To the heartbreak of Taeko, two versions of her husband’s translated diary read, “Two hours ago I took care of all the patients with grenades.” Four other versions do not include a subject in the sentence, saying only, “Took care of all the patients with grenades.” In the mind of Taeko and other church officials, this difference was crucial: It left open the possibility that Tatsuguchi himself did not kill the patients. If he “took care of all patients with grenades,” then perhaps Tatsuguchi—or even someone else—had merely distributed grenades for soldiers to detonate themselves. There also was the chance that “took care of all patients with grenades” meant that he had just attended to them as a physician. Either way, Tatsuguchi would have been able to stay true to the biblical commandment of thou shalt not kill.
Taeko told the professor some details of her husband’s life—the man behind the diary.
“Wherever he was, he wanted to be a good Christian,” Taeko told the professor. “He wanted to do the best he could.
“He never would kill all those boys. For sure he would not. I would like to get that clear by getting the original [diary] if possible.”
The professor promised to try his hardest, but ultimately he could not recover the diary. The U.S. Army said the original was lost.
In his paper about the diary, published in the academic Journal of Ethnic Studies, the professor repeated the unverified story of Tatsuguchi trying to surrender on Attu with a Bible in his hand. The story was reprinted in the alumni magazine of Pacific Union College under the headline, “Don’t Shoot! I am a Christian!”
For a story on the fortieth anniversary of the Battle of Attu, the Associated Press published in May 1983 a story on Tatsuguchi that ran in newspapers across America with the quote, “Don’t shoot! I’m a Christian.”
The AP story was read in Tucson by a man named Dick Laird.
That’s not right, Laird thought. That’s not what happened at all.
21
* * *
Quest
He wasn’t really sure what he wanted to do. Through the help of a Japanese journalist, he had found the house of a woman in Sherman Oaks, California, named Laura Tatsuguchi Davis. He was told it was also the home of a widow named Taeko Tatsuguchi. Laird had called ahead to say he had some items from the Battle of Attu, and he wondered if any belonged to the family.
Laird was too nervous to tell anyone the true reason for his visit—he was the American soldier who had killed Nobuo Tatsuguchi.
When Laird arrived at the home, Taeko was polite, but not friendly. Laird opened his box of battlefield souvenirs, but Taeko said she didn’t recognize anything. Just looking inside the box seemed to bother her. She thanked Laird, then excused herself to the backyard, where she said twins were playing.
Laird could tell that Taeko was uncomfortable. He couldn’t blame her. Her husband had been dead for four decades. She had a new life in a new country. Laird was the one who wanted to revisit the past.
With Taeko in the backyard, it was now just Laird and Laura in the living room. There was an awkward pause. Laird wondered: What now? He fumbled and fidgeted. He was never a man of many words, and he was even less at ease with strangers. To the Tatsuguchi family, Laird was worse than a stranger, though only he knew it.
He tried to break the ice by talking a little about himself, about his life in Tucson, about his cultivation of bromeliads in the greenhouse he built. Laird could tell, however, that his chitchat wasn’t going over well.
Laura didn’t have to say it. Laird knew she wanted him to leave. But he still hadn’t done it. There was one thing he had come here to do, and it remained undone. Laird couldn’t bear to say it to the face of the widow of Paul Nobuo Tatsuguchi, but he knew he owed it to the family. Laird owed it to himself.
“By the way,” he told Laura Tatsuguchi Davis as he entered his car, “I’m the one who killed your father.”
And he drove off.
Laura was thunderstruck. She was forty years old and had never known much about her father. Her main source of information was her mother, who, in the words of Laura, “did not like to dwell on sad stories.” Laura knew her father had been killed in World War II in Alaska. She knew he was born in Japan but studied in America, and that he loved both countries. She knew he was devout, and a pacifist, and had been drafted against his will, and had served as a surgeon. She had heard the story of how her father had tried to surrender with a Bible in his hand.
Her older sister, Joy, who had lived with Laura in the United States but had married and moved back to Japan, had one memory of their father. That was playing hide-and-seek with him as a young girl in an apartment in Tokyo. But Laura was born after her father had been sent to war. She had never seen or heard her father. She knew little about his life, and even less about his death.
Outside her house, Laura struggled to breathe. She did not want to go back inside to tell her mother. She did not want to return to the house, period. She slumped in her car and cried. She had shaken the hand of the man who killed her father. She had offered him tea. Laura turned the ignition of her car and drove.
She didn’t know where to go. She didn’t know what to do. Truth be told, she didn’t know what to think. She had not thought about her father in a serious way for a long time. Besides her mother’s sparse stories, and some pictures on the wall, he had never been a part of her life. She had wanted to know more about him, but life got in the way—school, marriage, job, house, twins, elderly mother at home. She barely had time to think about herself.
The more she drove, the more she realized she needed help. Luckily, she knew someone.
A friend who had served in the Vietnam War was now a psychiatrist. She called him.
“Oh my God,” she told him. “I just talked to the man who killed my father. My stomach is churning. I feel terrible. What should I do?”
Her friend listened to the details of Laird’s visit, as well as the story of her father’s death. “I think he came over to relieve himself of a burden,” the friend told her.
That analysis was a shocker. Laura hadn’t considered this. She had always thought that growing up without a father had been a burden for her life. But what if the man who killed her father had regrets? What if he carried a burden, too? The guilt might be unbearable. It made her think.
Laura spent more than a decade on a quest to figure it all out. When her own marriage ended in divorce, she became a single mom with little unscheduled time, but she worked hard to open up some hours to learn about her father. She asked her mother lots of detailed questions about her life, her father’s life, and their life together. Her mother opened up a little, but still did not want to talk much about the past. Taeko wanted to spare her daughter the pain. Laura, however, felt compelled. A stranger who knocked on her door knew something important that Laura did not know about her father. She wanted to know the story of the man who made her.
She doubled back to talk with the Emory University professor who in 1971 had interviewed her mother and investigated the Battle of Attu.
“You are the daughter in the closing lines of Nobuo Tatsuguchi’s diary?” he asked her.
“I am,” Laura told him.
“My goodness,” he replied.
History had come to life for the professor.
Laura was thrilled with the way the professor had put her father into historical context. He had written: “Since the time of the American Civil War probably no lover of America has been assigned to such burdensome military service. He was loyal to two peoples and two cultures, who were warring against each other.” She had learned about her father as a man from Taeko. The professor helped Laura understand her father as a symbol of the tragedy of war and the clash of cultures.
The professor helped Laura hash out the similarities and differences in the conflicting versions of her father’s diary. She came to understand how, in the chaos of war, a competing translation of a single Japanese phrase or symbol could raise questions that would persist for decad
es.
She wrote letters to her father’s medical school classmates and even attended a class reunion. At first she was nervous to walk into the ballroom. She knew no one. Everyone at the reunion was considerably older—the same age as her father would have been.
As attendees clustered in groups—some were old friends, some were reintroducing themselves for the first time in years—people began to notice her nametag: Laura, daughter of Paul Tatsuguchi. First she was greeted by a few individual doctors. Then whole groups came. The gravity inside the room shifted.
The reunion turned into a de facto Tatsy tribute, with Laura as the star attraction. Old classmates buzzed around and introduced themselves. They told Laura how her father had loved his wife, America, and Japan. For many classmates, he had been a walking, talking example that disproved America’s racist propaganda against the Japanese during World War II. They told Laura that he was humble and hardworking, serious in school but fun outside it, with a wry sense of humor. Everyone had a Tatsy story. Everyone shared grief over his fate in Attu. Everyone also agreed that he was a devout man of peace, though the classmates who served in the military during the war must have known that horrible things happened in battle that could not be easily explained or understood back home.
They were proud to have known him. The more she heard, Laura was, too.
For the first time in her life, Laura started to understand her father as a person and not just as a framed picture on the wall. She wished she had met him. When Laura was a girl in Japan, she knew many other children without fathers. In the United States, however, casualties had not been as common. Many of her friends in California grew up with fathers who could offer advice or help with school or just be there when needed. Laura had never known what it was like to have a father. The more she learned about hers, the more she felt loss.
Like the Emory University professor, Laura tried to recover her father’s original diary, but the Army gave her the same response—it could not be found. A U.S. senator lent the power of his office to the diary hunt. No luck. Laura concluded that her father’s battlefield writings truly were lost.
When Laura felt she had uncovered as much as possible about her father’s life, she was ready to learn about his death. She called Dick Laird to arrange a meeting.
22
* * *
Deliverance
It had been thirteen years since Laird rang the doorbell at the home of Laura Tatsuguchi Davis in California. The kindergartener twins who had been playing in the backyard on the day of Laird’s visit were now grown, and one boy, Brian, had enrolled as a student at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Laura was going to visit her son at school.
Laird lived just a few miles from campus.
As a career intensive care nurse, Laura was not easily flustered, but she felt on edge as she drove up to Laird’s home. Her mind raced. The last time she had seen him, Laird was so strong and stern and blunt—he had frightened her.
Now that hardly seemed possible. Laird was eighty-four years old and he looked like it. He lived in an assisted care facility. He shuffled his feet as he walked and he needed help entering Laura’s car.
Laura’s son had suggested dinner at a nearby family restaurant packed with customers.
The soldier and the daughter sat across the table from each other, with Laura’s son at her side, just in case she needed support. To others in the Arizona restaurant, it might have looked like a daughter and grandson taking their grandfather out to dinner—Laird was twenty-seven years older than Laura—except that few family dinners were this serious and careful.
Laird listened quietly as Laura described the way her father grew up, why he came to the United States, and how he was conscripted against his will to serve as a surgeon in the Imperial Army. She also talked about her own personal quest to learn about the father she had never met.
In return, Laird recounted his own past. He talked about his daughters, his photography, and his orchids. He’d had a full life, a good life, but war lurked behind it. He couldn’t move past it. Sometimes he dwelled on it. Laird told Laura about the hellhole of Attu and why he had killed her father.
The more he talked, the more Laird seemed to unburden himself. Still, Laura could sense that something was still on his mind. She asked how he was doing—how he was really doing.
He wasn’t well. The love of his life, Rose, had died little more than a year earlier, and Laird still hadn’t recovered. “Now I know why husbands and wives die shortly after a spouse dies,” Laird said. “Boredom. No one to talk to and argue with. No one to turn over to in bed in the middle of the night.”
The late hours, especially, were a problem for Laird. His nightmares were more frequent and worse. He had seen friends killed in war. He had killed dozens of Japanese in war. He had killed his own runner in war. He had nearly killed innocent civilians in war. He had seen soldiers do savage things. And, oh, the things he had heard—screaming, moaning, weeping. Sometimes he would wake with the voices of anguish in his ears. Of all the misery he had caused and witnessed, the one that still gave rise to the worst nightmares, Laird told Laura, was his killing of Paul Tatsuguchi.
“I killed your father and seven other men and they gave me a medal for it,” Laird said. “I still can’t sleep because of it. I didn’t have any other choice, but that doesn’t mean it was right. I keep thinking about your father and your mother and you and your sister. I think about it all the time.”
He believed Laura’s father, like other Japanese soldiers in the final banzai attack, was trying to kill him. But what if he wasn’t? What if he was just a pacifist running along with a banzai charge because those were his orders? The truth was that Laird didn’t know for sure. At the very least, Tatsuguchi was with the people who were trying to kill Laird and his fellow soldiers. Laird believed everyone atop that knoll on Buffalo Ridge at Attu was a mortal threat, so he lobbed his grenade and shot at them all. It was easy to kill an enemy who was a symbol, yet another uniform in an unrelenting army attacking Laird and his country and his way of life. But it was much harder to have killed a person. Laird knew now that Paul Tatsuguchi was a man torn between two countries, a husband who loved his wife and his children. He was a doctor who opposed war. His daughter said he loved America. “I was a professional soldier,” Laird told Laura, “but your father was not. Your father was not.”
All these years later, Laird still didn’t think he had done the wrong thing. He just could not identify the right thing. He feared he had killed an American.
“When I read the diary,” Laird told her, “I felt like I’d killed a husband, a father, and a Japanese man that had no business where he was at.”
Laura and Laird looked at each other. Their eyes welled. Laura did not know what to say, so she told Laird the first thing that came to her mind: “It was war. It was a long time ago and you did what you thought you had to do.”
In the middle of the restaurant, Laura knew it: The man who killed her father did bear a burden. He had carried it inside himself for more than five decades. He could not rid himself of it. And now Laura knew what she wanted to do about it. She could not give him peace, but she could give him atonement. After dinner, she sat down and wrote him a letter:
Dear Mr. Laird,
It was so good to have had a chance to talk to you tonight. I am writing this letter to express even more completely my gratitude to you for coming to my home so many years ago, and to ask you to let go of any feelings of guilt or pain you still have over what happened between you and my father at Attu. What happened there was neither your fault nor his. Neither you nor any of your comrades chose that particular battle or that particular time to fight. If fault lies with anyone, it lies with those commanding generals, all long dead, who decided to spend the lives of their men in what many believe to be a stupid battle over a useless and barren piece of land. That includes the Japanese generals who invaded, for what must have been symbolic purposes, small and frozen islands that they could neith
er defend nor use, and who left men stranded there. It also includes the American military commanders who chose the worst of seasons to stage a battle that never needed fighting.
The only thing that dignifies and sanctifies that terrible battle was the bravery, duty, and loyalty to country that those of you who were left to fight that battle displayed under the most terrible circumstances. You were an American soldier. Your native land had been attacked, and you accepted the task of defending it. You did the duty thrust upon you bravely and ably. So did your comrades. So did the men on the other side. None of you, on either side, chose to make this horrible war happen. When others did, it fell upon you and your comrades, and my father and his, to do what was left to you to do.
My father’s medical school classmates told me how my father felt in the later’30’s about the then-brewing conflict between Japan and the United States. My father loved America, and would have happily remained here to practice had family necessities not required him to return to Japan. He had traveled all over this country. He thought it would be insanity for Japan to get into a war with the United States, and told his classmates so. He said, “America is such a huge and powerful country. All of Japan is not as large as California. War with America would be insane. Japan could never survive it.” Had he lived to see it, he would have grieved, but hardly been surprised at the devastation Japan suffered before the war was over.
The Storm on Our Shores Page 21
