Homecoming
When my father left Iwo Jima on March 17th, he returned by ship to Hawaii. The 4th Marine Division was scheduled to return to the States, having been decimated by the battles on Kwajalein, Saipan, Tinian, and Iwo Jima. My father was sent to a replacement battalion, waiting to be re-assigned to another unit for the invasion of Japan. He didn’t have enough “points” to rotate back to the States with the rest of the Division. Two events saved him from another bloody amphibious assault. First, the Marines revised the points needed to be relieved from the next invasion and under the new point system my father had enough points. Second, the Enola Gay used the huge airfield on Tinian to carry an atom bomb to Hiroshima, mooting the need for an invasion of Japan proper. With the surrender of Japan, my father’s military career was over. He embarked on a troop ship for his return to the United States and the long train ride back to Chicago. He was discharged from Great Lakes Naval Station in North Chicago in November, 1945. The Marines wanted to keep him in the Corps because of his condition, but he insisted on being released and he had his way. On a map, it was a short trip from North Chicago to 7303 S. Emerald Avenue, but psychologically and emotionally, the distance was cosmic.
Throughout the war, the airwaves had been full of patriotic and sentimental songs, everything from the semi-ludicrous We’re Gonna Have to Slap the Dirty Little Jap, and Goodbye Mama, I’m Off to Yokohama to Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition and Bell Bottom Trousers to heart-touching songs based on separation and reunion, We’ll Meet Again, I Don’t Want to Walk Without You, Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree With Anyone Else But Me. One of the songs most associated with the war was Vera Lynn’s 1942 version of The White Cliffs of Dover.
There’ll be bluebirds over
The white cliffs of Dover
Tomorrow, when the world is free.
There’ll be love and laughter
And peace ever after
Tomorrow, just you wait and see.
It is a song of longing and of hope and I’m still moved every time I hear it. It was recorded by Kay Kayser, Sammy Kaye, Glenn Miller, Jimmy Dorsey, Bing Crosby, and Kate Smith but Vera Lynn’s is the original and best.
As beautiful as the song is, it must have been written by someone who knew nothing of the effects of war on the combatants who fought them and on the families to whom they returned. Especially for the fighters who were thrown into the crucible of front line combat, and for their families, there was precious little “love and laughter and peace ever after.”
On Ash Wednesday, 2003, the eve of the invasion of Iraq, I wrote in one of my quarterly letters to the supporters of the House of Peace:
Fifty-eight years ago today, my father was a 24 year old Marine private on Iwo Jima. In a battle that lasted little more than a month on an island about 1/3rd the area of Manhattan, almost 7,000 Americans and more than 21,000 Japanese were killed. It remains the bloodiest, costliest battle in Marine Corps history.
Thirty-seven years ago today, I was a 24 year old Marine first lieutenant stationed in Vietnam. The following year brought harder duty, as ‘CACO’ or Casualties Assistance Calls Officer in the Philadelphia area. Vietnam was not my sternest test; it was Philadelphia, for every six days I was on call to notify next-of-kins, usually poor or working class people, that their son or husband, father or brother, had been killed or wounded in Vietnam. A national mission that had started out in March, 1965, as fending off invading North Vietnamese shifted to “winning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people,” and ended – unsuccessfully – as simply trying to avoid military and political defeat by a Third World opponent. At the end of America’s longest war, there were 47,378 American KIAs (plus almost 11,000 non-hostile deaths), 304,704 WIAs and 2,338 MIAs. The numbers of Vietnamese men, women, and children killed, wounded, and missing were many times higher.
My father returned from Iwo Jima and I returned from Vietnam with campaign ribbons, but no Purple Hearts. We are not listed among the casualties of World War II or Vietnam. Nonetheless, my Dad knows and I know that our lives, like those of millions of others who don’t show up in casualty statistics, were forever affected by the war experience. Wartime casualty statistics always lie; the suffering and devastation wrought by the unimaginable violence of war can never be accurately measured: not only for the vanquished, but also for the victors; not only for the combatants, but also for their families
I was writing from personal knowledge. The Battle of Iwo Jima horribly wounded my father and, through my father, it injured his wife and his children. To the extent that I developed bad coping behaviors in dealing with him and his condition after the war, it impacted me and, through me, my family. Thus, in a very real sense, wounds from that battle almost 65 years ago are still felt in our family.
In March of 2005, I drove to Florida to visit my Aunt Monica and my Dad who was visiting her. On the way, I listened to a ‘book on tape’ by Farley Mowat entitled “And No Birds Sang.” The book describes the author’s service in the Canadian Army in the Italian campaign of World War II. In it, he quoted a letter he received during the war from his father, himself a World War I veteran:
Keep it in mind during the days ahead that war does inexplicable things to people and no man can guess how it is going to affect him until he has had a really stiff dose of it. The most unfortunate ones after any war are not those with missing limbs. They’re the ones who have had their spiritual feet knocked out from under them. The beer halls and gutters are still full of such poor bastards from my war and nobody understands or cares what happened to them. I remember two striking examples of two men from my old company in the 4th Battalion, both damn fine fellows yet both committed suicide in the lines. They did not shoot themselves. They let the Germans do it because they had reached the end of the tether. They never knew what was the matter with them. They had become empty husks, were spiritually depleted, were burned out.
In another book, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, Modris Eksteins discusses Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, or more accurately, Remarque’s psychological and spiritual condition after the War to End All Wars. He describes Remarque as
. . . a deeply disconsolate man, searching for an explanation for his dissatisfaction. And in his search, Remarque eventually hit upon the Kriegserleben, the war experience. . . “All of us were”, he said of himself and his friends in an interview in 1929, “and still are, restless, aimless, sometimes excited, sometimes indifferent, and essentially unhappy.”
. . .
Remarque himself stated the purpose of All Quiet in a brief and forceful prefatory comment:
This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure . . . It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war.
Your grandfather was one of Mowat’s “most unfortunate ones,” of Remarque’s “restless, aimless, . . . essentially unhappy” men who, “though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war.” I am confident that had it not been for the support of my mother and of my grandparents and Aunt Monica, he would have been one of the army of lost souls in the “beer halls and gutters.” He would not have survived on his own. In the same conversation in which he told me that it took him 25 years to ‘get over’ Iwo Jima, he also told me that the Marines did not want to ‘let him out’ or discharge him after the war because of his ‘condition’ and how hard it was for my mother to live with him. I don’t know whether he has any idea how hard those years were for Kitty and me. He has never acknowledged it to either of us. Kitty and I rarely talk of it and never at length, but in a serious conversation about 25 years ago she remarked that we had been ‘emotionally crippled from growing up with Dad.’ She was pretty accurate
My father had all the characteristics of the combat-induced PTSD veteran:
— isolation from family and others with a ‘leave me alone’ attitude
— inability to handle frustrations or even to identify them
— inability to express or share his feelings
— inability to handle it when things are going well, from a standpoint of not feeling worthy, survivor’s guilt
— lack of self-esteem, great insecurity, and feelings of worthlessness and helplessness
— jealousy of his wife’s relationships and activities, and, making everything worse, and, very significantly,
— abuse of alcohol, ‘self-medication.’
The problems experienced by combat-stressed veterans’ spouses are now well known and well documented. I’m sure my mother, only 23 years old when my father returned from the war, experienced many of those problems:
— being overwhelmed by pressures
— having to assume total responsibility, including the tremendous strain of financial insecurity because of her husband’s job instability
— feeling guilty that somehow she is responsible for my father’s rage or anger reactions.
— experiencing self-doubts generated by emotional and job instability of her husband; caught up in frequent crisis-responding, losing sight of her own needs or overall pattern.
— being afraid to say anything to him and not knowing how to respond, frustrated in her inability to help.
— being confused as to whether his problems were combat-related or not and whether there would ever by any resolution of his conflict.
— feeling responsible for ‘making it better.’ having to ‘mother’ or ‘nurture’ him and hence creating greater resentment and irresponsibility on his part.
— seeing him separated not only from her, but also from my sister and me with little sense of family and poor father-child relationships.
— feeling that support is not welcomed by him.
— experiencing emotional and verbal abuse.
— feeling dragged down by his negative attitudes.
— reduced self-esteem, anxiety, and a sense of hopelessness.
My father was never physically abusive to me or to Kitty. He wasn’t a physically violent man, except for one incident with my mother when I was a teenager.. Growing up with him in those close quarters was so very difficult mostly because he was so profoundly unhappy and it was impossible not to be infected by his unhappiness. He was one of those whose ‘spiritual feet had been knocked out from under him. . . spiritually depleted, burned out.’ He had seen what we cannot (thank God) imagine. What he had seen accompanied him to 73rd and Emerald after the war and stayed with him, especially in the nightmares. His drinking made a terrible situation worse. I’ll say more about that later.
Julia Collins wrote a memoir, My Father’s War, about her life with her father, a Marine Corps veteran of the battle of Okinawa. At the end of the work, she wrote:
For a Depression-era boy who had never left New England, World War II represented a stunning expansion of my father’s world. He crossed America and the equator, traversed thousands of miles of ocean, island hopped in the tropics, and finally made it all the way to China, . . . But when the salty vet came home in April 1946, those boundaries immediately contracted, along with his ambitions.
“The war ruined my son,” my grandmother [Angie] confided to my mother after she filed for divorce. “When Jerry came back he wasn’t the same. He stopped caring about a lot of things. he couldn’t get that war out of his system.” . . . Not until after Dad died did Mom report to me what Angie had said and admit she probably was right.
It would take a later war, in Southeast Asia, to make the public conscious of combat’s psychic wounds. World War II vets did their duty long before the soul-searching of the antiwar movement or diagnoses of post-traumatic stress syndrome. Theirs was the honorable war, its brutal aspects better left unexamined. “Advance – Advance – Advance” – the Marine Corps shout also applied to peacetime: no backward looks, no lollygagging in anguished confusion. The troubled World War II vet suffered alone with his grisly memories and sense of having left his better half behind . . .
The hidden war wounds that undermined his life infected our family. But in his postwar struggles, as in the real war, Dad was not alone. And neither were we. Since his death, I have come to understand that he was in the company of many men whose lives were devastated by the Good War, with repercussions that would be felt for generations. Many of the deaths set in motion by that war played out for decades, slow and excruciating. Many a family, like mine, can trace to World War II the root causes for the remoteness, anger, depression, despair, alcoholism, violence, even the suicide of their husband or father. Like my dad, the unlikeliest of warriors, many men did not belong in combat and were altered forever by its brutal exigencies
She could have been writing about my Dad, and my family.
As I look back on my life in the process of writing these letters, I realize what little contact I had with my father after I left home at 18. He wrote me two letters, one during my freshman year at college and another when I wrote home after my sophomore year that I had decided to take my commission in the Marine Corps rather than the Navy. He was taciturn at home and even more so on the telephone (“Well, let’s not run up this phone bill” marked the quick end of every long distance call.) He fled to Florida after my mother’s death in 1972 and for a period of 13 years, from 1982 till 1995, we never spoke or wrote to each other, a long silence that wasn’t broken until my grandmother’s death, when I wrote him. I mention all this simply as a preface to the (obvious) statement that I don’t know my father well. Other than the years from our reconciliation in 1995 till his death in 2007, most of my memories are from the end of World War II until 1959 when I left home, a period spanning his life from age 25 to age 39. Those were, I believe, his worst years, years that, but for the war and the Iwo Jima trauma, should have been his best years, years of establishing himself in some work, growing into maturity, enjoying his family, and building a future. Instead, they were in large measure lost and wasted years. The frequent bouts of anxiety and depression, the relentless terrorizing dreams and the sometimes out-of-control alcoholism drained him of vitality. I cannot remember him having any hobbies or recreational interests. If he had any educational or vocational interests, it didn’t show. As far as I know, he had no enthusiasm for anything. I have no memory of him ever building anything, or fixing anything, or caring very much for anything other than perhaps his car. It was my Uncle Jim who took us cousins to Comiskey Park to watch the White Sox games, who took us to the Brookfield Zoo, who took us to Riverview Amusement Park, who started to teach me how to drive, who played ‘catch’ with me. I don’t remember my father taking part in any of these activities or indeed in much of anything that could properly be characterized as an “activity.” By the time I left home in 1959, he reminded me of the farm worker in Robert Frost’s The Death of the Hired Hand:
Poor Silas, . . .
. . . nothing to look backward to with pride,
And nothing to look forward to with hope,
So now and never any different.
He was pretty much a lost soul, trapped with his own thoughts and memories and debilitating dreams, cut off from the rest of the world, including his children.
I attribute his condition mostly to the war, to the Marines, and especially to the searing experiences on Iwo Jima. It is possible of course that he was “a sad sack” before he was drafted, but I don’t think so. I am persuaded mostly by my Aunt Monica’s description of his being in such bad shape when he returned from the war. It’s clear from what she reports that he was not troubled before his time in the Marines. The war changed him. Circumstantial evidence also suggests that he was pretty much a ‘normal guy’ before the war: the fact that he was a churchgoer, that he took pride in his appearance, that he had very good friends who remained his friends after the war and who were very much “normal guys,” and good responsible family men. I knew and liked and admired these friends as I was growing up after the war. Until he was drafted, he had a steady job as a machine operator at the Johnson and Johnson plant on the far west side of Chicago that manufactured Modess sanitary napkins, which in addition to their primary use were used as bandages and compresses for battle injuries. The best circumstantial evidence that he was a normal guy, however, is the fact that my mother knew him and loved him. She was a good judge of character and it’s impossible for me to believe that she would have married him in 1940 if he had been anything like the man he became in 1945. It’s also impossible for me to believe that she would have stayed with him (despite my intense wishing that she would leave him and take us away) through those dark years unless she was somehow sustained by the memory of who he had been before the war and by the hope that that man would someday reemerge from the wreckage he had become.
On the Town Before the Marines
On the other hand . . .
Until I wrote these memoirs I never thought in any focused way about the first years of my parents’ marriage. I knew that they were very young and that they were working class people with little money. I knew they lived in very modest circumstances. I assumed that they were reasonably happy until my father returned from the war. I have come to question that assumption.
Since I started this writing project, I have learned that my father was jealous of my mother, that sexual intimacy was painful for my mother, that my father worked in a war industry and could have, but did not, request a draft deferment, and that my mother wrote to him very seldom while he was away. These perhaps unrelated facts hardly lead inexorably to any conclusion about their marriage, but they support – though inconclusively – a hypothesis that the marriage was strained before my father left for the Marines in early 1944.
The jealousy matter does not come as a total surprise. My mother was pretty, full of life, vivacious and outgoing, with many friends and an openness to new friendships. She sang, she danced, she smiled and laughed easily. People liked her, both men and women, and she generally liked them back. My father, on the other hand, was then, as he is now, shy and unsure of himself in social settings other than the familiar. He came from a family to whom laughter and joyfulness and openness to life did not come easily. If my paternal grandparents had any personal friends other than one neighbor from across the alley, I never saw them or heard them spoken of. It is not surprising that my father had a pinched and rather sour view of life and I suspect that his attraction to my mother was based in large part on the fact that she did not look at life through the same myopic lenses he did. His friends in his adulthood were, with few exceptions, friends from his youth in Englewood: Chubby and Al Hawes, Al Braley, and Don and ‘Toots’ Rashcka. Beer was his lubricant and catalyst for social interactions. His zones of social interaction were family gatherings (i.e., with his parents and sister), get-togethers with the friends from ‘the old neighborhood,’ and familiar taverns. His only good friends not from his childhood were Marty and Marie Rohan, fellow habitués of Andy’s North Pole Tavern. Considering their profoundly different personalities, it is not surprising that that which my father found attractive in my mother before their marriage he found threatening after their marriage, especially after the two years of separation due to his conscription. Jealousy and mature, loving relationships are mutually exclusive which suggests to me that the marriage was challenged from the beginning.
The painful intercourse matter could be a problem in any marriage, of course, but a much bigger problem in a marriage in which the male is young, insecure, and jealous. Painful physical intimacy can lead to feelings of rejection and inadequacy on the part of the male, contributing to the problem of jealousy. Was this the case with my mother and father? I can only guess, but my guess is that it was. My father, like most insecure people, was prone to resentments, i.e., to taking things personally. He had a habit of saying “I resent that” where other people might say “That bugs me” or “I hate that” or “That really pisses me off.” For example, high prices for goods or services he would “resent.” For a long time, I thought he was simply using the term loosely and incorrectly, but on reflection, I think he may have been using the term accurately. He never had much money but this fact was attributable mostly to his own behaviors, e.g., dropping out of high school when he didn’t have to, never getting a GED or further education or training though it was available, and alcoholism, all compounded by the effects of PTSD after the war. The high cost of restaurant meals, for example, for him may have been a reminder of his inability to pay the cost easily which causes him ‘resent’ the prices, to take personally what others would shrug off, perhaps disgustedly or even angrily but not resentfully. With such a husband, having a physical problem that could be interpreted as rejection could also earn one resentment. So could popularity and sociability.
Of the 16,000,000 men who served in the military during World War II, 6,000,000 were volunteers and 10,000,000 were draftees. The draft began in October, 1940, a couple of months after my parents married. The term of service was 12 months, but that changed after the war started. All men between 18 and 45 were eligible for military service, but occupational and hardship deferments were available. Farmers, auto workers, munitions workers and many others whose work was important to the war effort were not drafted. My father’s job at Johnson & Johnson was making sanitary dressings for combat wounds; he was employed in a war industry. He had one small child and, after November 1943, another on the way. When I asked him recently why he didn’t apply for a draft deferment, occupational or hardship or both, he just shrugged. Was his passivity prompted by patriotism or something else? It may have been patriotism, of course; there was of lot of it afoot during the war and there is no reason to think that he was any less patriotic than the next guy. It may have been pride and a fear of being considered a ‘shirker,’ one who failed, as the Irish would have said, to “do his bit” while others were fighting and dying. It also may have been, however, at least in part, a desire to get away, to escape the responsibilities of married life and fatherhood. He had just turned 23 when Kitty was conceived and he was to be the father of two by age 24. Did he want to get away, to live among other young men, with no wife or children about? It certainly would not have been an unusual desire for one who had married and become a parent at so young an age. If he didn’t desire to be drafted, for whatever reason or reasons, why did he not seek an occupational or hardship deferment, like hundreds of thousands of other draft age men? Did he and my mother discuss the possibility of deferment, especially when she became pregnant with Kitty? As it was, when he was drafted, she was left at age 22 with me 2½ years old and Kitty on the way and precious few resources to rely on. Could either patriotism or pride make up for the difficult situation she was in? Was he using the draft as a way to run away from responsibilities, rather like walking away from the responsibilities of high school to make a few bucks as an unskilled worker? If so, each decision represented seizing on a short term solution to an immediate frustration, with long term negative consequences. Though I am only guessing on the basis of very inadequate evidence, and perhaps projecting, my best guess is that that was what was going on between my parents in 1944.
My guess about my father’s draft status is supported by the knowledge, based on my father’s statement to Geri that my mother seldom wrote him during his service. Neither my father nor my mother was a letter writer, but that would not explain long periods of silence from her. She was too responsible and loyal to everybody close to her for her to ignore her husband once he was gone unless perhaps she believed herself to have been abandoned by him, left in the lurch with a toddler and a baby on the way by an immature and selfish husband. Perhaps it is only my loyalty to my mother that causes me to put this ‘spin’ on the scant evidence available to me, but I don’t think so. All of her actions after the war and for the rest of her life demonstrated beyond question what kind of person she was; there was no way she would have ignored her husband after he was drafted unless she believed that he had walked out on her, with the local draft board providing the cover. (Another possibility, of course, is that my father overstates the lack of mail issue but, whatever his faults and weaknesses, I have never known him to be anything other than truthful and I take him at his word.)
If the parting at the beginning of 1944 was beset with troubles, the reunion at the end of 1945 must have been even more so. My parents had been separated almost two years with little communication, my father was suffering from PTSD compounded undoubtedly by anger and resentment about the paucity of letters and further compounded by rampant alcoholism. The man who returned from the war was not the man who left and the family he left was not the family he came home to. At my age, I would have had virtually no memory of him from two years earlier and Kitty at 15 months of age had never seen him. He was a stranger to us and, especially in his condition, undoubtedly an unwelcome intruder into our home and our hitherto uncomplicated relationship with our mother.
Even without the PTSD, his relationship with my mother must have been terribly strained. With the PTSD and the drinking and the living in the basement shoebox, the situation must have been at times nearly intolerable. For him, the insecurity and jealousy problems must have been doubled and redoubled by the lengthy separation and lack of letters. For her, the challenges of raising two little kids with hardly any money were compounded by having an angry, resentful, sullen, withdrawn, beer-benumbed husband to deal with.
His haven was the North Pole Tavern with other drinkers. I don’t know where my mother found a haven, perhaps with our good next door neighbor Ann Semrau. I doubt that she found much succor with the other Clausens, since (1) they were dealing with Monica’s divorce and the need to raise her three small children without help from their father and (2) my father may have poisoned the well, especially with his mother, with complaints about my mother’s not writing. I believe my grandmother had little if any affection for my mother ever. Late in her life, my mother returned from one trip to Florida with my father to visit his parents and told Kitty that she would never return. Grandma Clausen had had too much to drink one day or evening and laid into my mother. It hadn’t been the first time this had happened but my mother was resolved that it would be the last.
While I was writing these reflections, I watched an interview of Larry McMurtry on CBS Sunday Morning. He was discussing his writing the screenplay of Brokeback Mountain. One of his observations seems apt here:
Life is not for sissies. You need strength. Love is not easy. It’s not easy if you find it. It’s not easy if you don’t find it. It’s not easy if you find it but it doesn’t work out. The strong survive, but not everybody is “the strong” and many people don’t.
In another interview of a woman whose identity I can’t recall, she reported being very unhappy about some event or condition in her life. Her mother told her: “Look, daughter, being happy is hard work. Get to it. Shape up!” She was right.
I have mentioned before that I don’t remember any friends visiting us in the basement apartment, other than one visit by my father’s Marine Corps buddy, Theron (Mac) McClain. Not even Chubby Hawes or Al Braley. Other than Grandpa Dennis and Uncle Jim, I don’t remember any family members coming to our home. Not even Grandpa or Grandma Clausen or Aunt Monica. It wouldn’t have been the waterbugs or the hot water pipes or the cramped space that kept people away, but rather the tension within the space, the persistent unhappiness.
At Passover seders, Jews sing a prayer of thanksgiving called Dayenu, a Hebrew expression meaning “it would have been enough.” The dayenu verses relate 15 great blessings God conferred on the Hebrews, after each one acknowledging dayenu, it would have been enough, though yet another blessing followed. “Had he (only) brought us forth from Egypt, and not (also) destroyed their idols Dayenu, it would have been enough for us.” Dayenu can also be used negatively and sarcastically in referring to misfortunes piled on misfortunes. I am reminded of dayenu in writing that Iwo Jima was enough to extinguish joy in my father’s life. It would have been enough. As it turned out, a brutal crime against my mother in 1947 completed the job.
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