Writing rite: death of a soldier

GRIEF’S ANATOMY

optics

T. J.’s physician wrote: “The first bullet entered just above the optic foramen, crashing through, shattering bone, smashing nerve endings and capillaries.”

His hospital buddy on crutches said, “We call him ‘Left-eye Jones.’”

I, his visitor, thought: He was always first to spot something interesting in the dappled foliage. I remember how he used to raise his binoculars, point and shout, “There’s one now! A red-winged blackbird!”

“Where?”

“There, on the towering pines swaying in the wind. It’s flitting from branch to branch like an acrobatic angel.”

T.J. said, “You have to see them to know . . . what those towns are like. All the buildings are the same . . . and they’re the same color as the earth around them . . . and the streets are crooked. You never know . . . what’s around a corner . . . or catty-cornered from you. I saw them first . . . because I was on point.”

olfaction

“Then the bullet, itself broken, and bone fragments tore apart and seared through the olfactory bulb and the nasal septum.”

“He’s gotten stinky. We have to help him change.”

When we camped, he loved to sniff the air and state, “Smell that? That’s wild honeysuckle and mint mixing in the breeze off the lake. What a wonder!”

He liked to cook the rest of us breakfast and brew the coffee whose rousing aroma wafted into the slumbering tents and raised us to waddle forth toward the bacon and eggs sizzling over the grill.

“Or . . . maybe I smelled . . . something different. I’m not . . . sure.”

audition

“One bullet fragment ripped into the tympanic cavity and destroyed the left osseous labyrinth.”

“He’s lop-sided: deaf on one side, blind on the other.”

Sometimes, because his hearing had been so acute, he could lie still in the forest and identify which bird’s call we were hearing: the to-wit-to-woo of a whippoorwill; the caw of a jay, the warble of prairie chicken, or the honk of geese, the wail of a loon, or the sweet melody of a bluebird.

“Then explosions erupted . . . all around us . . . the sound was deafening . . . and I took hits right away.”

dexterity

“A second bullet hit his right wrist, smashed the carpus and severed the pollicis, shearing away flesh, ligaments, nerves and bones.”

“We’d challenge him to arm wrestle, but he can’t grip.”

When we went fly fishing, he had a smooth cast, grasping gently with his fingers on one side of the rod and his thumb on the other like a fulcrum. He’d draw the line back in a curving arc as smooth as a bullwhip artist’s, then flick the wrist forward, so the fly would snap back as if catapulted, and the line would arc over the water and the fly would land soft as a flower petal settling off a breeze.

His flies were struck more often than anyone else’s, so he fed the rest of us.

“I was a mess . . . couldn’t use my weapon . . . couldn’t see . . . couldn’t hear.”

locomotion

“A third bullet struck his left ankle, smashed the talus and tore boot and all away from the tibia and fibula.”

“The stump’s not a problem. It’s a wonder what they can do with prosthetics.”

He was always first up a hill and the steeper the climb the greater distance between him and us when he reached the top. The rest of us would be huffing and puffing, grasping at twigs while his strong stride sped him upward and onward.

“I couldn’t even . . . get up and run. The pain . . . it’s there . . . but it’s not . . . greater than the fear . . . or greater than the not knowing.”

digestion

“A grenade exploded as he fell, so fragments entered both the pelvic and abdominal regions. Fragments puncturing the abdomen disrupted the small intestines.”

“He can’t eat anything he wants anymore. Gotta take it easy on the spices and sweets.”

He loved Mexican food the hotter the better and pizza with all the toppings. His appetite seemed bottomless. We would grouse about how he never gained weight no matter how heartily he ate – a high metabolism and an iron constitution.

“When the corpsmen . . . lifted me onto the stretcher . . . and carried me away . . . I knew I was hurt bad . . . seemed to be leaking . . . everywhere.”

evacuation/procreation

“In the pelvic region, fragments penetrated his bladder and ripped away his scrotum with testicles, which were not recovered.”

“He won’t always have those catheters and bags. They’ll fix him up, so he won’t need ‘em.”

His girlfriend waits back in his hometown. She was the prettiest girl in the town, and we often marveled what their children would look like with her beauty and his athletic grace and confident bearing. The lovebirds would have been married after his stint and started a family. Does she know?

“Listen . . . here’s a letter . . . mail it for me . . . because . . . she’s got a right . . . to a life . . . I can no longer . . . give her.”

psychology

(months later)

“Cause of Death: suicide by overdose.”

“We thought he’d hang in. He didn’t seem like a quitter. Who knew he was squirreling away his pain pills?”

We called him ‘The Optimist’ and ‘Mr. Sunshine.’ More than any of us he had relished each coming day. For him every day had been an opportunity to be the best that he could be. People had been drawn to him because they knew he was success waiting to happen.

His note to me, written with his left hand, read:

“This is the last thing I can do for everyone who’s been so good to me. Live a long, happy life and prosper for my sake.”

End.

This narrative is a hybrid. It's form is poetic because the paragraphs resemble stanzas of alternating voices. But it retains a fictional sequence of conflict and resolution. It was first published in the short story collection Touch Me, 2009. ( Touch Me )

This piece of writing originated from my tutoring students in a laboratory setting. Usually I help students with reading or writing. A Vietnamese nursing student named Mygnoc came to me to help her with her Anatomy and Physiology class. She had fled Vietnam several years before and had learned English, but, as any medical student can tell you, the languages most useful to them are Latin and Greek. Speakers of Romance languages like Spanish and French have an edge over others because the roots, prefixes and suffixes of medical terms are familiar to them. But a person who is literate only in an Asian language has no clues to the immense lexicon that she must master as a nurse in America.

At the time she came to me I had just finished my sixth Buck Jaspers mystery (Possession), which has a character name Mai, who is a Vietnamese American. I had bought a Vietnamese-English dictionary to help me with a few Vietnamese phrases that I used in the book. I found that helping Mygnoc reinforced what I had written, but it also opened my mind to the beauty of the human body. I found a copy of Gray's Anatomy accessible through Bartleby.com and used it to illustrate the bones, muschles and organs that she confronted in her text. I probably spent four or fives hours a week helping her that semester. Slowly but surely, she caught on to the nomenclature.

Meanwhile, my mind had begun synthesizing what I had been learning--yes, one of the pleasures of teaching is that I often learn a lot from helping the student master material that is also new to me. As I had learned how beautiful and marvelous was the structure of the human body, I also felt a sense of tragedy for the mutilation, mangling and destruction that war inflicts on bodies. My mind naturally set my conception in the current wars: Iraq/Afghanistan. The title was a part of my initial inspiration.

Mygnoc passed her class, and when she came to thank me for my help, I thanked her for the inspiration for the story and showed it to her. She seemed to like it.

Sometimes Mygnoc brought exotic fruit as a gift to me; for example, dragon fruit as shown below with a Vietnamese pear. In turn, I sketched her on the computer and adapted a picture of her below. Finally, I wrote her a haiku in English and Vietnamese. This is the poem's debut.