Read Online Lies My Mother Never Told Me by Kaylie Jones - Free Book Online Page B

distant, hollow tone, that they were not for display. Common foot soldiers never wore their medals, only their Combat Infantryman Badge; it was a matter of pride. He showed us that too. A plain, thin, rectangular blue pin with an embossed rifle, surrounded by a laurel wreath.
    We knew the story of the Bronze Star—not from him but from our mother. A soldier from his company had taken machine gun bullets to the stomach. He lay in plain view of the Japanese pillboxes, screaming, trying to hold in his intestines with his hands.Two medics who’d tried to assist him had already been killed. My father, furious, ran from his position of safety, zigzagging like crazy until he reached the poor soldier and shot him up with the medics’ morphine. For this, he’d been awarded the Bronze Star.
    I found the scene in The Thin Red Line . It is not a private but Sergeant Welsh, our old pal Warden from Eternity in his new, crazier, meaner, drunker incarnation, who runs down to the screaming soldier. When Captain Stein tells Welsh he’s going to recommend him for the Silver Star—a higher medal than the Bronze Star—Welsh replies, “If you say one word to thank me, I will punch you square in the nose. Right now, right here.”
    Neither of the two biographies of my father that came out in the early eighties mention this Bronze Star—nor do any of his papers—though the medal rests in its original box in the James Jones archives at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin. My father wrote a sentence or two about it in WWII , saying it had been given to him randomly and arbitrarily. But when it had been offered, he’d taken it, not like his character Sergeant Welsh, who says Fuck You to the entire world.
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    When he was on Guadalcanal, my father killed a man in hand-to-hand combat. This scene is also in The Thin Red Line . In the novel, the calamity happens to the skinny, terrified Private Beade. It is the only documentation of the event in existence, as far as I know.
    By the time my father’s division, the Twenty-fifth Infantry, showed up on Guadalcanal, the U.S. Marines had already beaten the Japanese back and broken their supply lines. They were starving to death and dying of malaria by the thousands. But they still held on, hiding in bunkers and in the jungle, fighting on, unwilling to retreat, refusing to surrender. The starving Japanese soldier crept out of the jungle in his filthy fatigues and attacked my father while he was squatting to relieve himself. Myfather was forced to kill the soldier by wrenching his bayoneted rifle from his hands and bashing him in the head and chest with the butt. They were both afraid to shoot the gun, which might draw more soldiers—Jap or Yank—lurking in the dense, almost impenetrable jungle.
    My father found the soldier’s wallet in his pocket, a small, slim, red false-leather wallet with a thin black-and-white photograph of a young Japanese woman holding a baby in her arms. I had seen the wallet once, perhaps ten years earlier in Paris, when in a mournful and fragile moment, he’d taken it out of its hiding place and sat at the dining room table, looking at it.
    For the rest of my father’s life, he was haunted by the killing of this Japanese soldier. After he was sent back to the States for surgery on some torn ligaments in his ankle, he told his superior officers he would not fight anymore. They threw him in the stockade. They thought he’d lost his mind.
    So what happens to these soldiers, if they survive, when they go home? That is the subject of Whistle , the last book of James Jones’s trilogy, which I did not read in its entirety until it was published, much later in the fall of my freshman year of college. That book is about the return to the States of his four main characters, wounded during the fighting in the New Georgia campaign.
    While they all recover from their physical wounds, none of them