The War and the Marines

 The War and the Marines

My earliest memory is of an impromptu parade on Emerald Avenue of wagons, bicycles, and tricycles decorated with red, white and blue crepe paper bunting.  The occasion was VJ Day, August 14, 1945, the end of the war with Japan and of World War II.  Children of servicemen, including me, were paraded down the street in the wagons, bikes and tricycles.  Kitty was approaching her first birthday and was probably in our mother’s arms.  I was about to turn 4.  It is surprising that I remember that parade, but I do.

My next memory is of my father being home from the war.  It was November of 1945 or shortly thereafter but, again, I remember it to this day.  I was sitting on the floor in the living room, my knees pulled up to my chest, with my coat on, leaning against the wall between the kitchen and the entryway to the bathroom/closet space and my father was shouting at me.  I was supposed to have been watching Kitty, but I fell down on the job and he was angry.  Now, almost 60 years later, I pause as I write this because the memory of his anger and of the fear I felt then is still vivid.  He scared me. [As will become clear later, in the chapter relating the crime against my mother, I have come to believe that my memory that this incident occurred shortly after my father’s return from the war is mistaken.  It more likely occurred on October 1, 1947.]

My father returned from World War II badly wounded, in some respects permanently wounded.  He had no visible scars or deformities, but it is clear to me now that he had received a near-mortal wound to his spirit in the war.  He rarely spoke of the war, and never did to Kitty and me until the last few years, when he and I became closer.  He told me a few years ago, when he was 81 or 82, that it took him 25 years to “get over Iwo Jima.”  I think he was being too optimistic, since I know he suffered from frequent nightmares into his 80’s and stopped having nightmares only when, at 83, he came to live with Kitty and Jim in Phoenix and with Geri and me in Wisconsin.  I don’t think he is “over Iwo Jima” to this day.  He still sleeps with a radio on all night tuned to an all talk station.  It helps him avoid the bad dreams.

When he returned from the war, he started working again at the Johnson & Johnson plant in Clearing, west of Englewood.  I believe he held that job until a vicious crime against my mother in 1947 brought all in our family to a low place.  Thereafter, my Dad moved from one short-term unskilled job to another never lasting long at any of them.  He stopped at Andy’s “North Pole” tavern on the northeast corner of 73rd and Halsted each night for beer and brought two quarts of Drewry’s or Meister Brau home with him.  He wanted no noise in the apartment when he was home.  “A little peace and quiet” was his standard request; “Pipe down” was his standard demand.  I was afraid of him when he drank too much, which was not very often, and when he was angry or upset or brooding, which was often.  It didn’t take much to upset him.   Avoiding noise in living quarters that tight was no small challenge for two little kids.  My solution was to keep quiet around him and to bury my nose in books.  Thus, in truth, my lifelong reading habit started out not so much from a love of learning but as a defensive coping mechanism.  Indeed, I can’t escape the judgment that much of my way of dealing – or of not dealing – with life was profoundly influenced by my growing up in close quarters with an alcoholic father who very clearly suffered from what was then known as combat or battle fatigue and what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder.  

My father had all of the classic symptoms of combat-related stress disease: nightmares, difficulty sleeping, unwanted distressing memories and thoughts, anxiety, irritability, anger, emotional numbing, loss of interest in activities and people, and alcohol abuse.  On a larger scale, he suffered from the loss of any joy in living, of enthusiasm, of faith and hope.  Psychologists may refer to the condition as anhedonia; theologians call it despair. Throughout my childhood and Kitty’s, our father was distant, demanding, unaffectionate and unsupportive, a profoundly unhappy man.

A United States Department of Veterans Affairs staff psychiatrist named Jonathan Shay wrote a book entitled Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming.   He wrote:

Everyone knows that war can wreck the body, but repeatedly forgets that it can wreck the soul as well.  The sacrifice that citizens make when they serve in their country’s military is not simply the risk of death, dismemberment, disfigurement, and paralysis – as terrible as these realities are.  They risk their peace of mind – please, hear this familiar phrase, “peace of mind,” fresh again in all its richness!  They risk losing their capacity to participate in democratic process.  They risk losing the sense that human virtues are still possible.  These are psychological and moral injuries – war wounds – that are no less of a sacrifice than the sacrifice of the armless, or legless, or sightless veteran.

Bertolt Brecht expressed this loss of belief that ‘human virtues are still possible’ in a short poem titled “To Those Born Later”:

Truly I live in dark times!

The innocent word is folly.

The unlined forehead

Suggests insensitivity.

The man who laughs

Just hasn’t heard

The terrible news.

Like every other deeply traumatized combat veteran, my father returned from the war as a man with neither the capacity for laughter in himself nor a tolerance for laughter in others.  Having been a participant in the slaughter of thousands and having witnessed unspeakable suffering, he lost on Iwo Jima all joy in living.  I don’t believe that he has ever fully recovered it.  For much of his life after Iwo Jima, life became something to be endured, not something to enjoy.

Our family had the ‘normal’ reactions to his ‘abnormal’ disease.  Because of his inability to be emotionally close to us, we were cut off from him.  Because he was so emotionally distant, so often irritable and uncommunicative, it was hard to communicate with him and otherwise to relate to him.  We couldn’t help him and he couldn’t help us. In such circumstances, it doesn’t take long (at least it didn’t for me), for family members to feel unloved, unwanted, unappreciated, unworthy, hurt and fearful. In a very real sense, just as happiness is infectious, unhappiness is a communicable dis-ease.  It affects and infects those within its noxious range.  Because my father was so profoundly unhappy, we were very often and in very large measur    e an unhappy family, crowded together in that shoebox of an apartment.  

How did he get that way?  What happened to him and then to us?  How did the tall, slender, tuxedoed, good looking 20 year old standing next to his beautiful young bride in their 1940 wedding portrait turn into such a withdrawn unhappy man?   What happened, more than anything else, was the battle of Iwo Jima in early 1945 and a brutal crime against my mother (and against Kitty and me) in 1947.