The Souvenir (9 page)

These questions haunted me. Hoping to find some answers, I raided the shelves of the history section of the tiny Port Townsend library. When I returned to Los Angeles, the questions returned with me.

In his book
On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society
, Dave Grossman, a psychologist and army colonel, focuses on the long-term effects that the experience of killing exacts on the soldier's psyche. Along with other military historians, Grossman believes the heaviest burden of war is usually carried by army infantrymen—men like my father.

He cites one particular World War II study: After sixty days of continuous combat, 98 percent of all surviving soldiers suffer some kind of psychological damage. I remembered how, in one of his letters, my father complained, “Our division seems determined to set a record for consecutive days of combat on the front lines.” By the time the campaign for Balete Pass was over, the Twenty-fifth Division had been committed to the front lines for 165 days of
continuous combat
.

By far the most startling World War II statistic I read in his book was that only 15 to 20 percent of army riflemen in World War II would fire at the enemy. They did not run or hide, but they
simply would not fire
. To the question, Why did these men fail to fire? Grossman explains that there is within most men an intense resistance toward killing their fellow man. He then describes the techniques the military uses to overcome this innate and powerful reluctance. They must inculcate the idea that one's enemy is not a human being.

“For the war to be prosecuted at all,” writes historian and World War II vet Paul Fussell, “the enemy of course had to be severely dehumanized.” When someone is dehumanized they no longer have a face, a family, a history, a reason to be alive, or a reason to allow them to be left alive. “When you see a dead Nip, you won't
care. But no matter how many times you see a dead Yank, you'll never get over it,” a seasoned soldier told journalist Murray Kempton when he first landed on New Guinea.

This was true on both sides. John Dower points out in his landmark study
War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War
that this dehumanization contributed to the brutality and mercilessness of the conflict in the Pacific. “As World War II recedes in time it is easy to forget the visceral emotions and sheer race hate that gripped virtually all participants in the war,” Dower writes, explaining how “each side portrayed the other as its polar opposite: as darkness opposed to its own radiant light.”

“Bestial apes” is how Admiral William F. Halsey referred to the Japanese. “Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs,” he exhorted the troops. American wartime propaganda posters depicted the Japanese as subhuman and repulsive, “louseous Japanicas,” vicious jungle creatures, tailless apes to be exterminated.

On the other side, Japanese soldiers were told they were on a divine mission, fighting against a demonic foe, that American GIs were monsters who rifled corpses for gold teeth and took no prisoners alive. The Americans and British were considered savages who “ate raw meat and had mouths dripping with blood.” Roosevelt and Churchill were depicted in Japanese political cartoons as debauched ogres. The Japanese military turned the war itself—and eventually the concept of mass death—into an act of collective purification: “One hundred million people, one mind” was a popular slogan during the war.

By the 1930s, the traditional Japanese warrior code of honor called
bushido
, which called for humane, courteous, and kind behavior (adhered to by the Japanese Army in World War I), had been radically altered by the Japanese government and military, who inflamed feelings of hatred toward the enemy. The military training endured by Japanese draftees, often boys from poor farming
communities, was a system of rigorous discipline that included beatings, psychological humiliation, and exhausting physical exertion. Among veterans, the slang for new recruits was
issen gorrin
, Japanese for the sum of one sen, five ren (less than one penny)—the cost of their draft postcard. Military training was deliberately designed to prepare the recruits to brutalize others. I learned that historians refer to this system of indoctrination as “socialization for death.”

Senjinkun
, the military manual that all Japanese soldiers were supposed to obey in World War II, made several principles absolutely clear. One was obedience to one's superiors, who were considered representatives of the emperor himself, the highest moral authority. Another was that being taken prisoner by the enemy was a profound disgrace to the emperor, to one's family, to one's village, to the entire nation. Suicide was preferable to surrender.
Gyokusai
, the word means “to shatter like jewels,” was the phrase for an honorable death in lieu of surrender. To GIs like my father, this fact alone made the enemy seem inhuman. You approached a Japanese soldier warily, even if he was waving a white flag. He might pull out a grenade and blow himself up—taking you with him. To the Americans, the Japanese seemed to want to die, to glorify death. My father's statement—“Those Nips don't give up so we have to kill them all”—grimly sums up the prevailing attitude among American infantrymen toward their enemies during the Pacific War.

A
FTER THEIR LANDING
in Lingayen Gulf in January, the Twenty-seventh Infantry Regiment fought a fierce battle in the flat fields around the town of Umingan, which lasted until February 4. After that, they pushed inland over steep forested terrain toward the strategic Balete Pass in the Caraballo Mountains, where the troops of General Tomoyuki Yamashita, commander of the Japanese Fourteenth
Area Army in the Philippines, were entrenched in the hills.

The men in the Twenty-seventh made the arduous climb in fierce heat through dense jungle, often tripping over thick vines and sliding off trails where monsoons had eroded whole chunks of mountainside. Five months of fierce fighting passed before the Americans could claim victory over Balete Pass. What close calls had my father been through?

The first mention of the Japanese flag came in a letter on February 13, 1945, after Umingan was captured and they'd begun the ascent up Highway 5 toward Balete Pass: “I have a Japanese flag now. My first thought was to send it to Hal Rubin, but then, I decided that I'll probably sell it to some Marine for about fifty dollars. So I'll hang on to it awhile.”

The envelope containing only the flag (no note) was postmarked March 3, 1945. Over the next several months, while the battle raged around him, my father apologized to my mother for sending it home: On April 24 he wrote, “I'm so very sorry that I sent you the Jap flag. It was a little boy use of bad judgment. I'll never send any more such gruesome souvenirs home. I promise.” In June, after the battle was over, he fretted, “Don't put the flag on display. I should have sold it to some rear echelon glory hunters.” On July 1, a full four months after he'd mailed the offensive article, he was still suffering over it: “It was an adolescent impulse that will only be rectified when I am home with you and have apologized personally.” Four days later, July 5: “Your letter today mentioned how upset Mrs. R was about George's Purple Heart. Well, we all make mistakes. George is sorry that he ever mentioned it. Just like I was when I sent the Nip flag home. All George got was a scratch on his wrist from a piece of shrapnel and the medics put him in for it.”

Norman Steinman regretted the distress he had caused his wife when she opened the envelope and confronted the flag and what it possibly meant. But I wondered if there might be another explanation
why he had such a difficult time forgiving himself for sending the flag home.

In his essay “On Moral Pain,” writer-philosopher Peter Marin describes the psychological damage done to a man when he must balance the
obligation
to kill with the
guilt
that results from fulfilling that obligation. As Marin points out, it's a tragic catch-22: “The soldier is damned if he does, and damned if he doesn't.”

My father had violated his own standards of morality by picking up a war souvenir, and it troubled him deeply. He had done what soldiers have always done, taking what they have conquered.

Japanese flags were a common souvenir for many American soldiers. “We used to say that the Japanese fought the war for their emperor, the British for glory, the Americans for souvenirs,” wrote historian William Manchester. Souvenir is from the Latin
subvenire
, to come up again, to come to mind. Many of the men who took flags from the battlefield would later find, like my father, that they did not want the stories provoked by those old souvenirs to “come to mind.” Yet they couldn't bear to destroy them, either. That would betray their memories of their dead friends, their own grief and anger.

Thousands of years of human warfare have made clear that men can be permanently damaged by their “temporary” transformation into killers, by months of constant shelling and bombardment. In the American Civil War, this damage was called “soldier's heart”; in the Great War, soldiers who were “shell-shocked” were taken to a hospital where doctors zapped them with electrical current, insisted they renounce their symptoms and return to the front. In World War II, it was called “combat fatigue” and it was not uncommon, though the Pentagon brass insisted there was no such phenomenon, that anyone who claimed to suffer from it was a weakling or a malingerer. In 1943, in Sicily, General George S. Patton slapped and kicked a decorated soldier hospitalized with shell-shock and called him a “yellow bastard.”

After Vietnam, the phenomenon entered the psychiatric lexicon as “post-traumatic stress disorder,” which journalist David Harris, who was imprisoned for draft resistance during the Vietnam War, has perceptively defined as “undigested grief.”

For men who returned home from World War II, repression was the standard medical prescription. “Time will heal,” doctors told those men who thought to ask for help. The men who fought the brutal war in the Pacific—who'd seen their buddies ripped apart by Japanese bayonets, who'd filled their nostrils with the stench of death—buried their anguish. In refusing to speak of it, they might succeed in holding the horrors at bay.

For Norman Steinman, all those years of never crying, never venting his sorrow, trying to restrain his rage, to suppress the nightmares—all those years of placating his “soldier's heart” must have clogged his arteries with grief. He couldn't tell his wife the very worst that happened. He could send her the flag, but he couldn't tell her how he got it.

My innately gentle father and his buddies
allowed
themselves to believe that the enemy they fought in the jungle was subhuman. How else could they have tossed white phosphorus bombs into caves where there were living men? How else could the Japanese have tortured and beheaded civilians, prisoners of war, unless they believed likewise? In contrast, once I knew that my father's enemy
had
a name, was
indeed
a human being, he
became
human. Those simple words, “To Yoshio Shimizu,” brought a shade to life. I was not just in possession of a flag. I was in possession of a
name
. That name belonged to a person with a family and a history.

Though I trolled through his correspondence for a definitive answer, my father's letters never described how he actually acquired the flag. I tried to imagine the battlefield meeting between my father and Yoshio Shimizu. My imagination balked at the image of my father killing someone.

In March of 1945, Private Steinman wrote of leaving the battlefield during combat in a jeep with two other Jewish GIs—Sam Wengrow and Morrie Franklin—for Passover seder at Clark Field. Taking a cue from the 23rd Psalm, which we'd recited at both my parents' funerals, I mentally prepared a table in the presence of my father's enemy. I constructed an unlikely scenario. What if my father and his buddies encountered Yoshio Shimizu on the way to the seder? What if it happened, say, like this: My father is in the jeep with his buddies Morrie Franklin and Sam Wengrow. They have an overnight pass. It's two and a half hours over bumpy terrain to Clark Field. They navigate sheer drops more than thirty-five hundred feet, hairpin turns. After forty grueling minutes, my father says to Walter, the driver, “Can you stop here? Gotta take a leak.”

“No problem,” says Walter and he stops the jeep.

While my father pees, Sam Wengrow ventures farther into the brush. Out of the bushes appears a ragged Japanese soldier, waving a white flag. The man is jabbering. Sam points his rifle at the man. He could be booby-trapped, dangerous. He keeps babbling, follows the trajectory of Sam's rifle and marches to the jeep.

“Look what I found,” says Sam to his buddies. My father takes some communication wire and ties the prisoner's hands behind his back. “I'll sit in the back with him,” he tells Sam and off they go. My father has his carbine pointed at the man's side. They'll throw him in the stockade at Clark.

The man is terrified, relieved, famished. Shaking like Jell-O. My father gives him a piece of salami from his own private stash; he gives him a cigarette. The Japanese soldier wolfs the salami down. Who knows what they'll do with him, the prisoner must be thinking. He's still alive. He might as well eat.

“Tokyo boom boom boom?” Sam says to the prisoner over his shoulder from the front seat. Does he know Tokyo is being bombarded
with incendiary bombs? The man shakes his head, he doesn't understand. The rhythm of the bumpy road makes him drowsy. He falls asleep with his head on my father's shoulder. “You've got a new friend, Steinman,” Morrie teases.

They arrive at the seder with the dozing prisoner. Inside, the chaplain is holding up a matzoh and the assembled are reading responsively: “Behold this is the bread of affliction our forefathers ate in the land of Egypt. Let all who are hungry enter and eat thereof. Let all in who want to observe the Passover. This year here, next year in Jerusalem. This year as subjects, next year as free men.”