No Ordinary Joes (50 page)

In the years that it took me to finally finish this book, there wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t think about Bob and that moment when I cradled his head in my hands as his life slipped away.

A year after Bob’s death, I met Marty. He had been released from San Quentin and was living in a mobile home in Novato, north of San Francisco. He was off of drugs, but clearly fragile and, by his own admission, fighting a “horrible battle” with depression. “Vietnam and prison can do that to a guy,” he said. A tall, slender, good-looking man, with deep blue eyes like his father, he talked softly, breaking into tears on several occasions, clearly saddened by the lack of reconciliation with his dad. He showed me poetry he’d written about his experiences in Vietnam and pictures of his mother, who died a couple of months after Bob; he admitted to thoughts of suicide. Several times during the conversation he repeated his mantra: “I’m okay today, and that’s the best I can expect. I’ll deal with tomorrow when it comes.”

Leaving our meeting, I drove across the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco. I wanted there to be a happy ending to my story. Looking back,
I realize that I wanted this to be a story of resiliency and of how these four men had survived the Great Depression, gone off to war, and suffered through the unthinkable, but returned to America and ultimately left that darkness behind. But what I found were four men who came back from war and, although they did live out lives of differing degrees of quiet nobility, strength, and resiliency, carried with them the deep scars of a “good war” not only that never went away but that they passed on to their sons.

I guess one lesson from the stories of these men is that they offer further testimony, not that any is really needed, that there are no winners in war, only survivors.

In 2010, World War II veterans were dying at a rate of over a thousand a day. In late 2009, I found out Gordy Cox finally passed away, six years after the doctor had given him six months to live. Then I got a call from Chuck. I could tell from his voice he wasn’t well. In the past several months, lung cancer had racked his body. He’d just completed six weeks of radiation. He had lost forty pounds.

“More pain than anything I’ve ever experienced, including prison camp,” he said. “But guess what? I got married.”

“To whom?”

“Gwen. We got remarried. Sixty-three years after the first time. We’re not living together or anything, but I figured she wouldn’t get anything from my Navy pension when I finally croak. Now she will.”

Chuck died a few weeks later.

I’ve always been a little confused about what constitutes a hero. Is it hitting sixty or seventy-four home runs? Inventing a vaccine? Serving your country? Maybe. Probably. But I’ve also got to include a man who, despite his flaws, gives hospice care to his dying son and then makes sure that his ex-wife is taken care of financially. I’d also include a millionaire on that list, a man who listed his greatest accomplishment as the care he’s given his invalid wife. The fact that these men also gave so much in service to their country pretty much seals the hero deal.

W
hen I started researching this book in 2001, I couldn’t wait for each day, each new discovery. I knew that I had stumbled on a story that went to the heart of America—love, war, loss, history, failure, courage, and redemption. But something happened along my journalistic way. My journey broke down.

Maybe it goes back to my second research trip. I traveled to Florida to talk with a Navy buddy of Bob Palmer’s. The morning I arrived at his house was September 11, 2001. We sat in his living room and together we watched in stunned disbelief as the image on the television screen framed the twin towers crashing down.

“It’s like Pearl Harbor all over again,” he said.

Two days later I traveled to Georgia to interview Robert York, one of a handful of men still living out of the original crew of seventy-six. He was a nineteen-year-old electrician’s mate second class when the ship went down; now he was seventy-seven. Along with the rest of the nation, he was trying to make sense of what had just happened. I figured that his experience in World War II and the fact that he had been at Pearl Harbor and had suffered unimaginable torture as a prisoner of war would provide patriotic insight that I couldn’t possibly feel. We watched Billy Graham try to bring a measure of peace to the televised hysteria. When a flag flying at half-mast filled the screen, York stood up and saluted.

“I don’t think people in this country fully understand what that flag represents,” he said, his voice quivering.

“Did you vote for President Bush?” I asked.

“I’ve never voted,” he answered. “What good would it do?”

How could I ever unscramble the paradox of such a contradiction?

The deeper I probed into these men’s stories, the more my focus kept
shifting; I felt as if I was standing on quicksand. For example, the more details I learned about how the
Grenadier
sank, the more I believed that Captain Fitzgerald had screwed up royally, but how could that be the case when every man I talked to under his command steadfastly called him a hero?

These were men of the so-called Greatest Generation, and for the longest time America had been falling all over itself gushing over the way this generation had endured the depths of the Great Depression, performed heroic deeds against truly evil aggressors, then somehow found the strength to bounce back and rebuild a postwar utopia.

Yet in almost every interview, I regularly heard the “N” word tossed around like kindling and women referred to in terms that negated every advance for women’s rights over the past fifty years. How could I paint these men as the “Greatest Generation” when so much of the evidence I was gathering seemed to draw a picture of a racist, xenophobic, and misogynistic generation?

I would read about the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, and then sit down and try to write about the torture the Japanese inflicted on the men in these pages. I wondered what would have happened if somebody had photographed the degradation in the Japanese camps. Would there have been a greater public outcry against the Japanese after the war? Would President Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld still believe that waterboarding was okay or that due process didn’t apply? Did our leaders know that in the war crimes trials in Tokyo following the war, many of the Japanese military men directly responsible for the torture inflicted on our POWs were sentenced to death by American military tribunals? None of the men portrayed in this book believed such torture would accomplish anything other than lower our standing in the world. If these guys didn’t crack under the torture inflicted upon them (and I included only a portion of those descriptions on these pages because writing about it was difficult and I assumed reading about it would be equally hard), what would make anyone believe it would work against our captured enemy?

* * *

For research I beat a regular path to Google, as well as read books, official Navy documents, and firsthand accounts I found in the National Archives. But perhaps the best document I had for my research was from Gordy Cox, the guy who supposedly flunked first grade because he’d been kicked in the head by a horse. To help me in my research, he wrote a seventy-five-page account of what happened to him, stunning in its details and honesty. Captain Fitzgerald’s written testimony submitted during the Tokyo War Crimes Trials in 1947 was also very useful, as was Bob Palmer’s twenty-page autobiography titled “A Rather Unusual Story.”

Bob, Tim, Gordy, and Chuck weren’t just subjects for my book; we forged special connections. In sharing such intimate details of their lives, they put their trust in me. It was impossible not to feel a closeness, a responsibility. I visited their homes; sat in their living rooms; talked to their wives, ex-wives, and children; and dug through old letters. We met in restaurants, at a hospital, and rode in cars together. I attended two of their reunions, one in Las Vegas and the other in Reno—reunions that at times were so drenched in memories that it brought these men to tears. Always, the subjects understood the purpose of my visit. In most cases, I used a tape recorder, and if that was not possible, I took notes. All transcriptions were done by me.

By the time I showed up, these men were old, liver-spotted, hard of hearing, and sometimes slow to remember. Yet at times they told tales from sixty years ago as if it was yesterday morning. They showed me telegrams to their parents from the Department of the Navy that declared them missing in action. I listened to their anger over their treatment by their own government—and Japan’s—and the callous disregard for their right to reparation. I spent time with a psychiatrist who specializes in post-traumatic stress disorder, a term that wasn’t even coined until 1985. These men were all textbook cases, but they were all reluctant to admit that they suffered from it.

Scenes in this book were reconstructed from the memories of those involved, and are subject to the inaccuracies that the decades might have brought. When dialogue is directly quoted, at least one of the participants
is the source. With but a few exceptions, the real names of the people involved are used. In the few instances where I have changed the name of a minor character, it was to protect his or her privacy.

The “true story” was often hard to pinpoint. In some cases, the recollections of different individuals of the same event varied—e.g., the
Grenadier
’s sinking. In that specific case, as well as others, I recounted the story that made the most sense to me in terms of the published facts. If there was an account recorded within a couple of years of the incident, I relied more on that. With regard to the ship’s sinking, I interviewed ten men who experienced it and they all had different accounts. Four men believed the
Grenadier
fired two torpedoes at the freighters, yet there was nothing about any torpedoes in Captain Fitzgerald’s official report immediately following the war.

In the letters and journals that are included, they are reprinted exactly as they were originally written, although sections might have been omitted for brevity.

At times I cringed at the stories I was hearing. Combined, I was told over one hundred torture stories. But these were men who had to be tough. They had endured hardscrabble childhoods and withholding fathers. Every time they pulled out of the harbor to patrol enemy waters, they didn’t know if they were coming back. A submarine is no place for a loner, and these men grew to know each other better perhaps than anyone they’d meet the rest of their lives and forged a bond they found hard to explain, stumbling on words such as “respect” and “affection.”

When the war was over and liberation finally came, they returned to a country much different from the one they’d left five years earlier. All of them were married within a couple years of their return. Was it because it was an era when that’s what young people did, or because their imprisonment had made them all starved for affection and female companionship? I’ll leave that for the shrinks to determine.

Another thing the four men had in common was that they rarely, if ever, talked about what they’d been through, or spent time indulging in introspection. For the most part, they lived veiled lives. Until this book.

What was it that gave each of these men the mettle to survive a POW
experience almost unimaginable in its brutality? What gave them the strength to endure? Most days I felt inadequate to the task of figuring it out. In the end I could only conclude that they were all very tough sons of bitches, not just because they survived their captivity, but also because they endured the lifetime burden of war.

For whatever reason, Bob, Chuck, Gordy, and Tim were ready to talk when I came to visit. Maybe it was because they knew that this was likely their last chance to tell the world what happened to them. They talked freely about their childhoods, Navy careers, and years as POWs. They bristled at the handling of Iraq. They made dark jokes about living long enough to read this book. They were not pleased that I was past my deadline … by several years.

For all their honesty and candor about the past, most of them drew tight when talking about their relationships with their sons. I had to wonder. Had their experiences in World War II directly or indirectly impacted their kids? Three of their sons preceded them in death, and a fourth was in prison. There were stories of drug addiction, disease, and deep depression. But I didn’t initially learn any of that from these men.

I knew that to tell their stories, I needed to include the parts they would rather not discuss, if only in a final chapter. But to do so would surely cause them pain, a pain they didn’t deserve at this late moment in their lives. I wondered if there was a part of me that was waiting for them to die so as to spare them any pain this book might cause, or me the pain of thinking I may have betrayed them. As I write this, only Tim is still alive.

For months at a time, it seemed too daunting a story for me to try to tell. I’m not a historian or a psychologist, and yet it felt like I needed to be those things to somehow make sense of it all.

But perhaps nothing paralyzed me more than the day in December 2006 when I opened a Christmas card from Chuck Vervalin, of whom I’d grown especially fond. He wrote a little note on the inside: “I am 84 years old. I have read ten books in my life. I hope to live long enough to read the eleventh.”

I let him down. But I hope I still did him justice.

USS
Grenadier
(SS210) March 17, 1943

Officers