Dad took my sister and me on a couple hikes – one down along the Missouri River and the other through the closed golf course of our country club. I fell down a hill and gashed my knee and Dad wrapped my bloody knee in a dirty oil rag from the trunk of the car. Mom was not pleased.
Dad worked as a journeyman electrical lineman for the local electric utility, a couple of those years spent as the night ‘troubleshooter’. We grew up with hard-drinking, hard-gambling guys with nicknames like Shorty and Red. We grew up with Mom, us girls in tow, picking up the paycheck on Friday so Dad’s earnings would make it into the bank account instead of on a game table or a bar bill. My Mom mostly raised us. Dad honestly wasn’t around too much.
My father was raised in a family where the ‘future’ only existed as some fuzzy concept for somebody else. He was born shortly before the Great Depression and his father, a railroad man, died on the rail yard when Dad was 11. This was long before any public welfare system; any food or clothing my grandmother was able to provide to her fatherless brood of seven was through church and charity.
My Dad told me he was playing baseball in a sand lot when he heard about Pearl Harbor. Whether through patriotism or a sense of adventure, he wanted to sign up right away but wasn’t quite old enough. As soon as he graduated from high school (the only of his siblings to do so), he enlisted in the Navy.
My Dad served in the brand new SeaBees established in WWII to build air strips and Quonset huts in the jungle, clear minefields, build roads….any construction required in the Pacific Theater in a war that was being played out on sea and on land in very different battle fields than ever before. The Pacific Theater was brutal and hot and sweaty and dirty. And very, very exotic and far away from the poor white trash Kansas home in which my Dad grew up.
For my Dad, the reality of war was very different than the one portrayed on enlistment posters. My Dad was a sensitive man, aware that whoever he killed or witnessed killing may have been the enemy but was also someone’s brother, son, or father. He saw things so terrible that anything that vaguely looked like a gun – including pop guns and water pistols – were taboo in our house. Once he told me probably the single most horrific thing he saw during the War was the beheaded body of a Japanese soldier. Dad told me the Aussies sometimes did this because the body had to be intact to enter the Japanese equivalent of heaven. A final brutal act intended to demoralize and terrorize the enemy.
Dad was a hugely intelligent man with a complex and rather tortured personality. I remember Dad being really moody at times and often quick of temper. But it wasn’t until I was much older, until friends and family members were coming back from that war they called Viet Nam, that I was able to put name to his torture. At some point I knew he suffered from ‘shell shock’, the term they used for PTS before the events of Viet Nam made this a disorder and methods for treating it began evolving.
Memorial Day is tomorrow. Origins of the event vary widely among historians. Civil War historian David Blight believes Memorial Day as we now know it had its origins as a one-time celebration to honor Union prisoners of war that had been buried en masse without ceremony in the South. On May 1, 1865, over ten thousand mostly black residents of Charleston gathered to clean up and decorate the forgotten field of the Union prisoners’ burial ground. This astonishing event was covered by the New York Tribune and other national papers. For those attending, it was their way of saying thank you to these fallen soldiers for their recent freedom from slavery.
It took years for my Dad to come to terms with his own war experiences. I’m not sure he ever completely did. I know my nephew, who came back from Iraq a few years ago disabled and unemployable, will spend the rest of his life living with the trauma, physical and mental, of the explosion and subsequent firefight that disabled him. That’s what soldiers do. Soldiers are not extraordinary people at the start; they become extraordinary people because of the extraordinary pressures and horrors of war.
In a way, Dad lived the SeaBee slogan “We Build, We Fight” until he died. He built all kinds of things in his working life and he spent his whole life fighting really hard to heal himself of the effects of War on his spirit. On Memorial Day, it is appropriate to honor our fallen. We ask them to kill others so that we may live in peace and security, far away from the horrid mess of battle. They responded to the call of duty. It is our duty to properly remember their response to that call.
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