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The following story is excerpted from the book, An Essay On Healing by Vic Bull. It is used with permission from the author. [© 2000 by Victor Bull. All rights reserved.]
Trauma
….LATE SUMMER, 1945…. He was rehabilitating from war wounds caused by a German land mine in Normandy, France. He could walk without crutches or a cane; perform most tasks with his right hand; was adapting to blindness in his right eye for most functions except those requiring depth perception, most notably driving an automobile.
Much of his trauma was unresolved; buried deep inside his mind was the unbearable pain he'd experienced. Twice, after he returned home, he awoke from a brutal nightmare. What awakened him was his mother, Ariola, standing beside his bed. He was sitting erect, his legs in front of him on the surface of the bed. He was gripping with both hands
the leg that had been nearly torn off six inches above the ankle. The leg was fiercely painful and he was screaming. Slowly he gained awareness, that he was sitting on the bed shouting, as Ariola brought him gently awake.
He had no true memory of the scene after the land mine had exploded. Yet his mental images were vivid from witnesses' graphic descriptions, His true memory stopped just before the mine detonated.
He had stood up in the rear of the Army weapons carrier, a large stake body truck, to relieve the jolting discomfort of sitting on a bench above a rear wheel as the truck moved slowly along a path, not really a road, but two ruts in the earth made by passage of prior vehicles transporting supplies to forward units. By standing up he had gained relief from the jolting of the truck and he turned toward his buddy, Joe Fay, still seated on the bench above the other rear wheel opposite the one he, Al, had just vacated. Joe was gripping the edge of his bench, presenting a compacted mass, attempting to speak but failing to formulate words due to the constant jolting of the truck which turned his intended words into garbled sounds. At that instant, just before the land mine exploded, Al's personal memory ended. He could not recall noise or pain, just a lucid
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picture of himself standing above Joe Fay. Al's arms were spread wide to grip light, wooden laths which formed a frame for a canvas covering during inclement weather. He was formulating speech to advise Joe Fay to stand up also.
There, Al's true memory ended and he reconstructed the scene from the descriptions by witnesses. The explosion occurred, a great, shattering noise of a powerful bomb designed to destroy tanks. Joe Fay in his compacted position was disemboweled and died instantly lying face down in his own blood and shit, while he, Alan, was propelled through the top of the truck high into the air, then fell to the ground through the limbs of a huge tree. The leg he gripped in the nightmare had been nearly torn off and the foot dangled by attachments of skin, blood vessels, torn flesh, and ligaments, with leg bones severed and broken ends clearly visible in the leg and in the dangling foot. The pain of that injury, Alan believed, had blocked out his memory of the explosion and subsequent incidents of himself begging to be killed to stop the pain while being administered first aid and morphine which preceded the coma that lasted the next three days and nights in the field hospital.
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In the hospital he had experienced pain negatively: bydenying it. There, for eleven months he endured pain stoically. He underwent seven operations to insert first wires, then pins, then bone grafts to repair shattered bones in his right leg and forearm, and plastic surgery to reduce scar tissue on his temple next to his blind eye. Throughout, he repressed all expressions of pain, verbal or body language. Then when he returned home, and was in his parents' house again, he experienced
The nightmare flashbacks that re-enacted all the pain he had either forgotten, or ignored, or repressed. In the middle of the night during sleep he screamed with unbearable pain his mind had recreated in his leg, which in sleep he clutched and implored someone to shoot him, to end the torment.
He awoke from the seizure with his mother, Ariola, holding him as she had done when he was a child, comforting him as she'd done back then, saying, "There, there, Hon, you'll be all right. I'm here, everything's all right," And gradually he relaxed and without shame regressed to childhood, comforted by Ariola, weeping softly as he
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returned to sleep. The flashbacks left him weak and distracted with realization the land mine incident had not been painless, as his short circuited memory had implied. In fact, it had been so painful, his mind had blocked consciousness and later recall. But it was there, hidden, with potential to recur at any time as a nightmare.
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BAD VIBES
The eye was his worst injury. It was worse than blind: it no longer focused where he directed his vision. Instead, it drifted to the side, When he refocused his good eye, the bad one also moved into focus, but quickly drifted away again. He attempted exercises to rehabilitate the damaged eye, standing in front of a mirror, consciously moving it into balance with the good eye. Each time, it drifted away, out of balance. He felt anger and self-pity over this condition at first, later replaced by self-consciousness, timidity, and aversion to meeting strangers.
That was when the body of J. J., his brother who was six years older, and killed in the Pacific War, had been recovered and buried in the Punch Bowl National Cemetery in Oahu, Hawaii. He remembered not being able to cope with his grief for J. J. He was troubled by fragments of an old memory which had been pleasant. But J. J.'s death, and his own inability to express grief, had distorted the memory into a recurring nightmare…. In the dream, just as in the true memory, he was very small, before he knew speech. He was learning to walk. To maintain balance, he stood with feet spread wide, planted, his body trembling with
the effort to stay erect. Next moment, someone holding his hand, supporting him, moving him forward, gently, gently, step by step, encouraging progress, speaking in a soothing manner. After a number of steps, sustained by the person holding his hand to guide him, he was lifted high into the air, to the shoulders of J. J. But in the dream when he looked closely, J. J. had a death skull face and threw him down and he tumbled, screaming, into black, bottomless space…. And he would awake terrified, heart pounding, mouth dry, furious at J. J., until he reconnected with reality: J. J. was dead. And, he, Alan, was secretly angry at J. J. for being unavailable in his time of greatest need. And it was guilt over his anger that prevented him from grieving.
Comment
Vic Bull found it extremely difficult to write about his wartime experiences in the first person. And so he invented his alter ego, in the guise of Alan Brockton to represent himself. His is a compelling story and his book, An Essay On Healing, tells his story in prose and verse.
Vic, thank you for serving and thank you for allowing us to share your Memories.
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