Phantom Pain
Phantom Pain won the 1997 National Mature
Media Silver Award for magazine feature writing.
by Deborah Conner
THE DAY could not have been more beautiful. I stood with my
mother and the deacon beside the long black limo and watched the attendant open
the back door of the hearse. I saw them approach—the honor guard, walking
slowly, rhythmically. They were coming to claim my father.
His entire life had been bound up in the image of the
soldier. It stood next to him, remembering, in everything he did, even though
he was only briefly in uniform.
We grew up in the ever-expanding shadow of Washington's Capitol.
Always involved in some form of public service, he was the recipient of many
awards and held in high esteem. At home, however, he was a different man: angry
and remote, unable to connect to a family he clearly loved, but couldn't allow
to love him back.
I see now that part of him was lost. The whole of my
childhood was spent walking around the gaps of his missing pieces.
My generation came of age in the difficult Vietnam War
years. Though it is humorous to joke that I left home for political reasons,
the original decision was heart-wrenching. My father couldn't accept his
country in any form but an idealized one, and there was no room for discussion
or dissent. I left home very young and worked my way through college; he
refused to speak to or about me during those years.
Over time, we managed to craft a fragile truce. It was
during this period that I acquired what came to be for me a magic book, what I
felt was an instruction manual for my father. It was The Glory and the Dream,
William Manchester's mammoth social history of America from the Depression to
the 1970s. The book was full of real people, real lives, not textbook facts. It
told more than the cardboard when, where, what; it told the who and the why.
For the first time, I began to understand why certain
words—The Depression, The War, Korea, The Communists, The Bomb—were incanted by
my father with such awe, and why the desecration of America's
symbols stimulated an automatic, wordless rage. During my parents' coming
of age, the vast world had shrunk. Their generation had been through such a
whirlwind of drama and horror that they spoke about it only in mystical
phrases—things too big to talk about.
Manchester mapped the complicated terrain of the War
Generation, making me see that they had been young, too, and had the same
yearnings and dreams that I had. Dreams they never could act on until after the
war absorbed their youth, leaving them determined to control and perfect the
future. Hence the '50s. which they filled with creature comforts, a brightness
denied to cast any shadow. Hence the wordless, distant love they showered on
us, a symptom of their need to escape the past and feel things strictly in
terms of their own perfected now. Their relationship with their children would
also be perfect, with no room for the questioning that might break that spell.
I finally saw that they simply couldn't talk about the pain
and fear they had lived. They couldn't explain their sacrifice.
But in my father's case, there was more than this.
My father had joined the war the first moment that he could.
The youngest child in a large family, he wanted to follow in the footsteps of
his hero brothers. Once in the Army, he was sent to Northern Ireland as a
mechanic, and the few small ragged pictures in the scrapbook left from that
time show a tall, skinny blue-eyed boy, his arms encircling the shoulders of
his beloved brothers-in-arms. He sits smiling with them around a campfire, his
eyes shining and looking like the grandsons he would never know. In all my
life, I never saw his eyes shine like that.
His unit was bound to go on to the shores of Africa in the
first great assault there. But they would go on without him.
We didn't go to the beach when I was a child. My father
never danced. He was an amputee, and his full-leg prostheses was never strange
or curious to me. It was only part of him, and he was happy to have it,
proud of his skill in making it undetectable. Any improvement in its mechanism
was a wonder to him, and he was delighted to help and encourage others who
shared the same affliction. On his last trip to Mexico, he was thrilled that
his new appliance would have a molded realism—even toes—that would allow him to
wear shorts and sandals.
When my brother and I would ask him casually how he lost his
leg, he always said, "In the war." This explanation sufficed and was
never elaborated on, even to my mother. After I read Manchester's The Glory and
the Dream, and his personal account of the war in the Pacific, Goodbye Darkness, my
dad began to open up when I would ask about what had happened in those years.
He told stories of how my uncle was shot down, about people he saw injured as
well as comical tales of his friends. He told me things he'd never told anyone
else, because I listened. Manchester had helped me understand.
One day, he told me the story of his leg. Simply, without
details or anguish, he told me of an accident on a field far from battle. He
had been the victim of someone else's negligence, a rifle accident. I knew from
my reading that there were "million dollar wounds," wounds that would
heal but sent their bearer home—or at least, away from the action. On rare
occasions, these were self-inflicted, preserving the body at great
psychological and social price. Wounds of the soul.
My father bore something akin to this, through no fault of
his own. Because of it, he felt he could never measure up to those who were
wounded in battle, and he could never be sure who would misinterpret what had
happened. His honorable discharge and the pictures of the generals visiting his
bedside were tokens of proof of his innocence. But nothing could ever prove to
him that he was a good-enough hero.
I came to see that always in his mind were the memories of
the faces and the voices of his brothers-in-arms who went on without him to Africa.
There, his unit suffered casualties of 90 percent. He never forgot that
statistic, the odds that were against him in his parallel life of phantom
destiny. He felt he should have been with them—even if it meant not being at
all.
An entire generation silently remembered the ones they left
behind on similar shores. All the heroics in the world could not return them.
All that could ever be done is to remember, hold tight to the future and pass
on the mystery of life to their children.
With gratitude, I understood.
All this went through my mind that day at Arlington. From a
place beyond time, I watched the honor guard approach, surround and lift up my
father's flag-draped coffin. They carried him off in measured beat, back to
meet the lost part of himself, and I watched in awe of the appropriateness, the
healing, the sublime perfection of the ceremony.
Copyright American Legion Magazine Apr 1996
Charles Mattingly
