A Very American Tale: Reading My Father’s Wartime Letters

“Every day here brings some new, exciting adventure, but still I get homesick. I’m afraid I was spoiled while I was home on furlough. The way I feel now, if I can get back to the states, I’ll be perfectly contented never to leave them again.” PFC Bobby Lowery, U.S. Army, Occupied Japan, 1951. In a letter to his grandmother

My father graduated from high school in 1949 when he was seventeen. He left for college that fall and was probably the first person of his entire family history who had ever done so. By his second year in college, the Korean War was well underway and it was clear that my father and his friends were going to be drafted.

Draftees had a two-year commitment and little say over the course of their military careers. By contrast, the army offered enlistees some incentives for voluntarily joining. Among those incentives was a modicum of input regarding their role in the branch, and a commitment that the enlistee and a buddy who enlisted together, could spend their military obligation together. The downside of enlisting was that you had a three-year commitment rather than just two.

After his sophomore year in college, my father enlisted in the army’s “buddy program” with his best friend from high school. By the late fall of 1951, he found himself in occupied Japan. As a nineteen-year-old private, he and another soldier, in command of a jeep and a pup tent, traveled the backroads of rural Japan, mapping and measuring bridges. The pup tent was my father’s home that entire year. He spent most nights camping beside a country road in the middle of nowhere. Just two years prior, he would have spent his Friday nights carrying a tuba during the half-time show at his high school football game, played in a small town in the American southwest.

In a letter home to his grandmother, he mentioned that it was monsoon season in Japan, and he marveled at the blackness of the mud. He invited her to imagine how dirty he continually was, given that he owned only a single pair of pants, a single shirt, and a solitary pair of boots.

(As an aside, I knew the grandmother my father wrote to from Japan and Korea. He used to take us to visit her when I was a child. She lived on a tiny farm outside of a small East Texas town. With no indoor plumbing, she traipsed to the outhouse as needed and drew water from a well in the backyard. She raised chickens for meat and eggs and cooked blackberry cobblers from the wild blackberries she picked, which grew on the edge of the woods out back. She had been born in the 1870s and would have been around ninety years old when I knew her in the 1960s. She had not a tooth in her head by then and would rub snuff around on her gums to “soothe” them. There were spittoons placed strategically around the house and she could spit with a level of accuracy that was an absolute wonder and delight to a five-year-old boy like me.)

In a letter home to his grandmother, written during his year in Korea, my father wrote: “I did the same thing today that I do every day. I worked all day in one tent, then slept all night in another tent.” After two years of that kind of existence, tent-life had forfeited any allure it had ever held for my father.

A year living out of a pup tent in Japan, followed by a year of doing the same in Korea, disabused my father of any propensity he might have ever had to harbor romantic ideas about “camping”. He came home from Korea…and never went camping again.

My father seems to have been kind of a “Radar O’Reilly” for his reconnaissance unit. He could type like lightning. He went into the army as a private and was discharged as a sergeant. He worked near the front lines but was not himself directly in the fight, as far as I know. He told us very little about his day-to-day responsibilities in the army. His high school buddy, whom he had enlisted with and was still in the same company as my dad, was directly involved in the fighting, right on the front lines. After my father died, we discovered in his papers some poetry he had written while in Korea. One of the poems was a prayer for his friend who was involved in hand-to-hand combat where the fighting was fierce.

My father’s faith was central to his life and he was devoted to his little church back in his hometown. In his letters home, one of the greatest sources of angst he expressed was not having a church to be a part of while he was away. It really haunted him. He brought it up repeatedly in his letters, along with various efforts he was making to locate other Christians during the year he was cataloging the backroads of Japan.

When my father returned from Korea, his unit went directly to a base in Richland, Washington. He was there for the remaining months of his enlistment. His arrival in Richland marked the first time in two years he had been back to the United States. On his first weekend leave, he hitchhiked into town from the base, looking for a church that he could attend. It was a Saturday, so when he finally found a church, the building was locked and empty of anyone to talk with.

What happened next perfectly illustrates my father’s commitment to being a part of a church, but also the extent to which he had suffered by being deprived of it. Though the church was empty and locked, my father went around the building trying all the doors and windows. He found an unlocked window and managed to push it open and crawl through the opening. Breaking and entering was not something he made a habit of, but it was perhaps a sign of his desperation. He wandered through the building until he finally found the sanctuary. There in that dark, silent sanctuary, alone on a Saturday morning, a young army sergeant just home from the war sat down beside the pulpit…and wept.

As it happened, there was a young lady who attended that church who was a senior in high school at that time. She and her family were active in that church; her own father had been one of the founding members. When my father showed up for services the next day, he was invited home for lunch by that young lady’s parents, and befriended by her older brother. Three years later, that young lady married my father, and that’s how this post came to be.