Killed in Korea

My father returned from the war physically intact. He stepped out of the taxi in his officer’s uniform, his black hair ruffling lightly in the grey Manhattan wind. His face was more lined than I remembered, and when he smiled it did not meet his eyes, which seemed to look as much through me as they looked at me.

“Hey Dad,” I said cautiously.

“Hello, son,” he replied, and he patted my shoulder paternally. My mother was sobbing silently as she clung to him, and he rubbed her back with his other hand.

"Come on," he said, "Let's get inside and out of this wind." The three of us left the cab behind forever and opened the door of our first story flat, sheltered on the corner of 174th and Audubon Avenue. There were two small bedrooms inside, a small kitchen, and just enough room to squeeze the round wood table my father had built and an old, green sofa.

He sat down at the table and took off his hat, which my mother hung on the rack next to our door. I sat on the couch quietly and looked at him. I remember how scared I was. I knew I should be glad to see him, exceedingly grateful he was alive and only too happy to have him home, but all I remember was the fear. What had happened to him while he was gone? Did he remember me, and how we used to throw baseball on Sunday afternoons? Did the war steal his memories just as it stole him away from them? Was he just as broken as the others who had returned, passing them in the supermarket with their eyes far away and visibly flinching every time I came around a corner?

I searched my father's face, as if I could wring his hidden condition out of the careworn lines that had etched themselves into his skin. My mother stood in the kitchen, and I could tell she was searching too, though she tried not to show it.

"How was your flight?" she asked. He smiled.

"Long," he replied simply. "I'm glad to be back."

"We're so glad to have you back," she said, wiping the tear stains from her cheeks with a towel hanging by the stove. "Would you like some dinner? Charles and I picked up potatoes and chicken from the store earlier."

My father looked at me and smiled. "That sounds lovely." I smiled back. He seemed normal, or at least, in the initial cordiality that long absence always demanded.

"They say the Yankees are going to win again this year," I said with tepid excitement.

"Is that so?" he said. "There hasn't been much contest the last few years, I've heard."

"Not really," I said. "Though the Dodgers seem to be just as good as last year." He nodded. My mother was chopping potatoes and watching him out of the corner of her eye. He was staring absently at his hands.

"Charles," Mother said gently, "Why don't you go tidy up your room before dinner?" I nodded and walked into my bedroom. It was tidy as could be, and my mother doubtlessly knew it. I closed the door and pressed my ear to it. Her voice was low but audible.

"Are you okay?" she said softly. There was a pause.

"Yes," he said. "It's just..." Another pause, "Yes. I'm fine."

Dinner passed by amicably. My father said little but he smiled and asked me about school and whether I still played with Robert on Thursday evenings. Robert's father was dead but I didn't mention it. My mother and I spoke haltingly, as if to a delicate bird that might either collapse or burst out the window at any moment. But my father really did seem fine. He did not jump when I spilled my cup of water on the table, nor was he lying in wait under my bed when I went to sleep, to slit my throat like the enemies I imagined he ambushed every night in Korea.

But as the days went on I became more and more troubled with my father's behavior. He did not act rashly or suffer violent mood swings, nor did he become withdrawn and sullen, unable to face the regular routine of ordinary life, which I had been nervously expecting. He did not dig a trench in the small field behind our apartment building and live in it, like I'd heard Thomas' uncle did when he was discharged early from the war--they had seen early signs of his disturbance, no doubt. But I was troubled and I didn't exactly know why.

A week later I batted a baseball straight through Old Nelson's bathroom window across from Hood Wright Park, which caused a whirlwind of fury from my mother and polite, noncommittal reproof from my father.

"Charles," he said to me, "You know you should be careful when playing baseball so close to cars and buildings." His brow was furrowed but his voice was distracted, almost robotic--like he was repeating lines off a teleprompter.

"Yes sir," I replied. "I won't do it again." He smiled and patted me on the shoulder, then looked away out the window to watch a passing taxi as the heat of my mother's seething prickled the back of my neck. I'm sure she was thinking of "the budget", something I had heard of often but had never seen, like a mysterious monster that tortured her as much as it punished me for any childish destructive whimsy. I did not know how my father had both forgotten the monster and did not feel the heat, but he smiled benignly at my mother and grabbed his hat to take another stroll outside. Her mixture of outrage and confusion went entirely unnoticed as he stepped out the door.

I found this extremely out of character. The wielder of the budget rod had been my father as often as it had been my mother. I walked briskly into my room and opened the window to watch him walk down the sidewalk. He was looking up at the skyscrapers with mild disinterest and something akin to pain. It was a pain he had not put on in front of me, but he wore it now with a rigid familiarity. I was stricken as I watched him walk away. He was struggling and I knew it, but he was either hiding it or too lost to tell.

I decided to draw it out like a poison.

In hindsight, I realize my therapeutic method was probably not the medicine he needed, or anyone, for that matter. But my thirteen year old mind was determined to get to the bottom of the situation; so I staged my plan. It needed my mother's absence, but she didn't leave me alone often in those days. So three days later, when she left to go for a walk in Central with her friend Bernice, I pounced on my opportunity. I was supposed to be at Robert's house until she came back for dinner, but Robert's parents had left us alone. I winked at him and ran around the block to beat my dad home before he came in from his job searching, as we supposed.

I turned on the television in the corner, which was against my mother's carefully curated rules since my father got back. I found the news and turned the volume up, which was also against the rules. The black and white news man appeared, reporting death tolls in the same detached, teleprompter voice that my father had used in his reproof earlier that week. The armistice didn't mean much to this man yet, for the deaths still slid nonchalantly across his desk each day in the same routine manner.

I was none too soon.

My father's key turned the deadbolt and he entered, black coat over his shoulder and briefcase in hand. He froze as his eyes settled upon the television, the list of names scrolling up from the bottom as the news man read them off in his flat voice.

"Hey Dad," I said cheerfully. "How was your day?"

He didn't answer, still staring at the screen.

"Do you recognize anyone?" I said. He turned and stared at me blankly. I put on my best innocent expression. A tense moment passed.

"What?" he said.

"Do you recognize anyone?" I repeated. The list of names finished scrolling.

"Umm...no."

"Oh, that's good," I said. I paused.

"Do you know many people that died?"

He stared at me once again, but this time his blankness was mingled with shock, and a hint of the pain that I had seen out the window. I was getting close.

He still didn't respond. I waited, enduring the silence like a crouching predator. I could feel his shield growing thin. I wanted so badly to break it, to see even a flash of anger from my father, any kind of emotion or warmth other than the hollow shell that had returned to me. I do not excuse my aggressive insensitivity, but I hope you might understand the pain of a young boy who found out his father, upon returning, had already been lost forever.

But he slipped through my fingers.

At this point, less than two minutes after my father walked through the door, mind you, my father promptly shoved his hat back on his head. He mumbled something that sounded like "forgot something at the office" (what office, I didn't know), and yanked the door open.

"Wait!" I said desperately. But my father had shut his ears. And at this point my mother had also reached the door in time to stand witness to the situation, quite unfortunately for me.

"Frank," she said taken aback, "what are you doing?" He looked at her for a brief moment of frantic confusion and then bustled past her into the street.

"Frank!" she shouted, looking bewildered.

"Dad! I'm sorry!" I shouted at him through the wind, but he was gone. Just as gone as he had been since the summer of 1951.

My father returned later that night, but he wasn't really back. He didn't meet my eyes, and never again did I feel even a shadow of the brokenness that raged within him. I did not try to wring it out of him again. My mother tried, in her own way. But he had locked himself off from the miseries and hurt of the world, and so he could not exist. As there is no true presence without possibility of pain, so his presence had been killed in Korea.

It took me a long time before I found out some inkling of his cause of death. His body gave in to a bad case of influenza two years after his return, but I needed to know what happened to his heart. I had never heard a word from him from the day he returned, nor did my mother or anyone else. It wasn't until I was working as a junior reporter for the New York times in 1966 that I was able to get in contact with a member of his battalion.

He told me point blank, "Your father was lost by our third mission."

"How did it happen?" I asked him earnestly.

"How it always happens," he replied grimly. "It was too much for him. Jimmy died, and then Sam, then John, then we lost our captain and 17 more when they ran over a land mine." He paused for a long moment. "We watched it happen, your father and I and a few others. We ran to help but it didn't matter. Frank wasn't the same after that. He didn't talk much anymore except when it was necessary. He didn't joke. He walled himself up and never came back. He wasn't the only one. You can't watch things like that happen over and over and stay the same. A lot of people died over there and a lot of those who didn't couldn't handle being alive anymore."

He said he was sorry for my loss and wished me luck. I sighed and put down the phone. I sat in silence for a few minutes, and then wept. I hadn't wept when he died but I wept now. I remembered how it was before he left, how he smiled and held my hand to cross the street and how we used to play pranks on my mother together. The way he made her smile and how he ruffled my hair. That was how I always wanted to remember him. That was my father.

I wept because he never came back.