19 June 2022 – Father’s Day generates mixed emotions around my house. And while I am going to end on a pleasant note, I think my personal “father” experience is mirrored in the lives of many of my readers.
Here are the facts: my father was a bully who often used a strap and literally screamed so loudly that it sounded like his voice was tearing from his throat. When he spoke, he belittled. He never said “I love you”, he never hugged or kissed anyone. He brutalised my mother who threw him out of the house multiple times, and finally left him. In the beginning she endured him because she didn’t know what else to do. My sister sided with him because she only wanted his money (he was worth a small fortune). I hated him and refused to speak to him for the last 15 years of his life.
We knew he was mentally ill, and we tried numerous times to get him into therapy but he refused. It was only after he died that we found out the truth. I knew he was a WWII veteran, the youngest of 5 brothers and the only one to serve in WWII. He was a private, fighting under the army of George Patton and he was involved in the retaking of North Africa. He was captured when Allied troops went into Italy. He was a prisoner of war for 3+ years.
What I did not know until his funeral was that all of his brothers knew he had been diagnosed with “battle fatigue” for which he was never treated. It was never spoken about in my house, or by any family member. Quarantined – a room full of secrets roped off by silence. I am sure many families have such rooms. The brothers thought “let’s get the guy married off and all will be fine”. It did not work out that way.
After his death I spent 5 years getting his full military record and the history of his unit in North Africa and Italy, via the U.S. National Archives and the U.S. Library of Congress, plus friends in the Pentagon. And the U.S. military, being incompetent in so many things, ended up sending me the military and mental health records of his entire prisoner-of-war unit. I am using that information for a long-form essay on how the military treats its injured servicemen.
In 2020, during the 75th anniversary of the official end of World War II, with the assistance of some of my military colleagues, I traced his route – from his capture in Italy, to the locations of a string of prisoner-of-war camps in Italy and Germany. I know from military records he weighed 98 pounds when Allies freed the prisoner-of-war camp in Germany in which he was held.
And just a side note on language. I hate euphemisms, euphemistic language. And American English is loaded with euphemisms because Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality. Americans have trouble facing the truth. So they invent a kind of a soft language to protect themselves from it. And it gets worse with every generation.
My father’s mental condition from combat you undoubtedly know. It’s when a fighting person’s nervous system has been stressed to its absolute peak, its maximum, and it can’t take any more input. The nervous system has either snapped or is about to snap.
In the First World War, that condition was called “shell shock”. Simple, honest, direct language. Two syllables. Shell shock. Almost sounds like the guns themselves.
Then a whole generation went by, and the Second World War came along. And the very same combat condition was called “battle fatigue”. Four syllables now. Takes a little longer to say. Doesn’t seem to hurt as much. Fatigue is a nicer word than shock.
Then we had the war in Korea. Madison Avenue was riding high by that time. And the very same combat condition was called “operational exhaustion”. We’re up to eight syllables now. And the humanity has been squeezed out completely. Out of the phrase. It’s totally sterile. Operational exhaustion sounds like something that might happen to your car.
Then, of course, came the war in Vietnam. And thanks to the lies and deceit surrounding that war, I guess it’s no surprise that the very same condition was called “post-traumatic stress disorder”. Still eight syllables. But we’ve added a hyphen and the pain is completely buried under jargon. Post traumatic stress disorder.
Ah, language.
But I want to end on a high note and salute all of the fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers out there. A good friend, Shaun Usher, runs a blog called Letters of Note. He also publishes a few books under that name. I have quoted him numerous times in my posts and, with his permission, included some pretty outstanding letters.
He troves biographies, autobiographies, libraries, correspondence files, etc. to find letters written by such folks as Zelda Fitzgerald, Iggy Pop, Fidel Castro, Leonardo da Vinci, Bill Hicks, Anaïs Nin, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Amelia Earhart, Charles Darwin, Roald Dahl, Albert Einstein, Elvis Presley, Dorothy Parker, John F. Kennedy, Groucho Marx, Charles Dickens, Katharine Hepburn, Kurt Vonnegut, Mick Jagger, Steve Martin, John Steinbeck, Emily Dickinson …. oh, the list of authors is endless. He also has hundreds of letters sent to him by subscribers and fans.
It was through Shaun I was able to learn how best to troll bookstores and collectors and assemble my own trove of letters from some of my favorite authors. I now have enormous compendiums from such authors as Gerald Durrell, Lawrence Durrell, Henry James, Henry Miller, H. L. Mencken and Michel Montaigne.
It being Father’s Day this weekend, Shaun profiled a letter sent to him by Fergal Keane. Keane was born in 1961 in London, but spent much of his childhood in Ireland. He began his career in journalism straight out of school at the age of eighteen and within a decade he was a correspondent for the BBC—first in Northern Ireland, and then in South Africa and Asia – winning numerous awards for his war dispatches, as well as his books and other works.
On 4 February 1996, three years after the death of his own father, Keane wrote this emotional letter to a fresh arrival: his newborn son, Daniel:
My dear son
It is six o’clock in the morning. You are asleep, cradled in my left arm, and I am learning the art of one-handed typing. Your mother, more tired, yet more happy than I’ve ever known her, is sound asleep in the room next door. Since you’ve arrived, days have melted into night and back again.
When you’re older we’ll tell you that you were born in Britain’s last Asian colony in the lunar year of the pig and that when we brought you home, the staff of our apartment block gathered to wish you well. Your mother and I have wanted you and waited for you, imagined you and dreamed about you, and now that you are here, no dream can do justice to you.
We have called you Daniel Patrick. Your coming has turned me upside down and inside out. So much that seemed essential to me has, in the past few days, taken on a different colour. Like many foreign correspondents I know I have lived a life that on occasion has veered close to the edge: war zones, natural disasters, darkness in all its shapes and forms.
In a world of insecurity and ambition and ego it’s easy to be drawn in, to take chances with our lives, to believe that what we do and what people say about it is reason enough to gamble with death. Now, looking at your sleeping face, inches away from me, listening to your occasional sigh and gurgle, I wonder how I could have ever thought glory and prizes and praise were sweeter than life.
And it’s also true that I am pained, perhaps haunted is a better word, by the memory, suddenly so vivid now, of each suffering child I have come across on my journeys. Looking at you, the images come flooding back.
Ten-year-old Ani Mikail dying from napalm burns on a hillside in Eritrea, how his voice cried out, growing ever more faint when the wind blew dust onto his wounds.
The two brothers, Domingo and Juste in Menongue, southern Angola. Juste, three years old and blind, dying from malnutrition, being carried on 10- year-old Domingo’s back. And Domingo’s words to me: “He was nice before, but now he has the hunger.”
There is one last memory, of Rwanda, and the churchyard of the parish of Nyarabuye, where, in a ransacked classroom, I found a mother and her three young children huddled together where they had been beaten to death. The children had died holding onto their mother, that instinct we all learn from birth and in one way or another cling to until we die.
Daniel, these memories explain some of the fierce protectiveness I feel for you, the occasional moments of blind terror when I imagine anything happening to you. But there is something more, a story from long ago that I will tell you face to face, father to son, when you are older.
It begins 35 years ago in a big city on a January morning with snow on the ground and a woman walking to hospital to have her first baby. She is in her early twenties and the city is still strange to her, bigger and noisier than the easy streets and gentle hills of her distant home. She’s walking because there is no money and everything of value has been pawned to pay for the alcohol to which her husband has become addicted.
On the way a taxi driver notices her sitting exhausted and cold in the doorway of a shop and he takes her to hospital for free. Later that day she gives birth to a baby boy and just as you are to me, he is the best thing she has ever seen. Her husband comes that night and weeps with joy when he sees his son. He is truly happy. Hungover, broke, but in his own way happy, for they were both young and in love with each other, and their son.
But the cancer of alcoholism ate away at the man and he lost his family. This was not something he meant to do or wanted to happen, it just was. By the time his son had grown up, the man lived away from his family, on his own in a one-roomed flat, living and dying for the bottle. His son was too far away to hear his last words, his final breath, and all the things they might have wished to say to one another were left unspoken.
Yet, Daniel, when you let out your first powerful cry in the delivery room and I became a father, I thought of your grandfather, and, foolish though it may seem, hoped that in some way he could hear, across the infinity between the living and the dead, your proud statement of arrival. For if he could hear, he would recognise the distinct voice of the family, the sound of hope and new beginnings that you and all your innocence and freshness have brought to the world.