The Souvenir Page 6

  For the next three months, his wife entreated him to write their infant daughter a letter. My father balked. How could he explain the soldier’s superstition against writing a farewell letter before combat? How could he make clear how desperate he was to see a picture of his new daughter?

  19 November 1944

  And you see Darling—I want to see what Ruthie looks like—then getting Hal Rubin’s gift will be lots easier.

  In late December 1944, the Tropic Lightning Division was finally ready to move toward combat. They were divided into three groups and boarded ships for a convoy to Luzon. En route they staged a practice landing at Tetere Beach, Guadalcanal. “There were strong cross currents and faulty beach markings,” the yearbook reports. Deficiencies in their landing preparations were corrected before the convoy reached its destination of Lingayen Gulf, the Philippines.

  Weds, 3 January 1945

  Dearest,

  By the time you get this letter, the War Department will have released the news of our whereabouts so I can write a little more freely of my thoughts and reactions of a man just before going into combat.

  Up until now we weren’t allowed to mention that the outfit is going into action or that I’m on a boat but since this letter will be held until our whereabouts are no longer secret, the censorship has been lessened somewhat.

  I’m not really as nervous, scared, afraid, or tense as I thought I would be—of course the bullets aren’t flying yet—and I’ll probably be scared stiff when they start whizzing but right now I’m still perfectly normal and sane.

  A whole year of laying around and waiting for this event has perhaps taken the edge off it. When something like that is put off and delayed and drawn out the excitement and expectant thrill dies away—and then—I’m a little too old and staid to get excited at the thought of dangerous adventure.

  I’ll probably write a few more letters before I leave the boat but there will be a long interval after that before you hear from me again. But you’ve got to have faith—and remember that “no news is good news.” I have the utmost confidence in myself pulling through alright.…

  Writing has been difficult for me these last two months—with all the preparations for moving really got on one’s nerves. I’m sorry if I’ve written in a vein to hurt your feelings and I’m sorry that I’ve caused you all the undue anxiety. And it has been difficult writing on the boat—our compartment is so very crowded and unbearably hot. Except at night when I turn in, I stay away from there all the time. The only times I have written were when I’ve been on Message Center duty at the troops office aboard ship.

  Again, I feel physically in the pink—a little heavy but that will be sweated off in no time at all.

  I’ll write again before I get off this tub. And remember that I think of you constantly—and my love for you will carry me through—Norman

  His Russian soul also sustained him through combat. In April 1945, after sleeping on the ground and in holes for over a hundred days during the Balete Pass campaign in Luzon, “living through sights that left an indelible impression” on his mind, he confessed why he believed he had survived:

  I’ve had many a narrow escape, and I have two theories as to why. One is the old Russian adage of “nichevo”—“what the hell attitude”—the other is that someone is looking over me like an angel—I believe it is someone like my sister Ruth and perhaps my little daughter or maybe it’s my wife who has so much faith in me.

  It was surprising to read my pragmatic father’s belief in a talismanic word and a guardian angel.

  Soldiers have always carried talismans into battle: a lock of a daughter’s hair, a rabbit’s foot, photos of sweethearts, a family Bible. Pomo Indian tribesmen from California, who fought in the United States Army during World War II, carried special handkerchiefs on which a tribal shaman painted magical geometric patterns. Yoshio Shimizu, and millions of other young Japanese soldiers like him, carried silk flags tucked inside their helmets or worn across their chests. Around their waists they wore senimbari, “thousand stitch” belts, which carried the collective good will of their womenfolk.

  But my father carried with him nichevo. The literal meaning in Russian is “nothing.” He carried with him an attitude. Nothing. Zero. Void.

  I wrote to my friend Olga, an émigré Russian actress, to ask her what nichevo means idiomatically. Olga wrote back, “Nichevo means that your father did not care about what was around him. He found something valuable inside him that gave him power to live. Also, nichevo means ‘OK’ attitude, meaning that ‘we’ll have the end of this nonsense and the day will come and we live normal life.’ ”

  Perhaps the “nichevo attitude” is what the Buddhists call nonattachment. Shrug it off. Concentrate on the breath. It will be over. He would come home. He had promised he would come home.

  At the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, I heard an Auschwitz survivor describe the attitude that enabled her to persevere as “the resignation to go on.… Okay, God, if that’s what you want me to do—I’ll do it in order to live.” My grandmother used to shrug her shoulders, lift her palms heavenward, and ask rhetorically, “Listen, everything is unbelievable. But what can we do?”

  There’s a related concept, it turns out, in the Japanese vernacular, the expression shikata ga nai. In John Hersey’s Hiroshima, the first eyewitness account of the aftermath of the atomic bomb blast, a survivor explains: “ ‘As for the bomb,’ she would say, ‘It was war and we had to expect it.’ And then she would add, ‘Shikata ga nai,’ a Japanese expression as common as, and corresponding to, the Russian word ‘nichevo’: ‘It can’t be helped.’ ”

  Shikata ga nai. Nichevo. Nothing to be done but go on. During the Battle of Balete Pass, in Luzon in the spring of 1945, my father came down from the mountains by jeep to Clark Field, near Manila, to pick up supplies for his battalion. Two days later when he returned to his foxhole, it wasn’t there anymore. Blasted away by a shell. Was that the spirit of nichevo, the work of a guardian angel, or just damn good luck?

  His sister, Ruth, the angel who watched over him, was just fifteen when she died from a heart-valve defect. She had progressively weakened since she was ten or eleven. My grandparents did not exhibit the nichevo attitude when it came to their daughter. They traipsed from specialist to specialist in vain, hoping to find a doctor who could repair the tiny hole in their firstborn’s heart. When she died in 1927, my father and his parents never stopped mourning.

  Ruth had been my father’s best friend and his ally against all the strange experiences of a new land. She broke ground for him, cleared the way. Just as significant, he was her protector. He was quick on his feet and fetched things for her. He reported the neighborhood gossip when she was confined to her bed. Small for his age, he took his role seriously. Ruth was the constant in his life between what was unknown and what was known. Then she was taken away.

  Ruth’s death was the shadow over my grandparents’ lives, my father’s life, and, in some way, it was the shadow over our lives, in 1950s Los Angeles, as well. He rarely spoke of her.

  In 1951, a year before Jonas Salk discovered his vaccine, my sister, Ruth, contracted polio. She was six. I was just three months old, but Larry remembers the exact day. He remembers when Dad broke the news to our grandmother. The word “polio.” A shriek of grief, then weeping. My father reached into the bureau for a container of pills, begged my grandmother, “Take this! Stop crying!”

  Norman Steinman locked away deep inside himself those two great sorrows—the death of his sister and whatever had happened to him in combat. These were private sorrows, ones I was not expected to share. I never knew my father to cry.

  IN THE FALL of 1945, with combat behind him, my father was able to explain to his wife why he had resisted writing a letter to his infant daughter:

  Let me go back about a year ago and describe a scene in New Caledonia. One night Melvin Smith—a Texas boy whom I had basic training with at Camp Fannin—came into my tent and we were sh
ooting the breeze but I could tell there was something on his mind. Finally before the evening was over he came out with it. “Steinman,” he said, “would you do something for me?” “Sure Smitty—shoot,” I said, “what is it?” “Will you keep a letter and some personal papers for me when we leave the Island—and mail it to my folks in case I don’t come back?”

  He tried to talk the young man out of it. He tried to cheer him, told him how silly it was to feel that way. But Melvin Smith insisted. He died at Umingan on January 29, 1945.

  I believe that the fear of dying paralyzed his will to go on, and that was the cause of his death. So I had to tell myself every day that I would be coming home, and when I started a letter to Ruthie—and I started many—I just couldn’t be glib or jocular or breezy and once I started to get serious, I thought of those farewell type letters and tore it up.

  But he didn’t tear them all up. He did write one letter to his infant daughter before he went into combat. He wrote it on January 4, 1945, aboard the convoy ship that carried the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division to Luzon. He finally sent it home on January 29, the day Melvin Smith was killed at Umingan.

  Pacific Ocean, 4 January 1945, Saturday night

  Dearest Ruthie,

  This is my very first letter to you. I have been very reticent about writing; I can’t explain why. Your Mother has been telling you so many stories about me that I don’t have to introduce myself, and I fervently hope that when I do come home, I can live up to all of them.

  I am writing this letter while sitting on the top berth in a hold of a ship. It is very crowded, cramped, smelly and hot. The sweat just pours off you, whether you sit, write, read or sleep. This is the last letter I will write before we disembark and “Make History” as some bigwig once told us trying to impress us.

  Your Mother writes all about you, every detail all around the clock—and I love every word of it. I was a little cross with your Mother when she didn’t send the pictures of you at first—she didn’t realize that I am getting ready to go into combat and how badly I need to see what you looked like. But I’m sure that she understands now.

  I’d like to tell you a little of what you mean to me. You are the fulfillment of a great desire, and a symbol of a beautiful love of two people.

  Every man wants a child. It is a fulfillment of his function as a member of society. I especially wanted a daughter—one to take the place of my sister, a wish that I’ve wanted for some sixteen years. My childhood was very incomplete, and with her passing that void was never filled until you arrived. You are the first of the five that we always planned on having.

  I pray that we will be meeting soon—you, Mother and I. Until then, I promise you that I’ll always be thinking of you—I won’t try any heroics but of course my job and orders come first. I’ll be as cautious as humanly possible. I have the Russian attitude of “nichevo”—just Devil may care—and it is a good attitude right now.

  As for you—just keep Mother happy and busy so that she won’t worry too much during this period of waiting. I adore you both, Your Daddy

  The convoy reached Lingayen Gulf at 0000 (midnight, military time) on the eleventh of January 1945. When my father wrote this letter to his daughter, he was just days innocent of combat. Ruth was still healthy and whole. Nichevo was still strong enough to sustain him. The enemy was, though just barely, “over there,” in a place where Norman Steinman had never been and to which, after the war, he would never return except in memories he either tried to abandon or kept strictly to himself.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Speculation

  DURING THE MONTH I spent at Fort Worden reading and rereading my father’s letters, certain phrases jumped out at me. It was shocking to come across the soldier’s blunt, monosyllabic descriptions of his foe: “Those Nips don’t give up until they are dead. So we have to kill them all.” This language was so alien to the vocabulary of the liberal and tolerant postwar father I thought I knew.

  I logged those comments and checked dates. Most of them appeared after January 1945, after the Twenty-fifth Division landed at Lingayen Gulf, the Philippines. From his references to “Hal Rubin’s gift,” my mother deduced her husband was on the eve of combat, and in one of the few of her letters that was preserved she wrote consolingly, “Being ruthless is a new experience for one as sweet and peace-loving as you.”

  How does one transform a “sweet and peace-loving” man into a soldier, someone who is expected and willing to kill? Most World War II GIs were civilians hustled from dry goods stores in the Bronx, farms in Tennessee, mines in Colorado, banks in St. Louis. What happened to them when they encountered gruesome combat against the Japanese in the swamps and jungles of the Pacific Islands? What enabled them to kill other human beings? And, just as important, what psychological scars did they bear after they returned home?

  These questions haunted me. Hoping to find some answers, I raided the shelves of the history section of the tiny Port Townsend library. When I returned to Los Angeles, the questions returned with me.

  In his book On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, Dave Grossman, a psychologist and army colonel, focuses on the long-term effects that the experience of killing exacts on the soldier’s psyche. Along with other military historians, Grossman believes the heaviest burden of war is usually carried by army infantrymen—men like my father.

  He cites one particular World War II study: After sixty days of continuous combat, 98 percent of all surviving soldiers suffer some kind of psychological damage. I remembered how, in one of his letters, my father complained, “Our division seems determined to set a record for consecutive days of combat on the front lines.” By the time the campaign for Balete Pass was over, the Twenty-fifth Division had been committed to the front lines for 165 days of continuous combat.

  By far the most startling World War II statistic I read in his book was that only 15 to 20 percent of army riflemen in World War II would fire at the enemy. They did not run or hide, but they simply would not fire. To the question, Why did these men fail to fire? Grossman explains that there is within most men an intense resistance toward killing their fellow man. He then describes the techniques the military uses to overcome this innate and powerful reluctance. They must inculcate the idea that one’s enemy is not a human being.

  “For the war to be prosecuted at all,” writes historian and World War II vet Paul Fussell, “the enemy of course had to be severely dehumanized.” When someone is dehumanized they no longer have a face, a family, a history, a reason to be alive, or a reason to allow them to be left alive. “When you see a dead Nip, you won’t care. But no matter how many times you see a dead Yank, you’ll never get over it,” a seasoned soldier told journalist Murray Kempton when he first landed on New Guinea.

  This was true on both sides. John Dower points out in his landmark study War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War that this dehumanization contributed to the brutality and mercilessness of the conflict in the Pacific. “As World War II recedes in time it is easy to forget the visceral emotions and sheer race hate that gripped virtually all participants in the war,” Dower writes, explaining how “each side portrayed the other as its polar opposite: as darkness opposed to its own radiant light.”

  “Bestial apes” is how Admiral William F. Halsey referred to the Japanese. “Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs,” he exhorted the troops. American wartime propaganda posters depicted the Japanese as subhuman and repulsive, “louseous Japanicas,” vicious jungle creatures, tailless apes to be exterminated.

  On the other side, Japanese soldiers were told they were on a divine mission, fighting against a demonic foe, that American GIs were monsters who rifled corpses for gold teeth and took no prisoners alive. The Americans and British were considered savages who “ate raw meat and had mouths dripping with blood.” Roosevelt and Churchill were depicted in Japanese political cartoons as debauched ogres. The Japanese military turned the war itself—and eventually the conc
ept of mass death—into an act of collective purification: “One hundred million people, one mind” was a popular slogan during the war.

  By the 1930s, the traditional Japanese warrior code of honor called bushido, which called for humane, courteous, and kind behavior (adhered to by the Japanese Army in World War I), had been radically altered by the Japanese government and military, who inflamed feelings of hatred toward the enemy. The military training endured by Japanese draftees, often boys from poor farming communities, was a system of rigorous discipline that included beatings, psychological humiliation, and exhausting physical exertion. Among veterans, the slang for new recruits was issen gorrin, Japanese for the sum of one sen, five ren (less than one penny)—the cost of their draft postcard. Military training was deliberately designed to prepare the recruits to brutalize others. I learned that historians refer to this system of indoctrination as “socialization for death.”

  Senjinkun, the military manual that all Japanese soldiers were supposed to obey in World War II, made several principles absolutely clear. One was obedience to one’s superiors, who were considered representatives of the emperor himself, the highest moral authority. Another was that being taken prisoner by the enemy was a profound disgrace to the emperor, to one’s family, to one’s village, to the entire nation. Suicide was preferable to surrender. Gyokusai, the word means “to shatter like jewels,” was the phrase for an honorable death in lieu of surrender. To GIs like my father, this fact alone made the enemy seem inhuman. You approached a Japanese soldier warily, even if he was waving a white flag. He might pull out a grenade and blow himself up—taking you with him. To the Americans, the Japanese seemed to want to die, to glorify death. My father’s statement—“Those Nips don’t give up so we have to kill them all”—grimly sums up the prevailing attitude among American infantrymen toward their enemies during the Pacific War.