Ghosts of Ortona, page 4
This did worry me a little.
However, I reassured myself that it would not remain a problem. In the fieldwork tradition of anthropology, it was normal, even expected, for your plans to be overturned. Many of the legendary works by anthropologists told stories of this happening. The fieldworker goes to that Pacific island with a set of carefully developed research questions, all of which become irrelevant on arrival when it’s learned that the islanders have completely different things going on. My first anthropology professor had even been forced by circumstances to alter his plans while he was still on the ship, moving to a different island than the one he’d prepared to study. Another emphasis of the traditional method is deep immersion in unfamiliar ways of living. In the early stages there’s culture shock, and little of what’s happening around the fieldworker makes sense to them; however, with time and effort comes understanding, as does empathy for the lives of others. Those stories had inspired me. Those scholars had been disoriented, yet followed their intuition, and worked it out. I would do the same.16
Furthermore, I felt intuitively that in the course of talking with the veterans, I was tracking something substantial. Something was beneath the surface details of the stories of Ortona. I couldn’t tell what it was, but I knew it when I encountered it. Its presence was felt in certain moments when the stories weren’t making sense—or when the stories were going on as usual but there was a mysterious alteration in the narrator’s voice. It was felt in momentary breakdowns in my comprehension when I lost my bearings while listening and I instinctively felt something at risk. Was I the only one experiencing this? Or were the veterans aware of it too? It was never brought into the open. I wouldn’t know how to begin to discuss it. But whatever this phenomenon was, I sensed there was a pattern to its occurrence. It had some kind of meaning and I was sure it was important somehow.
I came home from fieldwork, transcribed all of the interviews, and examined all of my material.
Nothing came.
I looked for guidance and insight in the literature of my discipline.
Still nothing. I was no further ahead.
This wasn’t working out like the stories of the legendary scholars.
The enormity of my plight began to dawn on me. I was lost, without a clue to what my research had been about.
Whatever it was that I had naively tracked in my fieldwork, it had not been covered by my training. Worse, I couldn’t even guess what sort of training I would have required. I couldn’t name the problem. What was the nature of this phenomenon that I was trying to interpret? Was it just some trivial personal feeling that I had got? Surely I wasn’t that foolish; there must be more to it than that. But I lacked the words, the concepts, that would allow me to think my way further.
It was a dead-end struggle that continued for two years. Every path I took led me to a cul-de-sac. Then the money ran out. In order to stay close to my goals, I got onto the hamster wheel of low-paid university contract teaching. On the side, whenever I could make the time (which wasn’t often) I spun the other hamster wheel of trying to write up what I had done. More years passed with no progress. Eight. Nine. The life consequences of getting nowhere started adding up. In desperation, I tried to cease caring what I wrote for the dissertation. Any argument, I told myself, any interpretation that could earn me a pass, would do. Even that didn’t work. Maybe it was integrity, maybe some other affliction, but I just couldn’t put words together for what I didn’t feel was right. How had I got myself into this hole? I had always been a good student. I’d been told my future was bright.
The angst became all-encompassing. Even my dreams went in hopeless rounds.
SHOOTING AT THE BELL tower. Leaning on the wall. German prisoners singing. The Indian sniper losing hope. Strange death in the olive grove. The gift from the little Italian girl whose words he didn’t understand. The imploring look on his face. His struggle to get the words out. My sudden feeling of shame. Mel’s narratives had conjured so many mysterious images and sensations, I felt I’d spent the whole day in a dream.
Now I was coming back to reality. At the tables around me, young people were drinking chais and lattes, doing homework, and chatting in small groups. The usual coffeehouse music was playing, well suited to the evening and the university crowd. The upper-level café overlooked the bookstore’s main floor and big front windows. On the busy avenue outside it was cold, dark, and snowing. It was good to be here under warm lights in this world of books.
I had just purchased one. By incredible coincidence, I’d found on the new releases table a title on the very topic of my research: Ortona: Canada’s Epic World War II Battle.17 On the front cover was an image of Canadian soldiers and tanks on a street among ruined buildings. The hardcover’s jacket copy foretold that this reading experience would be intense.
In one blood-soaked, furious week of fighting, from December 20 to December 27, 1943, the 1st Canadian Infantry Division took the town of Ortona, Italy, from elite German paratroopers ordered to hold the medieval port town at all costs. Infantrymen serving in the Loyal Edmonton Regiment and the Seaforth Highlanders, supported by tankers of the Three Rivers Regiment, moved from house to house in hand-to-hand combat amid heavy shelling and wrested the town from the grip of the fierce German defenders.
That tone of grim ferocity reminded me of newspaper clippings I’d read in the archives earlier that day. I skimmed the book, looking for more descriptions of the action.
Here was a moment from early in the battle. The Edmontons had gained the upper floor of a house, surprising the Germans who were outdoors below.
Rifles, Bren guns, and Thompson submachine guns poked out of the windows and opened fire as one. The Germans died in place.
Aha. Now here was an explanation of the house-to-house fighting. The Canadians had made their way down a street by blasting through walls of attached buildings. I’d heard the veterans refer to this tactic as “house-clearing” or sometimes as “mouse-holing.” Here was my first clear description of it.
The process of clearing floors was dangerous and bloody business. When a hole had been breached in the wall, the first section hurled a few grenades through. After these exploded, one or two men would jump into the smoke- and dust-filled room and rake it with Thompson submachine-gun fire. If there were any paratroopers in the room, they usually died before they could react.
Something felt odd as I read. What was it?
Guns poked out. Germans died.
Something in the text was being hidden from view, conspicuously unspoken, held strenuously at bay like a tight, repressed coil.
The moment with Mel came to mind.
Mel had started out by telling me about his struggle with his stomach. He predicted that during the interview his stomach would start acting up. He told me this in order to tell me not to worry about it; he was used to it; he didn’t want it to stop us from talking about anything that mattered. His troubles with his stomach had started during the war, he said, beginning in Ortona—when he was “in the line,” the term that he and others used for being in combat. Ortona had been his first real battle and it had gone on for days and days.
“You know, whenever you’re in the line, you’re on two hours and off two hours, and my two hours off I was either heavin’ my guts or, I couldn’t sleep or, just like a, like an iron poker, a hot poker in your stomach, you know?”18
“You were two hours on and two hours off?”
“Two hours on. Yeah. We were relieved every once in a while by another company, you know.”
“What was it that you’d do when you were on? Would you be led up the street somewhere, or—”
“Yeah, yeah, you’d go up the street and uh, go into the next house, you know, and uh, throw a hand grenade first and go in with your gun and, you know. So—”
Mel paused. He had just begun to answer my question. Something was putting him off track.
“Yeah, these, these, these are things that I, that I say I was trying to erase from—and I did a fairly good job I guess but uh—but things that you try and erase from your memory because how much good does it do you to recall it.”
He paused again. Suddenly he seemed overcome by a thought that he urgently needed to share.
“I—I don’t think—I don’t think any veteran wants—wants the schoolkids today to—to glamorize war or anything. It’s a terrible thing. Nobody should have to go through it.”
His stammer worsened. His face was pained.
“What—what—what—what fun is there, what—what is there to killing each other? You know? And really, the only thing we’ve learned over these wars is how better to kill each other, and how—how many more people we can kill at the one time, you know.”
I observed him in stunned silence. A wave of shame went through me. This was the answer to my question about house clearing. What a thing to want to know. What on earth was I doing, asking this kind old man to tell me how he had killed?
Mel concluded.
“That’s the only thing that we’ve learned over wars.”
THERAPY WASN’T REALLY A decision, more like something I fell into. By the time that happened, the dissertation was only one of the issues. It didn’t even top the list.
However, as I worked through my problems as a client in psychotherapy, one of the positive outcomes was a new perspective on the PhD. This new perspective was that I could simply give it up.
After so much work, of course, it would be a shame not to get the degree; but it would be a greater shame to carry on stubbornly and be ruined by the effort. This decision not to finish didn’t have to be a tragedy. For too long, I’d been narrowly focused on academia. High hopes had got me into that world, but the wrong reasons were keeping me in. There was more to life than this.
But if I abandoned the project—I wondered—would I be letting down the men who had told me their stories? This concerned me. But it also occurred to me that none of the men had ever signalled that they expected anything more. In all of the time since I’d concluded my fieldwork, I’d never heard again from a single one of them. In the interviews, they had talked; I had listened. They had been helpful to me; maybe they felt that whatever they got from doing so was good enough. Even so, however, on the edge of my decision to quit, I wished that I could do more. The veterans had told me so much. I wondered if I might still manage to write something—nothing academic, to be sure, but something—provided that I could bear to live with the topic a little more. It was in that spirit, ready to say farewell, that I went back for a final look at the transcripts. I hadn’t looked at them for years.
I was astonished by what I found. It was like a fog had lifted, revealing whole new vistas—hills, trees, islands, an ocean horizon. The difference in comprehension was akin to returning to read a book as an adult that you’d struggled with as a child. What made the difference in reading was my new awareness of psychodynamics in narrative. As a client in therapy, I had learned to identify this in myself; now I could see it happening between myself and others on the page. Those moments in the interviews where I had vaguely sensed something beyond the words, now I was able to discern. I had the vocabulary, the concepts; they came to me naturally. Here was an instance of rumination or obsessional review. Here was a sudden topic shift, possibly motivated by a hidden association. Here was a recurring, unusual metaphor—some kind of personal symbol. Here was a false start and pronoun shift that might be a clue to implicit meaning.
That’s not to say that I saw through to all of the answers. But I knew these phenomena were real, they mattered, and there were sound methods for examining them. I knew what interpretive tools I needed, what training I had been lacking. These were in areas of scholarship—psychoanalysis, sociolinguistics, conversation analysis—that I hadn’t previously known how to read selectively, nor grasped their relevance to my work. Now I did.19
Furthermore, my intuition during my fieldwork had been correct—there was indeed a pattern to these moments of narrative mystery. These were symptoms of mental struggles to repress or heal emotional wounds. The struggles took different forms for different men. Sam had been trying to find peace by compulsively searching for vindicating details. Mel was committed to remembering others who had been wounded worse than him. Bill had been deeply traumatized by a moment of empathy that got violently upended. Ted was spiritually troubled and seeking atonement through public ritual. Maurice was also trying to atone through his private searching for a lost place. The contexts varied, but the struggles all had a common theme. Indeed, this theme had been in front of me all along. It was in the word that Norman had tripped on. It was Mel’s “only thing that we’ve learned.”
I could make an intellectual argument from this. A lot more work was ahead, but the way forward was finally clear.
I wrote the dissertation, passed the defence, got the degree.
It was done.
Then, having done it, I was desperate to get away.
For fourteen years, I’d been stuck in this topic. It wasn’t uplifting—it was dragging me down. I needed to get it out of my life.
A deep aversion to your PhD material is not conducive to an academic career. The dissertation is typically the basis for your first scholarly publications. It’s your resource, your capital, for establishing your authority, expertise, and the reasons for anyone to hire you. But the very last thing I wanted was to be an authority on this dissertation. Teaching about it, writing about it, arguing about it with others—that was not who I wanted to be. It had never been my plan to be an expert in this area. I had stumbled into it unwittingly. Certainly, I’d made the best of it and grown wiser from the experience. But I was spent. To live with it any longer would not feel like living at all.
So I left. There were other lines of work where it was useful to have this degree and where there was also no need to talk about it. There were places where I could apply my skills without it mattering how I had learned them. The unwelcome past didn’t follow me. No one knew or cared to ask. I could do my job, accomplish new things, and that was good enough.
IT’S TWENTY-FIVE YEARS since my fieldwork. Eighty-two years since the event that the fieldwork was somehow about. The men I interviewed are all dead.
And in the middle of my living room floor, I’m looking at this box.
I carried it up here from storage.
It makes me think of Norman. The box where he kept his “Safe Conduct.”
It also makes me think of Sam. He had a lot of these boxes. We spent a whole weekend going through them. I think he had three at least.
Sam was an exception. No one else had that many. But many of the veterans had a box like this, and they all described it the same way. It was the box of their war souvenirs.
Do I call my box anything? I’ve never had reason to speak of it. Box of my fieldwork, I guess.
I know what’s inside. Field notes, cassette tapes, documents, address lists, copies from the archives, photographs, maps, and the odd thing that’s a sort of souvenir of the road.
Memories of their memories.
He’s the guy who wants to know.
Do I want to be that guy again?
What am I doing with this box?
IREMEMBER THE SOUND of the wipers on the windshield of Sam’s car. We were driving up the northern highway in the early winter darkness. The road was wet from gently falling snow. Huge trucks blew spray onto our windshield as they thundered past, hauling loads of gigantic logs. Somewhere to the north, forests of massive trees were being harvested. Here, where we were driving, there were just a few plots of woods among the low barren hills. In the distance I could see the silhouette of a working pumpjack and the light of a gas flare.
We stopped at a gas station. While filling the tank, Sam remembered that he had a friend nearby who’d been a sniper in Ortona. He said this would be a good guy for me to meet. If I didn’t mind delaying our dinner at the restaurant, maybe he’d call the guy and ask if we could drop in. I said sure, let’s do it. Sam went to use the payphone and came back with the word that we were invited over right away.
A dirt road took us into an evergreen forest where the branches were laden with snow. The trees cleared briefly when the road crossed some train tracks, and then came thick around us again. We arrived at a clearing where there was a little wooden house with smoke rising from its chimney. It had a brightly lit window, and a brightly lit doorway that was open with a man standing in it. We got out of the car and Sam said some words of greeting. His friend Jim answered with a muttered word and a nod.
Jim was short and stocky with baggy eyes and a gruff, grey-whiskered face. He was in a plaid shirt, cardigan with holes in it, loose jeans, and puffy slippers—quite a contrast to Sam, who was skinny and extra clean-cut after shaving, combing his hair, and dressing up for the restaurant. When I started to remove my boots at the door, Jim brusquely grumbled that he didn’t follow that “stupid rule”—I should leave my boots on.
We went to the Formica kitchen table where there was a choice of mismatching chairs. I started to take an old wooden one, but Jim pushed a chair on wheels my way, saying this would be more comfortable. On the table stood three mugs with images of Alberta and the Calgary Olympics, and an ashtray. Sam started introducing me, saying that I was a student from Toronto. Jim shuffled to the stove, came back with a steaming pot, poured oily black tea into the mugs, and sat down with a cigarette, all while listening to Sam telling him about our work on Sam’s war souvenirs. The refrigerator was humming. A bulletin board on the wall had pinned to it a drugstore calendar, receipts, handwritten notes, and a war remembrance red poppy. I took my tape recorder from my bag and started to say my usual words to introduce my research.
Suddenly Jim was staring at me, panic-stricken.
