When you confronted my father he appeared to be, and was in the eyes of the conflict, one of the enemy. You and your comrades were all in a “kill or be killed” conflict. When interviewed almost 60 years later, you remarked that what hurt about the memory of my father’s death was that my father had no business being there and neither did you. But that could be said for most if not all of the men who fought and suffered and died there. None of you should have been there. But you were, and that fact cast upon you terrible duties, duties you discharged the only way you could. What happened, happened. You were not at fault. The men you fired upon that day would have fired upon you. Had you not fired when you did, you and more of your own comrades may have died. How could you know that there was an American trained physician, and a father and husband facing you? And what could you have done, other than what you did, even had you known?
Whatever happened out there that day, and whatever painful flashes of memory still visit you, I ask you to let them go. I ask you to accept what happened and forgive yourself and to be at peace. And I want you to know that the daughter and the wife of Paul Tatsuguchi both hold you in honor and gratitude for coming forward and visiting our home that day, and wish you peace and happiness.
With Best Regards
Laura Tatsuguchi Davis
When Laura returned home to California, she read her letter aloud to her mother. Together they wept, but Taeko’s tears turned into a smile.
“I miss my husband terribly,” she told her daughter. “Life was not easy without him, but life went on. We had to keep on. If you hold on to anger and animosity, it’s going to eat you alive. You have to let it go.
“The guilt was eating at Mr. Laird. At his age he wanted to feel peace. As Christians we believe in forgiveness. I hope you have helped Mr. Laird move on.”
Laura’s heart swelled. Her mother brimmed with so much grace. Faith may have given Taeko her roadmap to life, but she still chose every turn at every intersection. Laura wished she could match her mother’s model of empathy.
Of course, meeting with the man who killed her father required some courage by Laura, too. Her mother’s serenity about the decision helped convince Laura that she had done the right thing.
Laura wondered how Laird would react when he read her letter. Home alone in his elder care complex, Laird had plenty of time to hash over history. Laura knew Laird was the kind of man who drew a strong line between right and wrong, but the gray fog of war had blurred so many judgments. She had forgiven him. Could he forgive himself?
A few days later, Laird wrote back to Laura with his answer: “I don’t mind telling you that your letter brought a tear to these eyes. I think you understand just what went on during the war.”
The night after the restaurant, Laird told Laura, he slept without nightmares.
23
* * *
Return
Taeko Tatsuguchi and Laura Tatsuguchi Davis didn’t have to be told that the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Attu was approaching. In the months before, letters from retired American servicemen packed their mailbox. Many enclosed copies of their own version of the Tatsuguchi war diary. All their letters were roughly the same: Hello, you don’t know me, but I was a U.S. soldier in Alaska, and I found this diary. Are you related to the man who wrote it? I thought you might want it. I always wondered what happened to the man who wrote it.
Laura responded with brief but polite letters explaining who her father was and how he died on Attu. By now, all the Aleutian veterans had reached retirement age, and they had the time and interest to reconnect with the formative events of their youth.
Then Laura received two letters that required more consideration. The first invited her to a reunion in Hokkaido of Japanese troops evacuated from Kiska. The second invited her to speak at a commemoration ceremony on Attu. She attended both.
The Japanese reunion was somber. Yes, the Imperial Army soldiers had managed to outsmart the Americans with a daring escape from Kiska, but all their colleagues had been killed on Attu, and many of the Kiska survivors had been killed later in other battles across the Pacific. At the reunion they all swapped war stories about friends, officers, and what they found back home upon return. Some survivors debated the role in the war of the Japanese politicians and generals and even the emperor. After all the speeches and talk, one statement from a former Imperial Army soldier stood out to Laura. “Fifty years ago, we fought against each other,” said Teruo Nishijama. “It does not matter now who won or who lost. The question is, what have we really learned?”
For much of the reunion, the veterans circled around Laura. They were anxious to meet the daughter of the man who provided the only surviving written account of the Japanese loss at Attu. Most wanted to learn more about Laura’s father. Some were interested in Laura’s life in the United States. Few veterans seemed bitter. Most were wiser.
In Japan, Laura tried to visit her father’s family home in Hiroshima, but learned it had been destroyed by the American atomic bomb. She visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, and was taken aback when she met a man who had become a living exhibit on the consequences of nuclear war. When the man lifted his shirt to show visitors the awful bomb burns across his torso, Laura gasped. She knew the Japanese government caused much pain in World War II, but the Japanese people had suffered much, too.
Laura had learned a lot about war. The most powerful lesson to her, though, was about the aftermath. She had many reasons to hate the man who killed her father. But he was a man, too, with his own flaws and insecurities. Even if Dick Laird’s words and manners were rough, his heart was right. He had a conscience. He wanted to do better. Like Laura’s father, Laird was an ordinary person thrust into an extraordinary circumstance. He did the best he could in a situation no one should ever face. As Taeko said, “I understand that it happened during the war, and Mr. Laird, too, was ordered to fight against his enemy by his superior officer. War killed so many bright young people who could have tremendously contributed to the future of the countries. It’s totally a waste of talents.”
The mere logistics of war were daunting to Laura. To travel to Attu Island for the ceremony marking the fiftieth anniversary of the battle there, Laura had to fly from Los Angeles to Seattle to Anchorage, where she switched to another plane for the 1,100-mile trip to Adak Island in the Aleutians. From Adak she flew another 450 miles to Attu.
She could not get over the remoteness of Attu. The island was so far from anything. In 1993, the only inhabitants of the island were the twenty U.S. Coast Guard employees running a long-range radio station for ships navigating the North Pacific and Bering Sea. What Attu lacked in population, it made up for with wind and fog and cold.
Laura was struck by the raw feeling of the place. It was wild. Mountains towered, waves crashed, and willows whipped. The ground was so mushy that it moved with each step. The air was dank. She had never been so far from civilization. Few others had, either.
She looked around and could not imagine why anyone would fight over such a place. She could not believe her father died here. What was the point? Who gained anything? What were the generals thinking? What was anybody thinking?
On her flights to Attu, Laura had worked on her speech. At home in Los Angeles, she had written, “How ironic that my father was killed in combat against his beloved America while in loyal service to his Japanese homeland. . . . Like my father, I, too, have a great love for Japan and America.” When she arrived in Alaska, she reversed the order of the countries so that her speech said, “America and Japan.”
With a quivering voice, in front of American veterans and dignitaries, Laura read her speech first in English, then repeated it in Japanese.
“Beginning May 11, 1943, a terrible and agonizing battle raged for eighteen days where we now stand,” Laura began. “My father, a physician, died here at Attu on May 29th, the last day of the battle. I was only three months old and we never had a chance to meet, which grieved me throughout my childhood and
even as an adult. And then, through the process of reading his diary, which survived the war, from researching his family history, I began to find the missing pieces of life’s puzzle.”
She described her father’s life and how he had been torn between two countries. She told how he was born in Japan but learned to be a doctor in the United States, and how she and her sister had both followed him into the medical profession as nurses.
“Today, I place this wreath in honor of all the American and Japanese fathers, sons, husbands, and friends who died and were buried in this soil,” Laura said. “On behalf of all their loved ones who were left behind, but have never been forgotten, and finally in memory of my father, Dr. Paul Nobuo Tatsuguchi, who died, as he lived, in the act of healing.”
After speaking, Laura was approached by a California woman, Tempe Robinson. Her father, an American soldier, had been killed on Attu the same day as Laura’s father. At the time, Tempe was six months old and Laura was three months old. The two women hugged. Though born on opposite sides of the world, and opposite sides of the war, each fatherless daughter said she knew how the other must feel. Laura’s heart swelled.
Laura’s speech was received warmly by some veterans and coolly by others. Some told Laura they were moved by her father’s circumstance, and admired his courage under the worst possible circumstances. Other American veterans, however, remained upset that their government had allowed Japan to erect an eighteen-foot titanium sculpture on Attu with an inscription in both Japanese and English: “In memory of all those who sacrificed their lives in the islands and seas of the North Pacific during World War II and in dedication to world peace.” Some American veterans believed that Attu was sacred ground for the 549 Americans killed and 3,280 hurt there, and that the Japanese had no right to be building any monument to a battle they had started.
Fifty years after her father was killed in the Battle of Attu, Laura could see that some people would never allow some wounds to heal. Several months later, however, she was startled to be greeted with a sign of hope.
When Ed Dickinson, an American veteran of Attu, wrote a report on the Attu memorial trip for the newsletter of the U.S. Army’s 7th Infantry Division, he was contacted by another vet who read it and was moved by Laura’s speech. That vet requested Laura’s home address.
In the summer of 1994, Laura received a surprise package in the mail. It was a Bible. Laura opened the black leather cover. Inside was a pressed wildflower, handwriting in the margins—and a picture of her sister, Joy, as a toddler.
Laura and Taeko could not believe it. In their hands was the Attu Bible of Paul Nobuo Tatsuguchi.
The sender was Alvin H. Koeppe of Wayne, Michigan. Like Dick Laird, Koeppe was a soldier who had fought on Attu, Kwajalein, Leyte, and Okinawa. For fifty years this stranger had kept one of her family’s most treasured possessions and then returned it. The man was unclear about exactly how he had come to acquire the Bible, and Laura was not going to press him about it. She was so grateful just to have the tangible evidence of the faith of her father. She thanked the soldier profusely. Just a few months later, on May 3, 1995—fifty-two years to the day that he, Laird, and other American troops had boarded their ships to fight in the Aleutians—Alvin Koeppe died. Laura prayed that he died in peace.
When Laura had returned home from Attu it was with a new appreciation of veterans. It had been difficult enough just to visit the Aleutians. She couldn’t imagine trying to survive in a swampy Alaskan foxhole with shells and bullets exploding around her.
She wondered how Laird was doing. On her next trip to visit her son at the University of Arizona, she called Laird and took him to lunch. His mind was sharp and he seemed to enjoy seeing her. She told him about her trips to Attu and Hokkaido; he told her about his grandchildren and photography and orchids.
A few months after Laura took Laird out to lunch, she and her mother sent him a Christmas card. He sent one in return.
The next time she visited her son in college, Laura took Laird to lunch again. They ran out of things to say about Attu. Instead, they talked about life—the joys of raising children, the difficulty of balancing work and family, the decisions that had set them on their current paths.
On the next visit after that, they did not talk about Attu at all. Nor on the visit after that, or after that.
Amid the lunchtime bustle of a restaurant, they wondered what the other patrons would make of them, he the frail old man in a Western bolo tie, she the middle-age Japanese woman in fashionable black slacks and blouse. He had taken her father’s life. She had given him forgiveness.
Laura would never know exactly what had happened to her father on Attu, but she knew enough.
Afterword
* * *
In the spring of 2011, after several phone interviews, Laura Tatsuguchi Davis invited me to Los Angeles to meet her mother. Taeko was ninety-eight years old and living with Laura. You should come soon, Laura told me. She didn’t have to spell out the reason why.
I met Taeko in the hospital bed Laura had set up in the first floor of their home. Taeko could not sit up by herself. She drifted in and out of sleep. Laura said her mother still wanted to meet me.
When I introduced myself, Taeko nodded and whispered. I leaned in closer, but understood little of what she said. Her breathing was louder than her words.
Laura told me that she and her mother had lived together for more than three decades. For much of that time Taeko had been strong enough to help care for Laura’s twins, but now it was Laura’s turn to care for her. As a career nurse, Laura had an unvarnished view of what the days ahead would look like for her mother. Adjusting her mother’s pillow, Laura spoke in a voice with the timbre of someone accustomed to being heard above the din of a busy hospital. Yet her eyes were dewy. She left us alone.
I sat next to Taeko and felt like I was sharing the room with greatness. She had been confronted with so much in life. She had loved and lost and scrapped through war and its ruin to raise two young daughters who were now strong, smart, and loving women. She did not seek anyone’s pity or attention, though Laura and Joy did assure me she thought more people should know about her husband’s story. I asked Taeko if she could hear me, but received no response. Her spirit was stronger than her body.
In the course of my reporting I had come to view Taeko as a symbol—someone who had never fought in war, but still suffered one of its deepest wounds. What happened to her was not fair. She could have been bitter. Instead, she pushed on with dignity. She gave hope to her daughters. She gave peace to the man who killed her husband.
Her breaths deepened and slowed. Taeko fell into a sleep. I felt honored to sit with her.
Outside Taeko’s room, Laura showed me the photo albums and walls of pictures documenting the family’s life. Her father’s Bible had been donated to the Japanese American museum in Los Angeles. Laura wanted it to be part of history for others to see.
I checked in the next day with Laura, who told me that her mother was happy to have met me, and was hoping my research would help illuminate her husband’s story. Still, Taeko had not slept well that night. Laura thought her mother’s tossing and turning might have been caused by the rekindling of old memories. She doesn’t like to think about anything sad, Laura told me. Wanting to respect her, I decided against trying to talk with Taeko again.
A few weeks later, on June 1, 2011, Taeko died.
Dick Laird was a lonely man by the time Taeko and Laura had started sending him Christmas cards. His beloved Rose had died of a stroke on Thanksgiving Day of 1998. According to their surviving daughters, Peggy of Tucson and Ellie of Las Cruces, New Mexico, Laird seemed lost without Rose. He channeled his remaining energy into cultivating unusual orchids in his greenhouse, photographing cactus in the wilds of southern Arizona, and puttering around the house. A former neighbor described Laird as quiet and meticulous. He was the kind of guy, the neighbor told me, who looked you in the eye and kept his word. He was the kind of guy, the neighbor sa
id, you’d never want to cross.
Laird died on January 14, 2005.
As for Attu Island, it never became anyone’s military prize. After the Japanese were vanquished in the spring of 1943, the U.S. military succeeded in building a runway on Attu, but williwaws, fog, and the never-ending torrents of ice, snow, and rain prevented much use of the island. In December 1943, the Navy and Coast Guard began trying to build a LORAN navigation station for ships on Attu. The first shipment of construction materials was ruined after a storm smashed the delivery barges onto the rocks. Another storm killed nine workers when vast waves capsized their tugboat 200 feet from shore. In the succeeding weeks, the Army lost another forty-one men to high seas and avalanches. The war in the Aleutians was over, but Attu would not stop killing men. The navigation station was finally up and operating on Attu by February 1944.
A crew of twenty or so men operated the LORAN station through the Cold War. Attu was the nightmare job assignment of the U.S. Coast Guard. The isolation was extreme; the weather was worse. Even the peacetime veterans of Attu Island expressed amazement that they survived it.
By 2010, advances in GPS navigation technology made LORAN obsolete. The Coast Guard finally called it quits on Attu. In a fitting tribute, the official decommissioning ceremony was delayed for a day when a storm and thick fog prevented the Coast Guard plane from landing on the island. The last Coast Guardsman left Attu on August 27, 2010.
Today there are no permanent residents of Attu. The island receives only a handful of visitors a year, mainly federal biologists checking the status of colonies of nesting seabirds, and amateur birders spending thousands of dollars to spot rare Asiatic species blown off course by storms during migration. The island remains a majestic but eerie sight: Snowcapped peaks and rocky shores are strewn with the planes, weaponry, and vehicles destroyed six decades earlier. Visiting biologists and birders are cautioned to hike only in established areas to avoid detonating unexploded bombs.
The Storm on Our Shores Page 22
