My father was wounded twice in the war. The second set of injuries sent him home, but not because they were more serious that the first round. The first round sent him to a hospital. The second round sent him to a jeep for transport to a flight out of the country. When he hurled his bag into the jeep, the driver was in a hurry and sped off before my father hopped up into the vehicle. The back jeep tire rolled over Dad's foot and broke it. 

He was wearing only socks because his feet were still swollen from five days on a "really bad bed." Crack. Weak bones, cussin'...he climbed into the jeep, screaming at the driver, who had bucked to a stop hearing howling behind him, and then Dad decided to deal with the fractures later. He flew home with an untreated broken foot. He wanted to get the hell out of South Korea. He had been there a long time. A lifetime is long. So is 23 months in South Korea between 1951 and 1953. 

Dad used words that army guys don't use often now. Platoon leader. He'd wrapped up OCS in 1951 and was shipped out. He had one black soldier in his platoon who didn't speak a word for six months. My father told me that he didn't mind silence from a soldier very much, since "some of the other guys just never shut up." One of Dad's most famous stories -- told only because it always got a good laugh out of less informed folks, but more on that later -- is of that black soldier. "He didn't talk. He did a good job. I could count on him. Didn't need to tell him anything. He did a good job. Damn good job. He was steady. I always needed steady. Some of the men were just hooked on talking, talking, all the time, complaining. Anyway one night the shelling was worse than usual and we lost two men to injuries, bad stuff. One of the big mouths hollered out 'that one had his name on it!' when another guy was more or less split in two from mortar fire. This black guy, honestly, hon, you would have liked him, he was a lot like me, anyway, he was hunkered down and we were soaking wet, it was raining for hours, and all the other guys were talking about that one shot that had your name on it. That's all I heard for about two hours, the shell that's got your name on it. We all agreed that's when you just got killed, no doubt about it. And suddenly he spoke up. He said that "I ain't worried no damn about nothin' that's got my name on it. I'm worried about the one screaming through the air 'to whom it may concern!'" Dad told me just a few years ago, "that fellow, I know he made it home and had six kids before he was 30. Never heard from him after number six. Must have been busy." Dad liked to hear things like that about his men. He grieved too many of them and "not for long enough." He told me that "you never had time to miss the guys." You missed them, he told me, but "when you were down in the ditch and waiting for things to shut down and just stop, for the noise to stop, you didn't miss them right at that moment." That's what he hated about war the most. "Not having enough time to miss men you knew." My father died in clean pajamas in a dry bed in a VA hospital with a nursing assistant named Charyne Lee hovering behind me, handing me cups of water and old magazines from the lounge with articles in them about the Spanish Civil War. I read those articles out loud to my father for the afternoon. Charyne Lee was from Atlanta, George. She was about six feet two inches tall and had dark maple brown skin and hair braided up around her head. She did not talk much. She would rub my shoulders. She would bring me more magazines -- they were all old issues, dated from the 1960's. I don't even remember their titles. Some Life Magazines probably. She did not bring me old magazines because the VA unit was so impoverished for supplies or sundries. She brought them because she, at $11.22 per hour, dug through the old heaps of old magazines on purpose. She had heard my father and I have one conversation 10 days earlier about why new history books were so boring and sterile. She heard us say that we loved reading old history textbooks -- the ones with entirely awful caricatures about people in other countries. Charyne Lee's mother was the great- great-granddaughter of Georgia slaves, if I am using enough "greats," and her father was a "mutt" doctor from Chicago who grew tired of Chicago and wanted to live in a small town. "My folks were in love five minutes after they were introduced," she beamed. Ten minutes before my father died I asked Charyne what she meant when she used the word "mutt" to describe her father. "Oh," she answered, puffing up my father's pillow and moving his arm so it didn't drop heavily over his hip, "pop's mother was black and his dad was Mexican, I think, something like that. No one cared much. He looked allright. Never met him. His pictures, nice pictures. People say he was a very kind man." Dad died and Charyne Lee moved up behind me, between two roaming ministers who were dispatched to Dad's room to be with me so I would not be alone. She muscled them out of the way and wrapped a thin arm around my neck. "You have to keep it all tight and stay that way 'til you talk to your children, you can't lose it in front of your children, your poppa is watching everything you do now and how you will handle yourself, and men like him, well you know, they don't miss a thing." In South Korea a woman's older brother died from an unnamed disease at the age of 66. I knew her enough to approach her and express my sympathies. I did not try to be Korean. I bowed my head slightly and extended my hand -- something I do at wakes at home. She had met me in January, 2009, and had since accepted that I was not quite talented enough to adjust to a country where everything I did at home that was considered spot-on polite was viewed -- for lack of a better English phrase -- by South Koreans as ill-bred. What she did know was that I understood that she and her brother had seen their parents and six siblings shot by Chinese soldiers just north of Seoul in 1953. Her then 1-year old baby brother had been tossed on top of her parents, dead, with a bullet in his neck. She and her remaining brother did not eat food for two weeks after that. She knew I could not understand that at all. No one understands that, unless it has happened to them. I recall that she was 8 years old and told me that she hung on to her then 10-year old brother's hand for what seemed like months as they wandered around dirt paths and beaten roads between villages looking for water, not food. She had told me that her brother knew -- at age 10 or so, she said -- that they could survive if they drank water. Food was an afterthought. I considered her story as I stumbled through her world. Perhaps she embellished, perhaps she did not. She did not remember the exact ages of all her dead siblings, but she did remember that the Chinese just "moved through after they shot people and they shot people because they were planning on winning the war and that is what you do." Dad had walked past the body of a South Korean toddler, dead on the side of the road, "as big as a shark, or a dolphin, something that size, swollen up because he was dead for days and in the sun." My father was never very good at nice descriptions of horrible things. Charyne Lee stopped listening to the men on her floor years ago. "I had to," she told me. "Otherwise I'd be here too."

GREAT MEN AND GREAT DOGS

My father's words on his time in South Korea are private for the most part, but in time, I release them to my children, or I consider them with any new punch I take at writing of his life. A year after he died on March 3, 2005, I had compiled notes on his comments about the war and on the longer conversations we had about his time in combat. His sense of humor was intact, but his sense of timing was often impaired. Dad had a way of blurting out a new observation about war, about the Korean people, about the South Korean army, in the middle of dinner. I spent years in his room passing the salt and hearing him erupt into a story.

The routine was predictable. My beloved dog, Cassie, would amble into his room ahead of me and plant herself at his feet. He would rub her neck and gush over her character, insisting that she knew how to spell. Then, he would talk. The Chinese Army. The American military bureacracy. Dead children. Inch by inch, he gave me the war. Then cancer took him from me.

One night in South Korea changed him. I know of that night and why it happened, and I know that my father told me about it to clear his soul. I am not ready to tell my children that story. I wish that my father did not believe that the events of that night were something he needed to confess to me, but he did confess, and I let him do that. You do not tell a man to not confess, not when he has to. You do not judge his confession. You do not tell him that he didn't need to feel guilt. You listen. If he finally came to the moment where you were the person he chose to tell, you sit back and you listen. Someday, what you felt he needn't have confessed will make sense to you, and you will know who he was as a man.

It has not been five years since my father died. I have not mourned him. He would not want me to. Instead, I have discussed him -- with my children, with myself, occasionally with another person who does not know me well. For me, my father represents all the conflicting memories of so many men, and women, who saw The Korean War from the ground. For me, my father was not a hero, because he hated that people saw all soldiers as heroes. For me, he was my closest friend and the only adult I have ever trusted. When he bled his memories of war to me, it was the greatest time of my life. He trusted me too.

The day that Dad was taken from the house for the last time by ambulance, dying 11 days later at the VA hospital, Cassie paced the front lawn, observing the EMTs carefully loading my father into the rig. She was well used to them, the whole crew, and they were used to her. Dad had left in that ambulance four other times. I had once worked with them as an EMT years earlier. Cassie had knowledge. She understood when people arrived at the house to help my father. She peacefully paced, occasionally looking directly at a fireman or EMT with perked eyes. She never barked when they arrived at the house.

On that last tranport, Cassie moved among the crew, and they slipped around her. One of the EMTs patted her head and whispered something to her. She spread out on the lawn, staring at my father on the stretcher, and the EMT walked back to the rig. In a small town, rescue crews know the dogs who will be in the way, and they know the dogs who will set back and let the work happen because they are dogs who love their masters enough to let others take care of them when it is time.

For the entire time that my father lived in my home in the last years of his life, he was Cassie's master. She knew in those years that I did not need her, but that he did. She greeted my ex-husband when he came home, but then she would always walk back into my father's room. She sleep next to his bed. She stayed at his feet all day long. When the kids came home from school, she met them at the door, but led them into his bedroom. When I came home from work, she greeted me in a riotous body wave, and then again, trotted back into my father's room. My father loved dogs, but more important, he needed Cassie. She knew why.

She sat down in the driveway as the ambulance drove off, staring after it, the curve of her neck arched, her ears up. That was the last time she ever saw him.

I watched her walk back into the house, into his room, and lay herself down on one of his unlaundered sweaters, and I spread out on the floor next to her for a few minutes before I left for the hospital. I know that she knew. Great dogs know all about their human pack.

Cassie is gone now. She was old and she had a stroke. My children were with her and I was with her and my ex-husband was with her in the room. She had given us too much for us to just leave her there with the veterinarian and wait in another room. We owed her our happiness, our adventures, our sense of life. I can still smell her clean, water dog scent in my car. Her Black Lab father's face and color, and her Dalmation mother's sleek run through the woods, eased their last breath and were then spirits.

She is with my father now. I feel her running next to me on the central New York stretches of the link trail system, and I hear him calling out to me to run into his room to see Meet the Press on Sunday mornings. I hear her splashing, clumsily, in Chittenango Creek, and I hear him laughing when she leaps from the floor to meet the school bus.

The war is over only on paper. Dad wanted it to actually end. And he wanted Cassie to live forever.

You figure things out when they are handed to you, so obvious.