Breaking the Code

by Karen Fisher-Alaniz

  Hope you start receiving the paper soon if you haven’t already. The want ads and local news will tell you a lot that I never think of.

  For some unknown reason—they tell me I have a liberty again tomorrow. Every five or six days now. Still haven’t done any work. I’m getting my letter writing done on the job. It’s a good thing because I’m way behind on the letters and also in my studies. Got a swell book yesterday that you might be interested in Gerry? It’s “Your Wings” by Jordanoff. It cost three bucks and tells how to fly with all rules, regulations and air navigation, even parachute jumping—just everything and it’s simple too. It has a cartoon or two on nearly every page like Walt Disney’s stuff which makes it really interesting. It’s a big book—will take quite a while to read it.

  I’ll send it home for safekeeping when I finish it. Kind of wanted to be prepared just in case.

  Write soon. Love, Murray

  The job my father went back to after being in the hospital was not difficult. You could hear it in his letters. Was he given such a job because he was fragile? Was someone looking out for him, trying to make things easy on him because he’d had a breakdown after his friend died in his arms? Someone with a mind brilliant enough to break a complicated code probably wasn’t expected to break emotionally or mentally. But my father’s brilliant mind had broken. And so his work in naval intelligence was over.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Mourning

  The uppermost thing in all G.I.’s minds today is the death of Ernie Pyle. He was more important to the ordinary foot soldier than a general.—April 19, 1945

  I was a block away from his house when I noticed Dad was sitting on a lawn chair in the front yard. It was Wednesday, our breakfast day, but he’d never been waiting for me like that before. As I got closer, he stood and walked to the curb. He leaned in as I rolled the window down.

  “What do you think of my flag?” he asked.

  “What flag?” I asked, looking past him.

  He was grinning like someone who was keeping a great secret.

  He motioned for me to follow him. I parked the car.

  “Stand right here,” he said.

  I stood in the grass next to his chair. He went to the garage and returned with a pole about six feet long. Some sort of fabric was held between his arm and his side. His posture was erect, his stride confident, almost a march. He slid the pole into a hole in the ground that I hadn’t noticed and wiggled it until it was sturdy.

  He unfolded the fabric; it was an American flag. Then he attached it to the pole. With a simple sliding motion, he erected the flag twenty feet in the air. The flagpole proudly displayed the flag. He stood back and looked up at it and then at me.

  “It’s great!” I said.

  My father had always been patriotic. He was always the first one to put up a flag on Memorial Day, Veterans Day, and all of the other flag-raising holidays. During parades he stood and took his hat off when the flag was marched by. So this new addition didn’t surprise me.

  Each week after, when I arrived, the flag was raised. He followed proper flag etiquette, taking it down at night since it wasn’t illuminated. Sometimes, he raised it right when I arrived to pick him up. He loved it when the wind blew just right so that the flag was unfurled perfectly.

  I loved watching him raise it. There was such pride in every movement he made. When it was clicked into its final position, he’d look up. It was a symbol of strength and somehow he drew strength from it.

  A few weeks had passed when I stopped to pick him up for breakfast and he was sitting next to the flagpole. He raised himself from the lawn chair, giving it one last glance before getting into the car. I’d driven just a few blocks when he spoke.

  “It’s for Mal,” he said. “The flag. It’s for Mal.”

  It all came together then. He wasn’t drawing strength from the flag itself but from what it represented: his fallen friend. And when he sat out there, next to the flagpole, it was his friend’s presence that gave him strength.

  As we continued on to breakfast, I felt a well of emotions. My father and I had come full circle. At the beginning, I’d felt the need to fill every silence with words, every emotion with explanation. But as we rode together and then ate together, there was no need to do that. We understood each other, and we knew that silence too could be communication.

  Over the next few months, I would find him out there, in the lone lawn chair, just sitting, looking up at that flag or watching people walk by his house. When he heard that you could order a flag that had been flown over the White House, he ordered one and replaced the one he had. He knew all of the holidays and occasions that one is supposed to raise the flag, and he made up a few of his own too. He put it up as a celebration of birthdays and out-of-town visits from family. And sometimes he put it up for no apparent reason at all.

  What I began to realize, though, was that the flag was more than just a patriotic symbol. It meant that he hadn’t forgotten. He’d never been able to go to a funeral or memorial service for Mal. There wasn’t a grave to visit. But now, after more than fifty years, he had a place to go to remember.

  Mal’s death marked the greatest tragedy of my father’s young life. It was felt by him and somewhere it was felt by his family. But within a month’s time, the whole nation would mourn together. My father put words to that loss in a letter home.

  April 13, 1945

  Dear Folks,

  I was on liberty yesterday and out at a show at Kaimuki when they flashed the news of the presidents death on the screen. Of course everyone read it over a couple of times before believing it. Practically everyone walked out of the theatre kind of dazed. I was among them. Got on a street car heading back for Honolulu. A big negro top sergeant sat down next to me. Someone in the front of the bus held up an extra of the paper that said “Roosevelt Dies.” The negro said “I heard it but I didn’t believe it.” Tears were streaming down his face. Then as I walked across the street a boy asked me if I know why colors were lowered all over town. News came quick and it was hard to believe. It happened at 11:05 a.m. Hawaiian time.

  Spent a couple of hours talking to the lady at the U.S.O. about the proposed ex-railroaders club. We really got off to a flying start. I told her I hardly knew from one day to the next whether I’d be here or not but she said that part was OK. So we mapped out plans for a meeting the 23rd. She insisted that I was a good sign painter so grabbed a ruler and pen etc and made a big multi color notice to put up in the lobby.

  Oh yes, if Chad B. arrives, it will probably be right where I am. Hope you can run down his address for me when Mr. Broughton finds out about it.

  Glad the Honolulu paper is getting thru to you. Now maybe you’ll get some of the local news I never think of.

  Everyone is going in for baby kittens for pets now. They are kind of cute when they are little. Have a ma cat and five kittens kind of mottled gray color live where I’m working and at the main office a set of pure black ones.

  Have several advantages to my job. I’m temporarily on the staff now so I get a special card that lets me in to the shows without standing in line an hour or so and I get my mail an hour earlier. I don’t have to stand “quarters” for half hour every morning listening to a bunch of routine bulletins. A hard working man has advantages all right. By the way—I’m “working” now. Doing nothing as usual. Have a messenger watch this afternoon from four hours. Just drink cokes and gab with the gang.

  Well, this letter must end.

  Love, Murray

  “Do you remember when President Roosevelt died?” I asked.

  “Oh yes. I remember it very well,” he said.

  He proceeded to tell me the story of being at the Kaimuki movie theater and then on the bus. The story he told was identical to the one in his letter.

  “I just read about it in one of your letters,” I said.

  “Really?” he asked. “I wrote about that?”

  I nodded.

  “You have a fantastic mem
ory, Dad. You told the story almost verbatim,” I said.

  “I don’t know about the good memory. I don’t seem to remember anything these days. I get in the car and can’t even remember where I’m going,” he said.

  “Well, that’s nothing,” I said. “I do that all the time.”

  He thought for a moment.

  “Some things I just remember in detail,” he said.

  “You know, Mom says you have a photographic memory. She says you always have.”

  “Oh, I don’t have a photographic memory,” he replied. “Your mom doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”

  I didn’t tell him that my sisters and I thought that too. I didn’t tell him how different he is. I didn’t tell him that it’s not normal to read a book in one night and then be able to tell every detail about it decades later. I didn’t tell him how unusual it is that he easily understands complex schemes and commits them to memory, apparently without even realizing it. My father is the smartest man I’ve ever known. And yet when it came to emotions, it was a different story.

  What does it take for a man who remembers everything to forget? His best friend dying in his arms? As I read the letters dated late April, I could see an accumulation of events that were added to the death of his friend. Were they part of what drove him to bury it all away?

  April 19, 1945

  Dear Folks,

  The uppermost thing in all G.I.’s minds today is the death of Ernie Pyle. He was more important to the ordinary foot soldier than a general. He seemed to be right in there with them all the time and above all, he headed right back into action out here after “serving his time” in the European Theatre. Ernie could have stayed home without hurting his reputation or anything. I usually read his columns before the funnies even. They usually say exactly what the enlisted man is thinking all the time.

  Didn’t do anything unusual but eat ice cream—and that’s not unusual. Got a hair cut but forgot to tell them to shave the cookie duster off. Too bad. Maybe next year.

  I was the messenger this morning and got to write letter this afternoon. Guess I’ll have to brush up on my code and typing a bit too as I get speed tests in those subjects. It’s getting more complicated.

  I hardly even knew who was vice president let alone where he was from. Of course now we know we are in good hands. He can probably do a little drinking and get us out of the national debt or something. Still seems hard to believe F.D.R. isn’t at the helm.

  Wish you could get a picture of the Fiat with the first door open and the family or at least part of it—gathered ’round.

  That’s all there is—there is no more.

  Write. Love, Murray

  Dad rode over to my house on his Segway. We sat on the front porch, talking about nothing. Then I remembered Ernie Pyle.

  “Who was Ernie Pyle?” I asked.

  “You don’t know who Ernie Pyle was?” he replied.

  He was dumbfounded.

  “Well, Ernie Pyle was probably the best news reporter who ever lived. You know, nowadays we see all this news from what they call imbedded reporters. You know what that means, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “The reporters who go right along with the troops.”

  “Right up to the front lines,” he said. “Ernie Pyle did that during WWII. He went with the soldiers right up to the front lines. And in the end it cost him his life. He was shot by a sniper. The GIs probably mourned him more than they did Roosevelt. He was just one of the guys. He told the stories in a way that everyone could understand from the guys themselves to the housewife at home. Anyway, he was a hero to us.”

  Too much was happening at once in his letters. I felt overwhelmed and I wondered if that’s how he felt when he was going through it. First he’d lost his friend, then news of President Roosevelt’s death, and finally Ernie Pyle’s. When he talked about Ernie Pyle, it was like he was talking about the death of a friend. I wondered what it felt like to him back then. Did he feel like the world was falling apart, every foundation ripped away? Perhaps that’s why he kept his memories in a secure place for more than fifty years. Did one thing stack on another until he couldn’t take it anymore?

  It is said that people don’t commit suicide over one thing; it’s always a number of things, the accumulation of which becomes unbearable. I wondered if my father’s mind simply knew how much he could take and built a wall to save him. With the wall’s foundations firmly planted, even before he returned home, he could go on living. Had his life been spared by his mind’s ability to do this? It was impossible to even consider the alternative.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Lost Time

  Personally I would be glad to be turned loose over here in the middle of a pineapple field with orders to find my way back to Dayton.—May 31, 1945

  Dad and I continued to meet every Wednesday for eggs Benedict. However, since the day he remembered Mal, our time together had changed. Before, I had charged ahead with questions. But now I watched him for clues. I learned that his grief was almost imperceptible—the turn of his lip, the tip of his brow. If I saw any of those signs, I didn’t ask any questions. Sometimes we went for weeks at a time without talking about the war at all.

  But then there were times when his demeanor changed. There was a bounce to his step and a sparkle in his eyes. It was those times that we talked the most.

  “You know what bothers me the most?” he asked one Wednesday. “That time I lost.”

  “What time?” I asked.

  “After that time on the ship, when, you know…” he said. “After…”

  “After Mal died?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “I woke up in Aiea Naval Hospital. But I don’t know how I got there,” he said. “They must have flown me but I don’t remember.”

  A bell above the door jangled. He watched as a young family came in. He kept watching them as he continued.

  “I lay there at night when I can’t sleep. I just go through it over and over in my head. How did I get to the hospital? Who was there? It’s driving me crazy. You know I can remember every moment of my life except this one. Why can’t I remember?” he asked.

  He was looking me in the eye now. His eyes were pleading, asking me to figure this out for him. But I didn’t have the answer.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “What’s the last thing you do remember?”

  “I just remember trying to wipe the blood off of my shirt with my hands. I was just brushing my shirt like this,” he said. He brushed his hands down the front of his shirt.

  I couldn’t help picturing it in my mind’s eye, blood saturating his white shirt. The horror he must have felt when, with every swipe, more blood was transferred to his hands. The more he tried to erase it, the more bloodied he became.

  I drew in a silent breath.

  “And then what?” I asked.

  “Then someone said, ‘Somebody get that shirt off of him,’” he remembered. “And a couple of sailors pulled it over my head. And that’s all I remember.”

  “Until the pretty blonde nurse,” I added, trying to lighten the mood. He smiled a little.

  “I just wonder if it’s in there,” he said tapping his head. “I was probably on an airplane. It had to take eight or nine hours to get there. What did I do? Did I talk? Did someone talk to me? I must have just been out of my mind.”

  “You were traumatized,” I said.

  “When I woke up in the hospital, I asked that nurse if I was hurt. She said some people get hurt in their bodies and some people are hurt up here.” He tapped his head again. “I was probably in the psych ward and didn’t even know it. I got an email from your sister the other day and she said I have NTSD,” he said. “You ever heard of that? I think it means I’m just plain crazy.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard of it. And it’s P…TSD,” I said.

  “What does it stand for?” he asked.

  “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,” I said.

  My sisters and I had tal
ked on and off about what Dad was going through. My sister Kathleen had offered to send Dad a packet that included lots of information, treatment options, and other resources in it. I hadn’t known she’d sent it, but I was glad she had.

  The burden of carrying this had become heavy. Little by little, my life, my family, was showing the stress associated with trying to help someone through a traumatic experience. At times I was so tired and down and so overcome with grief for what my father had to live with that I felt alone. I didn’t know a single person who had a father who was in WWII. I didn’t know anyone who had a loved one who suffered from post-traumatic stress.

  Now that I knew my sister had sent the PTSD information, I was relieved and scared at the same time. I didn’t know if he was ready to face his problems in that way. And I knew that I would be the one to pick up the pieces if it backfired.

  “What does that mean, post-traumatic…whatever?” Dad asked.

  “Well, the way I understand it, it’s not anything new. Other wars just had different names for it, like shell shock,” I said. “I’ve looked it up on the Internet and they used to believe that it was caused by the loud sounds of the cannons or guns going off. But now they know that’s not the case.”

  “Sometimes I just blank out,” he said. “It’s like everyone around me is going about their business but I’m back there. I’m with Mal on that ship. Do you think that’s PTSD?”

  “Probably,” I said.

  It was such an important moment and I didn’t want to say something wrong. Now was my chance to help my dad. Maybe after all this time, I could finally point him in the right direction—one that had a chance of bringing healing to his soul.