Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier.

                                                                                    —Samuel Johnson

 No son can be objective or truthful about his father, though he may come to know him better than anyone else.

                                     —Ernst Pawel, Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka

When I was little, I believed that one day I would have to go to war. There was an ongoing war out there somewhere, and at some war-ready age, all boys were automatically shipped off to fight. Nights I’d toss in bed, even cry at times, my last waking thoughts of how every day brought me one day closer to The Day. [dad offered to talk to comp?]

My father spoke more than once of an assassin’s bullet whizzing past hm while he was being transported in a jeep. Of bullets flying over his head as he scrambled in the dirt. Of one thing or another at Clark Air Base in the Philippines during the Korean War. But usually, when my father spoke of war, he was referring to World War II.

On TV I’d watch black-and-white movies in which tired, unshaven soldiers hunkered down in burned-out buildings, lit cigarettes, and talked tough in some faraway land. On the nightly news, whirring choppers airlifted dead and wounded soldiers out of the jungles of Vietnam.

War war war.

My father’s frequent mention of war, and the TV images I was exposed to, were at odds with my day to day life.

In 1964, we’d moved into a two-story shingled house, light green wood with dark green shutters, he’d had built in Alexandria, Virginia. When I crossed the street, a trail would lead me through a stretch of woods ending at a creek, a branch of the Potomac River where I learned to fish for perch, and mold faces into the clay along the banks. My family attended bingo nights at the Officer’s Club; my mother and sister and I spent summer days swimming and diving at the Fort Belvoir pool.

Was I being lulled to sleep only to wake to the nightmare of war?

Eventually, I asked him if I would have to go to war when I grew up.

“Well, no, not if there isn’t a war.”

Wasn’t that a relief. Still, I’d heard of war so many times, I knew I’d be lucky if I escaped this awful thing my father hadn’t escaped.

#

My father’s nickname was Harpo, a name I only fully understood was associated with the Marx Brothers when I was in my twenties. Any association with humor was lost on me. Surely he was called Harpo because of his curly hair, which I inherited. His humor would surprise me, sneaking in on rare times when he retreated from his various roles—father, husband, Air Force officer, breadwinner. A neighbor at Vandenberg once commented on us boys shooting baskets in the driveway, saying how he appreciated sports but that he’d never participated in them. To which my father replied, “I guess you’re just an athletic supporter.” I.e., a jack strap. The sense of humor was always there, I suppose, but buried. More often, I’d hear the odd, almost metallic click of his jaw tightening.

There was always a little tension, an uneasiness between my father and me. I wonder if that’s just the way it is with fathers and sons, or if it’s part of the inhibition I associate directly with the military, and with growing up in a military family.

As a grown man, I saw a photo of my father when he was a teenager. He knelt down and held a dog, a mischievous grin on his face, most likely telling the dog to smile at the camera. The image captured a lighter side of my father I rarely saw. Above him and to the side stood his mother, amused, smiling down at her youngest son. Within six years she would be dead from a brain tumor brought on by breast cancer.

#

 “Pay attention to the stories people repeat over and over. These stories have affected them deeply.” Lines from a psychology book read years ago.

#

The one story my father told repeatedly involved his best friend, Owen “Hickey” Hilker. Later, I came to believe that this story related the most important event in my dad’s life, one that connected to other losses and early sorrows, and told of his being forced to deal with feelings he had no preparation for.

Hickey was someone I’d heard of numerous times while growing up. One story my dad repeated was that when they were teens, they’d bought a used Ford and spent an entire summer dismantling the engine in Hickey’s garage. Taking it apart piece by piece just to put it back together again. To see how it worked. Together they attended officer training for the Army Air Corps in Miami. Later, after killing time in an office at Shaw Air Base in South Carolina, Hickey had volunteered for infantry duty. “I don’t want to have to tell my grandkids that when the war was going on, I was stuck in an office stateside,” my dad said he’d told him. Following three months of training to be a platoon leader, Hickey was shipped off with the Ninth Division to fight in Germany. My father planned to join him after finishing his semester at N.C. State.

He discovered Hickey’s war letters in a trunk in the garage after my mother died, when he was purging the house of things that had painful associations. He hadn’t seen them in years. I told my father I’d like to read them. He took a while before giving them to me. “Let me think about it,” he said. I didn’t doubt he wanted me to. He’d been hinting at them recently, and he’d already shown them to my sister. But I assumed that this was his way of signaling what seemed obvious, that these letters touched on something painful.

Hickey’s letters, in chronological order, reminded me of a movie script, and I doubt I can do them justice by relating them here in my own words. In his first letter he’s in New York City ready to be shipped overseas. He boasts of going out on the town, drinking, and meeting women. I picture him in an Ike jacket and olive drab uniform, like so many men at the time, walking around Times Square. Unless I’m mistaken, Hickey got laid, and he’s doing a little boasting to my dad.

In the next letter, he’s aboard ship to France, suffering an enormous hangover that has become a chest cold. He encourages my father to write to him. In subsequent letters he’s in Paris. Later, he’s in Germany. He’s going days without a bath. He writes an ode to a bed, fantasizing about being clean and dry and tucked into a bed. He closes one letter saying he hasn’t heard from my father. Things are getting serious. He’s seeing dead cows along the side of the road. Later, dead humans. It seems to me he’s scared—though he doesn’t say this. Men didn’t do that then, though he’s up front about feeling “lonesome.” In one letter he says that when he gets back to Raleigh, he’ll be happy if he never travels beyond Wrightsville Beach. He’s ventured too far.

In one of his last letters, Hickey sounds desperate to hear from his friend. He’s heard from one friend or another, but he hasn’t heard from Harpo, his best friend.

Then there’s the inevitable. An official Army letter states that Hickey was killed in the line of duty. While commanding his platoon, he stepped on a mine in a field. Another letter, from a soldier in Hickey’s platoon, was written in response to Hickey’s former girlfriend asking if he could shed any light on the circumstances under which Hickey died. The letter is less polished, less grammatically correct than Hickey’s. A working-class accent He reaffirms that Hickey was blown up by a mine but adds that Hickey was “so aggressive.” This is something he mentions twice, how they’d tried to reason with him, but he was too aggressive. He gave orders they were reluctant to obey.

Eighty years after the fact, I wonder if Hickey had a death wish. If the soldier’s complaint masked foul play.

#

After I finished reading the letters, tears in my eyes. After telling my father how moving the letters were. After imbibing two or three glasses of the Irish whiskey he’d bought me that day—“Your money’s no good here”—and telling him about how awful war is. I asked him if he’d written letters to Hickey.

“All the time!” he insisted. “I responded to every letter Hickey wrote. More than every letter.”

#

Fathers and sons.

One story my father repeated was of spanking me when I was little. Neither of us remembered what I did to merit a spanking, but when I’d pulled down my pants and lay on the bed, I tensed my butt in anticipation of the pain. Seeing that, my father didn’t have the heart to spank me very hard.

Funny that he remembered this. I remember it, too.

#

The talents that get left behind, that find no place in the adult world.

Two of my father’s drawings hung on our laundry room wall. One was especially good, so realistic that at first glance you’d swear it was a photograph. A side view of a horse’s head, the glint of light in the eye perfectly rendered.

#

The first thing I ever wanted to be when I grew up was an artist. My father wanted me to become a doctor. That had been his own dream, but his father didn’t have the money to send him to medical school. On a whim, my father had applied to Harvard Law School and was accepted. I asked him once why he didn’t go. “I never wanted to be a lawyer. I wanted to be a doctor,” he said. His desire for me to be a doctor at times took on comical proportions. As I grew older, I was certain—in that way that young people assume that the world is just and will provide a perfect fit for their desires—that I would be a pro athlete. I’m embarrassed to say how late that dream died. “Doctors can play sports in their spare time,” he would say. Occasionally my mother would chime in, “You should be a lawyer.” Doctor, lawyer. After hearing their directives one too many times, I told them, “I think I’m going to be an Indian chief.”

As I approached eighteen, my mother chided me for not applying to one of the academies. To follow in my father’s footsteps and become an officer. A military man.

#

Every time I walked through the den, a stern, unsmiling man in uniform stared at me from the wall. My dad’s cousin. A general from whom my father gave me the middle name Douglas after giving me his own first name. His disapproving eyes watching me pass.

#

My father was driving the two of us into D.C. We’d just passed the drive-in with the marquee advertising Bonnie and Clyde when I had a horrible realization. “Dad, I forgot my bathing suit!”

“Oh, that’s okay.”

“What do you mean it’s okay? How am I going to swim without my bathing suit?”

“Oh, you’ll see.”

I held out hope I’d be able to borrow a suit, or one would be provided. Something.           

No such luck. In the pool area, some dozen men walked around naked, swam naked. Dried off their naked male bodies. A couple of boys younger than me wore trunks.

After we swam, my father led me into the locker room. A large metal contraption drew my eye.

“Here, climb on.”

He moved the weight, tapped it one way, back the other. The pointer on the end bounced against its confines, fell and rose, steadied itself. Sixty-one pounds. My father lifted two crisp, white towels from a neat stack, handed me one – rough, dry, with the strong, pleasant odor of steam cleaning. We wrapped them around our midsections and proceeded toward a metal door with small window that revealed nothing. My father pulled the handle, releasing a gust of steam. A few short-haired men sat on tiled tiers, hunched over, elbows on knees. One reached up and wiped his brow, splattering drops. We sat. The hot, odd-smelling air burned my nostrils and throat. I took short, unsatisfying gulps, struggled to breathe, kept my eye on the door. I balanced my panic, the desire to run from the room, with the image of the pale sweaty men, my father among them, and their silent acceptance. I fought the urge to move, to do something. Tried to feel comfortable copying these stoic men, sitting, breathing in hot steam, deep in the bowels of the Pentagon.

#

During my teens, I never wanted to be around my father. This saddens me now. I’ve begun enjoying golf, a sport I never much took to when I was younger, and yet it was his favorite. In his last years, I played with him and his usual partners at the Patrick course. He could do little more than ride the cart and slowly make his way to the green and putt, enjoying what he could of the game that got him out of the house and into the sun and fresh air, even as his eyes and balance failed, his body stiff and unwieldy with arthritis. I gradually grew more capable of loosening up, joking around a bit with these old men and joining in their bawdy humor, which my dad did not share, at least in front of me. Still, these men were very conservative, evidently devotees of FOX News. When one of them pulled from me that I supported Obama, he asked, “Do you know that his middle name is Hussein?”

There was a time after my sister had gone to college when my father took up shrimping at Mather’s Bridge on the Banana River. This involved hanging a Coleman lantern close to the surface and scooping up shrimp in a net as they rose toward the light. I went out once or twice with him, but I quickly gave up. If the shrimp weren’t running, one did a lot of standing around. Not a pastime for a teenage boy, at least this one.

Thinking back, I’m more aware that my father had no friends. If I didn’t join him, he’d go alone. I never wanted to help my father when he worked on his car, or when he asked me to help him work on the boat whose inboard motor seldom functioned after its first year. I was not technically inclined, but it was more than that. I was averse to spending time in an unbearable garage or under an intense sun unless I was surfing or mowing lawns. I’ve seen our blue-and-white boat where it stayed in the dock, hoisted above the water, as a symbol of the breach in our father-son relationship, if not some larger flaw, a falling short in our family overall.

Lately, I think again of the profound cultural shift that occurred in the late 60s and early 70s. The “generation gap,” a cliché I’ve resisted at the expense of seeing its truth. Perhaps if I were ten years older, I would have responded to my father’s requests wth “Yes, sir.” That’s the way it had been, I presume, for generations. But more personally, I suspect I held a subconscious grudge against my father for so radically affecting my life, molding my character and personality, through his choices, or those that followed from his joining the military. My life upended every two years, having to start over. Having no say in the matter. So that, in later situations when I had a choice, I’d say “No.” A word that carries little weight when spoken by a child. And a general sense of injustice and suffering from …

#

My memories of my father’s own father are of a stout man, white hair, large nose and ears, reclining in the soft green La-Z-Boy in his house in Raleigh. Reading his magazines, listening to the radio, sleeping in the afternoons. An old man’s prerogative, to rest after a career as an electrical engineer at Carolina Power & Light. He betrayed his Kansas roots in pronouncing “at all” as “a tall,” and said “why” when others might have said “well,” as in, “Why, that made no sense a tall.” My great-aunt lived with him, his sister who never married, who when we visited would tell me to always refill the water jug after I used it. The dining table was covered with a white tablecloth embroidered around the edges. At breakfast there was a spoon for everything—for eating cereal, taking sugar out of the sugar bowl, eating slices of grapefruit. Spoons beside spoons.

My grandfather would have seen the teenaged Hickey around the house quite a bit. In photos Hickey is handsome, dark-haired, dark-eyed, almost Italian-looking. Perhaps he’d eaten lunch there over an embroidered tablecloth while he and my father (“my father” sounds absurd when talking about someone in his teens) took a break from whatever mischief they were planning. Had my grandfather loved Hickey like a son? No. My father was distant, but my grandfather was more so.

So when my father made it home after his best friend was killed, I don’t imagine my grandfather could have helped him. Did he turn to his mother? He rarely mentioned her. When I asked, he told me she was “very accomplished.” She’d attended Boston’s Berklee School of Music, hailed from a well-respected family. But she was a source of more pain, and would die within two years of Hickey’s death. What loomed largest for him about her—and something I learned late—is that in the month before she died, my father walked to the hospital every day after class to keep her company. Much later, I wondered to what extent my father’s desire to become a doctor was motivated by his own mother’s suffering and early death.

When my father did turn to someone, when he had recovered enough from shock and disbelief and sadness and anger and confusion and disillusionment, he made his way to Hickey’s father, who ran a pharmacy in Raleigh. Perhaps he could have provided some comfort or understanding or what? to my father, to Bob, to Harpo. This is the second to last letter in the collection, rather confusing until one understands what’s going on. My father walked to the back of the pharmacy and entered Mr. Hilker’s office. Hickey’s father looked up, saw who it was, and walked out the back door.

In his letter, Mr. Hilker apologizes for not being able to face my father at that time. Seeing him was too painful, a visible reminder of his son and his violent death on a faraway continent. He urges my father to do whatever he can to avoid the war, to avoid taking that ship overseas. Raleigh had lost too many of its best and brightest. My father was the closest thing to a son that he had left. Mr. Hilker goes on in heartbreaking fashion to talk about being angry at God, how he knows he shouldn’t feel that way, but he can’t go to church anymore. Nothing makes sense.

It was just too much, too much for all concerned.

#

When my father was pushing eighty, he told me how he’d followed Mr. Hilker’s advice and signed up for all kinds of training available in the States. He traveled to Hollywood and learned about radar operations. A hometown girl, Ann Davies, had become a movie star and was dating Robert Mitchum, who made a good impression on my father at a party he attended in uniform. “Your money’s no good here,” Mitchum told him, and stood him a drink. From Hollywood my father caught a train to Big Spring, Texas, and worked at the hangar at Webb Air Base, where roaring jets contributed to later hearing loss. He did some pheasant hunting with a Texan he’d met in California. The Army Air Forces offered lots of perks to bright young men looking to serve their country. My father signed up for everything that was available, padding his resume. From Big Springs he drove down to San Antonio for more training at Randolph Air Force Base. Avoiding the war.

#

When I was in my forties, I once asked my father about his time at Clark Air Base, and he corrected me. “I wasn’t the base commander, where’d you get that idea? I was just in charge of radar operations.” I’d also gotten the story wrong about the sniper and the jeep. The sniper had shot at my father while he was riding a train, taking leave to buy a car. The bullet shattered the window over his head. By this time I’d connected his other mention of flying bullets to his basic training in Texas, where he spoke of live rounds of ammunition fired above the heads of the recruits, training them to stay low as they crawled.

#

Three years before my father died, I sat down with him and asked him about his wartime experiences, laptop in lap, trying to get the chronology. He was eighty-seven. For the first time it became clear that for months he’d been following Mr. Hilker’s advice even before it was given.

#

After Germany’s surrender, my father found himself back in California, in a waiting game, checking every day to see whether he was scheduled to be shipped overseas to Japan. The soldiers slept on a bluff along the Monterey coast, and the sound of sea lions barking kept him awake. The bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima saved him from having to board that ship. Eventually he would make his way back home to Raleigh.

#

The last letter in the collection is not a letter but a stack of letters that no longer exists, one that couldn’t be thrown away fast enough. Weeks after Hickey’s death, my father received a delivery from the US Army wrapped in twine. Addressed to Lt. Owen “Hickey” Hilker, from Lt. Bob “Harpo” Reynolds.