TERA ADAMS

Falling Away from Me

When he gets confused like this, he likes to tell me stories about the war. Back then the Corps took everyone. These guys were a tough bunch, some of them a little scary, but when it came down to it, that’s who you would want fighting next to you, and it came down to it a lot. They call it the Forgotten War, he would say, but the ones who fought in it could never forget. They were told the victory would be quick, that they would be home by Christmas. After the Incheon Landing, who could doubt General MacArthur when he said the Chinese weren’t in the war yet? “But they sure were,” he tells me, “and that cost him not only his command, but the presidency too.” 

He’s dying, but he forgets that. He also forgets who I am. Sometimes he thinks I’m my sister. He asks me about my nieces and nephew, and I tell him they are doing great. Or when he’s really gone, he’ll ask me where he is. “Rosie,” he will say, “where am I? Where am I?” 

“You’re at home,” I tell him. “You’re in your home. You live here.” And I wonder who Rosie is.

I always know when he comes back, he remembers, and I can see that. Then things go back to the way they were. At night, he sits in the living room with my mother, and they eat their dinners as they watch Fox News. My mother wasn’t sure about Tucker Carlson at first, but now she likes him just fine. 

I don’t have a family. I had a long illness that resulted in a hysterectomy, which is how I ended up living back at home with my parents as middle age dawned upon me. Since the hysterectomy, I’ve had a lot of trouble sleeping. So does he. For him, it might just be old-age and the fear of going to sleep and maybe not waking up. For me, it’s a lot more complex, hormones and the such. Most nights I get up and slip silently out to the porch and sit and read with my book light until I get tired or the sun rises. Some nights though, I get up and the kitchen light is on. He sits at the table holding the calendar. “Claire, I missed my doctor’s appointment today,” he insists. “See, it's right here.” 

“You didn’t have an appointment today,” I tell him. I try to show him that is next week, this is today. 

“We need to call the doctor’s office,” he insists. 

“We can’t. It’s the middle of the night. See the clock?” Sometimes he understands, but most times he doesn’t. So, I sit down at the table, and then we talk. 

I now find talking to him a curious thing. I always knew he had fought in the Korean War, but before now he never talked about it. I like the stories about the war. He tells me things you can’t read in books. When I was a teacher, I used to give a lecture on the Korean War. I wish I had known these things back then because my students would have enjoyed these stories from a war fought so long ago. 

Going to the movies was always our thing. Back in ’98 we went to see Saving Private Ryan one Saturday afternoon. I remember looking over at him as he sat stone-faced, watching the drama unfold on the screen. As we were driving home, I asked him how he liked the movie. He was quiet at first, and then he told me it was the first war movie he had seen since he had been in Korea. As he told me this, he looked so sad. I asked him why, and he said he just was. When he thought about Korea, it just made him sad. I couldn’t help but wonder why. It was this moment that piqued my curiosity and began my studies of the Korean War. 

Some nights he tells me about his childhood in the Lowcountry of South Carolina. Stories about shrimping with his best buddy Ben in the creek or taking his father’s dinghy out in the inlet in Murrells. “You say it like pearls with an M, not like the tourists who say Murr-ells,” he instructs me. 

On the weekends, his father took them hunting, Ben slept over on the floor next to his bed. They got up very early and ate breakfast his mother had prepared for them the night before as they drove towards Georgetown to the woods on the way to Andrews. They usually caught turkey or sometimes a deer. Every once in a while, they caught a boar. Then they would have a pig roast and invite the whole neighborhood. 

“Ben’s father was a son of a bitch,” he tells me in a low voice. “Just a mean ol’ alcoholic. Ben had two younger brothers and three sisters. That man ran his poor mother ragged, she didn’t know what end was up. They lived right down the street from us, and when his father was in a bad way, Ben would come over and stay at our house. I would often wake up and find him sleeping on the floor next to me. After a while, he was there all the time. My mama used to joke that he was like her second son.” 

I know when he starts talking about Ben, he’ll start thinking about the war again. Ben always leads back to Korea. They were like everyone else, when the war was announced, raring to go and fight communism. They were going to go over there and show those Reds that they meant business. “After WWII,” he says, “they split Korea right down the middle, divided at the 38th parallel. Half communist, half not. In the American mind, when North Korea invaded, losing the South was like losing to communism, and we couldn’t let that happen.” 

”I already know that dad, remember my lectures?” I remind him. 

”Oh yeah, right,” he says. But I can see him struggling. It’s like he loses a little more there in his mind every day. 

The war was announced just after they graduated from high school. He went down to the recruitment office with Ben and they enlisted with the Marine Corps. Ben had three more weeks until he turned 18, then they were on their way, their mothers crying and waving goodbye at the bus station until they faded away into the distance on their way to Great Lakes, Illinois, for boot camp. “We took training there, and it wasn’t that bad,” he tells me, “once you learned how to play ball.” The day they got their orders to go to Camp Pendleton, where they would depart for Japan, there was so much excitement in the air. They thought they were more than ready to go by then. They just didn’t know what they would be facing yet, he says, but they sure found out fast once they got over there. 

“The first time I ever been on a plane was going to war back in ’50,” he tells me. They flew them to Los Angeles, and before they knew it, they were being ferried onto a ship. “The ship was huge, the Navy you know,” he says with a grimace. And I get it, no Marine likes it when they are asked if they are a division of the Navy, and they are asked that a lot. “The Corps didn’t have a damn thing to do with the boat. You was their baby when you was on it. It was a carrier boat. What was on the boat, I don’t know, but I know it was packed. There were 2,200 head of us, packed in like sardines. We left the harbor going twelve knots, and it took us eighteen days to get to Hawaii. They gave us 72 hours, long enough to put fuel in the ship.” 

When they got there, he walked into town with Ben, and they went to a restaurant. They ordered country fried steak with mashed potatoes and red-eye gravy. “They even had sweet tea. They fixed everything just like they done in South Carolina,” he tells me. ”We needed that little piece of home right about then.” 

Afterwards they walked around town and they met a man on the street with a camera. He asked them, “Do you want me to take your picture?” 

“Sure,” he said. “Why not?” It cost him .57¢. “He said he’d mail it home to my mama, and I said, ‘Man, you’re going to take my money and you’re not going to mail it home.'” He did mail it for him though. “Different times,” he tells me. “I got a letter from mama saying she received it. Then she asked me what I was doing in Hawaii." "Fueling the boat up mama," he wrote back. It took them another four weeks to reach Japan, and by then they were ready to get off that stinking ship. “I came back on the same damn boat,” he says with another grimace. 

“When they got there, they told us to take our bunks down, so we did. Then some man, I don’t know where he was at, he mashed a button, and the whole entire side of the ship opened up. I was one foot off the water. They bought LSD’s out there to take us to shore, just like them boats in Saving Private Ryan,” he says. "They were made out of nothing but plywood. A machine gun would eat ‘em up. I couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened when we were actually in combat, all we had was the front door that was made out of steel so the bullets wouldn’t go through.” They were there for a month which felt like agony at the time, but they were glad to be on dry land again, even in a foreign land. They were so close and ready to fight, at eighteen, that’s how it was. Once they were in the thick of it though, they were scared shitless… 

“When we made land, they had about fifty trucks waiting for us,” he continues. They took them to their base camp in the capitol city of Naha in Okinawa. Their days at Camp Naha were spent drilling and doing odd jobs around the base. Okinawa was not that much different than boot camp, except the guys drilling them were a little tougher, and they’d already seen combat. On days when they had passes, they would leave camp and walk along dirt roads, past shacks and small homes and rice paddies, into town where the only sign in English said Coca-Cola. 

One time he went with Ben to visit a Buddhist Monastery. They left early in the morning as everyone slept. They walked for miles, and then they had to walk up a mountain, but it was worth it, he tells me. They watched the Buddhist monks in their morning prayer and wandered through the gardens. “Claire, such a beautiful, magical place. It was like a little piece of heaven,” he says. At one point, they wandered off and came upon a pagoda in a clearing with cherry blossoms swirling around and eaves that curved up like a smile. They sat down on the ground in front of the pagoda and could have stayed there forever in the solitude, the war felt so far away, but then someone else was there, an elderly woman in a kimono knelt beside them. “Most Japanese were Buddhists back then,” he tells me. 

“Hello,” she says. “Americans?” 

“Yes,” my father answers. “This place is so beautiful.” 

“We build our monasteries on mountains,” she tells him. “We believe the spirits of our ancestors live on the mountains.” My father hadn’t noticed the rudimentary graveyard off in the distant clearing. ”We come here so we can be closer to God.” 

“Do you feel closer to Him now?” Ben asks her. 

“Yes, I do,” she answers. Then she bows her head in prayer, and they do too. They pray and feel a small twinge of fear. The orders had come down the day before and the next day they would be leaving for Camp White Beach and crossing the East China Sea into South Korea. By then, they’d heard stories and had a better idea of what they would be facing over there. 

“I don’t know if I believe in God,” Ben finally says. 

“You will,” the old woman tells him. “In war, everyone believes in God.”  

My father is in his mid-eighties now. Back in the day, he was big and burley. Think Danny McBride with molten black hair and eyes that pierce. He was a guy you wouldn’t want to mess with. He had a way about him that made you understand this guy knows the deal. Now, it seems like he gets smaller as every year passes. He has stents for his heart and needs a walker to get around. I can see him fading away, but on our nights at the kitchen table he comes alive. “The next morning, we took off from Kadena Air Base in a twin-engine jet, and it was still dark. I wasn’t interested in that plane coming down. Those jets that fly so fast, you don’t know when they will hit an air pocket. An airplane won’t float,” he tells me. “It just sinks when it gets full of water.” 

Pusan is a city that tumbles down from the mountains to the sea and twinkles at night. When he tells me of Pusan in 1950 though, it sounds almost like a quaint fishing village, just with a heavy military presence. It was the only South Korean city not demolished in the war. One day in the future, he will visit me while I am working in Pusan, and when he visits the UN memorial cemetery, he will just break down and cry. 

“It’s ok dad,“ I tell him. “It’s ok.” 

Those first few days in port, Ben and him, they just took it all in. It really was a strange land for two boys from South Carolina. Navy ships in the harbor and the soldiers that were everywhere were the only sign that something was amiss. There were so many vendors selling anything and everything. He tells me about the ones who had buckets with eels swimming around in them and frogs crawling around on blocks of ice, or silkworms stewing in pots, and I say, “No! I don’t want to know about things such as those!” He laughs and tells me the story of the wily entrepreneur who found stuff and deep fried it. 

“What do you mean by stuff?” I ask him. 

“There was this one time, me and Ben bought deep fried sparrow from him. You see, we were more adventurous back then. While we were eating, Ben joked that one day when our kids wouldn’t eat their Brussels sprouts we would say, ‘Well let me tell you about the time I ate sparrow. You do know what a sparrow is, don’t you?’ I started laughing and almost choked on it when he said that,” he tells me. 

“Thanks for never saying that to us dad.” 

One night, they went out for dinner with two guys they knew from home. Dan and Jay were already officers. They were a year ahead of them in school and were in the first wave to go to Korea. They had dinner at The Seamen’s Club, and after dinner they had drinks at a bar down the street where they met an American doctor who would soon be heading north, for him a return trip. He was an orthopedic surgeon from New Jersey, and he told them it’s brutal, “Everything about this war is just brutal.” 

Dan and Jay took them on a jeep ride around Pusan, showing them the sights, and eventually they made their way down to the beach. They walked to the edge of the surf and then sat down and passed around a bottle of whiskey. “When the bottle got to Ben, he just held it and looked at it. I could tell he was thinking about his father, he had always vowed he’d never be like him. What he didn’t understand was he already wasn’t like him. ‘You’re not like him,’ I told him. He looked at me, and then he took a swig and passed it to me. I wasn’t used to it yet, and boy did it burn. We were lightweights back then, never really touched the stuff until we got to Korea.” 

They had so many questions for these guys who had already been in country, but all they wanted to talk about was home. “We were all looking forward, just in different ways,” he tells me. So, they answered their questions for a while and they all kept drinking. When Ben told them he wished he had gotten there in time for the Battle of the Pusan Perimeter, Dan told him, “No, you shouldn’t wish that. You don’t know, but you will,” and my dad felt that same uneasy twinge. When they were good and soused and driving back to the barracks, they took a ride by Pusan National University and Dan and Jay started chanting “PNU, PNU, where are the girls from PNU?” 

“We thought that was so funny,” he tells me, laughing at the memory. “You see, there were a lot of Korean boys from well-to-do families that went to college to avoid fighting in the war. We really resented them, and they resented us too just for being there. Here we had traveled halfway around the world to defend their country and they were right there. That just made us angry at ‘em. The GIs used to go over to the university all the time to steal their girlfriends just to screw with ‘em. It was a big problem. All these fights were breaking out.” 

Dan was right, they couldn’t have imagined. He and Ben were assigned to different units, and he wouldn’t see him or Dan or Jay again for a long time after they left Pusan. There were a few buddies from the ship in his unit, but it just wasn’t the same without Ben. “I wasn’t exactly tickled pink about that,” he tells me. “I just assumed we would be in it together, but orders are orders."  

Within a week of leaving Pusan, his platoon was ambushed while marching north. “I froze just like everybody else, then all hell broke loose. You just took cover and tried like hell to remember your training. I was just a young boy, and I was scared any damn way. Some good men were lost that day,” he says with great sadness. “That first time I finally realized I might die over there. While we were in the thick of it, I shot and killed a man. Afterwards when everything settled, I stood over him. He wasn’t much older than me. I went through his pockets and found photos of his family and a letter written in Korean. Everyone was ready to move on, but I couldn’t just leave him there without burying him. I just had to. The other guys grumbled about it, but they pitched in and helped, and we got it done in no time. I felt bad his family would never get the letter he had written them. We all had one in our pocket.“ When they finished, they just continued on their way leaving shells and bodies in their wake. They just kept pushing north. Once they got to Seoul, they met up with some South Korean soldiers and got reinforcements. “Those guys were all right,” he says. 

“I’m so sorry, Dad,” I say through my tears. “I had no idea." I wait and wonder if he will keep going, to that place he never goes. That place called North Korea. “And then what?” I finally ask him. 

I have so many questions. I want to know what it was like to be a soldier in a war. When I ask him, he tells me I could never know. He could describe everything he did, everything he felt, everything that happened to him, but, “you can’t know because you weren’t there. You could never know what it really felt like,” he says and then his head drops, and I know I’ve lost him. 

One night I get up and find him sitting at the table with a small bundle wrapped in old newspaper in front of him in a Ziploc bag. 

“What’s that?” I ask pointing to the bag. 

He opens it and unwraps the ancient newspaper. Inside, there is a small copy of the New Testament. He opens the navy-blue front cover, which is a little worse for wear, and reads the inscription. 

“Art, you are my comfort,” his mother had written. 

He has that faraway look in his eyes, and I wait for him to start talking. “When I got to South Korea, it wasn’ that cold. North Korea though was forty below and was cold as hell,” he tells me as he shudders. “What people didn’t know is, we were fighting two countries over there. The Chinese had already come across the Yalu River. They called it a river, but it wasn’t waist deep.” The winter was bad, but the summer was worse. There were dead bodies everywhere. “Claire, that smell,” he says with tears in his eyes.” 

Some of these things I already know, but I don’t say anything because he’s never spoken of North Korea before, and I want him to keep going. 

“As we moved across the country there were all these Korean folks who followed our camp. Some were hired by our government to bring us our rations and our water supply, and some were even paid to carry our equipment. Once we settled somewhere, so did they.” Camptown was small at first, but over time it grew, all these little stands and tents springing up around their base camp. A lot of the camp followers were displaced, so many women and children who had lost husbands and fathers and siblings and homes. “Sometimes I used to go to this hooch tent. The lady who ran it was named Rosie, and Rosie was one of those women.“ 

So, that’s who Rosie is. 

Rosie was one of the lucky ones. She set up a little tent just outside their camp. She made something called Gim-bap, which is a type of Korean sushi. She would put all kinds of things in it, sometimes the GIs would even give her their spam rations, and she would roll that into the mix. Most of her business was in the sale of hooch though. “I never told her this,” he says, “but after a little hooch, the Gim-bap tasted a lot better.” 

He sat in the corner by himself, and she often sat down and ate dinner with him. Their friendship started after he helped her out with some rowdy GIs. That first night, she brought dinner over for them, and as they ate, she told him her story about her village and how they lived in the shade of a dam. He can see her remember and go back there. “This war, it was fought in the sky. You knew when you heard that droning noise, you better take cover,” he tells me. 

Rosie was going down to the river, just like she always did. It was a cloudy morning and as the clouds drifted away, she could hear the drone of planes in the sky and looked up. That was the time before, though, before she knew what that sound meant. “It came from nowhere. The sky was fire. I tried to run back, but it was so very hot. My, how you say gajok…my family. My nam-mae, little brothers and sister,” she says as silent tears roll down her cheeks. “They were my family. They gone.” 

He takes her hand, "I’m so sorry Rosie,” he tells her. When I hear this, I arch an eyebrow, but he just ignores that and keeps going. “So much loss,” he says. “Her pain made me so sad, and a little guilty too.” He thinks about how hard it must have been to lose her family. How scared she must be now that she is in a place so far away from her home and so unfamiliar to her. He knows, he is also scared and in an unfamiliar place far away from home. 

“Drink,” he says and picks up her glass for her. She takes it, and then he picks up his glass and clicks it against hers. “Here’s looking at you kid,” he says, trying to lighten the mood. She doesn’t get the reference, but she laughs as her tears start to fade, then takes a sip. 

Rosie tells him of traveling south after the attack. She was alone and scared and journeyed by moonlight -- hiding from the soldiers who were now a part of the landscape. At seventeen, she was alone and unmarried. It took weeks for her to reach the border of South Korea, and all she found there was a sea of refugees. With no home and everything she knew gone, she did what she thought was the only safe thing a woman in her situation could do at the time, so she started following the United Nations Army. Eventually, Rosie was able to set up her small hooch tent with her family’s savings, which her father kept in their cellar, and she was lucky to find in the rubble. 

“What’s your real name?” he asks her. She tells him she is Rosie now. She liked the name Rosie, and it was easier for the GIs to pronounce than her Korean name, Eun-bi. When it gets close to his curfew, he tells her he has to go. 

“Goodbye Patty-son,” she says. “It is nice that we met.” 

“Have a good night, Miss Rosie,” he says. “That’s what she called me, just like that youngin’ in those vampire movies,” he tells me. “I was used to being called by my last name by then. Rosie and I had a lot of conversations over dinner. It was nice having someone to talk to who was not in the war. When I was with her, I could almost forget I was just a grunt fighting in a war halfway around the world. I could almost forget that."  

I am used to the dark by now. It’s my time. I glide through the living room, around bookcases and the TV and the piano. It’s a relief to see that the kitchen light is off. That means he is sleeping through the night, and all is well. As I am passing through the kitchen on my way to the sun porch, someone grabs my arm, and I gasp as my heart leaps into my throat. 

“You can’t go out there,” he hisses. “It’s not safe." 

“What’s not safe?” I ask my dad as my initial shock recedes and is replaced with something just as scary. 

“They’re in the trees,” he says as he points to a palm tree by the pool. “They’re everywhere.” 

I look out and all I see are the palm trees, and they look normal to me. “What are you talking about, Dad?” 

“The gooks are waiting for us in the trees, look, look!” 

This is something new for me, all I know is I have to calm him down, so  I take a breath and let it out slowly while I think. “Dad, let’s go into the living room and sit on the couch, they won’t be able to see us there.” I take his arm and guide him over, but he still manages to bang his shin on the coffee table. 

We sit down in the dark room. When he starts talking, he whispers. Then gradually his normal speaking voice returns, but he still won’t turn on the lights. It wasn’t easy over there in any way, he tells me. His platoon would leave base camp and go out for weeks on end. “We ate rough and slept rough. You had to keep your wits about you, that’s how you survived out there, and a lot of times just by dumb luck. I was fixin’ to survive and go home to South Carolina. 'Lord willin' and the creek don’t rise,' we all was.” 

It wasn’t all bad though. They still had some laughs. Sometimes, they gave their chocolate rations, when they got them, to the Korean children who flocked around their camps. Then they sent the kids over to the Army officers after teaching them how to say, “MacArthur eats shit." After all, MacArthur was an Army man. 

Dad usually went over to Camptown as soon as he got back and cleaned up. He had a few drinks, and Rosie brought him whatever was being served, which was usually fish or some type of meat with a side of rice, but more often than not, Gim-bap. Rosie got some food for herself and sat down with him. 

“What is it like out there?” she asked. 

“Not much happened this time,” he told her. He didn’t want to talk about "out there." Some nights he didn’t want to talk at all, so they sat and ate in silence. 

“What was it like out there?” I ask him now. How can I not want to know? 

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he grunts, and I know he’s back. “Dad, I just want to understand...“ 

“It’s late,” he says as he grips the edge of the table. Once he is standing up, he reaches for his walker and wheels himself off to his bedroom. 

I head out to the porch to read, but I can’t concentrate. I can’t help but wonder about Rosie and how close they really were. And the burning question of what did happen out there. I’m worried about him with these memories resurfacing. Tonight was unnerving. I finally give up, go inside, and take half of an Ambien. I don’t want my prescription to run out early, or I won’t get any sleep. 

I lay in bed, watch the shadows on the ceiling, wonder about what he must have gone through, and think about Rosie until I mercifully drift off to sleep. 

I get home from work the next night and my parents are sitting in front of the TV as Tucker Carlson talks about the election. “AMERICA IS STILL THE BEST PLACE THERE IS"  crawls across the bottom of the screen. I look over at my father. His head is tilting to the side, and he is drooling. 

“Dad?” I ask tentatively as I approach him. “Dad?” 

But he doesn’t answer, he just looks at me with googly eyes. 

“Mom, how long has he been like this?” 

“He was fine just a few minutes ago…” She says as she gets up. 

“Dad,” I try again as I start to panic. But he still doesn’t answer. “Mom, he needs to go to the hospital. Call 911 now!” I yell out. “Dad?” I try again, freaking out. “Dad?!?!”

He tries to lift his head and just gurgles as more drool runs down his face and then he tilts too far to the side and falls off his chair. My mother and I struggle to lift him into a sitting position with his back against the couch, but he’s just dead weight. I sit on the floor next to him with my hand on his shoulder alternating between looking at him and looking at the front door. Willing the ambulance to arrive, my mother opens the door and looks out. When the ambulance does arrive, the EMTs put him on a stretcher, give him oxygen, then wheel him out to the ambulance. We follow behind them in my car, but are back within the hour. We aren’t allowed to go in with him due to COVID.

He stays in the hospital for the next week as they drain fluid from his lungs and get his medication adjusted. We’re not allowed in to see him, not even for just a short visit. When he comes home, he sleeps through the night for the first week. Then he’s back at the kitchen table again, and so am I. “Death comes for you like a thief in the night. You never know when it’s coming, but you know it’s coming. That’s what it felt like out there,” he says like no time has passed. 

Dad had had a tough time on his most recent battle and news of the bombing of their base camp didn’t help. He didn’t know what he was going back to and who else he had lost. He got back late at night and was so tired, “A tired that rings through to your bones and beyond,” he tells me. Once he found out where his new barracks were and picked up his new rations, he headed off to the showers and took his first shower in two weeks, which revived him enough to go over to Camptown. “It was different,” he told me. “Everything was just off.” 

He wandered around the camp looking for Rosie’s tent and couldn’t find it. He finally came across a new tent and saw some other soldiers going in, so he followed them. It was very similar to Rosie’s setup, but he felt a kind of fear, the kind that sits in your gut just waiting to tear you apart. 

Dad looked around and saw some guys he knew from another unit sitting at a table in the corner. He sat down with them and ordered a drink. He asked the man who served them, “Do you know Rosie Kim? Where is Rosie Kim? Odi Kim Rosie?” 

“No, no Rosie,” the man tells him. "But so many women. I can get any one of them for you."

“I don’t want a woman,” he snaps as he rises from his chair. 

“Calm down,” one of his friends says. “You need to calm down.” 

“Josh,” he pleads, “what in tarnation happened?” 

“Here,” he says and hands Dad a drink. He downs it and then Josh tops him off. ”It was an early morning raid,” he tells Dad. The bombs were meant for them, but that’s not what happened. Morning was dawning when they heard the drone of the planes in the sky, and it was pandemonium as everyone took off running, looking for cover. The sky lit up as the bombs fell on Camptown. A few hit their base camp, including my father’s barracks, but most hit Camptown. 

“Rosie?” my father asked meekly. 

“I’m sorry, she didn’t make it,” Josh said. “There weren’t many survivors. I have something for you, I’ll come by and see you in the morning.” 

Dad went back to camp in a daze. Just one more death to add to the tally, but this one hurt and the pain was deep. Rosie was more than just a dinner companion to him. He didn’t know what she had been, and now, he would never find out. 

“Dad...“ is all I say. Sometimes there are no words. 

Early the next morning, Josh showed up at his barracks. He sat down on my dad’s bunk next to him. Then he put his hand in his pocket and pulled something out. “I found this out there. It’s a little singed, but I thought you’d want to have it.” Then he handed him his copy of the New Testament that his mom had given him. 

“Thanks Josh,” he said. “This means a lot to me.” 

He was still in a daze when his company went back out a few days later charged with leading an assault on a heavily coveted hill position. His friends told him to pull it together. “You’ll get us all killed,” they said. He told me of overrunning trenches with a hail of gunfire and grenade fire all around him. His Thompson submachine gun was like an extension of his arm, his colt revolver and a buck knife strapped to his belt, his vest packed with grenades. Once their Sergeant was killed by mortar fire, everything went to shit. “After that, all we could do was just hunker down and wait for air cover,” he said. As the sky lit up, he clutched the copy of his New Testament he now kept in his right pocket and said a little prayer for his Sergeant. Then they all breathed a sigh of relief, but not him, it would never be the same for him again. “It all became too much, I lost my damn mind, and in the end it didn’t even matter,” he said. “We took the hill only to have it taken back the next day by the Chinese. They had built a series of underground tunnels and many of them had survived the attack. But it didn’t end there. We pushed those commies off of that bloody ridge and secured our position.” 

I think he must be talking about the Battle of Bloody Ridge. I can’t believe he fought in that.

A few nights later after he got back to base camp, he found himself walking over to Camptown again. He sat in the corner of the hooch tent by himself. A new group of GIs walked in. When he saw them, he stood up, and he couldn’t believe it. “Ben,” he called out. Ben came over to him and then someone bear hugged him from behind. “Dan,” my father said. “Good to see you man.” Dan went over to the new proprietor and bought a bottle. “Let’s go outside,” he said. 

They pass the bottle around and each of them took a swig. Then Ben looked at Dan, and the way Dan looked back, with such grief in his eyes. “Jay, he was hit at Chosin and lost his leg and his arm. He’s in a bad way,” Dan told him. “He says he wished he had died, but he’s back stateside now at the VA hospital in Charleston.” 

They toasted Jay as fear coursed through their veins. They knew it just as easily could have been one of them. Just like that day at the beach, they passed the bottle around, but this time they had stories to tell. 

Dan went back inside after a while and then it was just Dad and Ben. Being with Ben again somehow helped him. When he died a year later at the Battle of Triangle Hill, my father was by his side. “The bullet hit him square in the forehead,” he tells me, ”and he just dropped. Just bad luck. Happened all the time and there was no rhyme, no reason. Just for one instant, being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I just dropped too. That probably saved my life.” He stayed with Ben as long as he could. 

He wrote a letter to Ben's mother when he got back, wrote kind things of bravery and valor, as if such things could lessen the blow. Dad also thought back to that day at the Pagoda and wondered if Ben believed in God now. 

Dad also thought about Rosie. It was her face he kept seeing. Her beautiful almond eyes, always looking for him as he entered the new tent. 

“Dad, I’m so sorry,” I say with tears running down my face as I put my hand on his arm. 

My parents usually spend the holidays with my sister and her family up north in Raleigh. When Thanksgiving rolls around a few weeks after he gets out of the hospital, he doesn’t feel strong enough to make the trip up north, so my mother decides to go alone after I volunteer to stay and take care of him. It was never a question; I never go anyway because I always have to work. 

I order the Thanksgiving Meal from Fresh Market and have Thanksgiving dinner together with my father for the first time since I was a teenager. I notice he doesn’t eat very much, which worries me. After we eat, I clean up and decide to catch up on some cleaning and laundry. 

My father stays in the living room watching movies while I work. After awhile, I hear a commotion in the living room. I rush out, so scared that he has fallen down or something else has happened. Instead, I find him marching around the living room singing, “Cavalry, cavalry, she said, it’s for my lover who is in the Cavalry," along with the TV. 

“Dad,” I say. “Are you okay?” 

“I’m ok, are you okay?” he yells, and then busts out another verse. “Cavalry, cavalry, she said, It’s for my lover in the U.S. Cavalry." I can’t help but laugh. It’s good to see him in such a good mood. 

He has the John Wayne movie collection on DVD, a Christmas gift from my sister and me one year, and watches them often. He really enjoys watching war movies now, but for a long time he wasn’t able to watch them. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon is one of his favorites. When I finish making up his bed and go back to the living room, the movie has ended, and he is sitting on the couch. 

“Dad, why don’t I make us some tea?” I ask him and lead him over to the kitchen table. 

“All right,” he replies. “Earl Grey, not that other kind your mom likes to drink.” 

“Got it dad,” I reply. On the counter is a bottle of whiskey and a glass. This doesn’t happen often, but I know better than to say anything. After I put on the tea kettle, I get two mugs out. His mug is red and says, “Once a Marine Always a Marine.” I ask him if I can get him anything else, and he says his feet are cold, and he needs his socks. I go and get some from his bedroom after steeping the tea and putting our mugs on the table.  Then I put them on him, one then the other and sit down with him. 

I can smell the whiskey tot he added to his tea while I was in the bedroom. Always the sly one. 

“This was really nice dad,” I tell him. “I really enjoyed having dinner with you.” 

“Me too,” he says. We drink our tea in silence. Both of us lost in our own thoughts. When we’re finished, I pick up our empty mugs and put them in the sink. I also put the bottle of whiskey away and pour the rest from his glass down the drain when he’s not looking. When I sit down across from him and look into his eyes, I can see he’s gone again, and I can see darkness. I now know that the war stayed with him and was always there. He didn’t talk about actually being in the war growing up, and now I know why. These are things I thought I wanted to know, what I wasn’t prepared for was the pain involved. 

“I was in country when they ceased fire and the armistice began. All I wanted to do was go home, but we still had some waiting to do. When I finally got out of there, I had some more time left, so I finished up my tour of duty at Camp Pendleton and then went to college on the GI Bill.” 

I’ve heard this before, from him, my mom, and Uncle Dan, but telling the story again brings him back. He went back to South Carolina and got a job at the paper mill in Georgetown, like so many young men had upon their return from the war. A few years later, his mother passed away. His father had passed while he was in Korea, he tells me with a tear in his eye. 

“That was a hard letter to get.” 

He packed his stuff and left South Carolina not too long after and went to grad school up north. After graduation, he got a job with Con Ed and moved to New York. He worked hard and moved up quickly. One weekend many years later, he was sitting in a bar while he was having a mini-reunion in Myrtle Beach with some of his Marine Corp buddies. Uncle Dan was there, and so was Uncle Jay with his new prosthetics. My mother, who was from Queens, was on vacation with some of her girlfriends from college. She was sitting across the room from them. While everyone talked about the news footage of men walking on the moon, Dan and Jay saw the table with my mom and her friends and they egged my father on until they all went over and offered to buy them a round. “There was an awkward moment when all of them looked at Jay,” he says. “Jay was used to that, but it still made him feel bad." 

Then my Mom said, "Thank you. That would be lovely," and she moved her chair and then her girlfriends did too, to make room, so we could pull up some chairs. He ended up talking to her for hours. They were married a year later. 

I wake up one morning feeling glorious and well-rested. These nights that I sleep all the way through are rare since the hysterectomy, and I cherish them. After I brush my teeth, I head to the kitchen and find my father unconscious on the floor. I call 911 and then run into the bedroom and wake up my mother. “The ambulance is on the way,” I tell her. As my mother calls out his name, slaps his face, and shakes him in an attempt to revive him, I watch and feel panicked and helpless, and so very scared. I walk out to the road and stand in the middle of it waiting for the ambulance. When I hear the siren and see the swirl of the lights, I run back into the house and tell my mother they are here. 

Then the EMTs are in our kitchen giving him CPR. Once they bring him around, I breathe a sigh of relief. Then they put him on a stretcher, give him oxygen, and wheel him out just like last time, but this time we don’t follow. We know we won’t be allowed in at the hospital. The doctor from the ER calls a few hours later to tell us he had a stroke and will be moved to the intensive care unit. For the next week we have no contact with him because there are no phones in the ICU for patients. We get calls from the nurses telling us he is agitated and has to be kept in restraints, which is horrifying to me. They tell us he cries as he tells them his family moved away and left him behind. When he’s not in restraints, he picks up various items within his reach trying to call us and speaks into them as if they are a phone. I wonder what he says, what he’s trying to tell me. I feel powerless knowing if we could visit him, even just once, he wouldn’t feel abandoned. 

When they finally move him out of the ICU to a room with a phone, he calls throughout the day and the night. He tells me he is being held hostage, and I need to call the police to come and save him. Every time I speak to him, my heart breaks a little more. He has a different doctor this time, and he rarely calls us, just the nurses to give us updates. When I ask them if they can give him a sedative so he can sleep at night, the nurse on duty tells me they already are. “I think he needs something stronger,” I tell her. 

“You’ll have to talk to the doctor about that,” she says “and he is dealing with all the COVID patients too, you know.” When the doctor finally calls, he tells us they performed a procedure on his heart, but there is nothing more they can do for him. They bring him home in an ambulance for hospice on a Saturday morning. My mother hires a company that sets up a hospital bed in the living room and provides around the clock nursing care. The nurses aren’t covered by insurance, and we worry about how we are going to pay for them, but they are not an option, so we try not to think about it as we welcome him home. 

“Claire,” he whispers to me his first night home. “They’re holding us hostage; you have to call the police.” Just like he said when he called from the hospital. When I look into his eyes, I can see he’s already gone. He asks me to go across the street and get our neighbor, Charlie, who is a retired police officer from Pittsburgh. Somehow, through all the fog, he remembers that fact, so I walk out the door and stand in the driveway for a few minutes after telling him I’m going to get Charlie. If only for a little while, it calms him down until he forgets and asks me again. 

He is in a lot of pain and struggles to get out of his bed. One of the nurses forgets to put up the railin . As she gives us the daily report at the end of her shift, he manages to get his leg down to the floor before his movement catches my eye, and I run over to him. But I’m too late, he tears the incision from the procedure he just had leading directly to his heart. This is on Sunday night and he loses consciousness. He only surfaces a few times after that, for a moment here, a moment there, before his eyes roll back, and he is gone again. “Dad,” I say through tears. “Please wake up, I need you.” 

The next night he still hasn’t regained consciousness. We have a different nurse then the two previous nights. Trying to figure out how to get to Netflix and play movies, we struggle with his remote controls. Finally, we find the search box and are able to find Saving Private Ryan, which over time became one of his favorite movies. He always says how realistic the first scene on the beach is. 

I sit with him and hold his hand as the movie plays. Somewhere inside of me, in a place I don’t want to face, I know he is ending. After I say good night, I lean over and whisper in his ear, “You’ll be okay dad, you’ll take a breath here, and when you exhale, you will be in heaven.” 

Early the next morning, my mother bursts into my room. “He died,” she yells out through her tears. “Your father died.” I knew it was coming, but it still feels like a shock. I sit up in bed in a daze, then go out to the living room and sit down in the chair I had left by his bedside the night before. I just look at him thinking too soon, we should have had more time. I sit with him in the living room as we wait for the funeral home to come and pick him up. 

As the nurse is leaving, my trance breaks, and I run out to the driveway to thank her for the night before. When I go back inside and look at his face, I see peace, and I know he’s in a better place. On his first night home, he looked up at me in one of his few lucid moments and asked, "Am I dying, Claire?" 

“Dad…” I said as I tried not to cry. “I think you are.” 

“Well don’t you worry about me when I’m gone,” he told me. “I’ll be singing with the angels and dancing on the stars.” Even so, when I sit down a few hours later to write his obituary, I weep. 

Marines from all over the state come to his funeral to honor his legacy. He was a member of the Marine Corp League, which is made up of veterans of the Marines, and did volunteer work with them for several years after he retired. He even served as the Marine Corp League State Chaplain for a few years and would visit with Marines who had been injured in combat when they came home from war. 

Uncle Dan is the first one to arrive. He is dressed to the hilt in his officer’s uniform and gives the eulogy. Uncle Jay passed away several years before, but he is still sharp in my memory, especially on a day like today. He came to New York every Thanksgiving and a few other times every year to visit. He used to say we were his favorite people in the whole world because we treated him like every other regular Joe. 

“What is a Joe?” I asked him. I was still very young. 

On Thanksgiving, we watched  King Kong together, every year. I squirmed and hid my face against him when King Kong stepped on the villager. Then he was just gone, and I didn’t understand. I always asked where he was, but my parents just said he couldn’t make it that year. I think about the moment my father finally told me the truth, and it makes me cringe. Dad was teaching me to drive a stick shift, and he made an offhand comment about how Jay would have liked to have seen it. 

“What do you mean would have liked?" I asked him. I’ve never forgotten the look on his face when he realized what he let slip. “Tell me,” I said. 

“Pull over,” he told me. I was so upset I stalled out in the middle of an intersection. “It was a long time ago,” he said. “He committed suicide.” 

I said some pretty harsh things to him. Hearing that Jay had committed suicide was like a punch in the gut. When I finished berating him for letting it happen, my father held me as I cried, while everyone honked at us. I really wish I had been better to him that day. He lost Jay too. Whenever I think about Jay, I miss him. He was one of my favorite people on the planet too. 

The minister starts the service by reading Psalm 23 and when he finishes, he pauses and then yells out “Devil Dogs” because he is also a Marine, and Hoo-rah is yelled back in chorus. “Don’t worry,” he tells everyone else. “Devil Dog is just another name for a Marine.” 

My sister, Crystal, grips my hand as he speaks. After the service, I sit outside on a bench by myself. Crystal comes over and sits down beside me. “It’s hard to believe he’s gone,” she says. "I wish I had made it down in time to say goodbye to him.” She had come down once when he was released from the intensive care unit. We fought with the hospital administrator, but in the end, she wouldn’t let her in. 

“He knows,” I tell her. 

Even though we are at his funeral, it still doesn’t feel quite real yet. Crystal’s family had to quarantine before coming down here because she travels for work, so it’s been two weeks since he passed. 

At home, I keep expecting him to be sitting in his chair when I come in from work and turn the corner into the living room. It’s the first place I look. 

“I thought we’d have more time with him,” Crystal says, echoing my own sentiment. She starts to cry, and I take her in my arms, “I love you sis,” I whisper, but I’m not sure she hears me. 

My nieces and nephew sit on a bench across from us and watch us huddle together, just like we did when we were little. They huddle together too. 

A few weeks later we are packing up his belongings, and I find a familiar bundle wrapped in newspaper. As I flip through the pages, a photograph falls out. It's an old photo of him and another boy standing in front of a storefront dressed in tan uniforms. On the back is written, “Art and Ben ’50.” 

When I look at the picture, I remember all our nights together at the kitchen table, and that makes me smile. “Semper Fi, dad,” I whisper towards the heavens. “Semper fi.”

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