dog whose wont and will is egg-suckin.
My father hoped silently. Uncle Guy finished the thought: Get a stick a dynimite—blow the head off. Aint but one way.
He left my father kneeling, downhearted, in the rising dust, holding the dog tight. Uncle Guy returned with a shotgun and a shovel. He paused, not looking at my father with the dog, but staring to the skyline, across the slant fields and gullied woods: You comin?
Of course he was. He had to. There was a code for being in the world in that place and time, Appalachian Virginia haunting back the ages to a Scots grim acquaintance with the dark. If your dog was to be shot, you were the one there to do the shooting. And so he did. And dug for the dog a thin grave, topped with a rough cross of two sticks lashed with twining. And with our family pets, he was slow to have a dog put down, waiting until the creature’s last reserves were spent: the redouble of that guncrack among the old growth and tangled understory where my young father had come to grief.
*
It was a turkey shoot. The Thunderbirds’ Sherman tanks lined the hill, immobile. Firing, being fired on. Aftershocks rocked the tanks in the mud gently, incessantly. Smoke unrolled in the distance like gauze. Hunter, an African American soldier, opened the loader’s hatch, to my father’s left. Hunter’s body slumped, the head clean off. The shell carried off his dog tags.
*
He came back with others to see my father. I heard this in the night on fishing trips, half-sleeping in a creaky cot in a rented cabin on Lake Moultrie, no door to filter the sound.
*
The North Koreans had drawn back and the basin was clear, for the time being. Smoke lingered heavy in places as the tanks were ordered to roll out. They stopped once to survey what had been gained. Small fires flickered here and there like votives, and the earth had been gashed and rutted. Trees were uprooted or scorched to tar skeletons. My father stared into a burned out hutch, still wheezing gray wisps of smoke. A figure was seated there, as if he was about to have a cup of coffee. He was bolt upright, perfectly still, charred to the bone. There was nothing in the air but the sound of machines. All the dogs were gone.
*
A soldier from another platoon, a man named Frank, stopped by our house in upcountry South Carolina in 2002, almost fifty years later. He remembered my father, but my father didn’t remember him. Frank was on his way in his RV from Buffalo, New York to vacation in Florida. Frank told about my father telling his men not to hit at civilian gangs of starving boys with the butts of their M1 Garands and about him telling his men not to shoot at dogs and about his row with the CO.
You’re a war hero, Noel. You changed people’s lives.
The ones that didn’t come back are the heroes.
*
My father’s version of the row with the CO was two words: Desk jockey. He didn’t say it nicely. His loyalty tended to the horizontal axis, not the vertical. To the soldiers.
*
When the platoon was on maneuvers, they had to secure the perimeter. My father often ran the nightwatch himself. One time, far out on the Yalu, a black cloak flashed in the blacker night. My father drew his pistol reflexively and brought the butt hard down on the skull. My father, who had the aural equivalent of a photographic memory, never forgot: Awful sound.
It was a woman, robed in black, with a basket.
Did she die?
I don’t know.
*
Late in life, late in the day, my father had a drink—liquor, clear or brown, always hard, on ice—as he walked the backyard, securing the perimeter, taking careful note of the trees and plants and how they were doing. He’d whistle for the dog to come with him.
*
I spent two decades researching and publishing scholarly articles and books and so on about trauma and PTSD, particularly combat trauma. Not once in that time did anyone ask me why. My academic colleagues presumed it was professional jibbing for position, intellectual dilettantism.
*
My father came back with a decoration for meritorious service, bronze in the shape of a star. Dependent from a red pentagonal ribbon, single blue stripe down the middle, both red and blue edged in white. He never wore it. As boys, we found the bronze star still in the box. We’d put it on my father’s Army Reserves uniform, requisite silver leaves on the shoulders, and play soldier around the yard. One time we pinned it on Beauregard, our black-and-white cocker spaniel. It hung there from his cream-colored flea collar, a fancy, weighted dog tag.
*
When he was dying, I asked my father what the war was for: To see how much shit a half-decent man can stand. Then: Some of us came back, but we didn’t come back all the way.
When he talked of other soldiers, ones he admired, that maybe he owed in some way, it seemed there was something beyond that. Something like dignity, but stronger. They used to call it honor.
*
My father’s been gone for over a decade. I’m married, with two sons. Sometimes our three rescue dogs bay, uselessly to our ears, in the dark. They wear their throats to rags with their howls, as if calling an old master, no more there. It’s probably coyotes. They’re overrunning everything now, resettling things.