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Making
things happen - with integrity. A weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday July 7, 2003 Volume V Number 32 |
FOCUS - The Tattered Red Notebook
It was the night before Father’s Day. Saturday. My brother-in-law Randy gently placed a tattered red notebook on the dining room table before me. The whole family was in the room, and somehow that eight and a half by eleven three ring binder caught everyone’s attention. A kind of hush settled in. I looked up from my place at Randy, and he looked down at me. “I don’t think you’ve seen this,” he said, and I wagged my head back and forth a time or two. I hadn’t.
He smiled. Then I looked over at Randy’s mom, Marguerite. She smiled too.
I opened the cover to the first page. It was a memory book, perhaps fifty years old - maybe more. The grainy black and white photograph of the G.I. gave me my first clue. He was a tall and lanky character, young, next to a buddy in the same uniform, looking into the camera with a self-conscious, boyish grin. It was Randy’s dad, a couple years before any of us were born, features bearing an eerie resemblance to the man who handed me the book. The setting of the scene - a far-away place with palm trees all around, barbed wire fences and a dusty old jeep with knobby tires and the windshield folded down on the hood.
Like many families of WWII veterans, Randy’s brothers and sisters knew little of Al’s experience in the war. He was a card carrying member of what we now call The Greatest Generation. Like his peers, he didn’t talk much about the war. The family remembered some sketchy details. Something of the hardships. Something about the South Seas.
As we leafed through the yellowed pages, we were struck by several pieces of correspondence; the tiny, detailed, square handwritten characters on aging pages of white stationary – Japanese script. These were original letters. On the opposite pages, translations, typed on one of those old mechanical ROYAL typewriters, with impressions from a worn inked ribbon in twelve pitch Times Roman characters, rough English sentences, expressing some very personal reflections.
Reflections on prison life.
I had recently taken an interest in this period of the War – triggered by a high school speech in which an American survivor of a Japanese prison camp in the Philippines told her compelling story to about eighty impressionable students on the campus of our local high school. Today, in her sixties, she spoke in somber tones about her family’s capture in Manila, just hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor. She was four years old at the time, 1941. As the Japanese Imperial Army expanded forcefully into sleepy neighboring nations, following the Nazi example of brutal occupation and conquest, U.S. forces crippled by the surprise attack (Tora! Tora! Tora!), watched helplessly from a distance, as their own troops overseas became vulnerable to assault. Even the famed General MacArthur was forced to retreat from the Philippines and find exile in Australia.
* * * * * *
Randy’s father, after raising a family in a rural town in the rolling hills of Southern Wisconsin, suffered heart disease and all the related complications as his life slowed down. His days as a printing press operator came to an end. Finally, confined to a bed, he kept track of his children, grandchildren and even great-grandchildren, welcomed visitors, and maintained a can-do sense of humor. He told stories, and read his Bible and seemed at peace. When he died this last summer, the family grieved his passing, and celebrated the legacy he left behind.
I spoke with Randy not long after the funeral and memorial service, and we compared notes on this milestone event. I lost my dad, who was about the same age, in a similar way.
But it was only on this trip that I learned about Al’s war-time experience. These notes and reflections tucked away in a memory book opened up volumes of insight into the experiences that shaped Al’s perspectives – though he rarely spoke of them.
* * * * * *
When MacArthur made good on his promise in 1944 and 1945 (“I shall return”) he marched back into the city of Manila with troops and hardware and in the raid, captured some of the key military leaders of the Japanese Imperial Army. They were held in prison camps, while the Allied forces liberated the city of Manila and the many prison compounds holding American and Filipino prisoners, like our high school speaker - who at the time just turned seven. General MacArthur, for this long awaited victory, became a Five Star General. The enemy officers held in the custody of Allied forces new their destiny. These were the architects of terror. There wasn’t much sympathy in a new world order – and the Allied victors were determined to prosecute the perpetrators of horrific war crimes.
The Trials at Nuremburg put Nazi decision-makers on trial on a world stage. Less remembered were the parallel trials in Manila, in which the architects of Japanese Imperialism were accused of well known, well documented and shocking war crimes in an international, public court. One of the most horrific stories to emerge from Manila during the Japanese occupation became known as the Bataan Death March, in which, under unspeakable conditions, General Masaharu Homma felt compelled to move seventy-six thousand American and Filipino prisoners of war, on foot, bound and gagged, most starving and dehydrated, fifty-five miles to a new prison site. Only fifty-six thousand of the prisoners made the journey alive, malnourished and diseased, thousands left to die behind barbed wire gates in dismal and rank poverty as the war continued. At least twenty-thousand died en route. And many many more afterwards.
The victorious and enraged General MacArthur brought General Homma to trial.
And while Homma waited in a Manila prison, along with several of his cohorts, he sat isolated in a dark and dank cell, under the guard of young Staff Sergeant Al Carver – Randy’s dad.
None of us really understood the import of Al’s experience, until we read the journal entries and newspaper articles and original letters.
General Homma and Dad Carver got acquainted while the high profile prisoner sat on death row. For Al's entire life, he remained in possession of an original letter written by the hand of General Homma. The letter, which we read aloud around the dinner table that night, betrays all the terrible ambiguities and contradictions of war. He confesses the horrors of the Bataan March; but he also complains that the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were no less criminal. He declares that justice has more to do with victory and defeat than fairness. While he leaves judgment to future historians, he seems, on the eve of his hanging, to accept his fate.
Al’s father saved another letter – penned by another prisoner on the row, condemned to die: one Kawai Takeo. Takeo expressed something quite in contrast to his superior officer, General Homma. He speaks of the kindness of his American captors. He claims to have found something radically new in the “Holy Bible” as he calls it, something that changed his life. In his prison cell, with an open Bible in Japanese, he came to embrace this new Christianity. He speaks of his new found faith, and that his faith takes away his fear of dying. He asks his captors to be sure to send the Bible to his family back in Japan. He thanks them for their care.
All of us around the dinner table, the night before Father’s Day, were moved by the sentiments expressed in that strange sounding letter, comprehensible only because of the translation attached. And we agreed. If only we could ask Al – “Was the Bible ever delivered to Takeo's family?” But Al now is gone.
We realized something of the indelible experience of a twenty one year old farm boy in a Manila prison camp, in the aftermath of a horrible war, in the epicenter of historical events global in scale, how it was that his faith came to life on that far-away island, and became his own; and the determination he had to pass it along from generation to generation.
The tattered red notebook became something of a torch – to be passed on – one father to the next.
* * * * * * *
It’s Monday morning, you are a leader.
This long weekend, we celebrated Independence Day with fire-works and barbecues and lazy conversations and cooled off in the pool. “… And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air, gave proof through the night – that our flag was still there.” And how it has stood through the years for generations – for our fathers, and their fathers before us.
Our children are growing, and asking questions about the past, questions I assumed were long since discussed and understood. I bite my tongue – I don’t say the obvious – “You should know THAT!”
Kids don’t really think about these things until they are ready. Then it’s time to fill them in.
So we answer. And color it up with some of the detail.
After dinner, we learned about Al. The brothers and sisters and cousins all stood around the magical red notebook, listening, absorbing. It wasn’t too late. Too late, maybe, to get more answers from Al. But not to late to learn something of the power of courage, kindness, persistence, loyalty, and faith that got him through.
Our independence came to us because of the sacrifice of so many.
I think Al knew the contradiction. He stood guard over his enemy. But as he looked through the bars into the prison cell at a man who fought on the other side, against him, he saw a man with a family, with loyalties of his own, a man who loved his country and his countrymen, a man with a capacity to reason, and a capacity for faith.
He kept a tattered red notebook as a reminder that his enemy became his friend.
And who knows? Staff Sgt. Al Carver and Kawai Takeo may well by now have found one another – again.
Imagine the reunion.
Posted in Valley Center, California
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2003
Special Thanks to my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
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