The Souvenir (5 page)

I wanted to ask my father about the flag, about Yoshio Shimizu. Norman Steinman didn't know his enemy had a name. And, I was pretty sure, he wouldn't have wanted to know.

A
MONG THE MEMENTOS
I found with my father's letters was a wallet-size membership card in something called the Domain of Neptunus Rex.

The card reads:

After a week at sea en route to New Zealand, my father noted, “Today we crossed the Equator and we had a Father Neptune party on the deck and it was really good.” I imagined a scene of levity: a GI with a long white beard dressed in fishnet stockings parading around the deck of the transport ship with a trident, while thirty or forty seasick doggies—that's what they called themselves (doggie for dog-faced, expressionless)—hooted and hollered despite their discomfort.

After months of training in Tyler, Texas, the GIs were finally on their way to “the real thing,” to the war itself. The satiric Neptune ritual, that shipboard frivolity, was a sanctioned way to release the tension of a long journey. But the vaudeville that celebrated the first crossing into a lower latitude masked a more somber initiation. The “membership card” was supposed to mark the end of life as these soldiers knew it; certainly life as my father had known it. Combat would actually effect the most profound transformation in these men's lives. Combat would initiate them into a fraternity of men both ancient and silent; the fraternity of men who have faced death—who have killed or been killed in war.

About male initiation rituals, the scholar Mircea Eliade writes, “When the boy comes back from the forest … he will be another; he will no longer be the child he was. He will have undergone a series of initiatory ordeals which compel him to confront fear, suffering and torture, but which compel him above all to assume a new mode of being.” In my father's letters, as well as evidence of change, I would find evidence of who he was before the war changed him.

The soldiers threw scraps of food from their King Neptune celebration over the railing to the dolphins and gulls. The other creatures of the deep—the whales, the sharks, the sponges, the rays, the blowfish—scarcely noticed the big boat carrying soldiers to war, casting a temporary shadow on their realm.

I
N THE FALL
of 1992, a little more than a year after my parents' deaths, I quit the day job I'd had for five years and headed north for a month to a writers' colony at Fort Worden State Park outside the town of Port Townsend, Washington, on the Olympic Peninsula. With me were my husband, my dog, and my father's letters.

I wanted to try to understand the connection between my father's silence about the war and our family's home life. I wanted to understand the ordeals that compelled Norman Steinman to assume a new mode of being.

I figured if I could just lock myself in a cabin with all those letters, I might unravel the narrative of those war years and comprehend some truth about the man, his experience, his pain. I wanted to know
how
the war changed him.

We arrived at Fort Worden late at night and followed the map to our assigned domicile. I'd imagined our living quarters would be one of the fine Victorian officer's houses on the main quad, like the ones in
An Officer and a Gentleman
, which had been filmed here. But cottage #255, originally intended for an enlisted man and his family, was a simple wooden bungalow. Three bare little rooms, a woodstove, some dilapidated furniture.

The next morning Lloyd and I set up my computer in the little office that faced south into the woods, and brought in extra tables to make a modest studio for him in the dining room. Lloyd, a sculptor, would use this time to paint.

I pinned on the wall a large 1945 map of the Philippines I'd found among my father's letters. The principal battles I marked in red: Balete Pass, Luzon, Leyte Gulf, Corregidor. The names of battles were actual physical places. My father had written about some young soldier from Texas named Melvin Smith who was killed in some place called Umingan. Where was Umingan? I located a speck on the map.

I pulled the crumbling rubber band off a clump of letters, opening
the now-fragile, yellowing envelopes and V-mails. The creases in the thin paper were well worn.

My mother, until now the only reader of this correspondence, had bundled the letters by month; she'd numbered each letter in sequence—from one to four hundred and seventy-four. I arranged the months within the proper year, and separated the years into different boxes. I established a daily practice of logging the letters, then reading and transcribing them. By typing his words—passing them through my sight into my hands and onto my computer—I began to absorb them.

I noticed how his handwriting varied depending on the time of day (at mealtimes, in between skirmishes), his location (on a bunk, in a hammock, in a foxhole), the quality of illumination (flashlight, candlelight, electric bulb), his writing instrument (fountain pen or pencil), his level of exhaustion and discomfort. What would take longer to grasp was how his own experience fit within the chronology of the Pacific War campaign.

The letters could be divided into four main periods: stateside training (1943, at Camp Fannin in Tyler, Texas); more training overseas (1944, in New Zealand and New Caledonia); combat and its aftermath (most of 1945, in northern Luzon in the Philippines); and the United States Army occupation of Japan (October to December, 1945, on a navy ship and in garrison near Nagoya).

I'd set a goal for a given day, say, transcribe all the letters from December 1944, or half of the letters from January 1945. But once I'd begun, it was difficult to stop. My order would break down and I'd pull letters to read at random out of the boxes. What was February 12, 1944, like? What was happening the second half of June 1945? I'd start in the morning and then look up amazed to see the dusky northwest sky streaked with purple and red.

Knowing that his wife would read what he wrote both consoled my father and gave him the ability to observe what was happening
around him more objectively. He also knew to temper his descriptions with reassurance. Her letters to him were a lifeline; in those gaps of time when he was unable to receive them, he suffered. They were constant reminders of a life worth living, a family to come home to, the ongoing daily saga of her life in Brooklyn—these were precious talismans. The constancy of their correspondence was unusual.

Even in the stressful period of preparing and waiting to go into combat, he continued to write home.

There were periods of weeks, especially later during combat in Luzon, when the mail could not be taken out or brought in to the troops over the rugged mountain trails surrounded by the enemy. During those times, my mother had no way of knowing whether her husband had been wounded or was still alive. Her nerves were on edge, her imagination primed for disaster.

Though subject to army censors, his letters answered a question I had never dared to ask while he was still alive: “What was the war like, Dad?” I began to discover the texture of his experiences—his appetites, longings, fears.

Food was frequently on his mind. He dreamed of Dagwood sandwiches: corned beef, pastrami, rolled beef and salami with
relish, cucumbers and pickles. He fantasized about “Italian food at Leone's and Little Venice. Swedish food. Smorgasbord at the Stockholm. French food at Pierre's. Chicken dinner at Mom's and some good American cooking at home from the Settlement Cook Book—a way to a man's heart.” My mother sent packages from Brooklyn containing sardines, shrimp, anchovies, olives, and pickled herring, which he shared with his buddies. He noted that her honey cake arrived spoiled. His fatigues were always dirty. His quarters were “miserably hot, comparable to a Turkish bath.” Living with so many other men was “similar to a cross-section of Coney Island and the bedlam of Times Square during the rush hours.” He longed for the comforts of home.

The booming of the big guns woke him up from sound sleep. Some men did not take off their shoes for a whole month. They slept in all their clothes. They kept puppies and monkeys for pets. “You'll find a monkey in almost every jeep or truck. The boys all like to play with them.” When the men bathed they often found themselves encircled by eyes; the native women liked to watch their lean bodies and muscular arms. A skinny white horse wandered through their camp one night, and it was a wonder it was still alive because “they throw grenades at shadows after all.”

With a letter written from New Caledonia, he enclosed two pictures of a young doe: