PHIL'S WAR

My stepfather Phil served in Korea as a teenager. A kid.
It perhaps has become a cliche to speak of the “Greatest Generation” but he was certainly of that group. For one thing, he almost never spoke about his time in the army. He certainly never, ever talked about combat.

While succeeding generations - including my own, of course - parade the minutiae of their lives in whatever public forums bring the most attention, those of Phil’s generation believed in a kind of stoicism that seems alien to us now. I can’t help but admire this bravery in the face of horror, knowing as I do the much-studied and discussed darker manifestations that could lurk behind the stolid masks.

Early in the last decade he spent several months suffering through illness, countless hospital stays, surgery - to remove more than half of his colon. He came close to death. Weeks went by with him nearly unconscious, suffering infections, an NG tube up his nose and down his esophagus, his mouth and throat raw and irritated.

He had survived Korea but a young surgeon nearly killed him by planning an unwise operation to address a bad infection. Luckily, the surgery didn’t happen and Phil was transferred to a hospital in Cincinnati and many more weeks later managed to make it home alive. In the aftermath of all of this trauma, however, he became depressed. Who wouldn’t? This also lifted gradually.

It was some time during the year that followed that I paid my mom and Phil a visit and a surprise unfolded quite suddenly. Phil went into another room and returned with a small box. He handed the box to me and told me that he would answer any questions I had about the Korean War. The box contained only a small collection of things. Many were Korean artifacts taken off of dead soldiers, one soldier’s horribly distorted body frozen forever in two rather disturbing photographs. One photograph showed the deceased’s family, the human face of those who suffer from the loss of even one soldier.

I asked only a few questions.

Years later when Phil was back in the hospital, at the beginning of the end, he regaled my then girlfriend and I (she a nurse in that place) with some surprisingly bawdy tales of his adventures with a buddy on leave in Japan. This was before the second tour, before his mother died in a car crash that he survived, before Korea and his initiation into the real Hell of humanity. Not the phony Hell that religious zealots invented to keep us all in line, but the Hell that we make out of our own unwillingness to get along with each other.