When War Becomes Personal: Soldiers' Accounts from the Civil War to Iraq

My Father at War

One Having been taught in school about ancient alchemists who changed base metals into gold, or “mufkuzt,” or were supposed to have, I naturally thought of my father as an alchemist too. Part of his working day, he dealt in white-hot iron in white-hot ladles, but sometimes he also had to deal with brass. The iron, once cold, was dumped outside as “pig iron,” awaiting collection, but whatever he did with brass remained unknown, maybe on its way to transmutation into gold. Filing a piece of brass one day, he got some brass filings on the skin of his legs, and so began a saga of skin trouble in which the outer layer kept peeling and he had to stay at home, fuming, with special wet bandages arrayed around his calves. He itched and squirmed just like, as he said, someone from the trenches with dermatitis hidden within the puttees they wound around their calves. Sometimes, I could tell, he was in a special state, not quite knowing where he was and whence his trouble had come, from the trenches or from brass. Imagine, having been spared trench-rot only to undergo the caress of filed brass. Doctor Crawford, an affable, garrulous Scot, visited him almost daily, and they invariably settled down together for a straight Scotch after the daily dressing with penicillin. I shall never forget my father’s characteristic semi-crouch from those days, when he reached forward almost like a water diviner (minus twig) and groped for some part of his leg that was itching and perhaps paining him as well. Pain he could assimilate, having become a past master at that dreadful tryst, but the itch subdued and vexed him, requiring more and more Scotch, especially when Crawford was present. In fact they were cordial drinking buddies, and our Gaelic doctor was one of my father’s newfound friends. With him, my father became more voluble than with me, his child, or with my mother, and from a distance I attuned myself to the rhythm, the give and take of their exchanges, punctuated by what I : p a u l w e s t My Father at War 6 6 | P A U L W E S T supposed was bawdy laughter (at that stage, I thought most laughter was bawdy). Crawford had been in the army too, but had not seen action, so it was likely that my father was airing for the second time stories of mud and glory that had kept me countless times from my sleep. My father’s leg never healed, although the physical sensations diminished , and I had the impression that Crawford’s visits would go on forever, and my mother sniffing the Scotch-laden air with mild censoriousness . Clearly, the things my father and I did together, pretending or embellishing, would not figure in his recitals for the good doctor; I felt like their jealous protector, unable at that time to do much about preserving them, but already beginning to regard my father as a man of mystery who told different listeners different pieces of his epic, and possibly none of them all of it. Did the pieces hang together, as if in the mind of some sublime, omnivorous overseer? To an extent they did, but I never conferred with Crawford, not about my father anyway, but only enough for him to wash out my ears or diagnose spondylitis in my neck. Some people , I thought, came into the world to baffle others, who tended to think of their fellow-creatures in clichés or archetypes, allowing little scope for chronic idiosyncrasy. We were surrounded by enigmas of weather and chemistry, so why not enigmas that were people, even people you knew well and, knowing them well, credited with predictability? Whether my father had set out to puzzle us, I never knew, but I always assumed he thought of himself as a minefield grafted into a sweet-smelling garden in which place-names and names of battles sat uncouthly beside the names of women or even lost friends, that remained permanently under the surface as the property of a man whose vocation was to keep the most volatile parts of himself under lock and key. Sleep is tyrannical with even the meekest of us, subduing and enslaving until we can stand no more. My father, however, after retiring at eleven, would often be up again by four, downstairs, poring over erudite...