Boys and girls alike grow up piecing together a history of violence with their plastic people. Barbies and little green soldiers, armed with plastic spoons and their fathers watch, fight the battles their great grandparents lived with near harmless tumbles and no actual shrapnel. I watch my children play and I feel in constant awe that almost anywhere we put our feet here was once a war zone.
For me it was different, although I cannot say I walked up hill to school in the scolding arctic winds I will say that the clues of what had transpired in the near past seemed to seek my hands as a child. Angaur Island had been the scene of much bloodshed during World War II and the relics of these events rested under the thin layers of phosphate and soil waiting to be remembered. Even my grandmother's stories were those of her life during the war, there was no time for fairy tales when so much history was waiting to be told. In the backyard of my family home, which had once been a hospital, I found the vials that had once held medicine, shell casings, grenades and other relics. There were never many sleep overs at my house as a child because the whole town believed that our house was haunted. Maybe it was, I never met anyone I could see through.
In 1999 my mother came home from the mesei (a traditional wetland area for cultivating taro) with a weathered steel canteen in her basket, she had effectively harvested history. I noticed two names, a man's and a woman's, scratched into the canteen as well as an address in Wisconsin, I decided to look them up as soon as I could, wondering if it were possible that the man had survived the war. Perhaps he would want this link to his past returned. I wrote the man a letter and was surprised when he responded, I could still talk to the past, these pieces of the puzzle I picked up now had voices. The man lived not far from the address he had scratched into the canteen and had even married the woman whose name, scratched then so long before their uncertain union, remained preserved as a love letter encased in mud for five decades. I mailed the canteen back and the man sent me the article from his home town paper, we are all so surprised at the connections that have been made. The man was a marine during the invasion of Peleliu and so we have no clue how his personal effects ended up 7 miles away in Angaur, that is a question not easily answered. I continued to follow this thread, when my family took a road trip across the U.S. I wrote and asked if we could visit. Soon my history lesson went from a mere phantom possibility to having a face and a home which I would find myself visiting, albeit under less dire circumstances than the man's visit to my country.
When we crossed the threshold of the man's home, my family and I were traveling back in time, finding ourselves that much closer to the stories echoed by our elders. We were meeting this marine and seeing the samurai sword he had carried home with him, a souvenir of his journey we had the privilege of encountering. Everything was kept in the basement, away from prying eyes, underground available only to those willing to dig.It was heavy, heavier than I had expected and when I held it in my hand I found myself surprised at the lack of tarnish, how little had eroded away. I am referring to both the sword and the connection we had made. We spoke only superficially about his role in the war, i enjoyed hearing tales of a airplane drop tank converted into a boat for exploring the ocean. There were moments like these that must have displaced the drudgery of the marine's mission to win. Seeing his commander take a shot to the head just inches away seemed always to be buried below the surface, it was only later when I read an historical account of this incident (the man never wished to discuss these matters with me, I respected his privacy) that had been published in a book that I realized how he must have suffered.
While the man had travelled already, his history in Palau long finished except for this final thread, the canteen, which now rested in a box of photos and other memories, many he may have wished to forget, in a box in the basement. Later his daughters wrote me, saying indeed I had unearthed something in their father and memories once entombed now emerged. I had kicked the dust off of something, as I often do on Angaur, and found a larger story lies underneath.
No comments:
Post a Comment