Memorial Day: The damage done

On this Memorial Day, my thoughts turn to my late father, a veteran of World War II and a member in good standing of the Greatest Generation, now dead these 25 years.

This day, created as a way for us to honor the men who marched off to fight in this nation’s wars and never returned, is not designed exactly for him. He survived his trials by combat and came home – undamaged on the onside, but changed forever on the inside.

Nonetheless, I think of him today. And of his life after he came home in the closing months of 1945. There would be no quick return for him – no tickertape parades or crowds at the train station welcoming the boys back from overseas. When the Japanese surrendered, Dad found to his bitter dismay that he didn’t have sufficient “points” to be mustered out immediately.

How such a thing could  be bewildered the battle-tested U.S. Army sergeant. After all, he was drafted only months after Pearl Harbor, had walked ashore during the first invasion of Japanese-held islands in the Aleutians and miraculously emerged unscathed from the bloody horrors of Okinawa, the last ground campaign of the war. Since points were rewarded based on length of service, time spent overseas and duration of combat, how could he possibly be short?

A paper-pusher’s mistake no doubt, a typo in the blizzard of paper forms that governed men’s lives, then and now. But Dad never questioned the unfairness of it all. He shouldered his disappointment and headed to Korea for several months of occupation duty.

And then he came home to Texas, a farm boy back from the first and only big adventure of his life, a survivor of one of the greatest tragedies of mankind and one of the men and women who risked all to protect their country and the ones they loved, and in the course of things saved the world from an unimaginable evil.

The first thing he did was to tackle some unfinished business, the courtship of my mother that the war had interrupted. He climbed into his Ford sedan and drove to my mother’s farm. Perhaps he brought along the photo of her he had carried across the Pacific in a sweat-stained and battered pocket album. He proposed and she accepted.

And that brings me to the photograph.

It was taken on their wedding day, a mere weeks after my father’s return. The young couple – he was 28 and she a mere 20 – look directly into the camera. A nervous and somewhat uncertain smile hesitates on her pale, thin face. The years directly before and during the war have been hard on her. Before meeting my father, she was married and quickly divorced from an Army officer who swept her off her feet and then broke her heart when he deserted her and the Army. She has waited for my father to return for more than three years, wondering no doubt if the relationship would withstand the separation.

As for my father, his steady expression is unfathomable. In some ways, he looks older than his 28 years. He has seen and experienced terrible things, things he will never share with his family. Does a slightly haunted look linger in his eyes or is it just my imagination?

He bears no scars of his ordeal. At least no scars that anyone can see. He came home with a bad case of trench foot that lasted for months, but otherwise he’s in excellent health. Like many wives of returning servicemen, my mother is reluctant to ask too many questions about the war of her new husband. And he is reluctant to offer much in return, other than amusing tales of life in Schofield Barracks in Hawaii before his unit shipped out for the Aleutians.

There is one thing she notices. For months after he returns, he stubbornly refuses to go into a store alone. She must accompany him or he sits sullenly in the car. She has no explanation for such a weird quirk, and he offers none. But she wonders, is this a psychological twitch caused by something that happened to him during the war? An unconscious reaction to a trauma he keeps locked deep inside? Eventually, the reluctance fades and then disappears. She is thankful but wonders all her life, what did it all mean?

On this Memorial Day, I think of my father’s service and how those three eventful years colored the rest of his life. I know he thought about those experiences. And I suspect a compulsion near the end of his life to talk about them with people who would understand was the reason he joined the VFW, after a lifetime of distaining servicemen’s organizations.

I’ve been an avid student of World War II all my life, a passion fueled, no doubt, by father’s own history. As I think about it now, I’m certain it was an effort to understand the stoic, deeply reserved man he was, to learn the stories he couldn’t – or wouldn’t – tell, to come to grips with the sacrifices made and the costs paid.

Like my mother, I struggle with the question: What did it all mean?