Eyes
I wrote this story five years ago.
**
As a little girl, I don't remember ever wishing my dad could be normal. I don't remember ever wishing his face looked like other dads. It's just always how I've known it, and I liked it, I was proud of it.
I took up the role of his defender and advocate early in life. When people would stare, I would glare them down so bad. I was proud of how different he was, and I wanted to show him off.
But I remember, when my sister was really young, she just wanted him to have a face that she could understand, that looked like everyone else.
She would touch his face, and ask, Why?
It didn't embarrass her, she just had trouble understanding how someone could get hurt like that. He explained it once to a five-year-old boy in our church. The little boy had come over to my father very solemnly and asked, What happened? My dad explained it so gently, I'll never forget.
"My eye was broken," he said. How? My dad said that he'd been in a war, and he'd been shot. He pointed to the corner of his right eye and the corner of the right side of his mouth. As he explained this, he could tell that the boy was feeling really pretty bad for him so my dad put his hand on the boy's shoulder and said, "Don't be sad. I'm not in pain anymore." The boy looked up at my dad and in a grave voice said, "Yeah. Being shot's a tough thing."
**
In 1968 when my dad joined the marines, he thought he was unstoppable. The two words he remembers thinking were escape and freedom. So he dropped out from life as a philosophy major at Santa Clara University in California where he was in great shape from being an oarsman on the crew team. Between his freshman and sophomore years, he had gone through Officer Candidate School for the Marine Corps. He was big, strong, intelligent, and attractive. Dazzlingly attractive, with an unforgettably handsome smile.
He wanted to join the marines to find his identity. To be a hero. And to prove himself a man to his father and to everyone else. His parents didn't want him to go. And his girlfriend didn't want him to go. Two days before he left, my dad's mom died, a fact which he has always thought was her way of saying, I can't handle this.
And while boot camp had been easy for my dad, and his idealism really prevented him from being scared, when he finally arrived in Vietnam, he was terrified. He was serving a unit where he didn't know anyone, there was absolute anonymity. Watching soldiers die and watching them get wounded was a constant. And the terrible thing was, my dad soon realized, that this enemy they were killing was nothing more than a mirrored image of themselves.
**
I think I was always kind of proud of how unusual my dad was. I would grab his hand and yank him outside to go exploring, to do errands, just to be together. We walked everywhere through San Diego. Despite being 95 percent blind, he had the entire city memorized right down to a jagged decline at the end of a street corner on my paper route where his white cane might betray him, catching the drop too late. San Diego was beautiful when I was young, with a cool warmth that made you always want to be outside. Our neighborhood smelled of honeysuckle and tiny lawns, with strip malls gingerly popping up on the streets selling frozen yogurt and beauty supplies.
When we walked down the streets together, strangers would gawk, and I would stand a little taller, swing my hand a little prouder. But there were many, who had met him maybe just once, who delighted at his presence. Inside the different stores, sometimes managers would approach my dad, lay a hand on his shoulder and say, "Jerry! How you doing?" My dad would grin and recognize the person warmly by voice and touch. Soon they'd be swapping jokes and catching up. He was known around town.
I wanted to make my dad known to everyone. As soon as I was old enough to be studying Vietnam, I tried to get him to come in as a guest speaker. I thought everyone should see him and hear him and know that there are some forms of history that you continue to live with the rest of your life. When I was in the 8th grade, he came into my history class. One of the kids raised his hand. What do you think of Rambo?, he asked. My father using his dramatic flair for pause, stared straight at the kid, and said, "I think it's pure shit."
**
The day that my father was shot, four days after his 21st birthday, his morning began with the usual sweltering heat and panic of battle. Only this morning, he had to listen to his friend Mack slowly die in a foxhole nearby. Mack and his buddy had refused to dig their foxhole as deep as it needed to be, and Mack got shot in the chest. My dad listened to him moan until he stopped moaning. The night before, my dad had listened to him read a note from his sister about how excited she was that he was coming home in a month. Later that day, after Mack was gone, when they ate their breakfast, someone asked: Who wants Mack's C-Rats? And my dad was horrified. The food was holy, he thought. How can you just eat a dead man's food? Then of course he remembered, oh yeah, over here nothing like that matters, you're either killed or injured or waiting to be killed or injured.
Later in the day, my dad went on a sweep to check out an area to make sure it was safe. It was then that he was shot. The two bullets came from a sniper hiding somewhere in the jungle. And my dad crumpled to the ground. The other four marines he was with were shot dead. And my dad held his face in his hands, praying: Please let me die, let me die, let me die.
**
My sister used to keep a black and white picture of my dad from when he was in high school tucked into the corner of her full-length mirror. She would pretend it was an imaginary boyfriend, he was so handsome. As our dad, with his face sewn and clipped and constructed back together through more than 150 surgeries, he was an entirely different person. The bullets had torn away part of his lower face, so that one-third of his tongue had to be removed and all but four of his teeth were gone. Surgeons later sewed up the right socket of his eye, replaced a piece of his skull with a metal plate, and created a new nose from part of his hipbone. For us, we couldn't even imagine what he was like before all this.
As a kid, I would call my dad Nice Lion. He used to have a huge thick beard and fuzzy flowing curls. My sister and I would always give him a hard time when it was crazy and curly. We joked with him a lot, and he would pick us up and twirl us around. He would do almost everything like other dads would do. And more. He was our hero.
One time when my sister was small, she made her way outside, softly into the shallow end of our pool. The minute my dad stopped hearing her, he jumped in, and saved her life. She had been quietly, passively drowning. In my dad's youth, he was a strong, fearless lifeguard. When he would usher during the summers at Sea World, he carried this brazen attitude with him. Talking to a trainer one day, my dad asked: How can I work with Shamu? The trainer said: Just go for it, and my dad did. He hopped on the killer whale and rode around the enormous pool and held on. The trainer took a picture which my dad keeps in his study today as a memory of this moment of glory.
He was always our hero. I would sit on my dad's lap as a very little girl, tapping his knees like a typewriter because I was going to be a writer someday. As I grew older, I would read him what I wrote, and I would take such pride in the fact that when we watched TV or movies or even just took a walk, that he said I described things best of all. Better than mom or my sister or his friends. There's a special art to this: You don't say too much, you give just enough details to help him put the picture together himself.
**
After being shot, my father thought his life was over. He prayed his life was over. But his buddy Al found him and was not willing to let him go. So he yelled at him. "You fucking pansy you are NOT going to die!" At six feet two and 210 pounds, my dad was too heavy to carry to the helicopter waiting nearby so Al, a small, wiry man, screamed at my father to move. "You call yourself a fucking marine? You call yourself a man? I want to see you move!" Al was able to insult my dad up the hill where the chopper was waiting, and in one swift lift-off he was flown away to the USS Sanctuary, a medical ship where the injured were taken. The chief surgeon later reported that he'd never seen a man's face who lived so badly damaged. My dad came to the ship without ID tags and there was no way, no time to ask for his name. The surgical nurse had to force a breathing tube in while he was awake so that he wouldn't swallow what was left of his tongue. They had to take the pieces of his shattered jaw and try to keep some of the muscles together for some semblance of a face.
In the weeks and months that followed, my father lived in a fog, totally oblivious to the world around him. When he was moved to San Diego to be a patient at Navy Hospital, he still thought he was in a dream. One time, in a moment of consciousness, he wrote a message to his nurse, "My mom just died, I hate my dad, and I know my girlfriend doesn't love me. Why am I alive?" With his teeth wired shut and a tracheatomy tube in his throat, he dropped down to 135 pounds in three weeks. People would visit him and not make it, fainting from the shock of what my dad had become. It was two months after being shot, when he really woke up from his haze. He heard a civil defense siren, and he realized, wait a minute, I wouldn't put a civil defense siren in my dream. And that's when he felt a total release into the luxury of knowing that he was never going to be shot at again. He felt free. He felt like no matter how bad this was, he never had to be shot at again.
**
When I was away at college, I got a call from my dad one night. It was 1993. He was calling from Washington and his voice was breathless, his tone was peaceful. He had been visiting the Women's Vietnam Memorial and something amazing had happened.
My dad was approached by a woman who asked if he had ever been a patient on an army head-injury hospital. He said, yes, that he'd been on the USS Sanctuary in June of '68. She said she had a friend who'd been a nurse at that time, and a half an hour later my dad was introduced to Helen Roth. Even without words, they hugged. When they found a quiet place to talk, my dad asked her if she had known the two primary surgeons who'd worked on him. Helen said, "Yes, Jerry. I know them." When they found somewhere to sit nearby, she put her arm around him, and revealed to my dad what she now realized to be true: "Jerry," she said, "I was your surgical nurse."
Helen told my father that she had never been able to forget him or his injury. Three years before this chance encounter, she had written a poem about my dad—it was before she knew his name, before she even knew that he was still alive. The poem addressed the horror of saving someone so torn apart and the hope of someday finding out that his life had been worth living at all.
Helen was too emotional to read it aloud to him so they had some friends of my father's read it aloud to them both. And as they listened, they cried out of happiness at the gift of finding each other. This is the poem. It's called "Eyes."
When my father finished telling me the story, I was stunned. I had always known what had happened to him in Vietnam, but until then, I don't think I ever really understood. My dad told me that until that point he felt like he had lived two different lives. Now, he said, he knows it's been one life, connected by love.
**
As a little girl, I don't remember ever wishing my dad could be normal. I don't remember ever wishing his face looked like other dads. It's just always how I've known it, and I liked it, I was proud of it.
I took up the role of his defender and advocate early in life. When people would stare, I would glare them down so bad. I was proud of how different he was, and I wanted to show him off.
But I remember, when my sister was really young, she just wanted him to have a face that she could understand, that looked like everyone else.
She would touch his face, and ask, Why?
It didn't embarrass her, she just had trouble understanding how someone could get hurt like that. He explained it once to a five-year-old boy in our church. The little boy had come over to my father very solemnly and asked, What happened? My dad explained it so gently, I'll never forget.
"My eye was broken," he said. How? My dad said that he'd been in a war, and he'd been shot. He pointed to the corner of his right eye and the corner of the right side of his mouth. As he explained this, he could tell that the boy was feeling really pretty bad for him so my dad put his hand on the boy's shoulder and said, "Don't be sad. I'm not in pain anymore." The boy looked up at my dad and in a grave voice said, "Yeah. Being shot's a tough thing."
**
In 1968 when my dad joined the marines, he thought he was unstoppable. The two words he remembers thinking were escape and freedom. So he dropped out from life as a philosophy major at Santa Clara University in California where he was in great shape from being an oarsman on the crew team. Between his freshman and sophomore years, he had gone through Officer Candidate School for the Marine Corps. He was big, strong, intelligent, and attractive. Dazzlingly attractive, with an unforgettably handsome smile.
He wanted to join the marines to find his identity. To be a hero. And to prove himself a man to his father and to everyone else. His parents didn't want him to go. And his girlfriend didn't want him to go. Two days before he left, my dad's mom died, a fact which he has always thought was her way of saying, I can't handle this.
And while boot camp had been easy for my dad, and his idealism really prevented him from being scared, when he finally arrived in Vietnam, he was terrified. He was serving a unit where he didn't know anyone, there was absolute anonymity. Watching soldiers die and watching them get wounded was a constant. And the terrible thing was, my dad soon realized, that this enemy they were killing was nothing more than a mirrored image of themselves.
**
I think I was always kind of proud of how unusual my dad was. I would grab his hand and yank him outside to go exploring, to do errands, just to be together. We walked everywhere through San Diego. Despite being 95 percent blind, he had the entire city memorized right down to a jagged decline at the end of a street corner on my paper route where his white cane might betray him, catching the drop too late. San Diego was beautiful when I was young, with a cool warmth that made you always want to be outside. Our neighborhood smelled of honeysuckle and tiny lawns, with strip malls gingerly popping up on the streets selling frozen yogurt and beauty supplies.
When we walked down the streets together, strangers would gawk, and I would stand a little taller, swing my hand a little prouder. But there were many, who had met him maybe just once, who delighted at his presence. Inside the different stores, sometimes managers would approach my dad, lay a hand on his shoulder and say, "Jerry! How you doing?" My dad would grin and recognize the person warmly by voice and touch. Soon they'd be swapping jokes and catching up. He was known around town.
I wanted to make my dad known to everyone. As soon as I was old enough to be studying Vietnam, I tried to get him to come in as a guest speaker. I thought everyone should see him and hear him and know that there are some forms of history that you continue to live with the rest of your life. When I was in the 8th grade, he came into my history class. One of the kids raised his hand. What do you think of Rambo?, he asked. My father using his dramatic flair for pause, stared straight at the kid, and said, "I think it's pure shit."
**
The day that my father was shot, four days after his 21st birthday, his morning began with the usual sweltering heat and panic of battle. Only this morning, he had to listen to his friend Mack slowly die in a foxhole nearby. Mack and his buddy had refused to dig their foxhole as deep as it needed to be, and Mack got shot in the chest. My dad listened to him moan until he stopped moaning. The night before, my dad had listened to him read a note from his sister about how excited she was that he was coming home in a month. Later that day, after Mack was gone, when they ate their breakfast, someone asked: Who wants Mack's C-Rats? And my dad was horrified. The food was holy, he thought. How can you just eat a dead man's food? Then of course he remembered, oh yeah, over here nothing like that matters, you're either killed or injured or waiting to be killed or injured.
Later in the day, my dad went on a sweep to check out an area to make sure it was safe. It was then that he was shot. The two bullets came from a sniper hiding somewhere in the jungle. And my dad crumpled to the ground. The other four marines he was with were shot dead. And my dad held his face in his hands, praying: Please let me die, let me die, let me die.
**
My sister used to keep a black and white picture of my dad from when he was in high school tucked into the corner of her full-length mirror. She would pretend it was an imaginary boyfriend, he was so handsome. As our dad, with his face sewn and clipped and constructed back together through more than 150 surgeries, he was an entirely different person. The bullets had torn away part of his lower face, so that one-third of his tongue had to be removed and all but four of his teeth were gone. Surgeons later sewed up the right socket of his eye, replaced a piece of his skull with a metal plate, and created a new nose from part of his hipbone. For us, we couldn't even imagine what he was like before all this.
As a kid, I would call my dad Nice Lion. He used to have a huge thick beard and fuzzy flowing curls. My sister and I would always give him a hard time when it was crazy and curly. We joked with him a lot, and he would pick us up and twirl us around. He would do almost everything like other dads would do. And more. He was our hero.
One time when my sister was small, she made her way outside, softly into the shallow end of our pool. The minute my dad stopped hearing her, he jumped in, and saved her life. She had been quietly, passively drowning. In my dad's youth, he was a strong, fearless lifeguard. When he would usher during the summers at Sea World, he carried this brazen attitude with him. Talking to a trainer one day, my dad asked: How can I work with Shamu? The trainer said: Just go for it, and my dad did. He hopped on the killer whale and rode around the enormous pool and held on. The trainer took a picture which my dad keeps in his study today as a memory of this moment of glory.
He was always our hero. I would sit on my dad's lap as a very little girl, tapping his knees like a typewriter because I was going to be a writer someday. As I grew older, I would read him what I wrote, and I would take such pride in the fact that when we watched TV or movies or even just took a walk, that he said I described things best of all. Better than mom or my sister or his friends. There's a special art to this: You don't say too much, you give just enough details to help him put the picture together himself.
**
After being shot, my father thought his life was over. He prayed his life was over. But his buddy Al found him and was not willing to let him go. So he yelled at him. "You fucking pansy you are NOT going to die!" At six feet two and 210 pounds, my dad was too heavy to carry to the helicopter waiting nearby so Al, a small, wiry man, screamed at my father to move. "You call yourself a fucking marine? You call yourself a man? I want to see you move!" Al was able to insult my dad up the hill where the chopper was waiting, and in one swift lift-off he was flown away to the USS Sanctuary, a medical ship where the injured were taken. The chief surgeon later reported that he'd never seen a man's face who lived so badly damaged. My dad came to the ship without ID tags and there was no way, no time to ask for his name. The surgical nurse had to force a breathing tube in while he was awake so that he wouldn't swallow what was left of his tongue. They had to take the pieces of his shattered jaw and try to keep some of the muscles together for some semblance of a face.
In the weeks and months that followed, my father lived in a fog, totally oblivious to the world around him. When he was moved to San Diego to be a patient at Navy Hospital, he still thought he was in a dream. One time, in a moment of consciousness, he wrote a message to his nurse, "My mom just died, I hate my dad, and I know my girlfriend doesn't love me. Why am I alive?" With his teeth wired shut and a tracheatomy tube in his throat, he dropped down to 135 pounds in three weeks. People would visit him and not make it, fainting from the shock of what my dad had become. It was two months after being shot, when he really woke up from his haze. He heard a civil defense siren, and he realized, wait a minute, I wouldn't put a civil defense siren in my dream. And that's when he felt a total release into the luxury of knowing that he was never going to be shot at again. He felt free. He felt like no matter how bad this was, he never had to be shot at again.
**
When I was away at college, I got a call from my dad one night. It was 1993. He was calling from Washington and his voice was breathless, his tone was peaceful. He had been visiting the Women's Vietnam Memorial and something amazing had happened.
My dad was approached by a woman who asked if he had ever been a patient on an army head-injury hospital. He said, yes, that he'd been on the USS Sanctuary in June of '68. She said she had a friend who'd been a nurse at that time, and a half an hour later my dad was introduced to Helen Roth. Even without words, they hugged. When they found a quiet place to talk, my dad asked her if she had known the two primary surgeons who'd worked on him. Helen said, "Yes, Jerry. I know them." When they found somewhere to sit nearby, she put her arm around him, and revealed to my dad what she now realized to be true: "Jerry," she said, "I was your surgical nurse."
Helen told my father that she had never been able to forget him or his injury. Three years before this chance encounter, she had written a poem about my dad—it was before she knew his name, before she even knew that he was still alive. The poem addressed the horror of saving someone so torn apart and the hope of someday finding out that his life had been worth living at all.
Helen was too emotional to read it aloud to him so they had some friends of my father's read it aloud to them both. And as they listened, they cried out of happiness at the gift of finding each other. This is the poem. It's called "Eyes."
My eyes are the only part of my face
Which speak to you
In the confusion of our surroundings.
You are watching my eyes for some sign to assure you that perhaps the blood you taste
And swallow until it chokes you
Is not your own.
You seek some assurance that the burning pain of your seared flesh will cease when you awake from what you hope
Is some demented joke
Or diabolical dream.
There is an immediate bond between us.
The lower half of my face is concealed
By a surgical mask.
The lower part of yours torn away by an act of war.
Your attempt to speak is futile, terror strikes your eyes as you begin to strangle
Your hands gesture frantically communicating your fear.
As you reach toward your face my hands catch yours.
Our own eyes lock.
I must decide if the reassurance you seek should be the truth or empty platitudes.
Certainly, it would be easier to say, "Lay quiet, everything will be all right."
But my eyes would attest to the lie and I feel you would live to hate me for it.
The truth is,
I have never seen a man
With the lower half of his face torn
Brutally apart.
There is little remaining to identify you,
Yet here you lie, awake and staring at me.
Wanting an answer to the question:
"Please! How bad is it?"
My insides churn. I'd like to turn and run, bury my head in someone's shoulder, scream, then cry.
Instead, I swallow hard,
Wipe the blood from your eyes
And tell you the truth, pausing momentarily
To say we will try our best.
You reach up and take the mask
From my face.
A smile of encouragement and
Tear-filled eyes greet you.
I am touched by the humanity we share.
In the 13 hours that follow,
We try to reconstruct your face.
Are we playing God?
Later, your head a mass of bandages and drainage tubes,
Your eyes say it all.
"I made it!"
In the hours that follow
As sleep eludes me,
I wonder.
Will you live to curse us
For your life
Or will your courage overcome the obstacles ahead?
Years have passed and I am seeing your eyes again.
I see the hope and courage I saw then and silently pray that this is true
Rather than think
Your life became so unbearable,
Your emotional pain so intense,
You chose an abrupt and brutal end.
I will take my mask off if it will help
Again.
But when I start to cry
I am afraid
I won't be able to stop.
You see
I need to know that your wounds healed,
That you can smile again
And laugh.
Then I, too, will be at peace.
When my father finished telling me the story, I was stunned. I had always known what had happened to him in Vietnam, but until then, I don't think I ever really understood. My dad told me that until that point he felt like he had lived two different lives. Now, he said, he knows it's been one life, connected by love.
posted by mandy at 5/30/2006 02:29:00 AM
