CHAPTER ELEVEN

Nightmares Return

My address is Ad.Com.Phib.Pac., which is merely an abbreviation for Administrative Command Amphibious Pacific—which is just what we wanted to stay out of.—January 22, 1945

The mention of Iwo Jima was just that, a mention. It wasn’t anything personal, like, “I was there.” Still, I had renewed energy and motivation to keep searching. The following Wednesday I was a little early picking Dad up for our regular breakfast. As Dad went to shave and get his coat for breakfast, Mom motioned for me to go outside with her. We stood on the brick steps.

“The nightmares have started again,” she said.

She looked at me as if I was an expert in this field, as if she’d asked a question that only I could answer.

“Really?” I asked.

My mind went back to the first nightmares. Shortly after 9/11, my father had become depressed. He didn’t realize it at the time and it’s only on reflection that my mother and I put it together, but somehow his WWII experiences got linked with the tragedy of 9/11. Soon, he immersed himself in everything having to do with WWII. Then the nightmares began. They weren’t specific at all. But to him, they were real and troubling.

As he tossed and turned, my mother would feel the bed move. His screams came out as pathetic whimpers. If she tried to wake him, it seemed to make it worse. Then he’d wake with a start and sit on the side of the bed, sweating profusely. But he never remembered what the night terrors were about, only a general sense that they were about the war.

Then for no obvious reason at all, they stopped. It was sometime after that he gave me the letters.

My mother twisted her wedding ring.

“I wonder why they’ve started again,” I said.

I wanted to help. I wanted to offer something to her, like she’d done for me so many times over the years. Still, my father’s reaction baffled me. Was it just chance that the nightmares started again? Was it the mere mention of Iwo Jima? What else could there be? He still hadn’t told me anything about what he did there. My mother stared at me. I wanted to help; I just didn’t know how.

“He was restless and calling out in his sleep last night,” she said. “I couldn’t understand what he was saying, but he just tossed and turned all night long. In the morning, when I picked his pajamas up off the floor to throw them in the dirty clothes, the top was just drenched with sweat. I mean, you could practically wring it out it was so wet.”

Just then, my father appeared at the screen door. He frowned at my mother.

“Oh, you stop talking to her, Bettye,” he said. “Wednesdays are for me. You’re not allowed to speak on Wednesdays, don’t you know that?”

At breakfast, I watched for signs. I expected him to ask about the reference to Iwo Jima that I’d found in his letter. After we ordered our food, there was a lull in our conversation. But he didn’t bring it up, so I decided not to bring it up either.

When I dropped him back at his house, the whole breakfast had come and gone without him saying a single word about it. And that made me wonder: What had changed? Why wasn’t he anxious to talk about it now?

That evening, while watching the news, an image came on the screen. It was a report on the war in Iraq—dusty roads, abandoned buildings, and U.S. soldiers who wore so much gear that even their mothers wouldn’t recognize them. They were on a rooftop lying in wait. They were on their bellies or squatting by glassless windows. Suddenly, gunfire erupted from the abandoned buildings.

I jumped, startled from my armchair complacency. I quickly took the remote control from the coffee table, my thumb over the channel button. I froze. I couldn’t change the channel.

The men on the screen couldn’t change it either. I imagined how the pound of bullets escaping guns, the sound that I could simply turn up or down, must feel in their chest. I held my heart and tears welled in my eyes.

And so it goes, I thought sadly. Generation to generation. War to war. My daddy’s pain, held in for so many years, was the same as any soldier returning from war today. On the screen, the gunfire had stopped. The team, who could easily have just died, was jubilant. For now, I thought. For now you are joyful. But what will you be when you are back on U.S. soil and that joy is a lifetime away? What will your life be like then?

I felt so sad that I simply went to bed. I wanted to not think about what I’d seen. But I couldn’t stop thinking. My father had come home from the war like everyone else of that era. He’d returned to the soil of his home just as the soldiers today would do. But somehow a part of his soul remained there. Something had happened there, and even though his mind may have pushed it aside, buried it, his soul had not.

I finally fell into a deep sleep. It was a dreamless sleep, but also one without memories that turned to nightmares as I slept. I was one of the lucky ones.