In memory of Corporal Phillips

This is my old M41 field jacket, which I’ve shared photos of before but probably never really talked about. This is a reproduction item I found at a now-defunct army surplus store in Westminster, SC and saved up to buy when I was fourteen or fifteen. The 1st Infantry Division “Big Red One” insignia and WWII-era corporal’s chevrons I got from Medals of America (which was also the first place I ever heard of Fountain Inn, SC, where I now live).

Why the Big Red One, and why a corporal? Because this was the jacket that belonged to one of my first serious fictional characters, Cpl John Phillips.

Cpl Phillips was born in 10th grade keyboarding, a class in which I quickly outstripped our weekly typing exercises and was left with free time. A lot of free time. I would run out the clock hammering away at you-are-there scenes of the first wave at Omaha Beach—climbing down net ladders from their transports into Higgins boats that pitched and yawed in the heaving Channel; riding in to the smoking shore, some laughing, some throwing up; dashing into hell down a steel ramp; and working up the beach, through the wire, up the bluffs, and inland, scraping together what ad hoc forces they could along the way; culminating in the destruction of a German pillbox defending one of the beach’s critical draws. Cpl Phillips told me all about it, dispassionately, in great detail. He was my narrator.

Over my last three years of high school I spun out Phillips’s entire wartime career—from Oran and Sicily to the Hürtgen Forest and the Reich itself—and wrote two whole novels about it, both set in Normandy and the bocage, with its fortress-mazes of hedgerows.

Phillips’s stories owed a lot to the grunt’s-eye view stories in Stephen Ambrose and the first-person present-tense style of All Quiet on the Western Front, and were heavy on action, especially inspired improvisation in the face of surprising reversals. They were juvenilia in the purest sense—sincerely, straightforwardly imitative, learning by copying, and almost sweet in their naïve tough-mindedness and their desire to simultaneously shock, thrill, uplift, and move.

I spent a lot of imaginative time with Cpl Phillips. And well into college I’d occasionally check in with him mentally. He was born in 1920, and while I never got around to writing down all of his adventures or exploring all of the tragedies that befell his platoon, it really was like visiting an old family friend to think back and say, yes, Phillips survived the war, and got back to his wife Katherine, and he’s still alive and well at 82 (high school graduation). Or 87 (college graduation). Or 90 (grad school graduation).

But of course that would make him 102 now, and Phillips was too much of an average joe to have made it that long.

Suddenly this jacket, which I got in high school and added accurate patches to and actually wore around a lot (I was even cooler then than I am now, you see), has somehow become an heirloom to me, its original owner. So when I think about this fictional character, about whom I haven’t written a word in twenty years, a little part of me grieves. Were he real, he would have died sometime since he first told me those stories. And of course he was real enough to me.

Part of the curious and melancholy magic of imagination, of storytelling—even when those stories have never seen (and never will see) the light of day.

Not to end on a downbeat note, of course. Because in another part of me, Cpl Phillips is still alive and kicking, still cleaning his Thompson submachine gun, or sleeping in his foxhole, or swapping stories with Pfc Friday and Pfc Brown, or writing yet another letter home to Katherine.

Let me offer this as a coda: While Phillips himself has been minding his own business and I’ve mostly left him alone, his platoon commander did show up in Dark Full of Enemies, where he’s placing Pfc Grover Stallings under arrest in the Big Red One’s camp in southern England six months head of D-Day. That’d be 1/Lt Roberts, who I’m sad to say went on to die in late June of 1944 despite Phillips’s heroic efforts to carry him to an aid station. (I did mention All Quiet on the Western Front as an inspiration, didn’t I?) And let me here apologize that, on his way into the plot of Dark Full of Enemies, Pfc Stallings stole his pistol. Roberts may have died in my imagination, but the last time we see him alive in that novel he’s young, irritated, overawed and a little bewildered by the arrival of a Marine in the OSS, and still hasn’t discovered the theft. Though I’m sure Phillips and everyone else will hear about it later.

I’m sure they’re still laughing about it.