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In the August 14, 2009 New York Times there is an article about Albert Perdeck, an eighty-four year old veteran of the Second World War who has never fully recovered from the trauma of having the aircraft carrier on which he served in the South Pacific struck by a Japanese kamikaze attack. He still has nightmares, and he has been troubled by an undefinable anger for more than sixty years. He can smell still the smoke and the charred bodies.
Such accounts by old veterans sadden me and always remind me of my father, whose life was so shaped by his time as a Navy radioman in that same South Pacific war. He didn’t experience as much violence as Mr. Perdeck and was not so emotionally scarred, at least as far as we knew. He’d get angry, especially when anyone denigrated the United States or when the government didn’t take care of its veterans. He once chastised me for not respecting the flag. The silkscreen I had of Chairman Mao didn’t please him, to say the least.
My father would have been eighty-seven this past August 8. He was born exactly twenty-three years before the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. What follows is an excerpt from my book, In and Out of the Working Class. Consider it a remembrance, dad.
“Bud: My Father”
Bud’s feelings toward his father Carl were ambivalent. He admired his father’s abilities. Though Carl had quit school in the eighth grade, he had become a time-study engineer at the plant. He could add long columns of numbers in his head and he could tell time without a watch. He had been a skilled athlete, a long-distance runner and a baseball player. He used to take Bud to the local games; Bud remembered yelling “that’s my dad” when Carl hit a home run. His father’s best sport was bowling. He was the best bowler in town, and he almost never missed a spare. Bud was a good bowler himself, the one sport besides pool he could play well. His high school yearbook had commented that “he could give his dad a run for his money” on the lanes. But he wasn’t as good as Carl, and that was the problem. He felt that his father didn’t respect him. Maybe it was because Bud had been sickly when he was a baby, with tubercular bones that had cost him two years in a sanitarium. He still wasn’t strong, and he never could play baseball or any of the rougher sports. He sure wasn’t much of a fighter.