A Soldier’s Daughter Salutes Her Late Father

[Hat tip to Cronesense, who inspired me like some loving juggernaut.  Thank you.]

[first diary originally published on DKos 11/19/05.  The following are excerpts.]

now cross-posted at DailyKos

This diary is about war, and what it does to people. Although I write about WWII, which is said to be over, it is just a scream back from the other end of a time warp through that tunnel to hell known as warfare. It is an echo of the present war in Iraq, and the last terrified glint in my dying mother’s eyes.

Mine is the information soldiers would tell the U.S. if only they would be allowed to return. For the victors can suffer worse fates, in the end, than the vanquished. I know this because Dad brought World War II home with him.

This is also the story of one of the first internet bloggers (not too successful with the technology in his 80`s) whose nickname happened to be “Webb.” As he lay on his deathbed, I gave my word to Dad that I would write about him – having more capability to honor him than his poor, confused mind would allow at the end of his life. And now I had better get to writing while we still have the freedom to use the internet. For the “military-industrial-complex” government Dad feared and foresaw all his adult life has at last come to power.

As the daughter of a soldier of World War II and an only child of two people old enough to be my grandparents, some of my political thinking is perhaps grounded in ages previous to most “baby-boomers.” All my life I heard Dad say of the world financial system: “It’s a house of cards. You’ll see it come down in your lifetime.” Now with over 8 trillion in debt (and who can honestly count all the details?) and an over-leveraged US consumer public (remember when we were called “citizens” and not “consumers?”), I can only imagine that the regime truly intends to catapult the national economy into the abyss. You couldn’t misspend that much money and not know the consequences, right?

Vitals about this old soldier named Webb: he died on January 8, 2003 of congestive heart failure, PTSD and allopathic medical follies at age 85. The attending physician wanted to underscore the fact that his death was war-related (PTSD complications) on the death certificate.

Because Webb was a first lieutenant with the Army Air Corps (later the Air Force) in the Pacific Theater of War during WWII, flying B-26’s with the Jolly Rogers. A fearless leader, it turned out that Webb’s intensity may have been rooted in the fact that he was one of the first human military guinea pigs who received amphetamines to make him a better warrior. I have wondered if he might have provided himself as a model for Joseph Heller in Catch-22, for Dad went mad as all men eventually did. Back then they called it “war fatigue.”

Dad flew 54 missions in 8 ½ months, which astonishes his peers from WWII. The most known missions was thought to be 72, but that was accomplished over a matter of a couple years, not a few months.

I still feel Dad was a loyal leader. As if on cue from a Joseph Heller scene, Dad went crazy. He wanted to kill his commander when the number of missions was raised from 55 to 65. Dad went to the leaders, screaming something to the effect that he would not let them kill his men.

Men flip out in war that way. I was told by one of his fellow Jolly Rogers that nearly every man in the Pacific Theater of war ended up with “war fatigue.”

For his effort, however, Dad was rewarded with shots of something unnamable, held incommunicado on a hospital ship, brought to a VA hospital, put into isolation cells and given electroshock therapy, which back then was about as deliberate and artful as hooking a man up to a car battery.

They have him an officer’s pension for his trouble, but because the nerve damage occurred on land (in the VA hospital) rather than in battle, they would not call him a disabled veteran. They labeled him “psychotic.”

And he fought a fierce inner battle for the rest of his life, trying to auger pride against shame. He undid himself trying to justify himself. He never knew that he was administered amphetamines instead of the so-called B vitamin shots he recalled on his deathbed. But maybe in the end:

I again saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift and the battle is not to the warriors, and neither is bread to the wise nor wealth to the discerning nor favor to men of ability; for time and chance overtake them all.

~ Ec 9:11

I just now noticed that the verse is numbered 9:11, a good number for the usurpation of power.

____________

[diary 2 – originally published on DKos 11/20/05]

I can’t pass those aging homeless disabled veterans, some raving, some depressed as they stand under bridges destitute, and not think of Dad – although he was savaged by WWII, not Viet Nam and never was homeless. I remember him grimacing horribly as he peppered the living room with curses about the folly of corporate warfare, his face flashing fluorescent television blue, shaking fists at the sight of Viet Nam (the first televised war).

Dad hated anyone who loved war, and he saw the Bush machine coming. His mind had degenerated by the time the Bush star rose to power, but he was alert enough to wax furious as all the dumb-down of the media came into place. He ranted ceaselessly about it. He told everyone he could corner that he wanted to sue the media He even went so far as to campaign for the US presidency (naturally a public relations disaster). It would be a platform to voice his objections to the emerging military-industrial-complex and the international corporate privateers who now run our country.

We`re talking about one very eccentric old lieutenant in his 80`s. Once highly articulate and competent, in late life the effects of the PTSD and electroshock therapy overtook his health. People didn’t understand – none of us understood – that his war injuries included damage to the artery from the heart to the brain. Electroshock therapy scars that artery, and in his old age Dad became hypoxic – blood would not properly circulate in his brain if he experienced the least adrenaline surge. The artery would shut down, and Dad’s keen mind was rendered all but mute. We did not understand his behavior until he got on oxygen two months before he died. Suddenly he dropped the combative persona and the mania, and began to converse with sense and wonder. Surprise: it wasn’t Alzheimers after all. Dad and I finally got the chance to bond.

By the time he was forced to rely on oxygen, he had alienated everyone. This comes as a surprise to a lot of caregivers of the elderly, to find that some dementia immediately clears up under the force of oxygen. Poor soul, he went completely misunderstood until the end. When everyone refused to listen to him anymore, he took to the mid-nineteenth century tool he understood best: letters to the editors of newspapers. He became notorious.

As his nerve damage increasingly cost him his communication skills, he helplessly witnessed the disintegration of democracy and the media – he had all the more to say. He began to realize that the mass media had been sold away to all the wrong kinds of people, boding ill for the health of any democracy. This was the 90’s. But who cared? The stock market was too vibrant. Life in the US was too delicious for the well-educated and the moneyed, almost to a man, to “stoop to politics.” Politics became unfashionable for just about everyone .

* * * *

If I could pick a time when politics came back into style, it would be after Seymour Hersh’s articles on sexual torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib went to print around April, 2004. My husband (a Viet Nam veteran) and I had a long conversation about the muteness of the media on the Iraq war on April 4, 2004, shortly before Hersh`s story broke. We left that day for a camping trip in Utah, stopping along the way to look for a Sunday paper. Identifying with fellow soldiers in Iraq, my husband wanted to check up on the war. Scanning the front pages of everything from the New York Times to the Bozeman Chronicle, we could not find the word “Iraq” on the front pages of even one newspaper. All the way to Utah we marveled: isn’t there a war going on? If it ended, why weren’t we told? Why is it not news? Has the regime threatened journalists with imprisonment if they mention it? Where are [insert names of all respected journalists’] thoughts on this? Are [insert names of journalists] alive, or publishing anymore?

We examined our generational differences, contributing to a lack of demand for “political” information. I was born in 1956, to grow up among the first, maybe only mini-generation of US men to not have to even register with the Selective Service. While there is a $50,000 bounty on most adult men who do not sign up for selective service, those men who came of age from 1975-1980 were excused from concern, as the nation pondered passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. A question arose: if it is unconstitutional to discriminate by gender, then can we make men sign up, but not women? Mandatory selective service registration was tabled until about 1980, when men were again obliged to sign up by law.

The apolitical fashion of the US might have been fueled by the early adulthood of a truly twisted mini-generation not well described by the Baby Boomer title. While growing up on the lush spoils of war, my “generation” had a confusion of gender issues never seen before. Men did not have to sign up for selective service, and I was at the forefront of a generation of women who had legal, “safe” and reliable birth control available from puberty on – backed up by abortion on demand in case the first failed (Roe v. Wade, 1973). Women were not forced into motherhood, and men were not forced to be soldiers. My age of women were not the players of the `60`s “sexual revolution;” rather the heiresses of the so-called liberties. No such thing had happened en masse to women before, ever.

This confused men to hell and back. Guys I graduated with started out emulating their older brothers and uncles who became soldiers, only to inherit an early adulthood where soldiering (post-Viet Nam) and even manhood were openly disdained. Many felt emasculated. In the 1980’s it occurred to me that all the most insane lone public outcries (McDonalds’ shoot-ups, “going postal,” the Chucky Cheese and Luby’s incidents, etc.) seemed to be committed by men born after 1950. It was as if their violent outrages were fatal expressions of some grand sense of impotence. Women? Sex was no longer a way to control a woman (no resultant pregnancy necessary). I would call it “Generation Sex.”

My husband’s generation, by contrast, knew the draft. They knew what it meant to be sent to war. “Baby Boomer” women born in the `40’s were still relegated to secondary status – a woman could be fired for being pregnant, had to have a male signator on any credit card, and were socially ostracized for sexual licentiousness. By the time I got to high school, they were setting up nursing lounges for unwed mothers. Women didn`t get kicked out of school for being pregnant anymore. The prevailing social mores of the early `70`s suggested that a man did an honorable thing to get a young girl stoned/drunk and engage in sex. It went on everywhere: Generation Sex.

Generation Sex men were not compelled to serve in the armed forces. It made for a very different profile. It brought a sense of disaffiliation from politics, even civics, and that amid a glut of consumerism. A very self-absorbed, unconcerned people were born – a people alienated, in the feminine case, from their very biology. Hence nascent inattention to all things international in the USA.

To these, my poor father preached in vain about an emerging world threat right here at home, in the form of the “military-industrial-complex.” Only his ranting was the disintegrated logic of a geriatric mind. I mean, he became an object of ridicule to his small town, among the younger people. Many older folks still respected him for his sharper earlier years, when he was a community leader. The newcomers to town knew none of that. And they openly scoffed.

* * * *

My husband and I did an experiment: throughout southern Utah, pretending we might be teenagers from the community who would want to read up on the Iraq war, we shopped everywhere for media. We found supermarkets, drug stores and book corners glutted with every species of narcissistic appeal – body building, sex, interior design, guns, guitars, island getaways, you name it. We could, however, seldom find Time Magazine. We could find NOTHING in print discussing the Iraq war. Even Rolling Stone published as if our nation were Costa Rica, with no army to account for – we could not imagine how young people could find any printed stimulus to encourage study of the situation. Television? You’ve seen it. The internet? First you have to know which question to ask. And just how were young people supposed to develop an informed wonder about international issues?

Come on, USA. We now have the president we deserve. Didn’t too many of us party our collective butts off until 9/11 [speaking for myself at least, with apologies to any hard-working Democrats for whom this is not true]? We, for the most part, have been worthless stewards of our literacy, pursuing all things material while thumbing our noses at politics. Is this a good stance for the electorate of the world`s greatest superpower?. We have shunned “political” discussion while the CIA/Halliburton grew into the monster world police state we now have begun to understand.

And as my father went mute, we had in him the prophet we deserved – the inchoate mumblings of madness. Who was even paying attention in the 1990`s as the Bush Cabal began to man the Pentagon? Look at newspapers from even small towns in the 1960’s, and you will see attention to international issues. Today? The front page boasts quarter page “human interest” photos of people kissing puppies. The carnage in Iraq is relegated to someplace near the weather and the obituaries. Which unfortunately doesn’t seem to bother most people.

* * * *

[third diary, originally posted on DKos 11/21/05]

The worst crossroad I faced as Dad was dying was whether to tell him that his “insanity” – his war fatigue, or PTSD – was evidently amphetamine psychosis. Maybe four or five days before Dad died we learned that his group of bombardiers in the WWII Pacific Theater of War was the first wave of human guinea pigs to whom the military secretly administered amphetamines. Dad never could explain his brief but consuming insanity to himself. He had never imagined or heard that “war fatigue” could actually be amphetamine psychosis. He hated every and any occasion where he might have to explain his retired officers’ pension, based on “insanity” rather than war fatigue (or PTSD). His insecurity about his sanity drove him to further destroy his own life, and ours.

I wanted to tell him, because I felt it would set him free of his core vexation and burden in life. Others said no, don’t present the government’s betrayal for him to meditate upon in his last few hours alive. That would be too bitter, because he already knows too much.

* * * *

The plot reversed in the few months it took Dad to die. Trust between he and I had finally kicked in, and deepened. For during the last eight years of his life, he and I were not close. He scared me half to death, the way he became so intense and angry as his brain became hypoxic. We didn`t know what was happening with him until the end, and he was frequently terrifying to behold.

Three things changed: first, I got the guns out of the house. Then once Dad got on oxygen he regained his senses. And Dad finally – nine days before he died – signed papers allowing me to inquire about his military medical records, because it looked like Mom would not get a pension from the VA as things stood.

All those years, Dad didn’t like anyone looking into his retired officers` pension. On official paper he was listed as disabled for being psychotic. After he died I found heartbreaking letters from the VA as he attempted to reason with them. One letter rejected his request for a disabled veteran license plate, because the government refused to qualify him as such. Why? Because the majority of the nerve damage was from the electroshock therapy in the VA hospital, which was in Sheridan, WY. Even though his breakdown occurred infamously before his men on the battlefield, he was destined for disgrace by the government he had served in World War II.

* * * *

How he fought his insecurity was to set up tasks for himself. He didn’t sell himself short, either. Once he, along with fellow railroad employee Warren McGee and the late Honorable Senator Mike Mansfield, took on the proposed merger of the Northern Pacific, Great Northern and Burlington railroads. The issue was hung up by the Montana legislature, on account of the core role of the locomotive repair shops in Livingston.

Dad had grown up amid a generation accustomed to public discussion about anti-trust legislation. He was alert enough to comprehend that the merger was actually a corporate Houdini performance, where the players would assign and reassign themselves new identities within sleeve corporations, selling the whole works back to themselves at huge profits. Dad and Warren went to the libraries in St. Paul and Minneapolis to research corporate ownership of the railroads, under the tutelage of Mansfield. Sure enough the transfers amounted to illegal monopolistic trade prohibited by Anti-trust laws. In 1964 they presented their findings to the Montana Senate (I was there as a little girl of seven).

They won. The merger – which was a fearful knot in the throats of perhaps millions of employees and related businessmen along the northern corridors where those railroads operated for years – was tabled under a moratorium for seven more years.

[note: a reader has requested copies of Dad’s papers. We have just moved, and everything is packed up. Gradually I intend to start working this up into a more careful presentation.]

* * * *

I could not touch the guitar for months after New Orleans was murdered.
Because I saw that picture of Bush wanking a guitar that Tuesday before a republican fundraiswer while New Orleans drowned, his pudgy, artless fingers flailing strings to impress “the haves and the have-mores” somewhere in California. Something in me went into mourning and hasn’t come out of it since. Does anyone need to be told that New Orleans is the musical soul of the US?

And the recent destruction of the south does relate to railroad history.
It’s all about oil. The railroad merger plans of the 1950’s and `60s were about Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamsters and all the oil thugs of Texas conspiring to reduce transportation of goods by railroads, instead building up a nation addicted to petroleum. Railroads are too efficient. Why not assign every soul in the United States an internal combustion engine, so you can sell more oil? Burn, baby, burn more oil.

In New York state around the 1930’s, there was even a well-publicized scandal whereby bridges over highways entering the city were intentionally built too low for busses to pass beneath. This was to restrict African Americans access into the city, because at the time they were nearly all too poor to own automobiles.

The country was conspicuously, consciously designed for the people to consume oil at insane levels. My Dad, as if not angered enough about corporate privateering, saw the great interstate highway system plans include the demolition of his newly, masterfully built house and farmstead. He argued successfully against that, almost at the cost of a heart attack.

Presumably for defense purposes, the interstate highway system which spanned the country during the 1960’s and `70’s opened the way for an embarrassment of private vehicles to streak around the countryside.

Now our cities are deathtraps, as we saw in the south during the hurricanes. Cities can’t handle routine rush hours. How about everyone with a driver’s license starting up all those vehicles at once? Gee, what a coincidence – the passenger service of all the railroads is mostly GONE except through the eastern corridor between Boston and Washington, D.C. Now, those oil lords wouldn’t really want all of us to DIE during emergencies for lack of evacuation potential, would they?

RIP, NOLA

* * * *

As the executive corporate thugs did everything they could to gut the railroad system during the 1960`s, Dad became ever angrier. He understood exactly what they were up to, in collusion with the oilmen (he hated the Texas monopolists). And as a railroad engineer, they were messing with his very livelihood and that of his entire state and community.

Of course the merger people sent shills into town (Livingston) to entice the public into believing that the merger would bring about an unparalleled economic windfall. And not a few people bought that story. People hounded Dad and Warren McGee and the other community supporters of the anti-merger movement. Dad’s efforts were not appreciated by all. They held to the illusion that he and Mansfield had cost them money. It was a small, mean, windy town, and did some of them ever excel at meanness. Dad watched his activism cost his family our peace, in spades, over many years. We’re talking about ridicule in the classroom by the worst bullies of all – the teachers.

Thus when everyone came knocking around seven years later once the moratorium was ended, begging Dad to spearhead resistance to the merger, he declined. Sure enough, the merger lords gutted the economy of Livingston.

You would watch Dad simply rave, as he drove the highways, about the trucks. To him it represented the disintegration of the railroads and a theft from the US public. Because the railroad was granted as a public trust. Through their illegal corporate maneuvers, the executive corporate goons had swept the greatest US public trust – all the land grants, mineral reserves, and on and on – into their greedy private hands.

Dad foresaw the collapse of transportation, the cessation of trucking in national emergencies, and mass starvation. He made his point in his geriatric years through hoarding, something we grew to understand during the two years it took to clean up his estate.. Now that leading experts are losing sleep over the imminent prospect of global financial collapse due to the Bush administration’s deficit spending for the war, Dad’s hoarding makes more sense.

As he lay dying upstairs, we canvassed the 2,000 square foot basement and found bottles, bags, stocks of tuna fish, seed and grains, rubber bands, tinfoil – a lot of the usual things that people report when cleaning up the households of geriatric hoards who lived through the great Depression of the 30’s. We griped, we worked our tails off, we loaded pickup truckload after truckload of seemingly worthless things squirreled away in the last ten years or so of Dad’s life.

Now it makes sense. He was preparing himself and Mom for the day when the trucks stopped running, when the electricity failed, when the services were shut off which modern US society takes for granted. Other than failing to put up the windmill and the solar collectors he always mentioned, he had done a decent job of preparing to face a world in absolute decline.

He saw that the entire country had been set up as a cat’s cradle, a feeble web subject to absolute disintegration under warfare. Because about ¾ of the people live a thousand miles or more from the food sources. And only 1 ½ percent of the public are employed in agriculture anymore. Kids in cities don’t know milk comes from cows, and so forth. Most urban people probably couldn’t figure out how to grow a potato. And what’s going to happen when the trucks stop rolling, everyone gets hungry, and masses start whipping out guns at the local WalMart?

* * * *

Dad was not a man who needed to be told that the national government was capable of lethal mass treachery. As I meditated about whether to tell him his own personal story about amphetamine psychosis – as I asked the caregivers, and family members, he began to go under. He was so weak, he would ask for conversations to end.

I honor his simple Christian faith. He went on to rest for the next go-round. And thank God for having him as a father, despite all the pain of it. It was as if my life were perfectly designed to lend necessary perspective to face our monster government now.

* * * *

old soldier
I saw you brighten at me
then as if a curtain dropped
you withdrew your heart
each night
you die a little bit more
slip off into the killing fields
prisoner of memory
outside of time

~ stonemason, right after he died

the barberpole
red neon scrawl on the window
after hours, after dark
displays illuminated inside – red
ghosts of hair clippings talking
still furious afterglow on a
clean swept floor
their heads mown
subjecting their pates to heaven

a tear in the sky
a thinning of the veil
between the living and the dead
a silhouette of a lost father
in the clouds at noon
on a bright winter’s day

the barberpole
busy torguing
souls to the sidewalk
the endless white line
twisting heavenward
or a hellbent spiral
depending on your point of view

picasso never
let anyone have locks of his hair
a life spent
dodging witchcraft
jealous ones sought his power
and he knew it
cherishing his helix, that
tension of life and death,
tantras and blessings spelled in paint
a union of contrary worlds
pulsing like a barber pole

and the songs of the old warriors
and the scent of cheap aftershave
they’re forever shaking out the dust of foreign wars
from their boots
speaking in code about their injuries
beneath wall mounts in barber shops
the image of their faces
shattered in infinitely opposed mirrors
as planes of vision join
as the barber pole dances

yes the red afterglow
all those meetings in spirit
sometimes among ghosts
someone told me it would be like this
when my father’s soul slipped away
with the clouds
into the bright air of winter
and strangers
took his body

~  stonemason, right after he died