“Leaving The Table”
I was enjoying a steak at one of those all-you-can-eat restaurants in Florida with my parents and their friends, Jim and Janet. Feeling like a fifth wheel that night, dad encouraged me to ask Jim lots of questions about Korea. I had planned a trip to Thailand and Korea and would be leaving in a few days. Jim was a Korean War veteran who served in the American army towards the end of the war, from about 1952-53, after the Chinese got involved on the side of the North Koreans.
I remember loading up on my salad and sitting down across from him and we were all seated at a circular table, the hot Florida sun setting with a nice orange hue as I inquired: “So, Jim…I understand you volunteered to fight in the Korean War. I’m going there next week”. Jim responded by correcting me, saying he didn’t “volunteer”; he was drafted by the army, and served mainly in what became North Korea.
I didn’t know much about the war at the time. We munched on our steak and mom and dad were deep in conversation with his wife, Janet. Then, wanting to know more about his experiences, I blurted out:
“Did you see anyone killed”? Silence followed.
The space between us was uncomfortable, only broken by the image of him shaking, shaking, shaking…followed by him getting up from his steak dinner and walking out of the restaurant. The image of him shaking and transforming into a trancelike state was haunting, one seemingly innocuous question transporting him back decades in time from this plush steak restaurant to some bloody lifeless battlefield on the other side of the world. Situations can turn on a dime, I thought.
Mom looked at me with soft but piercing eyes and asked what I’d said to cause him to leave the table so suddenly. Before I had time to answer, Janet saved any further awkwardness, saying something like: “Oh, it’s just the memories…always happens when he thinks about that war”.
Her casual nonchalantness was comforting because I soon realized I’d triggered some kind of PTSD attack. I’d heard about the condition before but now I could see its effect in the most unlikely of places, the most unlikely of times.
I remember thinking about that old phrase, “the past is not really the past because our memories live in the present”, or something like that. Minutes passed and I continued to munch on the rest of my steak, but without the state of voracious satisfaction I’d been in a mere 5 minutes before. Mom and dad changed the subject to golf, movies, or beach swimming conditions, as I tuned out and turned inward, thinking about Jim in some obscure North Korean village, where he might have seen things so horrific, the mere mention of the words “killed” and “war” in the same sentence triggered unspeakable, unfathomable images of tragedy that he’d never forget, perhaps reliving the horror every day.
Jim did eventually return to the table, composed and refreshed. We never spoke about the war again. I left for Korea the next week.