January 2011

Flip through some old magazines from the World War II years. Among the earthy-scented, kaolin-coated slicks or the brittle, decomposing butterfly wings of newsprint, advertisements acknowledge cutbacks in consumer goods, while the advertisers produced war essentials “for the Duration.” Americans knew what that meant: The Duration was the duration of the war, an unknown length of time right up to the end in the Pacific.

What people probably did not consider as the war raged was the subtle way in which the Duration would outlive actual combat. All around us evidence of World War II still affects our lives. It may be in the form of slang or political thinking, our very mores, and, in an immense physical legacy, tangible and enduring yet all but unnoticed.

I do not wish to detract in any way from this outstanding article, but I must question your statement in the lead to the letter found on page 101: “This one carries a date that almost certainly is the day the event that haunts the writer took place.”

The letter’s date of 17 September 1973 is approximately eight months after the Vietnam War cease-fire.

Of course, it’s not clear that the writer of this letter was writing about actions in Vietnam; perhaps this was in Laos or Cambodia. Another possibility is that the letter could be misdated and it was actually written in 1993, since the writer states in the first paragraph that he is saying things that should have been said twenty years ago.

As I read about the Vietnam War Memorial and the artifacts and small articles left at the site (February/ March), I was totally unprepared for my reaction as I wept and couldn’t stop and finally had to lay the magazine aside.

This morning I decided to finish the article, fully prepared to stanch any silly tears. I failed utterly. Why I should weep at the picture of a package of Kool cigarettes and a can of beer taped together attached to a crudely printed note is hard to explain.

It must be that the Memorial and all the mementos left there make war personal as nothing has ever done before.

Thank you for the wake-up call. “Passing” meant a lot to mixed-blood me and should to all of us who are the complex stew which is the U.S.A.

My grandfather passed for white in the early days of this century. I come from a line of folks who go crazy thinking they can change the world. Grandfather Hedrick (something white, African, and Bird Clan Cherokee) hired a dark cousin of his to work first in his home and then in his wagon repair shop. The Klan came to say they didn’t want a nigger doing a white man’s job and then they came back to beat my stubborn black relative to death. Grandfather never got over it but he kept on passing. What would you do?

Thanks for the well-written article, “Passing,” by Shirley Taylor Haizlip (February/March). What devastation prejudice can bring to family and society. Reading her article reminded me of the people who speed past me on the road only to have me drive up behind them at the next traffic light. Prejudice has but the slightest variation on this analogy: American prejudices are so pervasive that we are always running from some group only to find that our running was in vain. “Passing” tells us once more that we are the group from which we’re running.

Fifty years ago, in the summer of 1945, I was a naval officer in Norfolk, Virginia contemplating my inevitable return to the Western Pacific, when two bombs were dropped, the Soviets entered the war, and the Japanese emperor prevailed on his government to throw in the towel. On August 28, the first occupation forces arrived; on September 2, the formal surrender took place. A few days later, Rear Adm. R. A. Ofstie, for whom I was working, called me down the hall and asked if I would like to go to Japan.

Admiral Ofstie had been appointed senior naval member of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, which, after a big effort at assessing the virtues of this form of warfare in Germany, was now about to extend its attentions to Japan. But the Pacific war had been a dominantly naval affair, and while there had been plenty of dropping of bombs, it was not what was generally considered “strategic” bombing. No doubt this would be clarified in time. Although demobilization was beginning and I had plenty of points to get out, Japan sounded interesting, so I said I would go.

On the morning of August 6, 1945, the American B-29 Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later another B-29, Bock’s Car, released one over Nagasaki. Both caused enormous casualties and physical destruction. These two cataclysmic events have preyed upon the American conscience ever since. The furor over the Smithsonian institution’s Enola Gay exhibit and over the mushroom-cloud postage stamp last autumn are merely the most obvious examples. Harry S. Truman and other officials claimed that the bombs caused Japan to surrender, thereby avoiding a bloody invasion. Critics have accused them of, at best, failing to explore alternatives, at worst of using the bombs primarily to make the Soviet Union “more manageable” rather than to defeat a Japan they knew already was on the verge of capitulation.

Rhino, a terrific outfit in Santa Monica, dedicates itself to picking scraps off America’s endlessly bounteous cultural table. Recently, it issued Private S.N.A.F.U., a videotape collection of fourteen cartoons made by Warner Brothers between 1942 and 1945. Snafu, it used to be explained to credulous postwar children like me, was a military acronym for “situation normal, all fouled [sic] up,” and Warner’s private is indeed fouled up. He whines about any job he’s given to do; he gets drunk in a bar and tells a beautiful blonde with a stenograph on her lap where his division is headed; bored with manning a Pacific outpost, he overlooks the significance of an empty ration can of “rice and fish eyes” and nearly lets a Japanese task force slip by. Licentious, lazy, envious of every duty but his own, a shirker, he is the Warner animation department’s idea of the American fighting man in his larval form.

In 1989, the Berlin wall came down. A year later the unimaginable had become a reality: Germany, divided in 1945, was reunified, and it was beginning to raise a major voice not only in Europe but also in world politics. Hopes are high that this time Germany will assume a role among nations different from the one it played in the first half of the century. But in East and West there are deep and traumatic memories of two world wars, of how the Germans saw themselves then and of how they treated their neighbors.

Nor has the old “German Question” been forgotten in the United States. Many people wonder about the future of a relationship that for more than a century has experienced repeated ups and downs. The two countries have been bitter enemies in two world wars and rivals as industrial nations, but they have also had close political, military, and economic ties. However hard they may have tried at various times to retreat into their shells and ignore each other, neither has ever been able to afford to do that.

My story begins in 1925. I was the youngest of nine children born to Frank and Leata Clark, factory workers in southern Wisconsin who were hit hard by the Depression. My father died when I was 13. In October 1943, as soon as I turned eighteen, I enlisted in the Army as a private, hoping to become a fighter pilot.

I soon found out that the Army Air Corps already had plenty of fighter pilots. I would have to choose among the paratroops, the infantry, and aerial gunnery. The prospect of jumping out of an airplane for any reason ranked as low with me as walking through the mud of the world as an infantryman. I made my choice.

I went to gunnery school in Las Vegas, Nevada, and after what seemed a short time, the crew I trained with was assigned an airplane. We picked up our B-17 bomber at Hunter Field, Georgia; proceeded to Bangor, Maine, then to Goose Bay, Labrador, and on to Valley, Wales, in the British Isles; and then joined the 8th Air Force, 379th Bombardment Group, 524th Squadron at Kimbolton, England.