I Killed Your Son

by Michael Woodworth Fuller

I don’t know when I began to collect dog tags. Somewhere between Normandy and the Bulge, in those days of limbo when I did strange things to maintain what I then thought was sanity. After killing your son, Frau 102, and another son who was trying to do the same to me, it seemed natural. I know your son had a name, Frau 102, but I don’t know what it was. It may have been Hans or Heinrich, Friedrich or Fritz. You’re not alive, anyway, Frau 102, since your son and I were about the same age, and my mother died a long time ago before the last war we had.

German dog tags in World War II didn’t have names, only numbers. They'd break the dog tag in half and leave one half on the body and send the other to Berlin for identification. Our dog tags had our name, rank, serial number, and blood type stamped into them. They also had a little notch in the corner. The notch was so you could shove the dog tag in between the teeth. Usually, you'd jam it in between the upper teeth, and then you'd kick it so that it wouldn't come loose, and they'd know who it was. Sometimes, the body was in pretty bad shape when they'd find it. We'd take the other dog tag to the Company Commander or the Sergeant, and the tags would all be collected at Headquarters. We wore two tags. They'd clink and make noise, so we'd put one of them somewhere else, just in case we’d get blown up. Also, we couldn't kill your sons if they heard us coming.

I killed your son on a road. He was on point with another son. I killed him, too. I preferred the Thompson sub-machine gun. It was an automatic weapon, which means you could just hold the trigger and it would keep on firing. Of course, we never shot it that way. We'd fire in short bursts of three of four rounds. I liked to hold the weapon so that it would move sideways with the recoil. That way, the bullets would move laterally across the body. We always fired at the body because that’s where the vital organs are.

The magazine held thirty-nine .45 caliber rounds – or was it thirty-one? We’d tape our magazines in two’s to double our firepower. We’d press the release, pull, rotate, reinsert, and charge. Because I held my weapon laterally, my magazine change was a second or two behind the other guys, which can be a matter of life and death if other sons are shooting at you, but I guess it was okay because I’m still here. The .45 was originally designed for an earlier war of ours in the Philippines. The enemy, crazed on some kind of drug, would rush our troops, swinging machetes, chopping off arms and legs. The .38 could not stop those with the machetes. The .45 could. It knocked them down even if they were not mortally hit. The .45 went in small, about the size of your fingertip. It came out about as big as the palm of your hand. So, if you hit the enemy in the guts, it was all over. That's what I did to your son.

I am not sorry I killed your son, Frau 102. It was necessary. Monsters are born into this world and, like rabid dogs, they must be killed, as must those who defend them. Your writer, Brecht, said of Hitler, they killed the bastard, but the bitch that bred him is still in heat. There are those fighting today who are proving Brecht was right. I know if I were to meet them, I would kill them and feel nothing, or they would kill me. I would still feel nothing. And that is good in a time of killing. Sons must forget they are sons. And they do. Quickly.

Your son wasn't the only son I had killed. Many times, you don't know if you've killed anyone or not. There's no order, really, to things; it's just a big mess. But the day I killed your son, I knew exactly how many I had killed. Two isn't a big number. I guess that's what got me started taking dog tags. I took the whole tag. I didn't leave the other half. There are many dead sons who have no name, and no one knows what happened to them. After I took your son's and the other son's dog tags, I started taking the tags of all the sons I killed. I collected tags the way soldiers collected ears in Vietnam. I never thought of ears. World War II was more civilized.

Sons don't die in wars. They are killed by other sons. Mothers and fathers are told the lie that their sons died bravely, quickly, and without pain in service to their country. The truth is, they die in great agony, terrified, and screaming for you, their mother. Sometimes, if they’re lucky, they are killed instantly. Sometimes, they are hurt so badly they can't scream. They just flop like a squirrel hit by a car. Sometimes, they run around like headless chickens. Sometimes, they are obliterated by a landmine or an artillery shell. They burst like balloons filled with red paint. They don’t have any tags, which is why they’re classified as MIA’s.

There’s no proof that they’re dead. Except for their blood and guts that stick to you. You can wash off the blood and guts, but you can’t wash out the images. You don’t have memories. You have images. Images happen to you without warning. They lurk, waiting to hurt you in the sound of a car, the movement of a tree in the wind, the slither of water on sand, the mud on a rainy day, a blotch of paint on a wall. You don’t know what’s going to trigger them or when they’re going to happen because they’re not related to anything in the present; sometimes, they don’t happen for years, and you feel safe. You should know better. What happens to you is more than just being killed or maimed. You stop being a person. You can't be a person and fight in a war, so you stop being one so that you can kill other sons before they kill you. When you stop being a person, you can do things you otherwise would never do. The truly terrible part is not what you did, but what you did does to you when you try to become a person again.

When the war was over, I brought home all the tags I had collected. In my stupidity, I thought of them as souvenirs. I came back home to “Mom and apple pie,” that old saw whose teeth in some families have remained clean and sharp but not enough to cut that line between dying for your country’s survival and a cause. I came home to a country, which, at that time, had never experienced foreign devastation on its soil. I found the girl and married her and went to school on the G.I. Bill and got a job and had a son and did the things good Americans are supposed to do.

I put the tags in a box somewhere in the dark of a closet, interring them, I suppose, with all those horrific images that refuse to die, more so now than they used to. My son found them and asked me what they were and what all those numbers meant. I told him quite simply that they were the numbers that had once belonged to men. I said men who were dead, not men that I had killed. He asked me why I kept them. It was a good question. My son was an intelligent and beautiful boy who grew into an intelligent and remarkable man. He was too young for Korea, and I was spared that although I would have gone once again for my country and, at that time, I would, I am sure, have taken Chinese dog tags if they had worn them (I understand they did not), or North Korean ones. It was his question in the hallway that made me save him later from the idiocy that was Vietnam. I made sure he went to college and got good grades as he always had, and so, being a good student and white, his number never came up. If it had, I would have swum with him the rivers of Canada to the North, as are those who are now swimming ours to the South.

I stood by the open closet, looking down at my mischievous boy whose upturned face was the innocence we went to war to protect, and I breathed in a way I knew he found strange, for he had never seen his father trying not to weep. It came to me then, why I had kept them and not thrown them away when the war was over. Quite simply, I had kept them to remember them. I knew that then, in 1953, when my boy was six. I told him that. He asked me if they were friends of mine. I told him they were, in a way, for I had been very close to them. I knew, of course, he did not perceive the irony in what I said, but it was true: fighting an enemy is an act of intimacy. I suppose if I had been more of a hard-core realist, I would have told him that those tags belonged to men I had killed, that they were trophies of conquered enemies. It wasn’t until my son asked me about them that I remembered them and learned from his sweet upturned face that images crammed away in old boxes at the back of dark closets do not go away but remain to be uncovered. Very frankly, I did not want to tell him his dad had killed those men, for he was holding a box full of all that was left of them. He said, oh, and shook the box. Their tags clanged in the hallway of our house, proclaiming their presence that could not be ignored. My son has always been a practical person who asks highly complex questions and then proceeds to find solutions. At six, his final question was the most practical. He asked if he could play with them. The enormity of his request kicked me in the stomach. If they had been bits of metal or an old shell or some other war trophy, I would not have objected, but these were the remnants of men who, if they had lived, may have looked down at the innocent faces of their own sons. I wondered if any of them would have put my name in a box and put it in their closet.

When I told him no, he of course asked me why, and I told him because I needed them for myself. The moment I said that I felt reality churn in my stomach. I had never felt anything like it, not even at Normandy. When the war was over, and I was still alive, all I felt was relief. In between, I felt nothing. You learn how to do that. But what happened to me in the hallway of our house with my beautiful boy shaking that box a little and looking up at me was what I guess women experience when they discover they are pregnant. Something inside them they didn’t know was there – stirs. They have nine months to prepare themselves before they birth. I had only moments before that unknown stirring would demand the light, and I was unprepared. Give me the box, Son, I said. He did so, angry that I would not let him play with my toys. That was all right. I would find a way to make it up to him. He left the house, seeking better playmates. The reality that had churned in my guts went away. I guess it was something like a miscarriage. I took a deep breath to make sure. There was nothing.

Until today.

My family and I were all standing in the hallway, getting ready for a family picnic – my son, Daniel, who is now fifty-five, my grandson Jack, who is thirty, my great-grandson, Bertie, six, and my grandson’s wife, Kathryn, twenty-eight, who, being the liberated woman she is, was not in the kitchen with my daughter-in-law, Sarah, and my wife, Martha; we were rummaging in the closet for folding stools, old blankets, stuff like that. The picnic basket was on the top shelf. I reached up for it, but Bertie wanted to get it, so Jack lifted him up, and Kathryn moved the basket so that Bertie could grab it. I saw in the three of them a tableau of all the families I had seen throughout the world. Their beauty caused a great stab of pain within me. I gritted my teeth against an image I was sure would be coming. I shoved the basket to Kathryn. Bertie pushed and pulled, and the basket tumbled off the shelf, bringing lots of other things with it, among them the box of dog tags. They scattered over the floor. Bertie squirmed out of his dad’s arms and went onto his hands and knees, picking up several of the tags. Oh, he said, what are these? Things of Dad’s Daniel said, looking at me, and I knew he remembered the time of Vietnam when I had taken down the box and showed him the dog tags in it and told him why I had not let him play with them when he had been a child. My wife came into the hallway, just then, her face intent with the purpose of hurrying us along. She took one look at me and saw I was never going to make it to that family picnic. She knew all about the nightmares. They come more frequently, now. Martha snapped an order, and when Martha commands, all obey.

My family scrabbled around the floor at my feet, tossing the protesting tags back into the box. Bertie held on to them, turning them over in his hands. I could see my son’s wish of so many years ago in his face. Jack yanked the tags from his son’s hands, sensing the urgency he could not possibly understand to bury the dead. My son put the lid on the box and handed it to me. He was careful not to shake it. He swallowed. When my son swallows like that, he’s hiding something. Was it regret? Or understanding? They all left the hallway, pulling Bertie after them. His head was turned over his shoulder at me. On his little face was an expression I will never cause to appear again. It was fear that he had done something terribly wrong.

After they drove off, I came out here to this large stump in our back yard, with the box, where I am sitting now. There’s no one to hear me but you, Frau 102. That is good. I don’t want my family ever to hear such sounds coming out of my body that I am hearing now. Can you hear me, Frau 102? Do you hear this birthing, retching my guts? Even as I am doing this, I know it is not sorrow I hear. Sorrow is shallow water. Grief is the ocean. It comes from your toes, tearing up the sediment of your being, scouring your guts, and surges out your eyes, your nose, and your mouth. I am soaking the top of this box where your son’s tags reside. But never my great-grandson’s. Nor yours, Vladimir. Or Abdullah. Or whatever your name is. I know you would rather see your sons and grandsons smiling and playing, and that you would rather smile and play with them as you, also, Frau 102, would prefer.

I am not grieving for you, Frau 102. I am a ruined person. My family believes that all of me loves them. I have no way of telling them that only a part of me loves them. Your son didn’t come back. Part of me didn’t, either. That’s why I can sob to you, Frau 102, because we understand the nothingness. I sob because forty-nine years ago my beautiful boy looked up at his daddy and asked if he could play with your son, and I said no. I will not make the same mistake again. My great-grandson Bertie will play with your son, Frau 102, and with all those others in the box. Eventually, he will lose them in the dirt of our back yard or in the fields surrounding our house, and he will forget them. It is altogether fitting and proper that he does this. It will be the best burial any of us can have.