Broken Record

Henry J.

April 14, 1965

First off, let me say that I don’t really see how this will change anything. Let me also say that I’ve never heard of a high school counselor being able to issue assignments. I know you said it’s not an “assignment” and that it’s voluntary but it still feels like homework and I get enough from my teachers, but I suspect you’ll keep on about it until it’s done. I also suspect that because you can write “Ph.D.” after your name that you’re not used to push back, and even with your repeated assurances of complete confidentiality, I’m filled with dread, with fear that this’ll make things worse. I’ll do it, but note that it’s under protest.

I saw on the news this evening that it’s been exactly one hundred years since President Lincoln was shot. I also saw that Richard Hickock and Perry Smith were hanged today for murdering that family in Kansas. Is there any meaning in that? I don’t know.

I don’t even know where to start; there are just too many beginnings and far too many endings. I suppose you could say that it stared during the war. Not the war we’re in now, even if Johnson doesn’t call it war, or the war before in Korea. Maybe it started when my father got home from World War Two.

He shouldn’t have even been in the war if you ask me. The draft age then was from eighteen to what? sixty-five? And if you were forty-five or younger then you were immediately liable to be drafted.

My mom said my father was thirty years old when his draft notice came. That was in June of 1943 and Mom was already two months pregnant with Tommy. My father had been a bookkeeper at the Ford dealership in Campbell California just trying to make sure that the debits equaled the credits then because the mailman had come he was spirited off to basic training to learn to kill Germans.

He’d been assigned to the 2nd Infantry Division. I still own a 2nd Infantry patch he wore, an Indian head in full headdress within a white star over a black shield. Despite spending hours in the library reading about the 2nd Infantry, I have no idea who designed the patch or what it’s supposed to represent. My guess it was a holdover from a time when the U.S. Army was shootin’ it’s way across the country, one Indian after another all the way to here in California. Tommy gave me the patch.

The 2nd Infantry shipped out to Ireland that October of ’43 and the following January Tommy was born while my father was preparing for the land invasion of Europe. His division landed on Omaha Beach on D-day plus 1--June 7, 1944, so he missed the slaughter of the early hours of the struggle. But he didn’t miss the fight. Not by a long shot.

2nd Infantry Division took up the battle during the first week of June 1944 and they fought their way across Europe, arriving at Pilsen, Czechoslovakia when the Germans finally surrendered on May 8, 1945. All told the 2nd Infantry saw 305 days of combat. The division returned home to Fort Swift Texas on 22 July, as the Army would say, but my father wasn’t with them. He’d been sent home and hospitalized on May 19th suffering from battle fatigue.

They don’t even call it battle fatigue anymore. Now it’s “Operational Exhaustion.” Operational Exhaustion doesn’t even sound like something that would happen to humans. It sounds like what happens when you rack up too many miles on your Chevy. Since battle fatigue no longer exists does that mean my father didn’t have it? And even when it existed there weren’t too many soldiers who served in World War Two who were diagnosed with battle fatigue. They had a tendency to get killed or wounded before any onset.

I read that symptoms of operational exhaustion begin to appear after about one hundred days of combat and that most soldiers will suffer its effects by two hundred days. My father saw three hundred and five days of combat. Three hundred and five days. And he wasn’t some eighteen year-old with huge balls and no sense. He was thirty. He’d been armed with an adding machine and a half-dozen sharp pencils when the Army swapped them for an M-1 carbine and a bayonet.

After the army had spent him all up they pinned a Combat Infantry Badge on his pajamas and sent him home.

I don’t know if he ever went back to work once he returned. As far back as my memory goes, he’d never worked. My earliest memories of my father are all much the same one to the next. They’re like those “what’s different in these two pictures” cartoons they have in the paper. My father sitting in his chair listening to the radio, sometimes wearing a different shirt, sometimes listening to the phonograph, sometimes with a plate of food resting on his lap, but almost always with a cigarette burning in his amber colored ashtray and his fingers worrying the musket right off that Combat Infantry Badge.

His ashtray sat on a footlocker my father kept next to his chair. The footlocker had been his during the war and it slept next to him like an old dog. I don’t know what he kept in it. The first time I ever looked in the footlocker it was empty.

I have to say I’m surprised I was even born. Like most people it’s hard to imagine their parents doing it, but my father could barely get a spoonful of soup up to his lips. How he got his...you know...up, I have no idea. I suspect my Mom just climbed on his lap in his chair one evening shortly after he got home, cigarette smoke curling up from the ashtray.

As a kid I had a Tonka dump truck that I employed to move and dump almost everything in the house. I’d play under my father’s feet and fill the dump truck making whining, grinding heavy crane sounds while I lifted wooden blocks or books or National Geographic magazines with my crane arms and fill the bed of the dump truck. Once loaded to capacity I’d drive off making engines sounds, including several dozen gear shifts, to some other part of the house where I’d tilt the bed on its rear hinges and deposit my load. Then often, I’d reload the same items and drive them to someplace else in the house, many times to their original location, and dump them there. My father never told me to “play somewhere else” or to “clean up this mess” or to “pipe down.” He just sat there listening to the radio over and around my loading and dumping, his cigarette smoldering in the ashtray.

Some people flick the ashes off their cigarettes like they’re typing out War and Peace in Morse code. They’d puff then flick, flick, flick, flick then puff and tap, tap, tap, tap into an ashtray. Sometimes they’d roll the red embers on the tip around and around like they’re shaping a worn out crayon. Puff, flick, tap, roll, Napoleon prepares to invade. Puff, flick, tap, roll, Anatol loses his leg. Puff, flick, tap, roll, Natasha smiles at Pierre. After several thousand flicks and taps the epilogue is a crushed cigarette butt. My father wasn’t like that.

He smoked Lucky Strikes. By “smoked” I mean my father would light one, inhale, set it on the lip of the ashtray and let it burn away. Every couple of days he’d fill the ashtray. My Mom would have me empty it, which was one of my favorite things. I’d pour the butts and ashes into the bed of the dump truck and wheel it off to the trash. I couldn’t count the hours I worked as a dump truck operator...if only I had been on the clock.

It was during summer vacation 1952 when the picture changed. That was between kindergarten and first grade. I’d awakened and worked my way down from the top bunk. Tommy used to sleep on the top bunk until one night when he fell out of bed; from then on I had the top. I liked it fine but it did get hot up there in summer. I slept in just my underpants because even the thought of wearing pajamas made me sweat.

I came downstairs in my white drawers and saw that my father’s chair was empty. He wasn’t in the bathroom. There was no cigarette burning itself out in the ashtray. Then I saw the Combat Infantry Badge on the armrest of my father’s chair. I could never remember not seeing it in his hand. The silver musket floating on a light blue bar was worn smooth, as were the leaves of the oak wreath that shrouded the bar. I didn’t touch it. I just looked and something told me the picture would never be the same.

My father had left. No discussion. No emotional fight. No tearful goodbyes or lies about going out for a newspaper. He was just gone. Still is. And the funny thing is nothing much changed after he was gone; at least not then.

It’s getting late and I think that’s enough for now.