17. The War

My father, soon after he enlisted.

Every generation has its war.

For my parents it was World War II. In the early fifties, as I came into consciousness of the world around me, and the fact that history hadn’t started with my own birth, I realized there had been this thing in the past called “the war”. It felt like a living but distant person, or a place, perhaps, that had been known and visited by everyone in the house except me. My father and Uncle Dick had both served, in the army and navy respectively, and both had been involved in serious action. But this was fairly common, in our small town: many young men had gone. Some had come back, and some had not.

In the front parlor was a photograph of Corky, a young man in my mother’s class who had been a particular friend of the family and, I gathered, had had a romantic interest in my mother. He had gone down with his ship in the Pacific. In addition to the photograph, displayed along with the family photos, were a few items on my grandmother’s desk that he had brought or sent from Asia; they felt like icons, or relics which had significance to the adults that I couldn’t quite fathom. Later my grandmother told me that he had left some of his clothes in our house, and that when my mother heard he was dead, she took them all out into the back yard and burned them.

In the early years, my father sometimes had nightmares that would wake me in the next room. He had been a tank driver in the infantry in Europe; he had landed at Normandy the day after D-Day and gone on to fight in the Battle of the Bulge. He said very little about his war experiences, which had been graphic, exhausting, and sustained, and had included long periods of hospitalization. When he came home, like so many other GIs, he just wanted to try to have a normal life. He was the son of the Methodist minister who had recently been posted to that small upstate New York town, and yet he was the opposite of pious and straight-laced: a bright light who rode into my mother’s life, smiling, on a Harley Davidson. I bet he was the most exciting thing she’d seen for a long time, and very handsome too.

The war made him give up any interest he had had in hunting and guns, even though he had been an expert marksman; one day, while he was renovating an attic space into a den, he took his rifle and walled it up in the closet. He did, however, watch war movies when they started to be shown on television. As the nation began to enter into the years of the Cold War and nuclear arms race, I can remember begging him to turn the sound down because the planes and bombing disturbed me so much when I was trying to go to sleep. (Broadcast media and antennas were an ongoing interest of my father’s, so we had early televisions, and experimental antennas in the attic. At night, walking me up and down the hall to try to get me to sleep, he used to show me the parts of the radios and amplifiers he was working on – apparently one of my first words was “tubes.” Later, I used to help sort the parts for his Heathkit projects and hold things in place while he soldered them.)

Everyone we knew had lost someone in World War II, but the war had also defined and changed them. Dad never joined the VFW or participated in veteran’s parades or communities; his uniform was folded and put away in a trunk, and only taken out once or twice that I remember, probably when I asked to see it. I grew up with the sense that he had seen things none of the rest of us had seen, and that part of his sense of self meant protecting his wife and child from that. He had done it, and never spoke of his service as heroic; he said flatly that war was hell, and became less and less interested and supportive of the military as the years went by. His kneecaps had been shattered in an accident and replaced by steel, and glass from the same accident was still working its way out of his face when I was a little girl. I remember when the movie M*A*S*H, about the Korean War, came out, we went to see it in the theater. I was sitting next to my father, and there was a running gag where someone was always saying, “Goddam Army,” and at the end of the movie, when an officer can’t get a jeep to run, he says, “Goddam Army. Goddam Army jeep!” My father muttered, “'Goddam Army' is right.”

But the funny thing was that the most tangible relic of World War II that we had was, in fact, our jeep – a 1952 Willys army surplus jeep. My father loved to drive it – hotrod it – and when there were kids around, a favorite thing was for him to take us on “wingdings” – hair-raising rides around and around the edges of a nearby gravel pit, and then down the back road where there were some big bumps that would lift us right off the seats. Of course none of us had seat belts or any safety equipment at all, and the exhaust fumes came circling up in the back, making us cough and sometimes get sick, but everyone screamed and begged for more, and he was happy to oblige. My mother often went along, good sport that she was, and she would try also try to keep him under control, but their banter was part of the whole experience – Dad pushing the envelope, Mom trying to reign him in. 

We still have the jeep, and Dad uses it for snow-plowing and hauling brush all the time. I love it, but find it very hard to drive – it’s his vehicle. When Dad and I go off on an errand in it together, it feels like old times - we’re both grinning. It’s very low-mileage – a little more than 30,000 miles – and the body was restored, maybe a dozen years ago. He’s planning to do a valve job on it right away - as soon as Charlie, at the garage, gets the new gaskets in.

Comments

[Peter]

What is it with these old Jeeps? Summer before last in Cortland, my sister and I were renting a U-haul and had to wait nearly forever behind a white-haired, ruddy-complected gentleman who had a roofless, rusty and very original-looking Jeep out front. The vehicle, however, had been provided with very rudimentary-looking seatbelts. I didn't dare ask him about it, because we were already late.

I saw a B-17 of the type my father flew this summer. I realize it's a generational thing, but I was still astonished by how low-tech everything looked. Then again, I suppose my own tools will amuse my daughter by their own simplicity ...

P.

[beth]

Probably. I wonder. Yes, I like the jeep for its no-frills qualities; it has just what it needs to do its job, and nothing more - especially nothing cosmetic. kind of like the Canadian health care system!

[butuki]

So much good writing you have posted since I last visited, and now I don't have time to read it all, let alone comment! Very, very frustrating...

It's interesting how recently a lot of people are gong back and looking at their relationships to war and how it has affected their lives. The interesting thing is that there seems to be more connecting going on between WWII and the Iraq War than between the Viet Nam War and Iraq. I wonder if there is a yearning for the supposed dignity that Americans felt at winning their version of a "just" war, whereas comparing Viet Nam and Iraq calls up too much cynicism?

My own relationship with war began with both my mother's German parents and my mother herself, having survived the bombings of their city (including my mother's best friend living in the apartment next door killed when the building was destroyed), the American and French prison camps, attempts to save and protect Jewish friends, a Nazi in the family (who is still looked at askance 60 years later), and the aftermath of scorn, hate, derision, and bullying from people around the world, wherever they traveled. Then there was the other side of my family, my Filipino/ African American father, whose Filipino father served in the U.S. Navy in the Pacific, during the campaign against Japan, while his mother was a nurse in the Army. The strange thing about this side of the relationships was that Filipinos still vividly remembered being subjected to American colonialism and feelings toward fighting another Asian neighbor was ambiguous, especially because the image of Japan was not that of American propaganda. Many saw the American and British claims to be freeing Asia from Japanese imperialists as the height of hypocrasy. In the Navy, because he was originally Filipino, my grandfather was not allowed to fight as a sailor, even though he had American citizenship. Instead he was relegated to being a cook.

All sides of the family saw their home countries destroyed, on the German side most of the sons never returned. The movies of the war that were shown around the world later always portrayed both the Germans and Filipinos as either evil or ignorant. My German great aunt, who lost her entire family both to the battles and to the bombings, braved the reactions she knew she would get in the States only 15 years after the war ended, to go live with my family and take care of my brother and me, in a land that she never felt comfortable in and where people would call her "Nazi" on the street (she eventually couldn't take it any more and returned to Germany, never to leave the country again). The war left deep scars in my family's sense of identity, much of what is still being pieced back together all these years later, including my own attempt to define myself without having to resort to the strong shades of patriotism that colored the world around all the members of my family, who all lived outside the definition of boundaries and borders.

[bitterroot]

I am so enjoying this chronicle of your family. So many of your themes resonate with my own life and times! The family's connection to the land is particularly striking, and very familiar to me. That sense of place, inscribed on the soul, creates a bond among family members that can be sustained for generations.

[Dave]

Still reading and enjoying this series very much. Oddly enough, there are no veterans in my family on either side. I think my Pop-pop always felt a little guilty for not having served in WWII, but he was an engineer at Mobil by then so of course he served U.S. "strategic interests" in another way. After he made his fortune, he always donated heavily to wounded veterans' groups.

[Jean]

[The war]"felt like a living but distant person, or a place, perhaps, that had been known and visited by everyone in the house except me": that perfectly describes my childhood memory too.

[beth]

Thanks for telling me that, Jean - I've really wondered if that was my experience only, or a common thing. My sense, from spending time in Britain, is that WWII continued in the national consciousness much longer than in America - understandably - but still, so many Americans served.