I think to a certain degree people can underestimate how extremely brutal wars can be - especially wars of decades past where it was a lot easier to sweep shit under the rug and have the government sponsored media sanitize everything. Being pushed to the extreme limits of brutality and doing things that are against humanity, and having to keep that up for months, if not years has to break something inside the human psyche. We're not built for that. I mean I used to hear shit from my father that I had never heard mentioned, ever in books or any media.
I know I've mentioned he was in Korea. One time he was telling me about the war, "You know, by the end, the North was hurting so bad for soldiers, China sent kids over. They'd come at you throwing grenades. We encountered them a few times. Squads of kids who were about 12 or 13 who would just come running at you throwing grenades."
I asked him, "What'd you do?" He said, "What do you think we did? We opened up on them."
I said, "That's pretty rough, having to kill kids."
He snapped at me, "What the fuck did you want us to do? They were throwing goddamn grenades at us!"
I wouldn't say my father had PTSD in the normal sense. Cars backfiring didn't send him diving behind the couch or into flashbacks. On the contrary he loved talking about the war and spent most of his retirement watching all kinds of war footage on the history channel. But when he talked about it, he'd talk about the most brutal, insane stuff and he'd usually be laughing about it like he was reminiscing about high school or something. And not on purpose - he wasn't being edgy. It was like he had this weird disconnect that he didn't even realize how brutal the stuff was that he talked about or that it wasn't normal.
One time my niece, who was about 11 at the time, was learning about wars in history class or something - she was over for easter dinner. So she's all excited to ask grandpa about being in a war and just blurts her question out at the table because she's too young to understand how loaded of a question that is. And my father is all animated and just launches into this story about how they were under attack and he got close to a tank and throws a grenade or some explosive inside the tank. Then it goes off and kills everyone in the tank and he decides to go inside and see what he can loot from the tank. And he says that he's climbing into the tank and there's some dead Korean at the bottom of the ladder and he slips and falls down the ladder and his foot goes into the Korean's stomach, which is blown open. And then he starts laughing and says, "Jesus Christ, I was so mad! I had just bought those goddamn boots!"
And everyone at the table - no one's faces had any color and it was dead silent except for my father laughing about messing up his new boots. And it's like, it doesn't even register that this is his 11 year old granddaughter who asked this or even how brutal this story sounds.
And the thing is, I don't think my father and his war experience is anywhere near out of the ordinary. I think a lot of what he casually talked about as normal is the kind of stuff that's swept under the rug and no one ever hears about it unless a vet decides to say something but for most people, they don't understand living at this level of brutality for months or years on end and how it can just completely destroy the human psyche in weird ways and that for hundreds of thousands of soldiers in earlier decades, this kind of brutality was normal, everyday living in war. Aside from the frostbite, my father's body had quite a few scars from bullets. He told me when I had asked about them, "Send you home? They didn't have enough soldiers! If you weren't dead, they'd patch you up and send you back out to fight."
Of course being like that he was far from father of the year. He was one of the most violent people I've ever met - even in his everyday living. We used to plant tomatoes and get those fat worms that are bad for tomato plants. Most people would probably pick them off and throw them in the garbage or spray them with insecticide or something. My father would pick them off the plants, throw them in an empty coffee can, and set them on fire. Just shit like that always had to be tinged with some unnecessary violence.
A much older friend one time helped to put things in perspective for me. He told me, "All the shit your father's been through - from Chosin to the frostbite to getting shot up to fighting the entire Korean war from beginning to end. No one survives that kind of shit and walks out of it like your father did unless they become a psychopath or they were already one. That's the only way you survive that kind of shit. And then you come back to the real world and people are arguing over parking spots or complaining about standing on line at the bank. Your father is probably walking around looking at everyone like they're sheep and he's God after what he survived. And everyone, including you, is just another sheep who hasn't earned the right to live, much less complain. It kind of colors how you deal with people in everyday life."
After he told me that, a lot of my father's behavior made sense. It also made my heart break a little for every vet who's probably carrying a similar load. You can't fix that.
