Autopsy of War: A Personal History

PROLOGUE

The bed of a large truck is overflowing with a jumbled pile of bodies—desperate, terrified marines had heaved the dead and the wounded together in a heap without battle dressings, tourniquets, splints, or first aid of any kind. Corpsmen and other doctors are already sorting through the pile in the bed of the truck, untangling the living from the dead, and lowering them onto litters.

I climb up one side of the truck and lower myself in among the pile of bloody bodies. One marine with a large wound in his neck tries to stand up and take a step toward me. As he grabs my shirt, he steps on a dead man with no head and falls backward, pulling me onto the pile of flesh. From beneath us, I hear screams of agony. To right myself, I place my arm behind me. My hand enters a gaping, feces-filled tear through a marine’s rectum and pelvis. The marine next to him vomits blood and begins to gag. I try desperately to turn him over so he can breathe, but he is pinned to the pile by a leg—not his own—that prevents me from flipping him over.

I reach down and tug at the leg. It suddenly flops free, and I almost tumble again. All I have in my hands is the leg—there is no body attached.

The vomiting marine stops moving and is no longer breathing. I start to resuscitate him and then see brains matted in his black hair. I let him go. My hands are slippery with blood, and I have his brains under my fingernails …

*   *   *

Decades later, I am in Washington, D.C., sitting at a large, heavy polished mahogany table ringed with large leather chairs in a lavish conference room. I am attending a meeting of the Defense Science Board, a committee that advises the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) on scientific and technical matters. Today the group includes about twenty people—retired generals, experienced, high-level DoD advisers, CEOs and board members representing various defense and weapons industries. The room is rimmed with aides, chiefs of staff, and eager, well-groomed male and female military officers in dress uniforms.

I am a new member of a group that already seems to know each other well, yet no one introduces me or makes note of my presence. For the past several months I have been receiving briefing reports and packets of classified background information to prepare me for the meeting. I had been interviewed by the FBI and had undergone a thorough background check. Even my high school classmates had been interrogated. The only medical professional in the room, I was invited to join the meeting because of my work with the Department of Defense in developing new ways to treat casualties.

With no formal introductions, the members start to speak, and soon the discussion centers on how best to defeat or coerce the enemy while causing the least collateral damage. The generals, consultants, and former defense industry executives discuss the relative merits of stealth weapons, unmanned aircraft, snipers, Special Forces, image-guided bombs, and other kinds of high-tech hardware and strategy. At one point, the conversation veers off onto a discussion of tactics, the selection of military targets, the most efficient ways to destroy specific structures, and how best to target select populations and individuals.

On a large screen we watch video clips that demonstrate the high-precision weaponry used in Iraq and Afghanistan. A truck slowly rumbling down a dirt road passes through superimposed crosshairs and explodes in a cloud of smoke—a precise hit from a jet fighter. A cluster of men in loose pants and flowing robes evaporates when struck with a small bomb launched from a drone. Some in the group laugh out loud and cheer as if they are witnessing a sporting event.

Foreign civilian casualties are weighed against American civilian intolerance of their own dead and wounded soldiers. Tables and charts of costs, hearts and minds, kill zones, quantification of civilian casualties, ratios of dead women and children to total dead civilians, soldier morbidity and mortality, combat casualty care, and medical evacuation time are used to compare the present wars with the American War in Vietnam and other U.S. military actions. The conversation goes on and on and on.

I think about what I know of war, what I have learned after witnessing its human cost for a year and examining its carcass for nearly forty years. During a lull in the discussion, I speak softly to the defense contractor sitting next to me. Try diplomacy, I say. Try peace.

Several men nearby overhear me. They look my way and scowl. No one asks my opinion after that, and I keep silent. Forgetting where I am, I drift …

*   *   *

The door flies open, and two soldiers rush in carrying a Vietnamese woman with both legs missing at midthigh. She is naked, and her stringy, jellied stumps are no longer bleeding. No need to stop here, I say. She’s dead.

What do we do with her, sir? asks one of the marine stretcher-bearers. Take her to Graves? Throw her away?

Before I can answer, other soldiers carry a Vietnamese woman with a missing right hand and several flank and thigh wounds past me. With her good arm she holds a baby to her breast. Both are covered with dirt and blood. As the mother loses consciousness, the baby slides away from her grasp and begins to cry. It falls to the floor and then becomes still and quiet.

A steady stream of women and children blown apart and badly burned flows through the door as the conference room becomes a makeshift hospital emergency room. A dead baby, charred black, is still warm to the touch. A six-year-old girl with a missing leg refuses to let go of her unharmed but bewildered two-year-old brother. Mourning mothers cling to dead children, and terrified children cling to dead mothers. Women of all ages wail, and babies and children scream. The conference room is further transformed to a forward triage center. The smell of burned flesh causes my eyes to water, and I start to gag. I know these sounds and smells are penetrating my brain, there to stay, and I fear they will rear up when I least want them.

I cannot keep up. I have no control over the flow of casualties. As I try to push a growing mound of bowel back into a small boy’s abdomen, I become aware that another doctor has joined me and is inserting a tube through the boy’s thin chest wall. The semiconscious boy moans loudly. The doctor explains to me that more than twenty Vietnamese have been wounded by friendly fire. In the ville, another dozen still lie dead where they fell.

Today is February 14, he says bitterly We could call this our St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. I work on in silence, frantically and frenetically at first, but then I begin to pace myself with unemotional efficiency. Ignoring the surrounding flesh and suffering, blame and shame, I focus on one life, one limb, one wound at a time …

*   *   *

Slowly the carnage retreats. Once again I begin to absorb the calm male voices around me talking about the ways to wage war. Eventually the discussion shifts to the growing number of suicides among veterans and soldiers on active duty. Accidents and suicides cause almost half of all fatalities in DoD. Recently, suicides outnumber combat deaths. Historically, the age-adjusted suicide rate has been significantly lower in the military than among the civilian population, but beginning in 2004 that pattern changed, and in 2008 the suicide rate in the army exceeded the rate in the civilian population.

No longer am I rendered speechless in this room lined with generals and defense industry executives. I open my mouth and put forth ideas about using social media to reach out to veterans and active-duty soldiers with stress-related psychological wounds and make suggestions about how to treat them. Maybe, I say, we could get more of them back to duty. Heads around the table nod in agreement.

Although never invited to another meeting, I am on the team.

BOOK ONE

THE GOOD BOY

CHAPTER 1

My first memory of my father is seeing him in a white dress military uniform, standing at the pulpit in his church, parishioners fanned out before him and looking up in adoration, as he spoke of sin, Jesus, and love. I was four, perhaps five years old.

War frames my earliest memories, and war was a major force that lifted my extended family from the poverty and ignorance of the Deep South in the years surrounding the Great Depression. By the time I began school all the men in my extended family had gone to war. I would follow them. Service in the military was the single event we all shared that determined the future course of our lives.

My mother’s father was an itinerant farmer in Tennessee, and although he never served, during World War I he left the farm to work at a munitions plant in Spring Hill, just south of Nashville. There he learned a trade, becoming a brick mason, and earned a steady wage for the first time in his life. Soon after the war ended, so did his job. In 1923, during the Florida building boom, he hitchhiked to West Palm Beach to look for work. A year later, he sent for his wife and four children: the identical twins, Jack and Earl, age ten; Claude, age six; and my mother, Lucile, who was still an infant.

They took the train to Florida and arrived with no possessions except the clothes they wore and moved in with my grandfather in one room of a boardinghouse. The three boys slept in the attic, and my mother slept with her parents. My mother’s strong-willed mother, my grandmother Mama Blair, worked as laundress, secretary, bookkeeper, or housekeeper, raised four children, and saw that they went to church. Staying just ahead of bill collectors, the family moved a dozen times over the next five or six years. The day after they fled one apartment to avoid overdue rent payments, the building was destroyed by the 1928 hurricane. My mother’s father did not often have steady work. When he did, he usually left most of his paycheck in a bar.

The twins never enrolled in school in Florida. Instead, they worked various odd jobs to help the family. Handsome, charismatic, and athletic, they became motorcycle policemen in the winter and in the summer played semipro baseball. In 1942, when the twins were in their late twenties, both boys and their younger brother, Claude, were drafted. Soon afterward my grandfather got drunk and left home for good.

Claude was the good boy. He joined the Boy Scouts, helped rescue victims of the 1928 hurricane, got involved in the church, and stayed in school. He graduated from high school as president of the student body and valedictorian and lettered in four sports despite working twenty hours a week with AT&T, first as a lineman and then in an office job. Even though he had no military experience, AT&T arranged for him to be an officer in the Army Signal Corps. He thrived in the military, eventually becoming an intelligence officer. In between military stints he returned to AT&T and simultaneously earned a law degree. Recalled to the service during the Korean War, he left active duty in 1953 as a major and rejoined AT&T. In rapid sequence he became vice president in charge of the Telstar Satellite Program, then president of Ohio Bell, president of Pacific Northwest Bell, and finally president and chairman of the National City Bank Corporation. He died at age ninety-seven. The headline of his obituary in the Palm Beach Daily News referred to him as bank chairman and veteran.

The twins, Jack and Earl, received formal training as military policemen and, although both had stateside assignments, were separated for the first time in their lives. After the war, they returned to the Palm Beach police force and reunited, their reputations enhanced and burnished by their service for their country. They always worked together and provided security for the growing number of extremely wealthy and powerful residents with winter homes in Palm Beach, families like the Woolworths, Rockefellers, Astors, and Kennedys. The Blair twins were very close to the Kennedys, especially Joe Sr. and, before he was killed in World War II, Joe Jr. On more than one occasion they acted as watch-out or helped provide cover for a Kennedy when he cavorted with a married woman.

To show real class, one could display the twins as security for very small dinner parties, and the rich and famous often planned social events around the availability of the Blair brothers. Standing next to their shiny giant motorcycles on either side of a mansion’s front entrance, they were treated more like guests than workers. Increasingly, however, they acted as private detectives and personal secret agents, cultivating contacts to arrange anything legal or illegal for a growing list of clients.

Eventually they bought a large hotel and started a rental car business as a legitimate front for one of Palm Beach’s largest gambling and prostitution rings. For decades the twins were powerful enough to keep major rental car companies and organized crime out of Palm Beach. A small band of men without last names was always around when needed, and Mama Blair was hired as a bookkeeper for a gas station they operated on the rental car lot. Executives from all over the United States and Europe could place discreet phone calls to one of the twins and by the time they arrived at the West Palm Beach airport whatever they wanted would be waiting: a car, a driver, women, hotel rooms, drugs, other entertainment, and gambling options. When clients were returned to the airport, their bill would be scrubbed to simulate a business trip, or there would be no paperwork at all showing that the client had ever been in Palm Beach.

My father, James Parrish, grew up in the poverty, ignorance, and bigotry of the Deep South in Sylvester, Georgia. His mother bled to death when she delivered her third child. As was the custom in his clan, his father, also named James, an alcoholic who occasionally worked as a fireman, actor, salesman, or barber, married the sister of his deceased wife. As the oldest (age five) child, my father assumed responsibility for the care and feeding of his family and tried to protect his two younger siblings from their genuinely evil stepmother. Doing odd jobs and stealing, my father provided the only steady source of food. He worshipped his father, who was most generous, attentive, and loving when he was sober and working and was dramatic, entertaining, and demonstrably affectionate when he was drinking. His frequent binges lasted days or weeks.

Crawling under porches and going through trash to find cigarette butts, my father began smoking at age six. He also joined his father, and further bonded with him, in binge drinking by the time he was ten years old. Because Prohibition started when my father was six years old, the liquor he made or stole was not only illegal but sometimes downright poisonous. During binges he would sometimes be deathly ill.

He went to school just enough to keep the truant officers at bay but forced his siblings to attend regularly and do their schoolwork. He swept streets or cleaned buildings before school, stocked groceries after school, and worked in a drugstore in the evenings. Although he was tough and easily provoked, his strong work ethic endeared him to his growing list of employers.

His father died when he was thirteen, and he became the official head of the household.

After school one day, to defend his brother from harassment, my father took on the school bully, who was two or three years his senior and considerably bigger. He beat him so severely that classmates pulled him away. For money or any reason, he could fight anyone anytime and most often won by sheer will. At 130 pounds, five feet nine inches, he was the starting offensive center and defensive nose guard on the high school football team. His teammates called him pissant. After his siblings’ needs were met, my father spent his time drinking, smoking, moving with a tough gang, and chasing girls. Secretly he was sleeping with at least one older married woman.

The summer after he finally graduated from high school, he had his first serious depression and suicidal thoughts. He was awarded a football scholarship to a small college but was too drunk to matriculate.

To get closer to one particular girl, he attended a Southern Baptist church and was soon adopted by a deacon who took particular interest and, by overpaying him for odd jobs, provided enough money for my father’s siblings and stepmother. My father had long talks with this man, began to attend church regularly, and became close to the fire-and-brimstone preacher. After a powerful conversion experience, my father was saved from sin by the grace of Jesus Christ and committed his life to God’s will. He stopped drinking completely, stopped volunteering for fistfights, and left his gang to be in the church community. His church mentors and hard work made it possible for my father to become the first of his generation to go to college, attending Stetson University, a Baptist school in DeLand, Florida. He was elected president of the student body, not because of his athletic prowess or classroom performance but because he was an effective orator, giving speeches at school events, civic organizations, churches, and anywhere else he was invited. He met and fell in love with my mother, a gentle, quiet, attractive classmate who had a part-time job playing saxophone in a local dance band. She gave up her music because my father associated it with sin—dancing and alcohol.

They married, and after graduation he earned a doctor of divinity degree at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, studying and practicing oratory by preaching at local churches. My older brother, James, was born while my father was in college; I was born during his years in the seminary; and my sister, Mary Blair, was born while he was the minister of a small church in Florida. He claimed to be in ecstasy when he was preaching. He was loved by his flock, who provided housing, a small salary, and a black maid to do housework and child care. The local car dealer gave him a car, and all the storekeepers gave him special deals on groceries, clothing, appliances, haircuts, and baseball tickets.

An American dream was launched. Every two or three years my father was called by bigger churches and Jesus to move us to different cities in the Deep South. He began to travel all over the South to conduct revivals—a week of daily evening services designed for the already saved to celebrate with singing, testimonials, and a powerful, emotional fire-and-brimstone sermon designed to bring new converts into the church. My father was apparently very good at creating the emotion and energy required to bring people to accept Jesus as their personal savior. When Jesus concurred, in 1940 my father accepted the invitation to become pastor at a small church in Plant City, Florida.

He proudly never helped with household chores or family care—we were there to care for him and serve as decoration, brought out for show and tell before my father’s friends and acquaintances from church, but otherwise left alone. If I happened to be around, to demonstrate what a great parent he was he would pull me close to him and pinch my cheek and say, This is my little Bubba, this is my little John Albert. Prefaced by Gimme some sugar, my father was always kissing the preschool children of his congregation, signs of affection that were withheld from the rest of us.

Except for my older brother, James W. Parrish Jr., the firstborn child, called Little Jimmie. Even when it seemed inappropriate, my father took Little Jimmie with him to civic meetings and adult gatherings, publicly smothered him with kisses, and wore him as a badge of family and fatherly love.

In 1942, when I was three years old, with great drama and patriotic virtue, my father announced to his congregation that when a certain number of church members joined the war effort, he, too, would go. He did. My mother was stunned. My father had never discussed this with her, but in our household, all decisions were his alone to make.

After attending chaplain school at William and Mary in Virginia, my father became a navy officer on active duty from early 1942 until V-J Day in 1945. As chaplain, he served aboard the USS Hampton troop transport ship, was temporarily assigned to the Seabees in Iwo Jima, and was stationed at bases in Hawaii and the Great Lakes Naval Base. He was once assigned as the chaplain to a black military unit stationed at Norfolk, Virginia, and founded a black Southern Baptist church in the community. His love of preaching was stronger than his strong