Dear Laura : Dad and the A-bomb
Prologue –– Freedom
There was only one fact that I knew in the beginning. My dad stood six-foot-two inches tall and weighed eighty pounds when the U. S. Marines rescued him on a beach at Hatmamatsu, Japan in September, 1945.
This is a little-known story that took place during the last time an entire world was at war, in a part of the world that remains a mystery to most Westerners––Indonesia and Japan.
I wouldn’t know the entire story until the year Dad died, and neither would he. I wrapped up the ending to Dad’s story and gave it to him for his 92nd birthday. I’ll never fully comprehend the kind of fortitude, endurance, courage and grace he’d needed to cultivate in order to survive an experience that would crush the souls of most people.
But, he didn’t just survive. He thrived. This book is dedicated to people longing to do the same.
Chapter 1 –– A need for six nails
In July of 1986 at our home perched in the hills of Echo Park in downtown Los Angeles, my brother Mike had joined my husband and I in the celebration of our daughter’s first birthday.
I squatted down on our huge redwood deck to help Candice walk into the house, ridiculously excited to let her loose on her first birthday cake. On the dining room table sat a traditional, German log roll sponge cake topped with two pink candles. I’d continued mom’s tradition of baking the cake and also her tradition of always including a candle to grow-on.
My daughter’s hand in mine, we toddled into the house. Mike glanced at the little wooden bench Candy used to steady herself. A bench my dad had made with her a few months before––another tradition. My brothers, sister and I had all made them with Dad as children. We used them to sit upon while weeding in our garden, or to put things within our reach.
As I lifted my baby into her high chair, Mike pointed to the bench and offhandedly whispered, "Concentration camp bench.”
“What are you talking about?” I said in a hushed tone as if such a thing could shield my baby from the ugly words.
“Ask Dad,” my brother said.
For me, this is where the story begins.
Before my brother whispered those three words on Candice’s first birthday, we’d never spoken of Dad’s WWII experience. I don’t recall when I learned the news for the first time. I seemed to have been born knowing Dad had been a Japanese POW, the fact flowed through my veins as much a part of me as my skin or hair.
After Candy’s birthday and some soul-searching, I wrote Dad a letter asking him to tell me the story about his first wooden bench. This began a decade-long adventure and involve a quest to uncover the truth. To put long-since forgotten pieces of Dad’s life back together again. To do what he’d spent a lifetime trying not to do––remember.
I’d ask questions. Dad would answer. I’ve interviewed many people in my writing career, but the most interesting interview of my life wasn’t with Quentin Tarantino, Christian Bale, the latest up-and-coming actress in Hollywood, or an adrenaline-addicted adventurer. The best and most significant interview of my life took place with my dad over stolen moments during our busy lives.
Dad and I exchanged many letters over the years. He was a good letter writer because he comes from a long line of missionaries. They were famous for writing letters because they lived in far-flung parts of the world and longed for news from home. It’s hard to imagine a world without the Internet and instant communication. In those days, letters were the only way to get the news until an invention called the radio changed the world forever.
I’d like to say that receiving Dad’s letters were like receiving little treasures, but that wouldn’t be entirely true. Part of his trauma was to do everything he could to protect himself and his family from experiencing danger ever again––any kind of danger.
So along with the answers to my questions, he sent what I fondly called packages of fear. Manilla envelopes filled with articles and books and documentation about the things I needed to be most afraid of––the coming BIG LA earthquake, financial crisis, water shortage, you get the idea. The fear around the envelopes became so palpable to me, that after a few years I asked my then-husband to open them and let me know what was inside. Tucked away within the packages, among the fear, treasures waited to be discovered and explored. Some begged to see the light of day.
The packages were a metaphor for Dad––fear-filled and joy-filled. Confusion ruled over the truth. Together he and I opened his package of fear and brought its contents into the light. Our exploration together unlocked mysteries over a half a century old that had been sealed tight if not almost completely destroyed by trauma or the fog of war. I wouldn’t know it then, and neither would Dad, but his package was missing something very important––the end.
All I knew was I needed answers. And Dad loved to tell stories. In a way, it didn’t really matter to him what stories he told. He whole-heartedly enjoyed the time we spent together and our correspondence by mail. He loved connection. Along the way, he would say that there was no greater treasure than a package delivered by the postman. It would take years for me to understand why.
To get to the heart of Dad’s story, the real story, he had to be brave enough to let me in. In order to do that, I had to show him the patience he’d shown me while working math problems that brought me to tears, repairing cars I’d destroyed, enduring dating disasters and serious boyfriends, giving me away in marriage, the journey of motherhood, the agony of betrayal and divorce and more. Together we’d talk and laugh and drink tea. I am convinced this story would have never seen the light of day without God, the U.S. Post office, tea, Indonesian food, movies, and Mom’s patience.
I am a romantic. This is my great strength and terrible weakness. As I received my answers and they turned into more questions, the developing narrative evolved into something more epic than a dad answering his daughter’s questions. The story transcended the personal. I was writing history.
I dedicated myself to reigning in romanticism’s role in the research and the form the story took. I surrendered to how the story needed to be told. That the story developed from the primary research of one individual was valid from a research perspective, but I couldn’t follow the breadcrumbs unquestioningly.
I had to verify the facts as we discovered them, use a pick axe and goggles to discover others, and allow for many Acts of God––being in the right place in the right part of the world at the right time; randomly meeting people who knew more about the story than I did, pointing me and the story in the right direction. There is no way this story would have been able to be written without Devine intervention. I state this fact in the interest of full-disclosure.
My journey naively began with the search for the answers to my questions. But the real job was to answer Dad’s and in doing so many more stories came to light. Instead of checking off the questions I had, I found myself creating new lists. Originally tangents of this story, I quickly realized that their answers would best be served in books of their own.
The most dramatic settings of Dad’s stories would be the European and Pacific Theaters of WWII. Not many families found themselves in peril in both theaters of the war, but mine did. Escape from one was lucky, escape from both impossible.
Dad’s first letter came without a package of fear. He’d mailed his letter in his signature white business envelope, a no-nonsense black, rubber-stamped return address in the left-hand corner. A handwritten note inside on blue-lined, ruled paper gave me my answer:
“Dear Laura,
When I was seventeen, three days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Imperial Japanese Navy sailed down into the South China Sea.
Suicide dive bombers flew down the stacks of two British battleships, the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, and sank them both. This destroyed the Allied Navy in the South Pacific.
Singapore surrendered and the Dutch East Indies followed. The Japanese landed on the island of Java where I lived with my family. I would celebrate my nineteenth birthday in a Japanese prison camp. A men's camp. I was a boy.
Our quarters were made of bamboo and thatched palm fronds. In normal Indonesian fashion, the floor was raised over the ground, and we slept on mats on this floor. The benches became our chairs.
By the time I turned 19, I'd learned to adapt. I found an opportunity to work in the kitchen. The rule was that the kitchen help could eat in the kitchen but not take food out of the kitchen. This way, I was not hungry.
My job was to keep the fires under the drums going with firewood provided. We were given a small axe to split the wood. Between meals I had free time and was able to split certain firewood logs into planks. It took a lot of work and the planks were uneven. The legs were two shorter planks braced by sticks.
The real important part of the bench was the need for six nails. Nails were impossible to get. But the prison camp was surrounded by a six-foot barbed wire fence. The posts were made of bamboo and the barbed wire was nailed into the bamboo post. At times, when the guards were not there, I crept to the fence and pulled nails out, being careful to only pull out nails which did not cause the wire to droop. By my 21st birthday, I had a little side business making benches.”
At this point, there were only two facts that I knew about Dad’s experience as a Japanese POW. One was the story of the bench and the other was that my dad was six-foot-two inches tall and weighed eighty pounds when the U. S. Marines rescued him on a beach at Hatmamatsu, Japan in September, 1945.
I had to know what happened in between.