They Tore Out My Heart and Stomped That Sucker Flat Page 5
One man, two wars. He was an infantryman, and he was a fine solder. I still have the Bronze Star, the citation for his battlefield commission, the Purple Hearts. Years after his death, I ran into a war buddy of his.
“Your daddy was as brave a man as I ever met,” he said. “He was good with the kids, the nineteen-year-olds who went in first. He led them through France. He knew the odds against him. Every night, we would talk and every night he would say, ‘I know I’m going to die tomorrow.’ He drank up France—trying to get that thought off his mind.”
Six years after surviving France he was commanding a rifle company in Korea. He told the story often. I remember every word:
“We were near a rice paddy, about to move out. Suddenly, the rice paddy started shooting at us. There were gooks everywhere.
“The Germans were easier to fight than these people. You could figure out what a German would do. In many ways, he was like an American. He feared death. Not the gooks. They would come in waves. You kill a thousand, another thousand would be there to take their place.
“It was nearly dark. They turned spotlights on us. They blew horns and whistles and shot off firecrackers and they screamed, and they kept coming and they kept coming.
“We fought through the night. They were tearing us apart. We managed to dig a small trench. Maybe twenty of us were left. At daybreak, a mortar barrage hit directly in the trench. It took a kid’s head clean off. The head rolled away from the kid’s body.
“I will never forget looking at that face. It smiled. I swear that face had a smile on it. The chaplain was still alive. He looked up at me and said, ‘Captain, you have just seen a man go to heaven.’”
More mortars came flying in. There was more death. The gooks overran the camp.
“I was still in the trench,” my father would go on, his listeners enthralled. I don’t know how much was embellishment. Very little, I suppose. Combat usually leaves little to the imagination.
“I was cut and I was bleeding, but I was alive. I figured they would find me still breathing and shoot me. I resigned myself to it. I wondered if my body would ever get back home. When we buried my mama, there was a place near her. I remember looking at that place and thinking that’s where I’d like to go when my own time came.
“I crawled near two dead bodies that were lying close to each other. I put my head face down with my nose in my helmet. I didn’t want them to see my breath move the dirt in the trench.
“I heard rounds being fired. They were shooting the wounded, the bastards. Two gooks jumped into the trench. They began kicking bodies. They kicked the two bodies next to me, but they never kicked me. I don’t know why. I was praying. I said, ‘God, if they kick me, don’t let me move, don’t let me make a sound.’
“The gooks never touched me. They left me with the dead. I didn’t move, even after I was positive they had left. When I finally crawled out of the trench, I couldn’t believe I had been spared. We’d been wiped out. I found one other soldier, another kid, who was alive. But he had been wounded. I picked him up and started walking with him in my arms. I had no idea where I was going. I just walked. When I got so tired I couldn’t walk any longer, I sat the kid down and leaned him against a tree. He was unconscious. I leaned against the tree, myself, and went to sleep. When I woke up, it was dark again and the kid was dead.”
So he wandered, stunned and alone.
“At daybreak, I came over a hill. I spotted a Korean boy standing a few yards in front of me. He had a grenade in his hands. I don’t know where he got it, probably off a dead soldier. I scared him, I guess. He pulled the pin on the grenade and threw it at me. I hit the ground. I felt the explosion and I took shrapnel in the back of my head and in my neck. I blacked out.
“When I woke up, I was in some sort of lean-to. The Korean boy was wiping the blood off my face and neck. He was South Korean and hadn’t realized I was an American. That’s all I could figure had happened. That’s twice I should have been dead in a day. And some people say there’s no God.”
He hid in the lean-to for six weeks. A Papa-san, an old Korean man, maybe the boy’s grandfather, brought him water and cold rice. Occasionally, he could hear enemy troops walking and talking near the lean-to. He dared not come out, not even to relieve himself.
It was dreadfully cold. His feet were frostbitten.
When the Korean boy thought it was safe, he led my father back to the American lines.
“I would have run back,” he said, “but my feet were so swollen, it was like walking on two basketballs.”
I remember the day the telegram came that said my father was missing in action. My mother cried. She tried to explain to me. I was five, so I cried, too. I didn’t know exactly why I was crying, but when my mother pulled me to her, I wanted to share every inch of her grief.
Later, the word came that my father was alive. He called soon afterwards from a hospital in Pearl Harbor. My mother and I cried again. When he stepped off the train at Union Station in Atlanta, we met him with boxes of fried chicken and cathead country biscuits, and I sat in his lap and he squeezed me and that night, that incredible night, he came to the bed where I was sleeping and he picked me up and he took me to his bed and he put me down between himself and my mother and they reached their arms over me to each other. There has been no such peace and security in my soul since.
I don’t know what happened to the man. Everybody who knew him had a theory. He couldn’t sleep. He would come again to me at nights, and pick me up and hold me and I would rub the back of his head and feel the tiny bits of metal still lodged there from the Korean boy’s grenade.
And he drank. First, it was nightly cocktails at the Officer’s Club, but it graduated to benders. He had tried to drink up France. Now he was taking a shot at Fort Benning, Georgia.
The Army forsook him. They called him unfit. I think back to his feet. They bled so badly after he came home from Korea. Every night, he took off blood-soaked socks. And they called him unfit.
He took to the road. This job, that job. The man had talent. Big voice. Military bearing. Played the piano. Name it, he could charm it. Name a bank, and he could cash a check on it, which is why the road beckoned so often.
My mother divorced him. She had no choice. I was seven. I saw him a couple of times a year after that. He could always make me laugh.
They called me one morning from the hospital in the little town of Claxton, Georgia. He had collapsed on the street. He was already in a coma when I got there.
I had never seen anybody die before. It wasn’t like in the movies. He was in a deep sleep, and he took a breath, and then he didn’t take another one. A nurse came into the hospital room and checked for his pulse and said there wasn’t any. She called in a doctor who verified the lack of a pulse. My father’s face was very blue. I held his hand and cried. I let his hand go when the doctor pulled the sheet over his head.
They said he died of respiratory failure due to pneumonia. No, he didn’t. He died from the effects fighting two wars can have on a man.
Those nights before my surgery that I sat alone with his picture, I took on my fear, the fear of the pain that was ahead of me, the fear of death, and of something else that was even a worse fear, somehow.
Brand it macho, if you will, but I was thirty-five years old and I had carried around a burden or two, but there had been no real test of my courage, no challenge that had come close to this.
As I faced my first, gut-wrenching moment of truth, I was afraid I wouldn’t take it like a man.
The picture helped. My own father. He led men into battle. He faked death out of its shorts too many times to count, and then he fought the booze and bad dreams and he didn’t give up until something you can’t find without a microscope felled him from the blind side.
If he could do all that, I assured myself, then I could do this.
I’d never been so grateful that we had decided to put him in the place next to his mama.
5
Where Are You, Now That
I Need You, Lucille?
I didn’t know if it was okay to drink beer the night before you check into the hospital to have heart surgery, so I started calling doctors to find out. There were at least a half dozen involved in my case in one fashion or another.
The first doctor I reached said I probably shouldn’t drink any beer the night before checking into the hospital.
“You don’t want to show up with a hangover,” he said.
I certainly don’t think it would have been appropriate for any of my doctors to show up at the hospital that day of my surgery with a hangover, but I didn’t see why it would be a problem for me to appear in that condition, so I continued calling doctors.
The third one I reached said, “Sure, you can have a beer.”
A beer.
“Nobody drinks just one beer,” I explained. “That’s why they come in six-packs.”
“Okay,” said the doctor, “two beers.”
“Draught okay?” I forged onward.
“Draught is fine,” he said.
There is a store near my house that sells draught beer in gallon containers. I stuck to my doctor’s orders and bought only two containers.
Beer has gotten me through a lot of tough spots in my life, and I will always be indebted to Ronnie Jenkins—you will recall him as the hero of Chapter I who taught me about women. He also taught me to drink beer.
My first lessons began at Lucille’s beer joint in Grantville, Georgia. We were both fifteen. Old enough to buy it, old enough to drink it was Lucille’s motto. Only we never actually bought any beer at Lucille’s because we always made certain we drank with Mr. Hugh Frank Logan, a local farmer.
Mr. Hugh Frank was a large man, who toiled in his fields and enjoyed topping off the day with a few cool cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, which is all Lucille served, except for Carling Black Label and nobody would drink that, not even Ronnie and I.
The problem with Mr. Hugh Frank was he was hard of hearing, so he talked in a very loud voice:
“LUCILLE,” Mr. Hugh Frank would begin. “GIMME ONE UH THEM BLUE RIBBONS.”
Because he was hard of hearing and talked in a loud voice, nobody wanted to stand around with Mr. Hugh Frank and drink beer. Except Ronnie.
“Watch this,” he said to me one night after Mr. Hugh Frank had ordered his beer.
“HIYOUDOIN’, MR. HUGH FRANK!” screamed Ronnie.
“NOT TODAY, BUT WE MIGHT GET A SHOWER TOMORROW,” Mr. Hugh Frank replied.
“MRS. LOGAN DOING OKAY THESE DAYS, MR. HUGH FRANK?” Ronnie pressed on, a decibel or two louder.
“GOT ABOUT TWO MORE ACRES TO GO AND THEN I GOT TO HELP HARLEY BOTTS MOW HIS,” Mr. Hugh Frank answered.
The fact he had misunderstood what Ronnie had asked had nothing to do with anything. The fact somebody—anybody—would attempt to talk to him brought out all sorts of generosity in Mr. Hugh Frank.
“LUCILLE,” I can still hear him boom across the crowded room, over Ernest Tubb or Kitty Wells on the juke box, “GIMME ’NOTHER BLUE RIBBON. AND GIVE THESE HERE BOYS ONE, TOO.”
Later in the evening, Ronnie would ask Mr. Hugh Frank his opinion of the Monroe Doctrine and Mr. Hugh Frank would buy us more beer.
I had a terrible hangover when I awakened the morning I was to check into the hospital.
“The doctor told you not to drink a lot of beer,” said my wife.
I should have married Lucille, I said to myself.
I packed a little bag. I put in my toothbrush, shaving cream and razor, bedroom slippers, and some aspirin for my hangover.
“They’ll give you aspirin at the hospital,” said my wife.
“These are for the drive over there,” I said.
“Did you remember to take pajamas?” my wife continued.
I don’t wear pajamas. I am firmly convinced a man who wears pajamas also drinks whiskey sours and then eats those silly little cherries that come with the drink.
“Here are the pajamas I gave you for Christmas,” my wife went on. “Nobody goes to the hospital without pajamas.”
I asked my wife to describe the medical journal in which she had picked up that piece of information. She said if I didn’t take pajamas the doctors and nurses would know I slept in my underwear. I asked what was wrong with the doctors and nurses knowing that I slept in my underwear. She said men who sleep in their underwear sit up half the night drinking beer and then they belch and snore.
That wouldn’t have bothered Lucille, I said to myself.
I was told to be at the hospital at 10:30 in the morning. I took my little bag with my toilet articles, bedroom slippers, and pajamas inside, and I walked out of my house and into my garage. I sat down in my car, turned on the engine and backed the car out into the driveway.
As I was about to pull away, my wife came out to my car and said, “If you don’t want to take the pajamas, don’t take them. I’m sorry I made such an issue about it.”
“You know something,” I said to her. “If you owned a beer joint, you’d be perfect.”
I chose to have my operation at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta for two reasons: It has an excellent reputation as one of the world’s leading centers for heart surgery, and the Atlanta transit system runs buses that pass directly in front of the hospital.
A nice nurse showed me to my room. It reminded me of the dormitory room I had when I was a freshman in college, not exactly the Ramada Inn, but better than the accommodations at the Laredo Correctional Institute.
The first thing I did after the nurse left was to check the lone window in my room. It wasn’t locked. The next thing I did was check to see how far away was the ground. Three stories. Tie a few bedsheets together and I could be out of here and on a bus in a matter of minutes. You plan ahead at a time like this.
I soon learned why they insist you be checked into the hospital nearly twenty-four hours before your surgery so every doctor and nurse on the lot, and the guy mopping the hall, if he is so inclined, can ask you a lot of questions.
I hadn’t been in my room fifteen minutes when a doctor wearing a beard and some rather strange shoes that looked like ballet slippers came in with a clipboard and began discussing my medical history with me.
“Diabetes?”
“No.”
“Blurred vision?”
“You mean when I’m sober?”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Ulcers?”
“No.”
“Asthma?”
“No.”
“Bronchitis?”
“No.”
“Venereal disease?”
“What kind of question is that?”
“Just answer it.”
“No.”
“Kidney failure?”
“No.”
“Pneumonia?”
“No.”
“Hemophilia?”
“Do what?”
“Is there any history of hemophilia in your family?”
“Third cousin on my mother’s side.”
“He was a hemophiliac?”
“Well, we weren’t certain, but he wore ballet slippers to work.”
“Is there anything you need?”
“Aspirin.”
Later the anesthesiologist came into my room and asked me more questions.
“Have you ever been put to sleep before?” she inquired.
“You mean outside a truck stop?”
Soon, it was time for lunch. If you have ever been in a hospital, you know about the kind of food they have there.
For lunch, I received some Jell-O, English peas, and something served in chunks with brown, lumpy gravy poured on top of it.
I hate Jell-O. Jell-O isn’t food at all. Children like Jell-O because they can see themselves in it and it jiggles when you put a fork in it. I don’t eat anything that jiggles.
I hate English peas, too. Once I went to Boy Scout camp and they served English peas every night for dinner. One evening, I made the mistake of indicating how much I disliked English peas.
“Young man,” said my Scout leader, “there are children all over China starving, and yet you turn up your nose at these peas.”
“I would like to take the first step toward helping solve the world food shortage problem by donating my English peas to the starving children of China,” I said.
Boy Scout leaders seldom have good senses of humor. He made me eat all my English peas and all that were left in the bowl before I could go back to my cabin and shoot craps with the other campers.
I vowed that night never to eat another English pea. I hope the starving children in China appreciate my gesture.
The chunky substance with the lumpy gravy on it. I asked the woman who brought it into my room if she knew what it was.
“Looks like some kind of stew,” she said.
“Stewed what?” I asked.
“I don’t cook it, I just serve it,” she answered.
I stuck my fork in it. It jiggled a couple of times and then hopped out of my plate and ran under the bed. I suppose that have to do something with those laboratory animals after they are through experimenting with them.
After lunch, they showed me a slide show concerning what to expect after I was finished with my surgery. This was when I first learned about the tubes they were going to put in my body.
The slides pictured a male patient in the Intensive Care Unit following his surgery. I looked at all the tubes that were running in and out of him and I noticed that he was smiling and seemed to be in no discomfort whatsoever.