hex_m_hell

As I write this, in 3 weeks it will have been four years since an intoxicated Trump supporter shot me. After my third surgery, my surgeon told me how close the bullet had been to the artery that runs in to my heart.

“Most people shot there just bleed out on the spot. The blood just dumps out like rushing water. There's nothing anyone can do.”

His ability to repair a tattoo was top notch. His human skills were perhaps not quite as adept at times. This seems to be how surgeons are, in my experience, but I still enjoyed chatting with him.

This injury was not unfamiliar to me. In general, my dad didn't really tell stories about Vietnam. So on the rare occasions he did, I listened. He only told this story once, but I paid close attention.

No one expected the Tet Offensive, since Tet is Vietnamese New Year. An offensive in asymmetric warfare isn't always what one would think of as a military action. Though most of the offensive involved soldiers fighting each other, other things happened as well.

American soldiers were having dinner in the mess hall when the bomb went off. Apparently putting a landmine under a stack of plates in a mess hall wasn't an uncommon way to carry out such an attack. Aside from the shrapnel from the mine, the plates shattered and plate fragments became projectiles.

There was a tiny hole in the man's chest. My dad never talked about the blood, just that the hole was tiny and that there was no time. This man died in my dad's arms in minutes. There was no time to operate, no time to act. My dad, who was a medic, was completely powerless in the situation. There was just a tiny hole, the sound of rushing water, and then a dead man in his arms.

I saw my dad cry once, at my grand father's funeral. The war took away pieces of him one by one. He tore a ligament in his knee chasing a fellow soldier who'd just snapped and run off in to the jungle. There were no other medics in his unit, so he stayed until he could be relieved. By that time there was nothing anyone could do for his knee. After decades of pain, he's now in a wheel chair.

Growing up I remember how often he had knee or back pain. This body was permanently scarred by the war. I knew that story. When he told the story about the mess hall, I started to understand the other scars.

Now I have my own.

[Added 2025.04.10]

I couldn't convey the emotion. I still can't. There are simply cold facts. I stare off, after reading this, to some distant place with a gaze that lacks focus. I can feel it. It's the same stare, same cold recounting of facts, I recognize in the memory of my dad telling me about the Tet offensive.

He couldn't have seen this coming. I expected to leave his trauma in the past, not to see it revisited on us for another generation. I look at my daughter, who's six now, playing happily in the water.

There's a strange continuity to history, one that doesn't come through the stories of wars told from the perspective of nobles and presidents.

She asked me once, “papa, when will I get my scars like you?”