Linda Frye Burnham

Fragments in Their Hearts

By Linda Frye Burnham

Men carry war in their hearts. I know that now.

As we approach May 8, the 50th anniversary of V-E Day, marking the end of World War II in Europe, we'll be hearing a lot about men and war. I've been thinking about it since last year's recognition of D-Day, when the media reported on veterans who went to France to walk the beaches and the fields. It was a shock to see these ancient warriors in tears as they remembered that day. They wandered alone and in pairs across battlefields, tracing names on monuments, reciting them like prayers. As these men took part in the ceremonies of remembrance, many of them broke down, sobbing openly, and when they spoke to reporters, they said they hadn't ever talked about D-Day to anyone, just held it inside.
My father spent two years in the Pacific during the war, a Navy lieutenant in charge of landing craft that carried Marines from troop ships to battlefields in places like Iwo Jima. He never talked about the war either. It wasn't until he was 80 and on his death bed that the memories and the pain came out. He lay there in the hospital, stroke-ridden and trying to speak. The messages came in fragments, and there was a look I'd never seen in his eyes, terror and tears. "Just boys," he said. "Took them into those beaches and left them. Brought back broken bones."
Those stories of death and suffering had stayed bottled up inside him for 50 years.
He was a quiet, private, sensitive man whose connections to the world were tenuous. An artist and a writer, he made his living freelance, doing commercial art, cartoons and portraits. He was born in 1909, the son of a postman and an elementary-school teacher from Coffeyville, Kansas. During the Depression, he spent his 20s as a photo-journalist, chasing around Oklahoma and Texas oil fields with a camera, gathering stories of wildcat drilling and oil fires. He met my mother in a community theater production and they were married when she was 23 and he was 30. I came along in 1940 and a year later he went to war.
My memories of that war are of blackout curtains and butter rationing and the day he came home from the Navy in his dark blue uniform and his white hat. To this day I can't keep from crying at the movies at postwar reunion scenes between husbands and wives. My parents were so young then, as young as my own children are now, and my father's life had been at risk every day for years, while my mother waited and prayed.
When the men came home, nobody asked them about the horrors of war. All that was past, and the new world was waiting to be constructed. The late '40s and early '50s were a period of what was called "normalization" in America. Men and women put aside the extraordinary time they had lived through and tried to craft the perfect life for their children, free of Depressions and world wars, and the memories of those things.
Maybe every post-war period is that way, a period of forgetting, because whatever the cause or character of a given war, any war is hell. Perhaps men today are more willing to deal therapeutically with the effects of soldiering. But my father's generation were the Real Men of the John Wayne variety, who kept to themselves. The flag-waving war movies of the '40s celebrated their courage and endurance, but the grisly trauma of the trenches was stifled in a sarcophagus of denial.
The only war stories my father ever told us were the ones he thought were miraculous. I can only remember two. He was stationed on a huge troop ship that was sunk by a bomb or a torpedo, and he had to jump into the sea from the high side of the foundering vessel. I can still see his face as the miracle of his escape passed across it. The leap. The long, long dive. The shattering entry into the cold water. The frantic search for the surface, swimming all the way under the ship and bursting through the other side of death. He was lucky, he said, to be alive.
The other story was about the night my sister was born. He had come home on leave one spring, and my mother had gotten pregnant. He was on watch that night in January when he heard the news of her birth. He talked about sitting on the deck staring for hours into the starry sky, trying to make sense of his life, marveling at the start of a new one. Lucky to be alive.
My father was a child all his life, and that childish sense of wonder pervaded everything the family did together. Every afternoon stroll became a treasure hunt. Every cloud in the sky had a face. Every rock on the beach had personality. Every joke was worth telling. Every minute was unique, and it passed too quickly for him. More than anything, he wanted to impart to us the knowledge that we were lucky to be alive.
That's why it was so painful to him when we threw it all away. The four children he had raised so carefully, for whom he had escaped the Depression and the war, ultimately let him down. He wanted so badly for us to be safe and healthy, but he had no idea how to equip us for the cultural revolutions of the '60s and '70s. Instead of four upstanding citizens who loved their country he got beatniks and hippies, dope smokers, drafter dodgers and longhairs.
The things we did he couldn't understand, couldn't even face. We left the Catholic Church, dropped out of school, had babies out of wedlock, voted Democratic, went to jail for possession of marijuana, badmouthed President Nixon, joined the Communist party, married interracially, went to live in Haight Ashbury, walked in protest marches against the government, wrote filthy poetry, made blasphemous art, defended homosexuality, proclaimed feminism, got divorced and debunked the myth of the happy nuclear family. In short, we trashed everything he stood for, and took a kind of moral high ground doing it.
We so clearly abandoned his view of the perfect world that he was overwhelmed by despair. His reponse to the enormity of our rejection played out at the dinner table like a grand tragic opera. Instead of talking about his hurt and disappointment, he pulled rank and delivered ultimatums, he drank and got incoherently belligerent, he existed in a state of rage and disgust, and he alienated us all. When, as adults, we tried to help my mother with his alcoholism, offered to go into family therapy, she refused. She said it would lead to the discovery of the reasons for his drinking, meaning us and our values, and that would tear the family apart. Denial was the better part of valor.
I believe now that his failure as a father in those troubled and confusing times is traceable to an old war wound. That shy and sensitive man was disabled by a dance with death, by an enduring, undiluted memory of terror, carnage, mayhem, inhumanity. He had lived through something that was inconceivable to us, and incommunicable. We had no idea what he had escaped, how much his life had cost, what his family was worth to him. He carried the war in his heart so we didn't have to face it, and that was the secret that caused him so much pain, the core of the misunderstanding between us.
When we trampled on his values, we diminished his heroism. When we scoffed at the past, we discounted his miraculous survival. If there had been a way for him to talk to us about it, who knows...we might have found ourselves capable of compassion.
The time is never right to talk things out within a family. The children are too young to understand, or the parents are too old. It's too early or too late. I move through my understanding of what happened in my birth family and my own family as if I were moving from room to room, each one different from the last. I want to bring my families along with me through those rooms, but somehow the time is never quite right. And then the time is gone. People who have religion believe we will all be together by and by, and everything will be understood. That alone is a reason to hold on to religion.
A few hours after my father died, I was looking out my window, thinking of him, and I saw a small white butterfly flit past in the garden. A thought came to me: "Maybe he's here, in that butterfly." The next morning I woke up and there was a white butterfly, still, on my pillow. Often in the five years since, I have noticed a white butterfly following me as I walked along a path or sat in a garden, and every time I do, I think he's "up there" somewhere watching over me, and everything's all right. It's all dropped away, all the sadness and the memories and the war he held in his heart. He's light as a feather, dancing through the air, and he's laughing at some joke he's just thought of. Just waiting till I get there so he can tell it to me.

Copyright 1995, Linda Frye Burnham — All Rights Reserved
This essay may not be published, broadcast or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of the author.
"Fragments in Their Hearts" first appeared in The Independent Weekly of North Carolina, April 7, 1995.

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