MY FATHER'S SECRET WAR
The story of a remote silent man who kept his breathtaking past and his real character a carefully guarded secret - until the day his daughter found out who he really was. A World War Two Spy Memoir.
March 9, 2008
Letter from Lucinda
Welcome to all my readers, old and new. Thanks to you, My Father's Secret War became a bestseller but even more important, thousands of you wrote me about the profound impact the story of my father had on your lives. Veterans were moved to talk for the first time about their war experiences, and their sons, daughters, and grandchildren, were inspired to crack open the secrets that had permeated their childhoods, leading them to heal relationships and accept that their parents were not just born for their benefit, but were real people with interesting, sometimes fascinating pasts.
"I was in the middle of a page and suddenly I saw Daddy, clear as day," wrote Bernice, from Billerica, Mass. "There he was with his mouth closed, unable to talk to me about anything really meaningful. I never knew what was up with him. Ms Franks, reading about your father was like jumping backwards into my own life. It explained why Daddy had always seemed so trapped, and why it made me feel like I wasn’t free either."
The media would have us believe that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder began in Iraq, or Vietnam, but we know better. Memory can be a tyrant and we have lived with the flattened emotions, the repressed memories; the lifetime of PTSD that went undiagnosed among so many vets, and among our fathers and grandfathers, who lived and fought through World War II. That war spawned a different kind of PTSD than that experienced by the soldiers coming home from Iraq. There were less violent outbursts, but rather a lifetime of being encrusted in stone, shell-shocked, with no psychological help to free them from a war that never ended.
Inevitably, their inaccesibiity created more casualties - the wounds of war were passed down to the next generation.
Finally getting things out in the open changed the way these children of the Second World War, the first baby boomers, felt about themselves; they could now explain and reinvent their childhoods.
Many veterans are just now ready to talk.
"They had lost their bayonets, these three Jap boys, and they stood looking at me scared out of their wits," wrote Dennis from Biloxi, Miss, who had been in the Pacific campaign for Guadalcanal. "I let my machine gun rip, I killed them anyway. You do things you never would do or never could do again. How can you talk about that? When I read about what it meant to you to hear your father finally verbalize what he did, I made a decision. I'm 83 years old and it's now or never."
"My grandfather came home without an arm," wrote Jessica from Boise, Idaho. "We all lived together on the ranch and it was in what you could call a Culture of Silence. He used that empty sleeve to keep people away. But my Granny used to say 'it wasn't that what crippled him. Go ahead, ask him about the War, but he won't tell you anything.' When he was with his horses, who don't ask questions, that was the only time he was really comfortable."
"My Dad didn't do anything as dramatic as yours," penned Frank, who lives in Nome, Alaska, "but I have to take care of him now, and getting him to tell tell stories makes the time pass less painfully -- the worst part of taking care of an aging parent is first, the boredom, and second, the the reversal of roles, he had become the needy child and me, the father, and now we are more like equals."
Some of the fathers of those who wrote letters had already died, having shared their memories with no-one. I urged these men and women to begin a search anyway, to put to rest all their questions. Many summoned up the courage to become sleuths, and dig out the long-buried secrets that had separated them from their fathers and often fractured their whole families. I told them how to track down wartime buddies, obtain official information. A few found out little, some found that their fathers had done amazing and secret work, but they all experienced a a measure of closure, sometimes as sweet and satisfying as if their parents had been alive.
As I embarked on the job of extracting my father's secret past and finally writing a book about it, something strange happened. I have written two other books and countless articles for the The New York Times and the New Yorker. I have always been interested in the material, but never before has getting the story become like an addiction. After I got the first clue as to who he really was, my desire to enter my father's mind became an obsessive quest.
You see, we had been incomparably close when I was a child, but when I came of age, he suddenly dropped me. He proceeded to lose his marriage, his company, and the respect of his children. He became an adulterer and an alcoholic. His mysterious trips away from home, his secret post office box, the calls he would make from restaurants, all rattled me. Then there was the time - I was barely 12 - when I found a Colt 45 under my mattress and went snooping around the house. I discovered a Browning automatic behind the Brillo pads and other guns hidden all over the house. I thought he was a delusional paranoid; little did I know that he had every reason to arm himself.
Most of my adult life, were were so far apart, we even had a hard time discussing the weather. Then one day, while helping him clean out his apartment, I found a Nazi cap and Iron Cross buried in a carton. I was horrified. At first, I thought that he had been a Nazi spy - until I figured out these had been part of a disguise he had used as an American operative. Thus began a 8-year search to find out what he had done in WWII. What impelled me forward in my investigations was the glimmer of a hope that I could prove he had been a hero. I wanted desperately to respect him again and also, I knew that if I found that he wasn't the "bad egg" I thought he was, then neither was I.
Little by little, he broke what he thought was a still iron oath of silence not to reveal any of his secret missions and he told me all that he had done. What I finally uncovered about his amazing activities, I will leave you to find out.
But I realized that in his remoteness, he had been trying to protect his family. I found out in a startling way just how much he really had loved me all along. And I fell in love with him all over again. As stunned as I was by what he had done, I was also proud of him; it cleansed our relationship, relieved his haunted mind, and resurrected us in each other's eyes.
My Father's Secret War is a cautionary tale about what many of the soliders coming home from Iraq will face. Ignored, their sacrifice unappreciated, those who suffer from PTSD manifest it in violent outbursts. But inevitably, they will have the same long-term effects as our fathers did; their personalities will change, they will be sunk into a repressed state of depression and silence unless they get the constant psychological help that few are getting now.
Why were so many of the boys who came home from WWII unable to shake off the effects of war? After all, unlike soldiers from Iraq or Vietnam, they were welcomed home as heroes; they had fought "the good war," indeed were portrayed in movies and song as tough, unafraid and eager to zoom through the air shooting down Betties or storming a German fortification. They returned to a comprehensive GI education bill and ready jobs. But behind the parades and the rejoicing, were men who had been in one of the most horrific wars in history -- imagine the trauma of finding yourself one of the only survivors at the bloody beaches of Normandy or the battle of Iwo Jima. Envision the irreversible shock experienced by the liberators of the Holocaust camps, many of whom, like my father, were whisked away, unable to process the incomprehensible horrors of what they had seen. Wives and loved ones, eager to resume their lives, did not want to hear about the war overseas and they simply drove it underground.
To my readers: I would love to hear from you; to have you share your thoughts, your own stories. Email me at lucindafranks@gmail.com.
© 2008 Lucinda Franks. Design by Andreas Viklund.