War's trauma remembered

The Boston Herald
November 22, 1991

I wasn't there. I hadn't been born. I don't remember.

And yet I do have memories pieced from stories I was told and stories overheard, and television and movies and books.

A photograph of a uniformed boy hung on a parlor wall, but the memory is fuzzy, the boy's face unclear. Army? Navy? Air Force? In which did he serve? I don't know. I was five, maybe six. I don't remember the boy's name; I couldn't pick him out of a crowd. But I know he was a boy, not a man.

He died in the war, my mother said. "Don't ask about him," she warned, the day she took me with her to visit the boy's mother. "It upsets her to talk about him. He was her only child."

I was my mother's only child; I looked at the picture and felt connected to this boy.

Most Sunday afternoons, while my father worked, my mother and I watched old movies. War movies were my favorite: "The Pride of the Marines," "Since You Went Away," "Mrs. Miniver," "The Fighting Sullivans."

"Did your friend have a star in her window?" I asked my mother.

She did, my mother said.

"Who told her her son died?

"She got a telegram."

"Did Dad fight in the war, too?"

"Yes," she said.

"Did you know him then?"

"I knew him but he didn't know me."

When he came home I would pester him to tell me about the war, to tell me what he saw and where he went.

"There's nothing to tell," he would say.

Finally, my mother told me to stop asking him questions. "He doesn't want to discuss it," she said. "Don't bother him anymore."

I found letters and poems he'd written from Italy and France, buried in a bureau drawer, and I thought he would talk then; but he took the letters and remained silent.

Only once did he talk. I asked him what shell-shocked meant and he said, "Why do you want to know?"

I'd seen a man at Dunkin Donuts, drinking coffee and smoking, I told him. He had dark, wavy hair, and was tall and handsome. But his hand shook and his head did a little, too; and when he lifted his cup, his coffee spilled all over him. My friend, Maureen, said he was shell-shocked. What does that mean?

"People see things in war they should never see," my father explained. "Some people, even when the war is over, still see these things. They play like a movie in the mind."

"Do you ever see bad things?" I asked. He didn't answer. But I got the feeling that sometimes he did.

Now I know the truth. Book truths: Bloodless, soundless, sanitized descriptions of war. Movie truths: Five years condensed into two hours. Simple truths: Of the 20 boys/men in my father's unit, only three survived.

Fifty years later, Newsweek is "Remembering Pearl Harbor." The writing is rich, vivid, heightened by memory, real and imagined. The timing is ripe; the anniversary looms.

But the story is the same: No matter how many times it's written or reenacted, it doesn't change. The old black and white photographs tell the deadly tale they've always told, and are still blurred, as if shot through tears.

The only thing that's different, that makes this story "news" are the color inserts of the soldiers, old men now, all retired and reflective.

One, Zenjie Abe, 75, is seated at a table, a large poster dated Dec. 7 in front of him. He wears a tan golf shirt, a blue-and-tan flowered sweater, wire-rimmed glasses and a serious expression. He looks like a grandfather.

Fifty years ago, Zenjie Abe was a dive-bomber who flew in the attack against Pearl Harbor. A 250-kilogram bomb which he dropped from his plane scored a direct hit on the USS Arizona, and 1,103 men died on that ship. Their bodies were never recovered; they are part of the sea.

All the soldiers are old men now. All the mothers who lost sons are gone. My mother's friend, whose only child died at age 19, never listened to music after her son's death, never danced, never laughed again. The 17 men in my father's unit, never got home, never grew old.

Multiply this by thousands, ten of thousands. Factor in lost arms and legs and minds. Add in the destruction of cities and homes and land.

Fifty years later, the cities have been rebuilt; new homes have replaced the old and the land is no longer scarred; And yet the human scars remain. Though thin and sheer and almost invisible, they still exist. And like the deepest of wounds, when probed, they still throb.