The Wound That Never Heals

Deep in their ordinary lives, when they are free from harm, many men begin to rummage inside themselves to inspect the slime left by war because they want to write about it. It is an awful task. One of the most remarkable of these memoirs, which I have been re-reading, is “Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War” by William Manchester, who was a young Marine almost left for dead on Okinawa’s Sugar Loaf Hill. In his descriptions of war, Manchester makes a passing reference to soldiers scraping the remains of friends off walls of bunkers and to entrenching tools they found in the mouths of dead friends who had been buried in sand by exploding hells.

There is a great deal of horror in “Goodbye, Darkness,” published in 1980, but that one image has stayed with me for years--the small shovel in the dead young mouth filled with sand. In his memoir, Manchester gives us the whole Pacific campaign with a small space devoted to his own wounds and hospitalization: “For me the worst part of the day was the doctors’ prodding and poking for the shrapnel. They gave me a small piece of wood to bite while the long steel instruments probed around. I think I screamed just twice.” He bolted from the hospital and returned to the front, in violation of orders. It was an act of love, Manchester writes; the men on the line were his family, his home.

Now comes Leo Litwak, also a writer and a veteran of the European theater, who has written “The Medic: Life and Death in the Last Days of WWII,” a book that should be given to every schoolboy in the country at the age of 13. Manchester was warned about the Marine Corps by his father, who was grievously wounded in World War I, but he volunteered anyway. Litwak wanted to use a rifle and was happy and eager to go to war.

But to his displeasure, he was assigned to be a medic, a noncombatant. Manchester went back at the age of 56 to the sites of the horrendous Pacific battles to force himself to learn more and to remember, a ghastly trip at best. Neither he, the New England aristocrat, nor Litwak, the son of immigrants, realized how deep was the scarring inside them. Litwak made the voyage back to the war without leaving home. And “The Medic,” which teaches us so much, makes clear that sometimes the monsters in war are not only the enemy but other men in one’s own unit.

In Germany, in a surrendered village flapping with white flags, Litwak’s company was billeted in comfort in German houses. It should have been a restful night, but one of their guards spotted a German uniform, yelled out and started shooting before there could be any answer. A German soldier, perhaps 16, unarmed and now terribly wounded, whispered a few words. Litwak, who knew Yiddish and had a year of college German, put his ear to the boy’s lips. “Why did you shoot?” the boy asked. Litwak could only say he didn’t know why. A hopeless case, the boy was taken to the battalion aid station.

And Litwak thought that was the end of him. But in 1967, on assignment to do a magazine piece, he enrolled in a five-day encounter workshop at the Esalen Institute. Noticing how tightly wound Litwak was, a group instructor asked him to take a “fantasy” trip inside his own body to examine the stress that affected him so clearly. Litwak imagined an enormous statue of himself and created a tiny self to climb inside the statue. Where are you, the instructor asked?

“In my chest.”

“What do you see?”

“It’s empty. There’s nothing here.”

“Where’s your heart?”

“There’s no heart here.”

The instructor asked if he could bring a heart in the body and Litwak writes:

” ... and suddenly there it was, a pulsing heart sheathed in slimy membranes, the heart I’d imagined seeing twenty-three years before in the open chest of a dying German boy, and I broke down, wailing for a kid I thought I had long ago put out of my mind.”

Other memories came back in a torrent. In the war, the young Litwak struggled to stay a decent man, to be apart from the unnecessary butchery. He describes a man in his unit who shoots two German captives when they are peacefully giving themselves up. The pretty rules on the conduct of war are openly violated, and nothing can be done.

He witnesses the murder and tells Lucca, his sergeant, that he doesn’t want to be part of what the other American has done and may seek a transfer.

“Lucca said death was everywhere. Where would I go to avoid it?

“I asked if we were no better than the Germans.

“Lucca was tired of his obligations, tired of the war, tired of his men, tired of me. ‘Let’s just get it over,’ he said.”

When Lucca is hit, he calls out “Help me, Leo,” but Litwak cannot save him.

In time he learns everything and has forgotten none of it. “A shell fragment could act as a bullet, knife, cleaver, bludgeon. It could punch, shear, slice, crush .... The more experienced I was the edgier I became. By the time the war was over, any loud noise would bring me down.”

Bitterness no longer touches either man; they have transcended all that. Manchester writes of how the passion died between him and the Marine Corps and how he grew to believe that half the evil in the world was done in the name of honor. The mass butchery on the Pacific Islands was so ghastly that he came to see through “the Corps’ swagger, the ruthless exploitation of the loyalty ... I now knew that banners and swords, ruffle and flourishes, bugles and drums, the whole rigmarole, eventually ended in squalor.”

Litwak puts it another way, writing: “ ... we had an exact address. We could locate ourselves down to platoon and squad. Now I wanted us to be scattered and never reassembled. No more armies or divisions or regiments or battalions or companies or platoons. No more theaters of war. No veterans groups, no reunions, no visits to old battlefields, no celebration of what we were once compelled to be ....” What an exceptional man he is. *