I’ve been thinking about my memories of war and warriors.
Memorial Day is about remembering. Here are three stories that live in my mind.
My first encounter with a warrior in my family happened at the end of World War II, when Uncle Harry, my father’s younger brother, came through Hollywood on his way home from combat. I was four years old and as dressed up as I could be when he came to our home to meet me and my little sister. A photo from that moment with him and my father is my only record of that visit.
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The day after the photo was taken, Harry dropped by my father’s newsstand on Hollywood Boulevard and announced to my dad that it was time I had a real baseball glove. My dad gave him a twenty-dollar bill, said, Bring me the change, and sent him half a block to Hollywood Sporting Goods.
He came back ten minutes later with a glove and said to my dad, Pat, I need another two dollars for a baseball. Aghast, my father yelled at him, You spent twenty bucks on a baseball glove for a four-year-old? Are you out of your mind? then gave him the two dollars. I played ball with that glove until its worn leather shredded during my high school senior year’s baseball season.
Over fifty years later, we travelled as a family to Boston for a graduation and I took our younger son Jesse with me to visit Harry and his sister, my Aunt Margaret, whom I’d never met before, in their small apartment in Lowell, Massachusetts. After welcoming hugs and a cup of tea, I told Harry I had a surprise for him. I pulled out the picture of him and me from fifty-five years earlier and handed it to him.
Oh my, Rick, he smiled, then said unexpectedly, I’ll be right back.
He went upstairs, returned in less than a minute and handed me a duplicate of the picture which, he explained, he’d kept tucked in the edge of his bedroom mirror since he returned from that visit to Hollywood. This warrior Uncle I’d met only once fifty-five years earlier, had kept me in view, had kept me in mind, and had kept me in his nightly Catholic prayers of thanksgiving.
My father was one of four children born to his mother before she died when he was eleven or twelve. His father quickly remarried because he needed help raising all those kids; his new wife had three more (including Uncle Harry). For reasons I never learned, my father and his new stepmother didn’t get along, and by the time he was seventeen he dropped out of school and joined the Navy in the early 1920s.
He lasted less than a year; he drank heavily, and the anger generated by his troubled childhood turned him into a streetfighter, which blended with the liquor to bring an end to his Naval service.
One thing he kept from his time of service was the tattoo of a seaman in a white sailor's cap on his bicep which would dance when he flexed it for us throughout our childhoods. It's my memory of that tattoo that inspired me to get the two that now stand hidden posts on my body, a barely conscious tribute to my father, Navy Seaman Patrick Thyne.
Sailors (not my father, but sailors very much like him) on liberty ashore, during the early 1920s © Naval History and Heritage Command.
The other habit he kept was his drinking. He died at sixty-nine from too many packs of unfiltered Lucky Strikes (which the government issued to service personnel when they entered the military) and an ocean of vodka.
Being swamped by the waves of his unruly behavior have sometimes made it difficult for me to honor those moments when, as a lost and frightened young man, he had been brave enough to enlist, brave enough to train, and would have been willing to fight the enemies of his country if he hadn’t spent his best years fighting the enemies in his head.
J. was among the high-school knuckleheads I hung out with and was bonded to for life, the way we are stitched to the friends who shape our identities as we make our way from childhood to adulthood. When I left in the early 1960s for six years of graduate school and work in New Jersey, I lost touch with him. I later learned that during my years away he’d married, had a daughter, and then enlisted and spent a year in Vietnam.
American soldiers (not J., but soldiers very much like him) on a search and destroy mission in Vietnam. Image courtesy WHYY (Bettman/Getty Images).
When J. returned, he was a different person. He developed a severe case of what we now define as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, the indelible psychic wound from watching too many of his companions die in front of him as they pushed their way through heat and fear and relentless firefights. He talked later about a comrade standing not far from him when a Vietcong bullet blew this friend’s brains out, one of too many traumas he endured in that turbulent year. For more than a decade after he came home, he didn’t sleep through the night and was restless and unsettled for the rest of his life.
Through the following decades we saw one another only occasionally, still embracing our childhood friendship but living in very different worlds. He divorced the mother of his only child, and soon after married a woman who developed Multiple Sclerosis a few years into their marriage. As her mobility declined, he spent the remaining decades of his life caring for her, struggling financially, never free of the psychic wounds of war.
Late into their seventies, with her physical and their financial resources dwindling, they borrowed a friend’s cabin in the Sierras and settled in to stay for a few months. Months stretched into two years until one day last spring they no longer answered the phone. A week later the local police found them both dead: J. had died of an apparent heart attack and his wife had been so debilitated that she was unable to feed herself.
He did come back from that awful war, so his name is not etched on its memorial in Washington, D.C. But he brought the war home with him, and he never fully made his peace with its invasion of his mind.
For me, a lifetime of antiwar activism dissolves in the sadness of my memories of J. and the unremitting pain about the way the two of them died, helpless, alone, and terrified.
And I grieve the fact that none of us, his knuckleheads, were there at the end.