BRATTLEBORO — My father, Clarence “Bud” Fairchild, must have told me one particular story 100 times when I was a little girl, and I always begged him to tell me again.
“Describe the water, the men, the weather. Tell me again, Dad. Tell me about the time you were in the South Pacific during the war.”
“It was beautiful, Frances. The ocean was so different from Hampton Beach in New Hampshire. We rigged up a swing on a palm tree so that we could ditch our skivvies, run toward the ocean, grab a rope, and push ourselves over that beautiful blue water.
“We found a way to keep the sharks on the other side of the island by feeding them G.I. food at regular intervals during the day.
“I tell you, Frances, there is nothing that Marines can't do.”
I can remember the tenor of his voice, the way he gestured with his hands, the looks that swept over his face as he remembered being in the Second World War.
“It is true that the higher-ups knew that they'd better keep us boys busy, or we would just get into trouble. In fact, before they let us build that swing, we did.”
He would always chuckle when remembering, a little red in his cheeks returning as he told the story again.
“All those boys with nothing but time on their hands can cause a lot of problems stealing food in the mess hall after dark,” he said, nodding to himself. “Giving us the opportunity to exercise and swim off our homesickness, boredom, and troubles is a good use of a fighting man's time.”
I can picture him there, young man that he was, a farmer's son from Bethel, Vermont. When he was 5, his dad, an alcoholic, burned down the family home in a late-night stupor.
His mother, Jenny Fairchild, finally put herself and her two boys on the train to Brattleboro and moved in with her sister Minnie on Grove Street until the divorce was final. After that, the little family moved to Reed Street, a poor area of town where the Holstein Association U.S.A. stands today.
My grandmother got a job sewing pajamas for the WPA, and my dad and my uncle, his older brother Robert, grew up during the Great Depression in Brattleboro.
My father knew it would be just a matter of time before he was drafted. He lied about his age, and at 17, wanting the opportunity to be out on the ocean, he enlisted with the Navy.
He did his basic training in the South and became a corpsman - a first-aid man. When he came down with scarlet fever a year later, the rest of his buddies got shipped to Europe while he lingered, very ill, in the hospital.
Once he was better, the Navy decided to loan him out to the Marine Corps since they were short of corpsmen. He was sent on a train headed to California and joined up with the replacements for the First Marine Division, who had won the battle of Guadalcanal. After a few memorable liberties in Los Angeles, he was put on a ship and sent to God only knew where.
“It was all hush-hush,” he said. “Of course, we all had our idea about where we might be going. It was clear we weren't headed for Europe but, really, other than that, we had no idea.”
* * *
I can hear my father's voice telling me the stories of his youth as plain as day in my mind, but there is a special reason I am thinking of him right now.
I am on my way from Hong Kong to Seoul, South Korea. The map that flashes on the seat back in front of me is a map I have studied since childhood. I can't believe I am actually flying over this area of the world. My father would be so pleased.
Before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941 - “the day of infamy” - people in rural Vermont (or in most parts of America) didn't know much about the South China Sea. Our fighting men were drawn into a war that took them to tiny specks of earth in places so far away that no one really knew where they were.
As I look back at some scrapbooks I have of that era, the newspaper articles are filled with maps showing where the fighting with the Japanese was taking place. The public had to be educated so they could understand what was happening and where these battles were taking place.
Saipan, Okinawa, Peleliu, and the beautiful Solomon Islands had previously only been the homes of local tribal people living quiet, undisturbed lives. The Japanese Army arrived in the late '30s and early '40s and promptly dug in. Knowing that these islands were the only land that stood between a world at war and the Japanese mainland made this real estate particularly valuable to both sides.
American soldiers were arriving by the thousands, ready to take these islands back into the hands of democracy at all costs. Many believed that it would be just a matter of time before the Allies would need to invade the Japanese mainland. These islands would serve as the stepping stones to get there.
Silently, tears are flowing down my face. The flight attendants are looking at me and the screen wondering what movie I am watching that makes me so sad.
I am watching Life of Pi, but it is not the state of the bengal tiger that moves me. It is not the loneliness of the main character as he fights for his life in a boat, stuck at sea.
It is the flicker of the map of the seat back beside mine that makes me weep, makes me yearn to hear those stories told once more by a live and living person again that brings these tears to my eyes.
My father died in 1999. With him went all the stories that he feared he could never tell me or anyone else.
As he lay dying, he said what he could, but the past haunted him all his life. There were nightmares, blank looks, and stares. Occasionally, when I was a child, I pestered him to tell me more about his war stories, and he just couldn't keep talking about it. I could see the memories on his face. They pained him. The color on his face drained.
Yet not wanting to disappoint his young audience, at those moments he went from the harrowing tales of combat to the lighter remembrances of drinking the local hooch, or finding king-sized snakes in the caves under the cots of the wounded men under his care.
Not too long before he died, he saw the movie Saving Private Ryan, and the tears began to flow in ernest. He told me more detailed stories.
He cried. He apologized for having to kill or be killed. But I know he went to his death with a lot that he couldn't say out loud to anyone.
* * *
I feel pain deep inside me. I feel the war in my gut - not as a soldier, not as a historian, but as a woman who has spent her life exploring what it was for her father to live through it. Perhaps a little like the children of Holocaust survivors, I grew up during a time when we were all children of parents who had served their country during the war.
I used to sit on my dad's lap watching the black-and-white television series Combat. There was a television in the basement for the shows my mother didn't want to watch. This was the place for bowls of popcorn on the old living room furniture. This was my father's man-cave 50 years before the term was coined. He would sit in the basement, enjoy a cold beer, and watch all the old movies and all the war and cop shows while my mother enjoyed Masterpiece Theatre and Jeopardy upstairs.
Recently, I found these old episodes on Netflix and watched them all again. The majority of the stories told there were true. A little research revealed that the writers and directors were almost all veterans. While their tales were cleaned up for the censors, the basic storylines were real.
I don't think we ever got through an entire episode together without my father remembering some details of his own experience. That's why I sat on his lap as an 8-year-old. I waited for those moments, and once he got rolling, I would move to the other chair so that I could watch his face while he spun his tales.
* * *
I can see one of the islands below us now as the plane is banking to prepare for landing. We are only 54 miles from Seoul. All my father's history is rushing through my head: the battles, the men, the people waiting at home, the words from the letters from my father sent to my grandmother.
June 6, 1944
Dear Mom,
I received your letter yesterday. I thank you for the information about the war bond. I kept the pictures, but I destroyed the letter after I read it. I know you don't like that, but I have to, mother. … well, the invasion of Europe has begun. I was sleeping early this morning when one of the boys came in and woke me up to tell me...
June 9, 1944
Dear Mom,
Received the letter you wrote Saturday and a couple days ago the one you wrote on Monday. I will be looking for that package, and I received the Brattleboro Reformers. With all the kids graduating now, wished I had my diploma, too.
So John [his stepfather] caught some good trout, boy would I like some good trout right now. Been busy as the devil today, new patients coming in all the time....
June 25, 1945
Dear Mom,
Long time no write, so here goes....Well, I was finally hit, Mom. I knew my luck would never last out. I am going to tell you the God's truth where I am hit so you will not worry about me.
My right leg is broken, and right now it is strung up in the air with weights and cables, ropes, tape, pins, etc. attached to it, but I am laying on my back with good sheets under me, the best of care, and a grin on my face. I have a few flesh wounds on my left leg and hip but they are coming along fine, too. I was hit on the lines by a Jap rifleman, June 15th.
They flew me off Okinawa and am now in the Marines Fleet Hospital on the water....”
What he didn't know then and learned later would change his life. He finally ended up in Great Lakes Naval Hospital for a little over a year and after a few surgeries was told he would never walk again.
As a young man of 19, he spent most of his days determined that he would get the use of his legs back again, which he did manage to do. The government gave a disability status of over 50 percent.
He was also honored with two medals.
One was a Silver Star for his “gallant efforts in saving the lives of several men caught on the battlefield under fire with serious injuries resulting.”
Part of his award paperwork said, “Without regard for his own personal safety, Clarence Fairchild ran through the battlefield and was hit by an enemy sniper while attempting to save the lives of two other soldiers.”
The other medal he received was a Purple Heart.
His grandson, my son Sam, now has all his war memorabilia. Sam works with the Marine Corps in Virginia. He is working with the curator of the National Museum of the Marine Corps on an exhibit that will celebrate the work and the lives of the Navy corpsmen who were loaned to the Marines during World War II.
We are told that with the full set of letters my father sent home, his original uniform, his Corpsman training materials, his Navy songbook, and his medals, he could possibly be the focal point of the exhibit.
If he were still alive, my father would be embarrassed, but he'd be so proud that his letters will be on file for curious historians and researchers for eternity. He'd also be happy that others will be able to learn about his and others experiences in combat.
The tears just won't stop flowing now, and I've given up the fight. I think about my Dad every day. I'm writing a novel that will highlight his experiences in the war.
And here I sit, above the very ground upon which he fought.
* * *
We're about to land in South Korea, and if I knew more of the personal stories of the men who fought here in their own war which came after World War II, I'm not sure I could ever stop weeping.
I hope sometime while I'm still living in China, I'll be able to take a week or so in Okinawa to research parts of the book in the museum on the American military bases there.
My father would be the first to tell me that today I'm here for a happy purpose and to let up on the water works. I am on a holiday provided by two very good friends, whom I will meet soon in Hawaii.
My father eventually made it to Hawaii himself. He liked to joke that he was “the only guy [he] knew who went to Hawaii, stayed six months, and never put his feet on the ground.”
He had a beautiful view of the ocean from his hospital bed in Honolulu.
That's where I'm headed next.