Chowdahead
"It took years for me to understand that the most complex and dangerous conflicts, the most harrowing operations, and the most deadly wars, occur in the head." - Jarhead
My granddad, my father's father, was the complete opposite of the ex-military stereotype. He was never particularly muscular or intimidating at any stage of life, and as he got older he developed an uncanny resemblance to Barney Fife. He was a lifer in the Air Force, though, and he saw action in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, although the latter mainly involved overseeing supply shipments from Luke Air Force Base outside Phoenix.
When he retired he bought a little house in Tempe. My family would come visit him every six months or so until he died during my sophomore year of high school. The house was what you might expect out of a widowed, retired officer - all shag carpet and wood paneling, and the ceiling had picked up a healthy yellow color from about twenty years' worth of Marlboro Lights. Whenever we stayed with him, I slept on the fold-out sofa bed back in his office. The office was in the back corner of the house, and it had all kinds of Red Sox paraphernalia and scale models of fighter jets. Above his desk there was a big black-and-white picture of Ted Williams, and beneath that there was a small frame that held his Distinguished Flying Cross.
The Distinguished Flying Cross is the highest honor you can get in the Air Force, short of the Congressional Medal of Honor. You can only get the Cross for "voluntary action above and beyond the call of duty that results in an accomplishment so exceptional and outstanding as to clearly set the individual apart from his comrades or from other persons in similar circumstances." I knew what it meant, but I also knew - per my dad's advice - that he would never tell anyone about it and that asking him about it would result in a rapid change of the subject. Years after he died, my dad told me how he got it. Apparently he had only told my dad and his siblings about it once - by writing down what happened and letting them read it. He refused to talk about what happened.
In late 1950 Col. Daniel F. McCarthy flew his F-51 Mustang over a mountainous region just inland from Incheon as part of a scout mission. While returning to base, he came across a North Korean supply convoy traveling through the hills. The convoy was being escorted by MiG fighters in Chinese colors.
In short, my granddad shot down the MiGs with his own far inferior aircraft and then turned his attention to the convoy. Whoever was running the show on the ground immediately realized that their operation was about to get tooled, so the order was passed down the line to turn off all visible lights and proceed in complete darkness. It was at that point that my granddad, looking for a target that was completely invisible by 1950s radar standards, somehow timed the release of a bomb perfectly.
When an airborne missile hits a truck, three things happen: impact, detonation, and the explosion.
Impact is exactly what it sounds like. Just after the bomb arrives, though, there’s an enormous increase in air pressure as the initial blast takes place. People and vehicles within 150 or so feet of the impact are torn apart instantly by the wave of overpressure released. Cars and armored vehicles just get ripped apart into shreds of metal, but with humans it’s a little more complicated.
The lungs are compressed violently in on themselves, with such force that the entire network of arteries and veins connecting them to the heart is sheared off. Then, in the millisecond after the first pressure wave passes, the lungs suddenly re-expand with enough force to burst right out of the chest cavity, and the huge volume of blood that was being pumped to them at the moment of impact goes with them. This sudden evacuation causes the torso to explode like a hot dog in a microwave.
Up in the skull, the nasal and sinus cavities go through the same process. The cribiform plate, at the back of the head, ruptures and fires upward into the base of the brain with the force of a shotgun blast. Pop.
Of course, this whole step is immediately overwhelmed by the explosion, which occurs a millisecond after the wave of overpressure passes. Before the victim's internal organs are even done escaping the body, the bomb's payload ignites and scatters anything that could even be mistaken for a hostile target across the surrounding countryside. This leaves nothing. Not a smoldering shell of a vehicle, not body parts lying around - nothing. There is a better chance of finding identifiably human remains a hundred yards from the point of impact than there is in the resultant crater.
When a truck blows up in a movie, there's usually a giant explosion, a 50-foot column of fire, and then a lingering plume of smoke that the camera fixates on, as if it were some sobering monument to the deserving villains or expendable good guys inside. In real life, the entire process of the bomb's arrival, its detonation, and the denouement are over in less than half a second.
My granddad was awarded the Cross for taking out the supply convoy, which was apparently one of the last lifelines for North Korean forces between Incheon and Seoul. Its elimination served the dual purpose of clearing a path for American ground troops and sent the message to the Koreans that sending ground transports blundering around unprotected, even in the middle of the night, was pretty dumb.
***
When I was seventeen I thought seriously about joining the military. I had decided early on that to be a man there were only two acceptable career paths: make as much money as possible, or dodge bullets and blow up ragheads. I'm actually surprised that more middle-class kids don't sign up sometimes. Maybe recruiters just think it's a lost cause to go after guys who could just as easily spend the next four years at Swarthmore instead of Camp Pendleton or Okinawa. I knew there had to be more guys like me - teenage suburban kids disgusted with the abyss between the trivial shit that other people praised them for and the real currency of manhood.
If I hadn't been born with a lung capacity that I found would classify me as 4-F, I would have gladly shipped out. In all honesty, though, I'm not sure I could cut it. For all the complaining about an army built from the ranks of the poor, I would sure as hell want a strike team of West Texas linebackers defending my country over a group of bickering Ivy League students. The singleness of purpose that comes from having nothing left to lose will make you braver than you ever thought you could be.
More than anything else, I'd always wanted that purpose. I hated being a worthless student. I hated not feeling like I had earned anything. I was desperate to believe that somehow, some way, I could escape the quarantined environment of private school where success is all but mailed directly to your house. I fucking hate the army of Christophers and Matthews that clogs America's business schools, the guys who can look back on life at age 70 and point to their backpacking trip in Tuscany that made them realize What Life Is All About.
At the same time, though, I know joining the Marines would have been a terrible decision. The military isn't really the place to go if you're looking to support your high-minded ideas about manhood, although they do stick to one tenet that I have always admired: you are not what you have, you are not your family name, and you are most definitely not what other people think of you. The poverty of meaning that you get from a college degree or working at Initech or a CLK convertible is the same poverty of meaning that comes from defining yourself by association with the Corps or the Air Force.
As I write this, the trailer for the movie Jarhead is running on TV. Along with Fight Club, that book taught me that searching for significance in anything outside yourself is foolish and hollow. The danger of defining yourself completely by anything, whether it's a high-minded elite university (cough) or the U.S. Marines, is that it can only delay you finding out who you really are. As of right now, I have zero credibility, and I like it that way.
The thought that my granddad did what he did with a wife and a baby daughter back home made me respect what he did even more. What makes me respect what he did the most, though, is that he never felt the need to define himself by what he did in Korea because he never chose to. To him it was never a symbol of freedom standing against the Communist menace - it was just an explosion. He could have just as easily been Joe Lightspeed and spent the last twenty years of his life attending every formal function in full military dress and regaling my cousins and I with stories of how he became Mr. American Hero, but instead he decided he'd rather be who he was - a guy who liked to watch the Red Sox and take black-and-white photographs of Cape Cod.
My granddad, my father's father, was the complete opposite of the ex-military stereotype. He was never particularly muscular or intimidating at any stage of life, and as he got older he developed an uncanny resemblance to Barney Fife. He was a lifer in the Air Force, though, and he saw action in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, although the latter mainly involved overseeing supply shipments from Luke Air Force Base outside Phoenix.
When he retired he bought a little house in Tempe. My family would come visit him every six months or so until he died during my sophomore year of high school. The house was what you might expect out of a widowed, retired officer - all shag carpet and wood paneling, and the ceiling had picked up a healthy yellow color from about twenty years' worth of Marlboro Lights. Whenever we stayed with him, I slept on the fold-out sofa bed back in his office. The office was in the back corner of the house, and it had all kinds of Red Sox paraphernalia and scale models of fighter jets. Above his desk there was a big black-and-white picture of Ted Williams, and beneath that there was a small frame that held his Distinguished Flying Cross.
The Distinguished Flying Cross is the highest honor you can get in the Air Force, short of the Congressional Medal of Honor. You can only get the Cross for "voluntary action above and beyond the call of duty that results in an accomplishment so exceptional and outstanding as to clearly set the individual apart from his comrades or from other persons in similar circumstances." I knew what it meant, but I also knew - per my dad's advice - that he would never tell anyone about it and that asking him about it would result in a rapid change of the subject. Years after he died, my dad told me how he got it. Apparently he had only told my dad and his siblings about it once - by writing down what happened and letting them read it. He refused to talk about what happened.
In late 1950 Col. Daniel F. McCarthy flew his F-51 Mustang over a mountainous region just inland from Incheon as part of a scout mission. While returning to base, he came across a North Korean supply convoy traveling through the hills. The convoy was being escorted by MiG fighters in Chinese colors.
In short, my granddad shot down the MiGs with his own far inferior aircraft and then turned his attention to the convoy. Whoever was running the show on the ground immediately realized that their operation was about to get tooled, so the order was passed down the line to turn off all visible lights and proceed in complete darkness. It was at that point that my granddad, looking for a target that was completely invisible by 1950s radar standards, somehow timed the release of a bomb perfectly.
When an airborne missile hits a truck, three things happen: impact, detonation, and the explosion.
Impact is exactly what it sounds like. Just after the bomb arrives, though, there’s an enormous increase in air pressure as the initial blast takes place. People and vehicles within 150 or so feet of the impact are torn apart instantly by the wave of overpressure released. Cars and armored vehicles just get ripped apart into shreds of metal, but with humans it’s a little more complicated.
The lungs are compressed violently in on themselves, with such force that the entire network of arteries and veins connecting them to the heart is sheared off. Then, in the millisecond after the first pressure wave passes, the lungs suddenly re-expand with enough force to burst right out of the chest cavity, and the huge volume of blood that was being pumped to them at the moment of impact goes with them. This sudden evacuation causes the torso to explode like a hot dog in a microwave.
Up in the skull, the nasal and sinus cavities go through the same process. The cribiform plate, at the back of the head, ruptures and fires upward into the base of the brain with the force of a shotgun blast. Pop.
Of course, this whole step is immediately overwhelmed by the explosion, which occurs a millisecond after the wave of overpressure passes. Before the victim's internal organs are even done escaping the body, the bomb's payload ignites and scatters anything that could even be mistaken for a hostile target across the surrounding countryside. This leaves nothing. Not a smoldering shell of a vehicle, not body parts lying around - nothing. There is a better chance of finding identifiably human remains a hundred yards from the point of impact than there is in the resultant crater.
When a truck blows up in a movie, there's usually a giant explosion, a 50-foot column of fire, and then a lingering plume of smoke that the camera fixates on, as if it were some sobering monument to the deserving villains or expendable good guys inside. In real life, the entire process of the bomb's arrival, its detonation, and the denouement are over in less than half a second.
My granddad was awarded the Cross for taking out the supply convoy, which was apparently one of the last lifelines for North Korean forces between Incheon and Seoul. Its elimination served the dual purpose of clearing a path for American ground troops and sent the message to the Koreans that sending ground transports blundering around unprotected, even in the middle of the night, was pretty dumb.
***
When I was seventeen I thought seriously about joining the military. I had decided early on that to be a man there were only two acceptable career paths: make as much money as possible, or dodge bullets and blow up ragheads. I'm actually surprised that more middle-class kids don't sign up sometimes. Maybe recruiters just think it's a lost cause to go after guys who could just as easily spend the next four years at Swarthmore instead of Camp Pendleton or Okinawa. I knew there had to be more guys like me - teenage suburban kids disgusted with the abyss between the trivial shit that other people praised them for and the real currency of manhood.
If I hadn't been born with a lung capacity that I found would classify me as 4-F, I would have gladly shipped out. In all honesty, though, I'm not sure I could cut it. For all the complaining about an army built from the ranks of the poor, I would sure as hell want a strike team of West Texas linebackers defending my country over a group of bickering Ivy League students. The singleness of purpose that comes from having nothing left to lose will make you braver than you ever thought you could be.
More than anything else, I'd always wanted that purpose. I hated being a worthless student. I hated not feeling like I had earned anything. I was desperate to believe that somehow, some way, I could escape the quarantined environment of private school where success is all but mailed directly to your house. I fucking hate the army of Christophers and Matthews that clogs America's business schools, the guys who can look back on life at age 70 and point to their backpacking trip in Tuscany that made them realize What Life Is All About.
At the same time, though, I know joining the Marines would have been a terrible decision. The military isn't really the place to go if you're looking to support your high-minded ideas about manhood, although they do stick to one tenet that I have always admired: you are not what you have, you are not your family name, and you are most definitely not what other people think of you. The poverty of meaning that you get from a college degree or working at Initech or a CLK convertible is the same poverty of meaning that comes from defining yourself by association with the Corps or the Air Force.
As I write this, the trailer for the movie Jarhead is running on TV. Along with Fight Club, that book taught me that searching for significance in anything outside yourself is foolish and hollow. The danger of defining yourself completely by anything, whether it's a high-minded elite university (cough) or the U.S. Marines, is that it can only delay you finding out who you really are. As of right now, I have zero credibility, and I like it that way.
The thought that my granddad did what he did with a wife and a baby daughter back home made me respect what he did even more. What makes me respect what he did the most, though, is that he never felt the need to define himself by what he did in Korea because he never chose to. To him it was never a symbol of freedom standing against the Communist menace - it was just an explosion. He could have just as easily been Joe Lightspeed and spent the last twenty years of his life attending every formal function in full military dress and regaling my cousins and I with stories of how he became Mr. American Hero, but instead he decided he'd rather be who he was - a guy who liked to watch the Red Sox and take black-and-white photographs of Cape Cod.
posted by Dan at 8:24 PM
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