1776 Continental Congress proclaimed independence from Great Britain
1826 Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both died on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence
1855 In Brooklyn, the first edition of Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" was published
1944 1st Japanese kamikaze attack on the US fleet near Iwo Jima
1966 LBJ signed the Freedom of Information Act
2012 Scientists at CERN's Large Hadron Collider announced the discovery of a new particle consistent with the Higgs boson, the so-called 'God particle
Come Up from the Fields Father
A great poem by a great poet. I suspect that those with the deepest appreciation for this poem are those who have lost a son, brother, or husband or lover in war, and those who have had the duty of notifying them in person of their loss.
The Fourth of July, the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air, and patriotism. Today is my 84th Fourth of July. The first 18 were spent in Chicago, listening to firecrackers and watching chintzy neighborhood fireworks. My 19th was spent in New York City, aboard the USS Coney (DDE 508), as part of NYC's annual big Fourth of July bash involving Fleet Day. I went to the observation site atop the World Trade Center during that visit. My 20th was spent at the Naval Amphibious Base, Little Creek, VA, where I decided to forfeit a Navy commission and to become a Marine. My 21st was spent at T&T Regt., Marine Corps Base, Quantico, VA, where I learned that I could endure more pain and inflict more pain on myself than I had thought possible. #22 was also spent at MCB Quantico, at The Basic School, as a newly commissioned 2nd lieutenant and a newlywed. We lived on Route 1, Stafford Courthouse, VA, on U.S. 1, where, in August 1963, we watched thousands of cars, trucks, and buses heading up to Washington for Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The next Fourth of July we were living in Yuma, AZ, and I was stationed at the Marine Corps Air Station then outside the city, now adjoining the much-expanded city. My 24th Fourth was spent on the semi-deserted Marine Corps Air Station at Iwakuni, Japan, awaiting space-available air travel to Vietnam. My 25th was spent near the birthplace of the Declaration of Independence, in Doylestown, Bucks County, PA, north of Philadelphia, where, on every 6th day, I had the duty of notifying the next-of-kin of Marines like Whitman's 'dear son, Pete.' Every Fourth of July since then, I have spent in and near Milwaukee.
18 in Chicago, 3 as a midshipman while on active duty somewhere, 4 as a Marine officer somewhere, and 59 in Milwaukee.
I've tried - unsuccessfully - to recall how I felt about this huge patriotic holiday during these very different periods of my life. I've wondered particularly about my feelings of "patriotism", and about what that term comprehends. Patriotism is assumed to be a great value, some sort of feeling or dedication that we all should share, but it is also used to disguise an indefensible nationalism: "Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." — George Bernard Shaw. "Patriotism is an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles." — George Jean Nathan. "Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind." — Albert Einstein.
The older I've gotten, the more I've read and learned, the more I've seen the American government at work, the more I seen of our nation's militarism, imperialism, and belief in its own exceptionalism, the less I fall for the ubiquitous hoopla that accompanies our Fourth of July celebrations. This particular celebration is particularly galling. On the national level, it is called FREEDOM 250. If one goes to the White House web page, about the celebration, one is greeted with "Welcome to the Golden Age!" with an invitation to sign up for Trump's political newsletter. Trump has taken over the occasion, just as the right wing in America has appropriated the symbols of the nation for its own purposes, especially the American flag. We are at an undeclared war with Iran, and triggered its war on Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, and the world economy. Our military is still murdering people in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific, in contravention of international law. We've appropriated Venezuela's entire oil industry and are threatening Cuba with starvation, if not invasion. We are betraying our long-time traditional allies, friends, and trading partners in Europe, with punishing tariffs and de facto repudiation of Article 5 of the NATO treaty, hurting most especially Ukraine. It's increasingly a struggle to find a reason to wave our flag and shout USA! USA! USA!
. . . she realized with a start that not only could she not imagine Felix on a cargo ship; she couldn't imagine him, period. She'd lost a sense of him. She'd been eighteen when they'd met, had been married for five years when he left, and had been living without him for two and a half years. She knew what he looked like, of course; there were photos of him on the mantel and in her wallet, but what was it like to be in the same room with him? His voice was gone from her ear . . .
The story reminds me inescapably of my mother and father, the days after he returned from the War, and my speculation about their life when and after he was drafted and assigned by chance - eeny, meeny, miney, moe - to the Marine Corps. From my memoir:
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. It was a short trip from North Chicago to 7303 S. Emerald Avenue.
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.” . . . . .
[I omit language opining that my Dad was a normal guy before the war, that my mother loved him, and that his changed personality after the War was attributable to his PTSD.]
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 badly 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, whence the jealousy. 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 was 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 is 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, 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 a liar 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 no substantial 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.
Reading this novel has made me think again, as I so often have, of my Mom and Dad during the war years, and the terrible years after the war. One can have little doubt that Felix Salt joined the Navy during the war, in part at least, to get away from his torturous relationship with his beautiful and lusty wife, Margaret. My Dad did not decline a draft deferment for the same reason Felix volunteered, but I have a pretty strong suspicion that he found some relief in getting away from the responsibilities of marriage and parenthood when he got his draft notice.
Dad, upper right, with Marine buddies, maybe Camp Pendleton or Hawaii, before Iwo Jima
