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