Breaking the Code

by Karen Fisher-Alaniz

  “You know, Dad, we have the veteran’s hospital right here in Walla Walla. I know they have counselors you can talk with.”

  “Oh, that’s what your sister said. I got by all these years just fine. I’m not going to a shrink now. Shrinks are for crazy people.”

  He’d said that all my life. He didn’t believe in psychiatrists, or psychologists, or even counselors. He’d often said that if you go to one you’ll come out crazy for sure. I searched for just the right words. This was too important to mess up.

  “Sometimes it just helps to talk to someone who understands, Dad. Counselors who work with veterans are different from regular psychiatrists. They understand the special things that go along with wartime problems. It just might help you to talk to someone,” I said.

  “I am talking to someone,” he replied. “You.”

  I wanted to argue. I wanted to remind him that I didn’t know what in the world I was doing. I wanted to tell him that this load was too heavy for one person and I was afraid I’d drop it somehow and he would be hurt. But I just smiled back.

  “I don’t even know how I went to the bathroom,” he said. “On the plane and then in the hospital…I don’t remember how I went to the bathroom. I mean, did I wet myself or did I use a toilet? I don’t remember. It just drives me crazy, all this.”

  April 24, 1945

  Dear Folks,

  Back from liberty and three letters awaiting me—none in today’s mail tho. According to my calculations my package should be here tomorrow. But I won’t “eat my food before it comes.”

  Just an odd thought to make you jealous. At ships service we can buy all the pineapple juice we want for a dime a large can. It’s ice cold and no [ration] points either. A few months ago it was a luxury but I’ve had so much of it—I’d just as soon drink good cold water.

  Spent rest of the time working from one U.S.O. to another. Saw a couple shows. Ate hamburgers and ice cream all day. Sure glad you sent Andy Keve’s picture—think I may be able to locate him thru the Red Cross. I saw his name on a U.S.O. register but just figured he was somewhere else like the rest of them. I still haven’t seen a soul I know in civilian life.

  Found out I can take my exam for a ranking anytime before the 15th of May and be rated June first. If the head officer wasn’t so stubborn I wouldn’t even have to take the exam. The rules concerning it state that a class “A” school graduate only needs a recommendation from his superior officer for a rate. But he claims I should know the stuff OK if I was so good in school so I’d just as well take the exam—boloney—anyway I’m studying again.

  A paper boy told me he made close to ten bucks for a six hour day—seems a private enterprise is a better money maker than salaries. A person could start up anything and make money at it. All kinds of trailers made into hamburger stands with a steady stream of customers.

  Guess I’ve never seen a stateside paper since I’ve been here. I’m kind of getting wise to the local ones. They put every shot fired into headlines. Maybe that’s part of the propaganda campaign to make us more conscious—as if we could be any other way in this atmosphere.

  Everyone seems to remember I’ll soon be a year older. Been getting cards from all over. After all the rumpus, I’ll probably spend the day as usual—on the job. I may celebrate by buying everyone a cigar for my birthday. Should be the other way around but what good would it do me, since I don’t smoke. I just can’t help smiling at everyone that has to stand in line for their ration of cigarettes, liquor and other unessentials. I sure save a lot of time.

  Don’t take Joe’s prophesies to heart. I’m afraid I’ll be here for a long time. Most of the boys around here have been here for 18 months and up so I can’t expect anything better. I just figure on coming back when the Japs are licked which probably won’t be too long now.

  Some of the pessimistic ones say, “Golden State in ’48—Bread line in ’49”—mostly cause it rhymes well I think. But I expect to be telling all of you all about it long before that. Some one even predicting home for Christmas, but that’s a little too pervious I’m afraid.

  Couldn’t locate any Fiat parts, but have two addresses to check with to find out when the owners get these parts. I’ll do it. Next liberty, but don’t get your hopes too high from Hawaii way.

  Well g’bye for now. Write. Love, Murray

  Since we’d started this journey, Dad had an interesting reaction to his letters. He was completely uninterested. He treated them like they were infected with the bubonic plague. He wouldn’t touch them unless he had to. And the only time he had to was when we got together so he could help me decipher his writing. We were halfway through a bunch of letters when we kept getting confused on where we were in them. I’d turn to the wrong page, or he’d get the wrong paragraph. Frustrated, he decided to read the whole thing aloud. As he did, I went about the task of typing in any words I hadn’t known. But then he got to the following paragraph:

  Guess I’ve never seen a stateside paper since I’ve been here. I’m kind of getting wise to the local ones. They put every shot fired into headlines. Maybe that’s part of the propaganda campaign to make us more conscious—as if we could be any other way in this atmosphere.

  “Hmm…” he said.

  He read it aloud again.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I think I was hinting at something here,” he said. “That line about the propaganda campaign to make us more conscious. That was a hint at what I’d just been through. I knew that nobody had any idea what had really happened at Okinawa—the code-breaking part. The part about being overly conscious of the war—I was talking about being part of the top-secret team and being afraid to speak a word of it to anyone.”

  He sat quietly for a bit.

  “So you did write about it,” I said. “Well, sort of.”

  “Looks like I did,” he said. “And it got past the censors too. They wouldn’t have had a clue about what I was talking about anyway though.”

  I looked at him curiously. For a rare moment in our times together going over the letters, he looked pleased.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Office Work

  Guys going by the hut all day, and now and then I hear someone say, yeah, listen to him copy that stuff…Only guy on the base that can copy it and he’s only a seaman. That’s the Navy for yuh—Ad infinitum—lots of fun.—August 13, 1945

  Good news!” I hollered as I burst through Dad’s front door.

  Dad was in his usual place in the living room. I sat across from him, plopping my purse down on the floor and the notebook on my lap. I opened the notebook and then did my best Vanna White impression, sweeping the valuable merchandise with one hand.

  “You know what this is?” I asked. “This is a typewritten letter!”

  I had finally reached the letter dated April 29, 1945, and was ready to celebrate. After months of deciphering my father’s tiny handwriting, I had made it to the first of the typed letters.

  “Well,” he said. “Now you won’t need me at all. It’ll be smooth sailing from here on out.”

  I got up and put the notebook on his lap.

  “Well,” I said, “I wouldn’t say that I won’t need you now. I’ll just be able to read the letters without needing you to decipher the words for me. But I still need you to decipher their meaning.”

  “Meaning, huh?” he said suspiciously. “I didn’t sign up for that. What’re you going to do with all this anyway?”

  “Well, it started out with me just transcribing the letters so I could give a copy to each of the kids. But now, I want to tell the whole story, like fill in the blanks where the letters leave off.”

  “So you’re adding more details,” my father said.

  “Yeah, something like that,” I replied.

  “What do you want me to do with this?” He lifted the notebook slightly.

  “Read it,” I said.

  “Oh, I’m not going to do any such thing. Who cares anyway? It’s just a bunch of letters,
” he said.

  “But now they’re easy to read. Thank God for the invention of the typewriter,” I joked.

  “Well, just because I can read them doesn’t mean I want to,” he said.

  He closed the notebook and held it out.

  I took it from his hands, a bit bewildered. I thought he would have enjoyed reading his letters at that point. Even though he seemed to have an aversion to them, I thought that maybe if the reading was easier, he’d be compelled to read them. He was a compulsive reader, after all. But he would have none of it.

  “So, it looks like you somehow got to a typewriter. How did you manage that?” I asked.

  He sat back in his chair.

  “When they released me from the hospital,” he began, “I started my office job. I think I actually got the job before I went to Okinawa, but I’m not sure.”

  He was relaxed. These memories came easily to him. There was no struggle or hesitation. I put the notebook in my backpack and sat back too.

  “They put me in a place called Flag Detachment. That’s where all the top brass were. I remember I kept being amazed when I’d see someone like Admiral Nimitz just walking down the hall. I tried to pretend that it was no big deal, but it was. I suppose it was an honor to be trusted to work there, but I figured even the top brass needed peons like me to type their letters and sweep their floors. Most of the time, those bigwigs weren’t in the office at all anyway. It was in Naval Intelligence but there wasn’t much to do with that once I returned from Okinawa.”

  “Did anyone talk to you about Okinawa? I mean, once you got the office job?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “I always wondered if everyone knew or not. I thought maybe they were watching me to see if I’d lose it or something.”

  “So what was your job there?” I asked. “What did you do on a daily basis?”

  He laughed.

  “Well, for one thing, I had lots of spare time to write letters. Everyone I worked with did that. I was in a small office. The commander was right across the desk from me. He had a yeoman, which is like a secretary, who he dictated letters to all day. Well, one day the yeoman was sick so he had to settle for me. And for some reason I was able to dictate as fast as he could speak. So when the Yeoman returned, he fired him and kept me.”

  “What else did you do, besides take dictation from the commander?” I asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Nothing really,” he said. “The war was really winding down.”

  He was right about that. His next letter, dated May 7, was V-E Day (Victory in Europe). Although he had yet to see an effect on the war in the Pacific, he was aware of what was going on elsewhere in the war.

  May 7, 1945

  Dear Folks,

  No wise cracks about our railroad club, Mom. Everyone I told about it, suggested we line up some chairs around the room and play train.

  The bank statement arrived and I just can’t figure where all my thousands disappeared to. My treasurer made some poor investments no doubt. Oh well, easy come easy go.

  Speaking of do-re-me, I have a total sum of 53 bucks now. I got paid as per usual a couple of days ago and added the sum to the pocketbook balance. Then a wild day of spending on liberty yesterday and I ended up with the aforementioned amount. Pretty good for a mere seaman. Don’t tell anyone but maybe I’ll save up enough to get the flivver painted by the time the war is over.

  And speaking of war over—this is a momentous day I suppose. No one seems very excited over here tho. The European situation seems so remote from ours that it’s just another battle to us. The war over here is big as life and looks very promising to last on for quite a while yet. No one seems to be celebrating at all and no one even mentions it in conversation. FDR and Ernie Pyles death were the important news as far as we were concerned. It’s sure swell to have that much of it over now tho. Maybe things will shape up faster over here from now on. I sure hope so. I’d like to spend Christmas at home.

  It’s funny about mentioning exactly where you are. People usually guess sooner or later and probably someone right across the bay from me can say all he wants about the place in his letters but the censors here have strict orders to cut out any mention of the place in letters here so out it comes. But anyway you guess exactly where I am so it doesn’t matter much anyway.

  Well, when I get a leave now, I can fly right in to Walla Walla. That will really be swell. That is if some general doesn’t bump me off and make me hitch-hike.

  Well I don’t want to make too much of a good thing. I seem to be getting more letters nowadays than when I was writing three a day. Guess I’d better get busy and answer a few for a change before they suddenly stop altogether.

  Write. Love, Murray

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Life or Death

  Mom, if you want perfect foot comfort, take the hula gals’ advice, just go barefoot.—May 9, 1945

  With his story now out in the open, I thought our conversations would be easier. And they were in some ways. But there were still times when the answers eluded him and it seemed that the harder he tried to remember something, the more evasive the answers became. Sometimes it never came to him.

  Sometimes he’d even answer a question from weeks or even months earlier without seeming to know he was doing it. That was the case with his job after Okinawa. It had been several weeks since we’d talked about the work he did after coming back from Okinawa.

  Mr. Ed’s remained our constant. We were mid-conversation, between bites of our Benedicts, when he suddenly blurted out, “You know the one thing I just hated about that job? My boss, the commander, made me do the dirty work,” he said.

  I was drawing a blank. I didn’t know what he was referring to. But he continued and after a bit more information, I realized just what he was talking about.

  “There was this metal drawer that sat on top of a file cabinet. Inside were 4 x 6 cards and each card had the name of a sailor who was in amphibious forces but not assigned to be out there fighting. And it was the commander’s job to go to that file and pick a name. Whoever he chose would be sent out to the war. Well, the commander wouldn’t do it.”

  My father looked down as if searching for the picture in his mind. Then, to my surprise, anger flashed in his eyes.

  “He made me do it,” he said. “I argued with him. It was his job to do that. But he didn’t want the responsibility. After all, what we were doing was replacing some poor guy who’d been killed. It was like Russian roulette. Well, I didn’t win that argument. He made me do it. So, I decided I just didn’t want to know the name. Each card had the name, rank, and special training of a sailor in amphibious forces. I’d go to that file, close my eyes or look away, and take the first card. I didn’t want to know who I was sending.”

  “I never thought about that,” I said. “I guess someone had to make those decisions.”

  “Yeah, well, it shouldn’t have been me,” he said.

  Dad had stopped eating. Everything about him was tense. He was nearly gritting his teeth.

  “There was only one time that I looked at the names on those cards. But I had to do it.”

  Now I was curious. I stopped eating too. At this point, with all we’d gone through together, anger seemed an easy emotion to deal with. There wasn’t any guessing or pretending. It was a relief to be able to actually see an emotion in my father.

  “Who was it?” I asked.

  “Well, it was somebody I knew,” he said. “A guy named Thomas Coldwell. We went to radio school together and he was a Dayton boy, just like me. We were always giving each other a hard time. We kept in touch, and we were both radiomen, so we tried to beat each other to the next rate classification. He was a good friend. Do you know what a Dear John letter is?” he asked.

  I nodded. “It’s a letter that someone writes to end a relationship or a marriage,” I said.

  “Yes. Well, so many guys got those, it made me glad I didn’t have a girlfriend, or a wife for that matter. Well, this guy, he’d
come around fairly often and we’d talk about the life we left behind. He had gotten engaged right before he was drafted. Well, one day he got one of those Dear John letters. He was more upset than I’d ever seen a man be. He was all torn up about it.”

  My father shook his head, remembering.

  “Well, he rushed into my office one day,” he continued, “and he said he wanted to volunteer to be sent out in the next Beach Patrol Party, or B.P.T., as we called them. Beach Patrols were the first ones to go ashore during invasions. It was well-known that they had an 85 percent casualty rate. He knew the guys being sent out were returning in body bags. So he said the next time there was a draft out, he wanted to be in it.”

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  I watched my father’s expression change. So much time had passed, and yet his emotions were raw, as if the events had just happened. He’d lost his best friend Mal. And now he was faced with losing another one. I wondered, How much can one person take? I watched him as anger turned to resolve.

  “I decided right then that if his name came up, I wasn’t going to put his name in,” he said. “It was the only time that I had to look at those cards. I looked just to be sure he didn’t get sent. I knew he was upset and even suicidal. But I couldn’t let him go.”

  “And did his name come up?” I asked.

  “It did,” he said. “But I didn’t turn it in. I put it back in the file, probably at the back. I didn’t want it to come up again, and it didn’t. Not long after that, I got a letter from him and he was aboard a supply ship, so I knew he was safe—well, safer than he would have been on a Beach Party Team anyway.”