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Patience is the gift of space and time, and a virtue I learned from my father. I spent many hours alone with him out on the water; and the memory of those times are precious, if mostly filled with silence. I know now that it was in those silences that I came to appreciate the value of introspection and the cost of self-pity. He was living proof that it takes a certain courage to spend time alone.
Robert Graves
Two Fusiliers
And have we done with War at last?
Well, we've been lucky devils both,
And there's no need of pledge or oath
To bind our lovely friendship fast,
By firmer stuff
Close bound enough.
By wire and wood and stake we're bound,
By Fricourt and by Festubert,
By whipping rain, by the sun's glare,
By all the misery and loud sound,
By a Spring day,
By Picard clay.
Show me the two so closely bound
As we, by the wet bond of blood,
By friendship blossoming from mud,
By Death: we faced him, and we found
Beauty in Death,
In dead men, breath.
- Robert Graves
My father wasn't much of a talker, or at least not much of a talker about anything of substance. His silence, I believe, was born of experiences beyond understanding, a taste of fire that musn't be shared with the uninitiated. Like Robert Graves he had, at some point, found beauty in death and, in dead men, breath. What he—and men just like him—never found were the words to describe those truths in ways that could temper the horror and mitigate the pain. So they stayed silent.
My father served in WWII, as did his brothers, but he rarely spoke of those times. Despite my best (if juvenile) efforts, I was shown only brief flickerings of that history. He once recalled the first time he saw snow, right after enlisting, when he was sent to Indiana University in Bloomington to learn Finnish; of a time in Paris, serving as a translator, where he tasted wine that reminded him of love; and about a tragic bus wreck he witnessed on the trip he took from Seattle back home to Louisiana after his discharge. That short, playing in my mind as I write this morning, is jumpy and full of gaps.
The film that begins this diary is one of 30 such copies made by the U.S. Army and presented to the families of the men whose lives were lost on the mission flown by Torpedo Squadron Eight from the USS Hornet at the start of the Battle of Midway. My father's brother was among those men who flew that morning of June 4, 1942, under the leadership of Commander John C. Waldron. History teaches us that these men were flying outdated Douglas DBT Devastators, flew in without fighter coverage, and did so knowing they would be beyond any range of possible return.
All 15 planes and all but one man were lost in that attack and not a single Japanese ship was hit. Yet historians tell us that these men, on a mission they fully understood would end only in failure and death, made an American victory possible at Midway. My father, to the day he died, grew silent and thoughtful at the mere mention of his brother's name, as if the breath of the dead had reached out and hushed his lips.
Flickering on our living room wall, a long crack in the plaster diagonally scaring an edge of the sepia-toned image, I spent many hours watching that film, silently, if only to catch a fleeting glimpse of the man I would never know.
Grab your coffee and pull up a chair.
What do you want to talk about this morning?