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, boys were 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.

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 talking about World War II.

I recall watching a black-and-white movie in which tired, unshaven soldiers hunkered down in a burnt-out building, lit cigarettes, and talked tough in some faraway land. On the nightly news, whirring choppers airlifted dead and wounded soldiers from the jungles in Vietnam.

War war war.

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

In 1964, we’d moved into a two-story Colonial woth light green wood and dark green shutters he’d had built in Alexandria, Virginia. When I crossed the street, a concrete path led me through a stretch of woods ending at a creek, a branch of the Potomac River where I learned to fish. I molded faces of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin into the clay along the banks. My family attended bingo nights at the Officer’s Club; my mother, sister, and I spent summer days swimming at the Fort Belvoir pool.

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

Eventually, I asked my father 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 thing my father hadn’t escaped.

#

My father’s nickname was Harpo, a name I didn’t understand until I was in my twenties. Any association with the Marx brothers and humor was lost on me. Surely he was called Harpo because of his curly hair, which I would inherit. His humor would surprise me, sneaking in on rare times when he’d retreat from his various roles—father, husband, and Air Force officer. A neighbor at Vandenberg AFB once commented on us boys shooting baskets in the driveway. He said 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 jock strap. The sense of humor was always there, I suppose, but buried. More often, I’d hear the odd, metallic click of his jaw tightening.

There was always a tension, an uneasiness between my father and me. Is that just the way it is? Or is it part of the inhibition I associate 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 teen. He was kneeling down and held a dog, a mischievous grin, 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. In six years, she would die 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.

#

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 his life. One connected to other losses, and told of his being forced to deal with feelings he wasn’t prepared for.

Hickey was someone I’d heard of often while growing up. One story my dad repeated was that when they were teens, he and Hickey had bought a used Ford and spent an entire summer dismantling the engine in Hickey’s garage. Taking it apart piece by piece, putting it back together again. To see how it worked. Together they attended officer training in Miami for the Army Air Corps. 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.” After three months of training, Hickey was shipped off to Germany with the Ninth Division to be a platoon leader. My father planned to join him after finishing his semester at N.C. State.

After my mother died, he discovered Hickey’s war letters in a trunk in the garage. He was purging the house of painful associations, things he hadn’t seen in years. I told my father I’d like to read them. “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. I assumed this was his way of signaling what seemed obvious to me. The letters touched on something else that was painful. Something he’d buried decades earlier. .

Watching a movie, a sensitive son singing (mnd the alliteration) to his father dreaming of the shoals of herring, articulating in music what he couldn’t say/acces. (Military Man/Son)

Hickey’s letters, in chronological order, reminded me of a movie script. I doubt I can do them justice by relating them in my own words. In his first letter he’s in New York City before being 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.

In the next letter, he’s on board a 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, in Germany. He’s going days without a bath. He fantasizes about being clean and dry, 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 my father. 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.

#

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. He had no friends. If I didn’t join him, he’d go alone.

To his frustration, I never fully warmed to golf, his passion. I rebelled against the unspoken expectation that I SHOULD play it because he played it, and his dad played it. That sons follow in their fathers in his footsteps. Whether anyone wanted to or not was never an issue.

I never cut my nails short though my father suggested having some nail was useful. Nope, that’s not the way I wanted them. He’d suggested I cut my hair, and looking back – and at pictures from that time – I see his point. My thick curly hair grew so high that it stuck out, literally, even in that era of long hair. I never wanted to help him when he worked on his car, or on the boat’s inboard motor that seldom functioned after its first year.

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I was not technically inclined, but it was more than that. Florida wasn’t North Carolina. I was averse to spending time in an unbearably hot garage or under an intense sun unless I was surfing or mowing lawns. In hindsight, I think that my father wanted me to be a friend, someone to help offset his loneliness, to fill the hole that Hickey’s death had left. I’ve seen our blue-and-white boat 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.

#

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. 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 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, on 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. Live rounds of ammunition fired above the heads of the recruits, training them to stay low as they crawled forward.

#

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: He’d been following Mr. Hilker’s advice months 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 Hilker, from Lt. Robert Reynolds. From Harpo to Hickey.