Yesterday I spent the day, my wife and I, with her dad whose lungs were inflamed and his heart a little tried.
We took him through emergency since his breathing was shaky, his chest was tight and he sounded confused. He’s 87, I know, but he’s sharp and all that.
Thank God his infection wasn’t bad and his fever has broken from the onslaught of a wide spectrum of antibiotics, those multi-syllabic substances whose morphemes sound violent, charged with “ex” and “pro,” “zith” and, of course, “max.”
I didn’t tell him this and didn’t dare mention it to my better half but it was only last October when we took her mother in, same wing, same floor, and the whole thing started in my unluckiest month that should really be given over to crisp apples, pumpkin glow and fun ghostings, frost and romance, Hawthorne, afternoon gold and the woodfires in the blue sable horizon:
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun … (To Autumn, John Keats)
It’s been a little this, but never just this, the way I wanted, which was just a good merlot and a fire, homebound calls and sacraments and sweet hours of prayer.
But here we are back again, I knew they both knew.
But to make a long story short, Flight Engineer Hank B. of the U. S. Army Air Force, Hell's Angels of the 303rd, won’t be voting this year, because he’s coming home with us maybe on Monday, where he can get the square meal deal, drink more cold water, and let his only daughter and granddaughters charge his days with laughter, some political discussions, doddering around the rectory flower beds, tears.
And I can serve him the Body and Blood of the Son of God.
But I am getting ahead of myself, because I meant to talk about yesterday.
Henry, or Hank, is about the best American I know, as he told us, but didn’t mean to, yesterday in his room.
For some reason, he spent four hours straight by his IV pole, seated in a vinyl lounge chair and warmed by those nondescript untidy white institutional blankets that are confined, thank God, to hospitals and other institutions. And he spent those hours like Homer by the fire, time traveling to Ithaca, Argos and Troy, his PTSD-arranged memory so distinct, so concrete that the scenes played like movies, his training in Texas and “open mess,” whose menu was stocked by fresh beef shot on the range by hot-dogging B-17 pilots who got censured but fed the boys pretty well.
After all, not many would come back. They all knew this.
He jumped from Texas to Tennessee for some reason, then took the QE2 over to the Midlands in England, and actually went to London but “wasted my time in a basement on an air raid.”
He went up in the air with his pilot and co-pilot, the navigator and gunners. He went over France and the Ruhr Valley. He was the top turret gunner, and assisted the navigator, and sometimes filled in the co-pilot chair because sometimes the co-pilot’s night had been too long and someone lucid had to stand in for “Charlie on the Town.”
That lucid, wide-eyed Polish-American who had been reared in Bishop Hodur’s Scranton call was renamed, by the crew, “Hank” (since “Henryk” was a little rough for the flight crew dialect) who never got scared, even in the black smoke of flak on daylight raids. Even when the daylight blue burst into overbright terror, sunflares of skyfire and black trails of sorrow, souls trapped in fuselage, and ball-turret gunners like chicks crushed in hurtling nests.
They did four missions okay, and it was a Memphis Belle sort of crew. A daredevil pilot from Indiana. A co-pilot we already know about. A bunch of waist gunners and turret gunners who were quickly growing into that archetypal band of brothers, with jokes no one else understood and unspoken cues to cover each other’s deficiencies and to care, with standup wisdom from grandfathers, for heartbreaks in London, and for the harder ones from home.
There was, of course, the short Italian kid who had lied about his age (he died last year from Alzheimer’s). He was only 17, shooting at Messerschmitts when his friends were at the prom.
I knew all this in bare outline already. Hank had started telling me these things about 15 years ago when his PTSD therapy started working (thank God for the VA clinic in Youngstown). What I didn’t tell him even then was that I had guessed at these things from his nightmares.
You could not avoid Hank’s nightmares. Every night, for years, when we’d stay over, my wife and I visited the war all over again. Front row seats, you know: that’s the kind of thing you get from flashbacks.
So for years, we had already heard about the pilot riven by a chain of machine gun fire on January 11th 1944 southwest of Berlin, and the co-pilot exploding on the flight deck in human flame and pieces. Henry was there, in the blaze, every night until the 90’s, no credit for previous experience, like an eight-track tape stuck on endless loop. For years we had heard about his desperate climb from the top turret to the bomb bay, only to discover that his chute wasn’t hanging on the hook but it was caught by a thread on a splinter of metal in the fuselage waist.
And we had heard about his coming to, miraculously, under canopy and shrouds, but landing on a diagonal and breaking both shins, going black, and opening his eyes and looking up at the wrong end of a rifle barrel, waggling in the sweaty grip of a pre-pubescent farm boy who was shaking so hard that he almost pulled the trigger while wetting his pants.
And we had heard about his incarceration for 17 months at Stalag XVII-B in Krems and just how “organized those Germans were.”
But since 1980, I had heard something from those dreams that he had never explained. I heard him shouting “Let him alone!” and “Oh my God, Lieutenant, oh my God, won’t they stop?”
Yesterday, I finally heard, for the first time, about that Lieutenant, that nice friendly navigator who had been training Hank to back him up “in case something happened.” He was the guy that Hank and the other survivors, the gunners and non-coms, always talked about when they got together at the EX-POW meetings. The Italian guy, to his dying day, couldn’t leave the round banquet table overset with gaudy décor under the glare of gaudy chandeliers in Vegas halls without reminding first Hank, “Remember Lieutenant L?” And Hank and the other guys looked down at the plates, and nodded, with reverence for Valhalla.
“What happened, Dad, after the constable arrested you in the field?”
In Hank’s words, the constable was an SOB who was trying to prove his manhood while remaining behind from the front: “You have to watch for cowards who want war, Jonathan, but only from a distance,” and I’d nod my head.
“They put us up in a corncrib that first night, the constable and his police …”
I was ready to move the narrative right along, to get to the processing centers in Hamburg and Frankfurt and the Stalag. But he was still stuck in the crib.
“… I don’t know why they did, why they could be so cruel to another human being.” Hank, yesterday, at this point, was staring at a vanishing point stuck in another moment, far removed from St. Joe’s fourth floor.
Then Hank’s mouth wrenched in grimace: “Juden, der Juden they’d say and they growled, Juden, Juden and I cried out Let him alone! and he’d moan awful and we call out Lieutenant! my God won’t they stop?”
Hank the 19 year old Polish boy now has fluid pocketed around an 87 year old heart, so I brought him back from a story that would hurt him all over again, as it always did, as his eyes ran in that second baptismal stream.
So it turned out that my father-in-law’s PTSD did not derive from his own “extraordinary” experience, as is stipulated by the DMS-IV statistical manual of psychiatric diagnoses (PTSD is coded 309.81 if you are a managed-care functionary).
His trauma derived from someone else's trauma, that of his Jewish friend, who was seen once more in Hamburg, before embarking on the three-day train to Krems (with no food, no water, standing room only, never a break, never relief).
Hank's PTSD is eminently Christian, and I wonder, now, as he's stuck at St. Joe's, in another crib, whether this is all one of those co-inherent exchanges, one of those "my life for yours" things going on upstairs, way higher above the heavens where those guys invaded with steel and gas.
Those guys saw their Jewish Navigator, barely a ghost, looking Auschwitzian, and they thought how lucky they were by compare.
Later, the Lieutenant fell off the face of the earth, literally, by war’s end, and his cries are still heard by the only survivor left from that Hell’s Angels flight: my father-in-law, young Hank, the widowed pilgrim from Krems.
So Mr. President, whoever you are, Hank is proud to be a soldier, your servant, and a waver of his little flag at the annual parades. But as proud as he is, you must know Sir, that this servant never did retreat from the field, and his band of brothers ascended to a nobility in the air that cost them fright and a communion of tears.
You must know Sir that his wife held him for years in those nights no drug could amend. His daughter kept him company while his eyes flew off on those distant stares, toward the shrieking air and drone of rage. His granddaughters' crayon sketches of kittens and dogs and themselves ringing their grandfather in a glint of paradise were the only talismans, at times, that brought this airman back down to the holy earth.
You must ask yourself, Sir, whether this bellicosity, this Clausewitzian idea of war as politics, is ever worth it. And I must tell you, Sir, that if you ever answer at a trice, too quickly and too confidently ... and if you ever say something trite like Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori and you forget that the guys who can say that are already too dead to say that, then Sir, you don’t deserve soldiers for servants.
You are a man, Sir, if your heart is at peace, and you know that wars displace and destroy, and disrupts sweethearts, and kills off villages over there and here. You are a man if you understand that wars idolize the state and denature the land. No matter how good the cause.
So Mr. President, if you can say that you sent Hank “over there” for good reason, and that he still suffers for flesh and blood and not for some simpering abstraction or (God forbid) "policy," then I will tell you you’re within your rights.
If you can look your servant in the eye and tell him he might die, and his house will weep and his village will go dry, then Sir, you can lead soldiers.
Then you might deserve a soldier like Hank.
Father, you brought tears to my eyes with this post. Our modern leaders should heed the admonition of Robert E. Lee, "It is well that war is so terrible -- lest we should grow too fond of it." A war entered into upon false pretences, a war with no recognition of its human or fiscal costs, a war with sanitized reporting from the battle lines and a war viewed on the home front with the coolness of a video game is a war which dishonors the soldier and glorifies the state. We must pray that the new President understands this before ever committing our sons and daughters to another foreign adventure.
Posted by: upstaterusyn | November 03, 2008 at 03:44 PM