March 22, 2005

• Combat Fatigue

  (This memoir segment follows the move with my mother from Halstead to Wichita when I was ten years old.)

  I did some Google research on PTSD after this winter’s incident when Doug killed and we butchered a bull moose in our yard.  I already knew a lot about it from my work at Open Door Klinic
  in the 1970s, where some of my clients had been Vietnam vets. 
  Stony, the man I traveled with after I got out of prison, was a VN vet
  with PTSD.  My best friend Mardy married Terry, another
  unpredictably violent emotionally scarred vet. 

  Knowing that there have been great changes made to the language and
  practice of psychology in the past thirty years, I sought a refresher
  course.  I particularly wanted to know if there were new
  developments that had passed me by.  Most of what was new to me in
  what I found, however, related to history.  For example, I learned
  that in the Civil War, PTSD had been known as “soldier’s heart.” 
  I wonder what we called it back when Greyfox and I were in the Roman
  Legions.  I suppose we attributed it to the war god and called it
  something like the madness of Mars.

  At the time of this episode in my life, the mid-1950s, after WWII and
  Korea, authorities were calling it battle fatigue or combat
  fatigue.  The adults around me still called it by its more
  euphonious, alliterative WWI designation, “shell shock.”  I recall
  hushed references to shell shock between my mother and her friends in
  the hard plywood booths of Halstead’s beer joint, when they were
  discussing one or another of the drunks who hung out there.

  When Mama first started going out with Charlie McDonald, I hadn’t a
  clue that he was one of those shell-shocked madmen.  My
  relationship with him went in the opposite direction to that of the
  ones with most of the Lonely Hearts that Mama was seeing around that
  time.  With most of them, I was wary of them and resentful of
  their presence at first.  I didn’t want any more substitute
  daddys.  Having Daddy Jim capture my heart and then disappear had
  been quite enough for me.  But in most cases, if the guys came
  back enough times my reticence thawed and I came to like them.  I
  liked Charlie right from the start.

  His physical appearance might have been a large part of that difference
  for me.  Most of the losers Mama met through the Lonely Hearts
  Club were short, dark, dumpy men with combovers or toupees and scant
  social skills.  Charlie was tall and slender with a full head of
  sandy reddish blond hair and a splatter of freckles on his face and
  forearms.  I suppose he reminded me of my father, but at the time I
  was not consciously thinking about Daddy — deliberately NOT thinking
  about him as much as I possibly could.  Mama and I were engaged in
  an unspoken conspiracy to forget Daddy because when we remembered him
  we would cry.

  Charlie drove a late model green Detroit bomber with a sprung, bouncy
  suspension, probably from his many ventures off-road.  When we
  went places, it wasn’t just to get to the place we were going.  We
  made side-trips, off down dirt tracks that wound along creeks between
  wheat fields.  It’s the way I prefer to travel even now, and I
  don’t necessarily need four-wheel drive to do it.  Greyfox was
  appalled after he gave me Gina, his Fiat X1-9, when I turned her into
  an off-road vehicle.

  Several of our outings that summer when I was between sixth and seventh
  grades were to Lake Afton.   One of them was particularly
  memorable for a bad sunburn described elsewhere.  Another one
  produced a story my mother told on me many times through the rest of
  her life.  Earlier that year at Girl Scout camp I’d learned to
  wrap potatoes in foil and bake them in the coals of a campfire. 
  We had taken spuds and a roll of foil to the lake with us that trip.

  We also took hot dogs.  Mama and Charlie roasted theirs on sticks
  over the fire as usual, but I didn’t want to stand around and try to
  keep mine near enough the flames to get hot, yet far enough not to get
  charred.  I wanted to go wade at the edge of the lake and catch
  minnows or tadpoles.  I wrapped my hot dog in foil, rolling it
  tightly, crimping the ends into a secure little envelope, and buried it
  with the potatoes. 

  I was down at lakeside, Mama was sitting at the picnic table, and
  Charlie was standing at the trunk of his car getting something out,
  when I heard a loud bang like a car backfiring.  Mama
  screamed.  Charlie jumped, cursed, and then hunkered down behind
  the car, looking around nervously.  In the general confusion it
  took a few moments to sort the situation out.  Finally, Mama found
  the foil amid the blown-out ashes and coals of the fire, and Charlie
  picked up the dirty and skinned innards of my hot dog, which had
  exploded right out of its own skin and hit him in the back of his
  head.  They were not about to let me live that one down.

  I don’t know if Mama and Charlie really got married.  I don’t
  think Mama’s annullment from Jim Henry had gone through yet at that
  time.  They took off to Kansas City for a couple of days. 
  Kansas had a waiting period and Missouri didn’t, so many people from
  Wichita got married in Kansas City. When they came back Charlie moved
  into Granny’s house with us and Mama started calling herself Mrs.
  McDonald.  It was a time and place that decent respectable
  unmarried people just didn’t
  live together and it would be about fifteen more years before I ever
  even heard of a married woman not using her husband’s last name. 
  Currently, one of my granddaughters lives in the Wichita area. 
  When she writes to me she uses her own name, but the man she lives with
  prefers to tack his name onto hers.  Go figure.

  Life with Charlie McDonald was a series of picnics for a while. 
  Then sometime after school started that fall, he started
  drinking.  I don’t suppose it was the first time he’d started
  drinking.  It’s probably more accurate to say he fell off the
  wagon.  Then the torment began.  I don’t recall how many
  times it happened.  It must have been at least five occasions but
  probably not many more than that.

  The first was the worst.  I woke as he came banging in the front
  door and turned on the overhead light.  I slept on a daybed at one
  end of the living room.  He left that light on and made his noisy
  way through the house to the bedroom.  He got Mama out of bed and
  ordered her into the living room, sat her down on the couch, got me up
  and told me to sit beside her. 

  
  Then he started telling us war stories.  I have heard a lot worse
  stories than that since then.  Stony and his friends used to sit
  around telling stories about the Tet Offensive.  I read about the
  siege of Dien Bien Phu and about the ancient siege of Masada.  I
  have recalled some pretty gory stories from my own past lives and read
  and heard about recent atrocities in Afghanistan and Iraq.  In my
  opinion there’s no such thing as a good war story.

  That winter, being dragged out of bed to listen to the haunting
  memories of a traumatized veteran, I got my own case of PTSD. 
  Don’t let anyone tell you that psychological illness isn’t
  communicable.  I know from experience that people can (at least I
  can) catch both paranoia and post-traumatic stress disorder from others.

  Mama soon told Charlie he had to move out, but they remained
  friends.  We saw him occasionally, but only in daytime and only
  when he was sober.  Years later, after she moved back to Wichita
  from Texas, Charlie introduced Mama to a friend and drinking buddy of
  his, Carl Cooper, whom she eventually married.

  

  • 3:53 pm
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