Facial Reconstruction Quotes

Viet Cong, young men carelessly eating their breakfast, never suspecting the Americans would be out so early. They paid with their lives. Most of us were pretty excited whenever we actually, but rarely, saw the enemy, much less killed them. But Barnes was cool, so cool, no big displays ever. Having reported the incident, and stripping the dead men, he soon had us under way, no credit taken, looking for further action ahead; considering there had already been contact, the likelihood of more that day was in the air. Whereas some of us were not looking forward to such an encounter, the thought excited Barnes. He was a great soldier, probably on his second or third tour — but why? Why would he come back after a facial wound like he had? I never asked, and he never told. You hear things in the army, as in all society, and some kind of narrative emerges; in this case, the story was that he’d been literally shot or sustained shrapnel in the face, skull, head, requiring a major reconstruction job as the scar branched deeply around his eye, nose, and cheek; even his lips were affected. And as he had clearly once been a handsome man, the scars perversely heightened his visage into a Phantom of the Opera echo — a man distorted, perhaps, by anger or revenge, or really a question mark. What was he about? He never hinted in all the time I was around him. I watched him with both curiosity and trepidation; he’d get back to the rear after we’d been out in the field a week or more and relax with booze, poker, cigarettes, sometimes a cigar. It was said he’d been in Japan in the hospital about eight months, rehabbing from the wound. And there he’d “married a Japanese gal.” And now he was back. Sort of an Ahab looking for his White Whale. And here I was, like Ishmael, walking five or ten steps behind him, always expecting that something was going to break because, like a fly, he smelled the blood of war. As good a soldier as he was, I was relieved when he got rid of me as his radio operator.

Lina took it and reached toward the dog. “Here you go, cutie.” The little, muddy fur ball belly crawled tentatively toward her hand. Small dogs bit too. Lina wouldn’t be able to block an attack. And then there were things like infections to worry about. Who knew what parasites were growing in this half-frozen muck? What if she got an infection or needed facial reconstructive surgery? All on my watch.

It was as if personality itself had a “face.” This nonphysical “face of personality” seemed to be the real key to personality change. If it remained scarred, distorted, “ugly,” or inferior, the person himself acted out this role in his behavior regardless of the changes in physical appearance. If this “face of personality” could be reconstructed, if old emotional scars could be removed, then the person himself changed, even without facial plastic surgery. Once I began to explore this area, I found more and more phenomena that confirmed the fact that the “self-image,” the individual’s mental and spiritual concept or “picture” of himself, was the real key to personality and behavior. More about this in the first chapter.

For a century the Neanderthal people have worn a stigma of hunched brutish grunting cavemen. Facial reconstructions of their skulls show them to look not exactly like us, and not exactly pretty. But beauty is a very subjective matter, and just because you don’t fancy them doesn’t mean that your ancestors didn’t. They definitely had sex with them.