Chapter 194: Searching for the Soldiers Who Became Our Dads

My friend Dan Sneider emailed the other day about his father. This was not in itself surprising; Dan has been working on a book about his father, who long before he became an ambassador was a soldier, serving in the Pacific in World War II.

But this email was different. This was about a moment that even now, decades after his father’s death, brought Dan close to him, even at what had been a dark hour in his father’s life.

Dan teaches at Stanford and was getting ready for class: “I am rewatching an episode of The Pacific on the Battle of Okinawa in preparation for my class today where we are going to discuss this and other films of the US war in the Pacific.”

Dan’s research had taken him to Okinawa. And there, unfolding on the screen, was his father’s war. “I was literally at the place in Okinawa where my father fought,” he wrote, “and could almost imagine what he describes, very carefully, in his letters home.”

That image of the child standing in a father’s battlefield, real or imagined – a father then much younger than his child now was – is as visceral as it is eternal: it is a story told again and again, sons and daughters following the path of Telemachus, searching for his father, Ulysses.

Dan is not alone among my friends whose father fought in World War II. My own late father was too young for that war and too old for Korea. Lucky him. Not so for the fathers of friends who returned from the front, no longer the same young men who went off to war.

These were the fathers who never spoke about what they had seen and done in the war, fathers who were among the millions of men who came home with scars both physical and emotional that they’d bear for the rest of their lives. They were the fathers who remained mysteries to children who watched them rage and drink and turn ever more inward, fathers whose nightmare screams they’d hear night after night, year after year.

David Nasaw’s father was one of those young men. Nasaw, an award-winning historian, has dedicated his new book, The Wounded Generation, to his father, who “served in Eritrea in World War II as a second lieutenant in the Medical Corps of the United States Army.”

A dedication that begs the question: what happened to him?

I wrote to Nasaw to ask about the book, beginning, as always, with why he needed to write it.

“I’m always asked this question and have, in the past, not really known how to answer. This time, it’s relatively easy. I wrote The Wounded Generation because I wanted to pierce the wall of silence that surrounded my father’s military service. Joshua J. Nasaw came back from war an alcoholic, smoking 3-4 packs of Lucky Strikes a day, with a heart condition. Though a lawyer by trade, he was trained as a Medical Corps Supply Officer at Office Candidate School in South Carolina, then sent to Eritrea to dismantle a hospital no longer needed as American troops departed North Africa for Sicily, then mainland Italy.

“Something happened in Eritrea that resulted in a full medical disability discharge. When he died, at age 61, the VA confirmed that his death was service-related. How? To this day, I don’t know. He never talked about the war or how it had contributed to his alcoholism, cigarette addiction, heart condition, and inability to get a night’s sleep without sedating himself at night and popping uppers to wake up and get through the day.

“I could have pushed harder, but he made it clear that this was not something he was going to discuss with me. After his death, I questioned my mother and his brothers and requested his military records (which were burned with thousands of others in a 1973 fire at a St. Louis warehouse). For decades, I put my search on hold. Then, after writing The Last Million, a book about the plight of eastern European refugees and Holocaust survivors and the myriad and tragic ways in which the pain and suffering of war did not end on VJ Day, I decided, as a sort of follow-up, to write about the millions of American veterans like my father who carried the war home with them after victory had been declared.

“As a historian, I could try to piece together my father’s story by studying and writing about the members of the ‘wounded generation’ who struggled as he did on homecoming and for years thereafter to travel the road from war back to peace, from GI to civilian.”

I then asked, “The story you tell turns one of the great bits of American mythology on its head -- Tom Brokaw’s Greatest Generation. Is there a particular burden that comes with essentially telling readers that what they wanted to believe was, in fact, not as it was? Does the relationship between fathers and their children figure in this?”

He replied, “I hesitated for a time in titling my book, The Wounded Generation, because I didn’t want it to be read as a critique of Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation. In the end, the title was just too compelling to discard. History is never just written, it is always rewritten. Every history book, if it is worth reading, is ‘revisionist.’ So too, this book. The narrative which focuses only on heroism and victory is a partial and distorted one. Wars don’t end with ceasefires. To focus only on heroism does those who fought a disservice. It trivializes their experience in war, transforms them from flesh-and-blood human beings into stick figures, overlooks the fact that in World War II, the majority of those who served had been drafted and were far from professional soldiers.

“I wanted to write another necessary chapter in their story: the chapter on homecoming and readjustment to civilian life, the story of my father and his generation, and their families, as they struggled to navigate from war to peace, put their lives back together again, save their marriages, reunite their families.”

Finally, I asked, “How often in the research and the writing did you find yourself coming back to your own father, in memories, and perhaps in stories you discovered about veterans whose own lives after the war may not have resembled his at all?”

He wrote, “Servicemen like my father who carried the war home with them, many of them with PTSD which was not diagnosed until the 1980s, had to cure themselves. The medical profession and the VA had nothing to offer them. No focused talk therapies or counseling, no drug therapies, no group sessions with those who suffered as they did. So those with PTSD and those who had a hard time on homecoming had no choice but to pull themselves together, as my father did when he stopped drinking.

“They succeeded, for the most part, in distracting themselves, getting on with their lives, going to school, focusing on family and work, walling themselves off from the past. In this sense, the ‘wounded’ generation was also a ‘greatest’ generation. In Slaughter House Five, Vonnegut’s stand-in, Billy Pilgrim is an involuntary time-traveler. This was the veterans’ curse. Only when they found ways to stop traveling back to the war were they able to get on with their lives as fathers, husbands, students, and then join the work world in a variety of capacities.”

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