I'm two months after the death of my Veteran mother.
Someone sent me an odd cryptic message today about the stages of "Sarah's" grief. I re-read my blog a few days after she died-one they attached. I'm so glad I wrote this reflective blog-no matter what it has been thousands of hours, heart, intelligence, feeling. A dedicated effort and for all its flaws an example of who I am.
In it I have reflected for 7 or more years, on teaching and living, art, motherhood and tried to openly deal with life.
My school district has done a good job in shaming me over the effort, an excellent job, but I really have not failed to write to the difficulties, the successes, projects. Nor have I simply capitulated. But I am a person, I have parents, losses, wins, things change-I write that. The blog collects that. It is a good way to learn about yourself and today I experienced that.
How you evolve over time-it is a process of the evolution of your journey in this life. Or failure to evolve.
Two months after the death of my Mom I find myself re-carpeting the house.
I worked myself hard the last week or so boxing our life, cleaning, now unboxing. Twelve huge bookcases alone was a monster effort-despite promising to throw out half the books I discover we own incredible books. There is nothing lousy by and large to eliminate. Ten years wears out a carpet. Mom's coffee took a toll on it really. There were trails everywhere, as she shook fiercely after her strokes. She also loved coffee. She denied being a cause of this in the most vicious way-and that reminds me of one of the most strong things about her-she was not holding onto too much blame. All the time she and coffee were inseparable. It is lovely to see new carpet.
But truthfully without my Mom here-it just remains carpet. New, definitely cleaner, but I feel just as odd as I have for the last two months. As if this broken heart left some part of me here- but took the true me somewhere else. Is that a stage in grief?
It is Veteran's Day and I'm thinking of my mother.
On this day every year we'd talk about her brother Marshall Lucas. He died in Korea in that war. We'd talk about the service of her brother Charles, we'd talk about her service, and my father's, and then many others we knew. I'm going to attach a post called "Raw" I wrote at least three years past.
It is something I want here for my Aunt Merilee to read.
Her son carries his name-and sometimes I forget that Marshall lives on in my lovely cousin's life.
That's so important.
Here's to our vets.
May those that survive, prosper. May those lost to time, may they be as honored as my Uncle was in having another generation carry their name forward -and their memory live on in them.
RAW
I'm going to take a little risk here.
My son Luca has been struggling in high school.
Nothing of the structure works well for him, but he certainly doesn't hate it. He's actually fond of it. His teachers don't complain of defiance or his attitude other than to find him unmotivated, not at all defiant, he just fell behind in a way a long time back. State scores are really great though. They can reap that, it gets him in "honors." He went to school at 4, not 5 and it's been the legacy of the late bloomer with a late birthday. His musical skills and his heart in sports all in this uber thin small guy is just really incredible. But high school isn't what he needs, yet.
At least not the way this is.
What he has been doing however I wish I could tell a teacher about.
I wish he had one that cared to hear it from a "me." Free of a lecture to either of us on "responsibility." I know it, that talk, I teach too.
One teacher referred me to an on line grade check rather than this kind of a dialog.
But I'd like to tell them my blocked intestine and the cancer might be on his mind, up coming operation, the vomiting, a bit like a shadow.
Maybe.
I'd really like them to help him with something else. Something impossible. Something too much for me to know how to deal with at all.
My son is very bonded to my mother who, because I was so ill really helped raise him. Or stepped in with comfort. Butter boy has been the apple of her eye since the day he plopped into her arms. And for a school project Luca interviewed my mom all about the second world war and her remembrances. She also was his "hero" in a project not evidentially so well graded this year. In that piece my son again went to her and she shared something very timely, the story of the death death of her younger brother to war in Korea. Something very rare for her to speak about. It might not seem timely on the surface until sitting on a Sunday as you watch an AM news program present the US deaths for the week. Look at kids that just stopped in time. And then you see the why it is right there for her. The clock that ticks for all of us it tolling for my mum. And after one big strokes through this last months mini strokes are telling her her time is at hand.
It kind of got me to see his score on this project with her be lower, he put so much into this. To a person unable to say to him, "that matters." in truth they have invalidated our family in a great show of ignorance, but I am mostly silent. It was such an invalidation, but from my child not a word,not a bit of that at all. He "likes" them. But, then, I haven't met the teachers. And I can check the grade on-line.
That's high school. I guess for some.
Luca has continued to dig to find out about a 19 year old PFC lost in Korea that doesn't even have a tribute written about him in the Memorial sites. Marshall R. Lucas died in Korea on patrol. That's all we knew. We knew Harold Osterud was the older brother, a medic, to a close friend of Marshall's from their town of Ashland Va that first got to him after death sending word to my grandmother, Gladys Pearl H. Lucas, that he died "instantly." We knew that. We knew that another soldier told my mom that prisoners weren't taken, they were made to kneel and shot in the head by the Chinese soldiers. Her brother was shot in the back of the head at close range. Just that way.
We don't know what a day was like for him, what the sun rise looked like there, if he knew people of the country, if he was comfortable or not. We know he had been to R and R in Japan. What could he have seen there? Did he understand the conflict? Do we ? My mom probably does she spent her life discovering this thing I call national reasons and rhymes. She had a few letters from him I once read but I will tell you what I remember of this was they were like peeking into a young person keeping something from their mom. They sound like my daughter talking to me about her life now at 19 in CalTech. Ultimately just reassurring. And making the best of something. Theses were not revelatory. And how I saw those was utterly by stealth when I found them in my father's closet. I think for years he held onto hem for my mom, because she could not bring herself to read the youthful voice of a kid sent to war. he has the strength for that.
And we as a family each in our way know that our parents, my cousins and I, we know this tore the fabric of the entire family. You can't really know because I can't capture it. I will say this I have never heard my family condemn other people, blame others, call for war....I have heard them speak of WW2 and the loses, the families destroyed, the necessity of that after attack in the face of loss of civilian life and the horror in Europe, the nightmares faced. But of these actions after this, I have heard almost nothing. My father lost friends in Korea, friends serving with him years on Guam. I've heard him tell of that in a sentence or two. I've seen his eyes mist. And they seldom really told us everything because they don't know it either. It was a misting that enclosed us, shrouded us. This loss and hurt included a different kind of remembering in the naming of my cousin for this lost murdered soldier boy. Not entirely understood in anyway andnow my son looking as all of us do at the puzzles of family, then has found some different pieces to reveal and try to fit into his part mostly because he was willing to go look. And he cared so much about my mother's pain.
During the time he talked to her she told him things I never heard before. And I'm an oral history lover, well I value trying to understand. When you talk of war that is not expressed by that sentence. It is so horrifying a thought, I value trying to understand it's effect on us all. Because from every position it is something that cannot be undone. But you don't always think of the story of the killing of your uncle to war as "history." You think of it as pain. Some things I never asked her.
Mom talked to Luca about why she herself went into the service.
She was in the Air Force. Both her brothers were in the service at the time of Korea, as was my father. Her younger brother was drafted out of VA, though he really was living in Florida with my grandmother who had moved to St. Pete. He was drafted out of Hanover County, Virginia. Mostly because the papers weren't changed in her recent move to put him in St. Pete's system. Mom wondered if this didn't appeal to the VA draft board in sending him off (in my mom's words) "to be slaughtered." Mom's kind of bitter. You would be too if you considered that where he died, the hill that was taken, just impotently reverted back to the enemy. She says in many ways that stands for how she sees war. I gather when MacArthur was stopped in his march into China...and boys lives were lost in the mishigas of this. I don't want to appear unaware this is felt all the way around, I want it however understood that so often you just know nothing.
Now I have to write carefully. I just learned more about her deep anger, feelings, pain than I really knew drawn into words ever in my living with her lifelong. I learned how they told the family of his passing, where she was. How it was that 5 days after he died, Eisenhower was elected on a campaign to stop this war. As a promise. She joined the service somehow in a form of solidarity with brothers she feared might lose lives to , in her words, "Try to keep myself occupied." Learned to fly a plane. Became socially conscious, involved, aware. She had fear and she read a letter sent by the Service signed by Truman saying her brother was dead, the day before Halloween (my most hated holiday a time I wish I could wipe away for her forever so she might not each year live it as she does.) Losing a young brother at 19 with no girlfriend or wife yet or baby to mourn him, lost to times, to a bullet. Stopped, almost forgotten, as her generation passes. No one aside from my cousins, her family, have ever written or contacted her about this life, this brother so dear to her. She carries in her the wish it all meant something.
And she knows it doesn't, in her words, mean "anything." "He died for nothing."
War, in my mother's words, should be fought by us oldsters.
Or ceases to exist. Pass away like a bad thought. Fought by those instead that might send in kids to die as a "solution." These things I heard her talk to my son about this last few months, and I watched my young historian hold her gaze as a priest might, or a confessor. As a child fully engaged in the greatest of life's learning lessons might hold onto the hand of time. A child becoming the balm and the memory, the receptacle of this job of helping her to ready herself at over 80 for her journey into no time by gathering her greatest sorrow, to release it, and being willing to witness this, to carry it into the days ahead. So it might not be forgotten.
And then I can check the grades on-line.
I don't know what grade to give my son.
He found the description of the battle that his uncle fought and died there on patrol. It was called Operation Showdown. Its commander got a Medal of Honor, he took it for the men like my 19 year old Uncle Marshall Lucas who died there a lowly PFC that now isn't recalled. I just don't know how to feel.
Luca found this description of this battle for a hill and gave it to mom. He found out that Dr. Osterund , the medic that couldn't resurrect a man shot in the head, but could tell his mom it was "fast" went on to dedicate a life to medicine in Oregon, to public health. His bother Carl, my uncle's buddy, we don't know. We hope he lived, and lived well. For both of them perhaps.
Luca found where we can tell his story so it isn't forgotten, and he wrote all of it into a form that will remain for him written inside, there all of his life, may I never be faced with sending his tender being off to war or into things I do not know off to die. He wants to join the service. It's tough. I am mostly silent with this.
My son believes in things I don't always see. He is young but all of his life he has known what he believes, been a "self," he believes in love, his family, in Christ, in doing right things. And in service.
So......here is the story of where my Uncle died, it's taken from the web. It is more than we ever thought to know. I hope I can be forgiven for placing it here:
Showdown on Triangle Hill: twelve days of intense combat in October 1952 cost the U.S. 7th Infantry Division 365 KIA for a piece of turf that ultimately remained in enemy hands
In October 1952, the U.S. 7th Infantry Division occupied a sector of the Main Line of Resistance (MLR) in central Korea near Kumhwa. Opposing the division, the Chinese 45th Division held elevations to the north, including Hill 598, also called Triangle Hill. Both sides were well dug-in. Battle lines had not changed significantly in almost a year.
After peace talks began in November 1951, the Eighth Army assumed an "active defense" posture and combatants on both sides marked time awaiting the outcome of the talks.
The "War of the Hills" had begun. For six months, this war played out as artillery/mortar exchanges and minor skirmishes that did little to change the situation. Then, in spring 1952, as frustration over the failure of peace talks increased, "active" defense gave way to active engagement. Operation Showdown began to take shape.
Col. Lloyd Moses, commander of the 7th Division's 31st Infantry Regiment, relates in his memoirs, "Not long after my arrival in the 31st Infantry, the division and corps commanders talked to me about an attack on Hill 598." By June 1952, Moses wrote, plans were under way "to move our MLR forward ... On 23 July, I began to make serious plans to capture Hill 598, should we be called upon to do so."
Hill 598 was a formidable objective. The apex of its 2,000-foot triangular crest overlooked U.S. 7th Division positions on a line of hills about half a mile away to the south. From this apex, two massive ridges extended to the northeast and northwest. The ridge to the northwest was dominated by a hill called Pike's Peak.
The other terminated with a pair of hills that had been dubbed Jane Russell in honor of the well-endowed American actress. A less prominent ridge, named Sandy, sloped down to the east. About 1,000 yards across the valley from Sandy stood Sniper Ridge, which, because of its strategic location relative to Triangle, also was an objective of Operation Showdown.
On Oct. 8, Far East Commander Gen. Mark Clark approved the operation. By then Maj. Gen. Wayne Smith, 7th Division commander, had selected the 31st Infantry to conduct the assault on Triangle Hill. The attack on Sniper Ridge was assigned by the Corps commander to elements of the South Korean 2nd Division.
`Shower of Grenades'
Operation Showdown began on Oct. 14. Although the original plans called for a single battalion attack on Triangle Hill, the objective was too large and too well-defended for such a limited force. So Moses ordered his 3rd Battalion to take the west sector of the objective, including Hill 598 and Pike's Peak. The east sector of the complex, including Jane Russell and Sandy Ridge, became the objective of the 1st Battalion.
In spite of two days of preparatory air strikes and artillery barrages, the two assault companies on Hill 598, L and K, met fierce resistance from the Chinese as they made their way up the hill's steep south slope. Small groups from the attacking force repeatedly assaulted the crest of the hill, each time being repulsed by "a shower of hand grenades, shape charges, bangalore torpedos and rocks."
Within the first half hour, all of L Company's officers became casualties. After two hours, with both assault companies still bogged down, I Company was committed to the battle.
Taking advantage of earlier gains by the 1st Battalion, I Company attacked the hill from the east through Sandy Ridge. L and K companies, pinned down throughout the day, were finally ordered to withdraw. I Company held into the evening, but faced with repeated counterattacks, also abandoned the assault.
In the 1st Battalion sector, A Company led the attack on Sandy Ridge and Jane Russell. Pinned down almost immediately by small arms fire from Hill 598, the platoon on Sandy sustained 25 casualties in the first few minutes. When the remainder of the company was also stopped short of their objective, B Company was sent into battle.
Sandy Ridge was finally taken and consolidated, but the attack on Jane Russell remained bogged down. C Company was then pitched into the maelstrom. After three hours of combat against intense resistance, "the crest of Objective `B' (Jane Russell) was in friendly hands."
On that crest, 1st Lt. Edward R. Schowalter performed feats Hollywood could not duplicate. He led platoons of A Co., 1st Bn., 31st Inf., up Jane Russell Hill. "Right through the hail of grenades and small-arms fire he led us," recalled one GI.
Nearly killed twice, he at one point found himself stacked among dead Chinese. Severely wounded, he spent six months in the hospital recuperating. Modesty was Schowalter's hallmark.
"I always figured I was awarded the medal as the representative, of a superb fighting team," he said. "We took that hill together. I wear the Medal of Honor on behalf of all the men who fought and died on that hill. It's really theirs."
Repeated enemy counterattacks, however, finally forced the 1st Battalion to abandon its positions, and by the end of the day, the enemy remained in control of all 31st Infantry objectives.
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Unit's Deadliest Day
In terms of casualties, it had been the most costly day for the regiment in all of its more than two years of action in the war: 96 KIA and 337 WIA. It could have been a lot worse. For the first time in the history of modern warfare, every combatant in the assault force was wearing an armored vest.
The following day, the 1st Battalion of the 32nd Infantry, placed under the command of Moses, assaulted Sandy Ridge and Jane Russell, while the 2nd Battalion of the 31st attacked Hill 598. E Co., 31st Inf., reached the trenches on 598 and, reinforced by F and G companies, secured the position. Strong resistance, though, continued from the enemy on Pike's Peak.
Pfc. Ralph E. Pomeroy, a member of E Company, manned a machine gun at the end of a trench to protect his platoon's flank. When the enemy attacked, he kept up heavy return fire, killing many of them and slowing the assault.
Shortly after, he was severely wounded from a mortar burst, and his gun mount rendered inoperable. Still, he removed the gun and aggressively moved forward. After suffering a second wound and with his ammunition depleted, Pomeroy took on the enemy in hand-to-hand combat--using his weapon as a club--until he was killed.
Pomeroy earned the Medal of Honor.
On the northeast arm of the complex, A and B companies of the 32nd Infantry were unsuccessful on Jane Russell and had to withdraw to Sandy, where C Company had established a foothold. At that time, Moses ordered I Co., 31st Inf., into the battle. No units, however, were able to do more than consolidate positions on Sandy.
Early on the 16th, Smith transferred command of the operation to Col. Joseph Russ, commanding officer of the 32nd Infantry, and the two idle battalions of the 31st were ordered to replace the 17th Infantry in the west sector of the division's front. The 2nd Battalion of the 17th was placed under the command of Russ and secured Jane Russell Hill that afternoon.
Attack and counterattack continued for the next eight days as Russ continued to rotate units into the battle. Then, on Oct. 25, the Republic of Korea (ROK) 2nd Division relieved the 7th Division on Triangle and, after 12 days, U.S. involvement in Operation Showdown ended.
The best available U.S. casualty estimate for Operation Showdown is 1,540: 365 KIA, 1,174 WIA and 1 captured.
A week later, the ROK division that was struggling to hold Triangle, even as it continued its battle for Sniper Ridge, was finally forced to abandon the hill.
An objective planned to be secured by two battalions in five days had required an entire division. And it was only partially occupied after 12 days and could not ultimately be defended. For the remainder of the war, the battle lines around Triangle Hill remained essentially where they were before Operation Showdown was conceived.
RICHARD ECKER is a 7th Infantry Division veteran of Triangle Hill and author of Friendly Fire (Omega Communications, 1996).
COPYRIGHT 2002 Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learn
My uncle was:
LUCAS MARSHALL R Rank=PFC Serial Number=US53080856 Branch=InfantryThe deadliest day. Oct 30th.
Military Occupation Specialty=01745 Year of Birth=30 Race=Caucasian
State of Residence=VA County of Residence=Hanover
Unit=31st Inf Regt Division=7th Inf Div Type of Unit=Inf Regt
Place of Casualty=North Korea Date of Casualty (yymmdd)=52 10 30
Type of Casualty=Killed in Action
Detail of Casualty=
Group of Casualty=Killed in Action
And that's about enough information to send my Mom into greater waves of memories' pain, but also the other evening when sharing this with my son, she was generally talking about the real cost of war. Trying to make the insanity of this absolutely clear. She could tell about the differences in these two wars she knew pretty well, her 21st husband serving in WW2.
Mom who herself served, who married a serviceman, who gave America the ultimate sacrifice brought to my son her thoughts on Vietnam, on Korea, on Iraq. Mostly Mom asks questions. One of her questions involves those who do not know this cost firsthand as often willing to commit others to pay it. But......her exact words were
"You can't understand until you've lived this."
And my son, who has dedicated months to holding her pain, struggling to get in his assignments, sat through her talk I suppose more sure than ever we are a place, nation, worth risking a life to continue having.I felt perhaps this differently too. But I don't know because he's a pretty wordless boy, a force of nature, a kid sans language that did not really speak until 4. The year he went to school, that year he started talking.
Luca has been willing to look at the injuries and pain we hold as a family. Quietly. To absorb it, to try sincerely to bring it his heart, energy, and sincerity.
When I became so ill with gastric bleeds, with the undetected cancer as the tests, the pain,and the awful struggles through it all drug on and on.... he'd just sit with me. He was cheering, he was accepting; he seemed so free of judging, so open to interpreting your pain as something he sees with compassion and care. In this way we have to say he has been since his birth just the best thing that has happened both to Ma and to me. Our sweetheart.
Yes, I could check the grade checker, sure, thanks, but I'd like to tell his story of these last few months to a child's teacher. One that might better know him, to understand him. Just as I might want Marshall in his 19 short years to know he will be remembered.I wish I knew his thoughts. He was ever missed and recalled for his humor and warmth, for being a good person, his passing in war the ultimate tragedy. By a sister and her kids. A sister that loved him.
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