Wednesday, February 8, 2023
In bed around 11:20, awake at 5:45, up at 6, perseverating on John Prine's Sam Stone lyrics 'There's a hole in Daddy's arm where all the money goes, Jesus Christ died for nothing I suppose. 26 degrees under clear skies, Cloudy day ahead, winds 2 to 8 mph with gusts up to 13 mph, producing wind chills between 20 and 36 degrees. Sunrise at 6:59, sunset at 5:13, 10+14.
Sam Stone, Chuck Clausen, The Best Years of Our Lives. Sam Stone returned from Vietnam "with a Purple Heart and a monkey on his back." My Dad returned from the Marines and Iwo Jima a 25-year-old morose, depressed, anxious alcoholic. Sam and my Dad both had children they neglected as they fed their addictions to ease their PTSD. Neither could hold a job for long. Sam lost his home bought on the GI Bill; my Dad had his family live in a roach-infested, 1 bedroom apartment in a basement. Each of them was like the character played by Dana Andrews in William Wyler's 1946 movie about vets returning home after WWII. The movie reminds me of my Dad of course as did, in a very different way, the movie I Never Sang For My Father. I spent much of my life trying to understand my father, perhaps trying to please him, following him into the Marine Corps despite his heartfelt letter to me asking me to stay in the Navy, to stay away from the Marines. His service ribbons were for Iwo Jima mine for Vietnam. Unlike many former Marines, he had no love whatsoever for the Marines. He took no pride in his service and tried for most of his life to forget what he experienced during 'the good war' and on Iwo Jima, nevertheless haunted by bad dreams at night. After my mother died at 51, he and I went 13 years without sharing a word, a thought, a letter or a phone call. He was 75 and I was 55 before we established a relationship. One day, talking at his kitchen table in Florida, he told me the Marines did not want to discharge him in November 1945. He didn't elaborate, but it was clear he was not fit to return to civilian life. I didn't think to ask but I suspect he was a patient at the huge Naval Hospital at Great Lakes, his last stop before returning to our basement apartment 35 miles south. But the war had been over for 3 months, the military was radically downsizing, and my Dad was insistent that he wanted out. My 23-year-old mother, my 1-year-old sister Kitty, and I at age 4 were left to deal with the emotional and spiritual wreckage the war had made of him. Despite Abraham Lincoln's pledge in his Second Inaugural Address "to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan," the government provided no help whatsoever. We were on our own. For some reason, I am thinking of the little speech given when a Marine veteran dies and a folded flag is presented to his next-of-kin: "'On behalf of the President of the United States, the United States Marine Corps, and a grateful Nation, please accept this flag as a symbol of our appreciation for your loved one's honorable and faithful service." I'll stop here because I'm full of thoughts but at a loss for words. . . The things an old man thinks of at sun-up.
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