Tuesday, February 3, 2026
1931 Arkansas legislature passed a motion to pray for the soul of journalist H. L. Mencken after he called the state the "apex of moronia"
1959 Plane crash known as "The Day the Music Died" killed musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, J. P. Richardson (aka The Big Bopper), and the pilot near Clear Lake, Iowa
1994 President Bill Clinton lifted the US trade embargo against Vietnam
2025 El Salvador offered to jail ‘American criminals,’ including U.S. citizens. Marco Rubio said 'the U.S. was grateful for the offer
In bed at 10, up at 7. 14/7/23/11
Morning meds at 11 a.m.
What a strange coincidence. Yesterday, I chatted with Larry Anderson for half an hour or so during which we discussed, among much other stuff, my Dad's Marine service on Iwo Jima in 1945. Afterwards, I sent him the chapters of the memoir dealing with those experiences. Last year, on this date, I had the following email exchange with him:
LOA: Robert Bly?
CDC: If I recall correctly, you were an English major at UWM, one of those increasingly disparaged, "useless" majors (like history) that aren't specifically designed to prepare college students for a trade or profession, like accounting or computer science. If so, uou may be more accepting of one of what Geri thinks of as my "eccentricities," i.e., I like poetry.and classic literature. I don't like most of the poetry I come upon, which is simply incomprehesible to me, but I have some that move me deeply like Walt Whitman's "Come Up From the Fields, Father" about a mother's grief over the death of her soldier son, and Yeats' "Vacillation", only the 4th and 5 stanzas. Now that I am an old man, all that seems to have stayed with me from my college education is my enjoyment of literature that I picked up in my English classes in Marquette's Liberal Arts college. In any case, I came across Robert Bly's poem about the dream of a telephone call from his dead father in my paperback anthology of poems edited by Garrison Keillor, "Good Poems." It grabbed me because of its suggestion of a troubled relationship between the poet and his father and ambivalent feelings toward his father: "Why did it take us so long to get going. Perhaps he left us somewhere once, or did I simply forget that he was alone in winter in some town."
I think you know my Dad was one of the 70,000 Marines who fought on Iwo Jima 80 years ago this month. He was a radioman He came back to my mother, my little sister, and me quite thoroughly fucked up from the experience. He never talked about it until he was in his 80s and I was in my mid-60s, and then only sparingly. Growing up with him and his PTSD was a miserable experience for my sister and me. I had a strained relationship with him most of my life. There was a period of 13 years in which we never spoke, never wrote, never communicated at all and it was only when we were both old men that we developed a healthy relationship and real friendship and even then, he held onto what seemed to be his life's motto: 'The less said the better.' In any event, it was with that personal background that I read Robert Bly's "When My Dead Father Called."
The last few years of my Dad's life, he lived with Geri and me during the warmer half of the year and with my sister Kitty in Phoenix during the colder half. My children didn't know him. All they knew of him was that my former spouse Anne told them he was "a crabby old man," which was what she knew of him. I wrote a long memoir for my children that contains a lot about my childhood with him, about Marine training, Iwo Jima, and PTSD. Quite a bit of research went into the memoir. I have the chapters on my computer in digital form and, if you're interested, I can email you the chapters on his time in the Marines and the effect it had on him. They would explain why I was so moved by the conclusion of Bly's little poem: "Perhaps he left us somewhere once, or did I simply forget that he was alone in winter in some town."
I'm still deeply moved by Robert Bly's poem, and by Whitman's "Come Up From the Fields, Father," and by Yeats' "Vacillation," and, not surprisingly, they are all related to my experiences with my parents. My Mom's been dead almost 53 years now, and Dad 19 years, yet they fill my old age with memories and feelings, both of gratitude and of regret.
When My Dead Father Called
Last night I dreamt my father called to us.
He was stuck somewhere. It took us
A long time to dress, I don't know why.
The night was snowy; there were long black roads.
Finally we reached the little town, Bellingham.
There he stood, by a streetlamp in cold wind,
Snow blowing along the sidewalk. I noticed
The uneven sort of shoes that men wore
In the early Forties. And overalls. He was smoking.
Why did it take us so long to get going? Perhaps
He left us somewhere once, or did I simply
Forget he was alone in winter in some town?
Vacillation
My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.
. . .
Although the summer Sunlight gild
Cloudy leafage of the sky,
Or wintry moonlight sink the field
In storm-scattered intricacy,
I cannot look thereon,
Responsibility so weighs me down.
Things said or done long years ago,
Or things I did not do or say
But thought that I might say or do,
Weigh me down, and not a day
But something is recalled,
My conscience or my vanity appalled.
Come Up from the Fields Father
Come up from the fields father, here’s a letter from our Pete,
And come to the front door mother, here’s a letter from thy dear son.
Lo, ’tis autumn,
Lo, where the trees, deeper green, yellower and redder,
Cool and sweeten Ohio’s villages with leaves fluttering in the moderate wind,
Where apples ripe in the orchards hang and grapes on the trellis’d vines,
(Smell you the smell of the grapes on the vines?
Smell you the buckwheat where the bees were lately buzzing?)
Above all, lo, the sky so calm, so transparent after the rain, and with wondrous clouds,
Below too, all calm, all vital and beautiful, and the farm prospers well.
Down in the fields all prospers well,
But now from the fields come father, come at the daughter’s call,
And come to the entry mother, to the front door come right away.
Fast as she can she hurries, something ominous, her steps trembling,
She does not tarry to smooth her hair nor adjust her cap.
Open the envelope quickly,
O this is not our son’s writing, yet his name is sign’d,
O a strange hand writes for our dear son, O stricken mother’s soul!
All swims before her eyes, flashes with black, she catches the main words only,
Sentences broken, gunshot wound in the breast, cavalry skirmish, taken to hospital,
At present low, but will soon be better.
Ah now the single figure to me,
Amid all teeming and wealthy Ohio with all its cities and farms,
Sickly white in the face and dull in the head, very faint,
By the jamb of a door leans.
Grieve not so, dear mother, (the just-grown daughter speaks through her sobs,
The little sisters huddle around speechless and dismay’d,)
See, dearest mother, the letter says Pete will soon be better.
Alas poor boy, he will never be better, (nor may-be needs to be better, that brave and simple soul,)
While they stand at home at the door he is dead already,
The only son is dead.
But the mother needs to be better,
She with thin form presently drest in black,
By day her meals untouch’d, then at night fitfully sleeping, often waking,
In the midnight waking, weeping, longing with one deep longing,
O that she might withdraw unnoticed, silent from life escape and withdraw,
To follow, to seek, to be with her dear dead son.
Whitman's great poem always reminds me of what my dear sister told me during one of our daily, early-morning chats in our 70s. When she and my mother came home from work one day to the apartment building where they lived, my mother opened her mailbox and saw that I had written from Iwakuni to tell the family that my squadron had been deployed to Vietnam and that I would soon follow. She had opened and read the letter in the vestibule where the mailbox was, not even waiting to take the letter upstairs to her apartment. And she wept. She wept because her son, her firstborn, her comfort and joy during the years of WWII, was going off to his war just as her husband had 21 years before. And she must have feared that I might come back from my war, if at all, as shattered as my Dad was when he came back from his. That was 60 years ago and I still picture her, standing next to the mailboxes, crying, my little sister holding her and comforting her, but dealing with her own fears. It reminds me, of course, of the millions of mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, who are the uncounted casualties of all our wars, including the few I was destined to meet as a Casualty Assistance Calls Officer on the north side of Philadelphia in 1966-67.
My worst job, however, – the worst job I have ever had – came every 6 days when I was the Marine Corps’ Casualty Assistance Call Officer for the north side of Philadelphia and the northern suburbs. When a Marine was killed or seriously injured while on active duty, whether combat-related or not, an officer and a senior staff NCO delivered the news personally to the next-of-kin, almost always the wife or the parents. The information about the death or injury came into the Marine detachment at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. If the family member to be notified lived north of Market Street, one of the teams in my rotation got the call to tell the family. My team was myself and a staff sergeant who worked for me, a fellow named Schmidt from Antigo, Wisconsin. The call would first go to Pete Powell, our admin officer, who would call me or the other officer on CACO duty. I would call SSgt. Schmidt and pick him up at his home and we would drive, usually silently, to the home. Each of us knew that if the circumstances were a bit different, it could be his wife or parents receiving the Marine at the door. As soon as the person visited opened the door, or saw us approach, he, or usually she, knew why we were there. If the Marine was not dead, I would have to get that information out immediately. If I wasn’t yelling “he’s all right” or “he’s alive and being cared for” or some such statement, I didn’t have to tell the wife or mom that the Marine was dead. She knew it from my uninvited and dreaded presence in her doorway. If we didn’t have information already about church membership, I would stay with the family while SSgt. Schmidt went to get a priest or minister or at least a friend or neighbor who could stay with the bereaved after we had left. Such misery! Such suffering! How awful those encounters, how awful still the memories of them.
It was the memories of the mothers and wives that were with me as I watched George H. W. Bush gushing over the Gulf War in 1991. “The specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian peninsula. . . It’s a proud day for America – and, by God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.” Those memories remain with me as I watch “H. W.’s” idiot son “W” and his band of neocon chickenhawks prove Daddy wrong in the desert sands of Mesopotamia. Bush and Cheney and Paul Wolfewitz and Richard Perle and almost all of their legion of neocon supporters never stood in a doorway in front of a shrieking, terror-stricken mother learning that her son is dead, never spoke with a young wife about the return of her husband’s body and the need for funeral arrangements. While others were making these casualty calls in north Philadelphia and all across America, George W. Bush was getting inducted into Skull and Bones and enjoying his last year at Yale under his student deferment while Richard Bruce Cheney was on his fourth or fifth deferment, working in Madison for Governor Warren Knowles while working on a Ph.D. at the UW. Richard Perle was working on his master’s degree at Princeton after attending the London School of Economics while Paul Wolfowitz was doing graduate work at the University of Chicago after graduating from Cornell. These men were all privileged. They were not the type to get their asses shot off in a messy war in Asia. They were not the type to let military service alter the trajectory of their privileged lives. Like the vice-chickenhawk-in-chief Cheney, they “had other priorities in the 60s than military service.” Very few of the Marines and soldiers and airmen and sailors who did serve came from such backgrounds. They came from backgrounds much like mine: blue collar, the so-called ‘working class.’ They did not have estates in Kennebunkport. Their homes were apartments and modest frame houses on small lots. Their list of educational attainments usually stopped at high school, boot camp and infantry training. These were the men the United States sent to kill and be killed, not the likes of Bush and Cheney, Wolfewitz and Perle. And it was the wives and children, the parents and siblings of such men who would live with the consequences of their service. For them, it wasn’t “the specter of Vietnam” that was “buried forever,” it was their son, their husband, their father, their brother. For them, the “Vietnam syndrome” has never ended, any more than World War II “syndrome” or the Korea “syndrome“ has ended for those who suffered the deepest losses.
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