Emergent Voices: Three Memoirs by U.S. War Orphans

2008-04-05T18:09:00.000-07:00

Introduction
Chapter One: Grief's Silence
Chapter Two: "Society Must Be Defended" (Social Theory)
Chapter Three: WWII War Orphans
Chapter Four: Karen Zacharias/After the Flag is Folded
Chapter Five: Gail Hosking Gilberg/Snake's Daughter
Chapter Six: The Current War
Works Cited

Introduction

2008-04-05T17:21:00.000-07:00

I come to the subject of U.S. war orphans through a combination of personal experience and intellectual curiosity. I lost my father to the Vietnam War when I was twelve years old. The oldest of three girls, I fully remember the initial trauma and the insidious aftermath.

My father's chopper was shot down by a sniper on Thanksgiving Day in 1971. The morning after Thanksgiving that year, as we were eating donuts and listening to music, an unmarked car pulled up in our driveway. Two men in dress blues stepped out. All Air Force wives know what that means, and the men had only spoken a few words before my mother collapsed on the front porch. They carried her crying to the couch. We were told that our father’s chopper had crashed in the river and that he was missing in action. Mom sobbed; I felt shocked and numb.
I took my two little sisters, ages six and nine, downstairs to the basement and kept them there. We stayed quiet and listened, forgotten in the confusion. For two days we made sandwiches and stood apart, watching. Dad’s body was recovered two days later. Mom cried some more. People brought us food for a few days, there was a funeral, and then we were left alone. Mom stopped crying and walked around the house with a distant stare. A dark silence occupied our house for a long time.
Soon after his death I remember running into Mom in a dark hallway and her sharp intake of breath as she said, “You look just like your Dad.” I stood there, guilty, in the middle of the floor. I couldn’t help being a reminder of sorrow. Did I remind everyone of Death, my face an omen of the grief Death brings? What else
could explain the averted eyes, the painful silences from both friends and strangers when the news was told?

I didn’t understand what war was. Mom sheltered us from television images of the war. Besides, those men wearing camouflage running around on the ground were not my dad. My dad was a pilot; he wore a plain flight suit when he went to work. He was doing something Top Secret and the return address on his letters was fake. As far as I knew, Dad was at work on a very long mission. When he was killed, I did not know why I felt so ashamed.

As I grew older, I came to hate the Vietnam War and blamed the government, even though I had no idea about the war’s causes and avoided any mention of it. I became a rebellious teenager, transforming hurt into toughness. I grew bitter in my ignorance.

Hating the war helped when I had to tell someone my father had died fighting there. I couldn’t say he had been drafted unwillingly; he was a career soldier who volunteered to serve two tours in Vietnam. Joining in the belief that it was a bad war made it easier to get along with others who hated it, which was most everyone I met. I did not know then that my father had been a hero.

I found out about that from The Trunk. On Thanksgiving Day 1996, the 25th anniversary of his death, Mom deposited a heavy blue trunk in my living room. She firmly announced that these were my father’s things and were now mine to keep. She was finished with them. I wasn’t so sure I wanted the trunk, so I put it away in the closet. Many months later I opened it. There sat his Air Force hat, the silk band stained with sweat. The musty dress blues, a mysterious black beret, scattered medals, stack of letters tied with yarn, a folded triangle flag. I remembered the casket flag, men with quick white gloves folding the neat bundle, placing it with finality on Mom’s lap. Years of silence, all bound up into this one trunk, now airing in my spare room.

I had seen the medals as a child, set out on the bookcase in the basement. He had earned most of them during his first tour in 1969. Now I saw what they were: A Silver Star, three Distinguished Flying Crosses, an Airman’s Medal for Valor (he was most proud of this one), eight Air Medals and a Purple Heart. Fourteen medals. Most of the citations were missing; I had no idea what he had done to earn them. The Silver Star is the second highest medal an Air Force pilot can earn, but all I remembered was Dad's joke that he had gotten it by flying a general to use a real latrine. In my little girl mind, I had believed for many years that this story was the truth.

Since opening the trunk, I have researched his mission and read over 100 letters he had written. I have made contact with several men from his squadron. I found out that Dad was a highly skilled Air Force chopper pilot for the 20th Special Operations Squadron (the Green Hornets) who was flying “sensitive and classified missions” on the real, secret front lines of the war. The 20th SOS’s mission was to rescue long-range reconnaissance patrols on the ground in Cambodia during a time when both the United States and North Vietnam were denying any involvement there. Dad repeatedly flew extremely hazardous missions head-on into gunfire with frequent disregard for his own life. One time he and his men ran to a crashed and burning chopper and lifted it up enough to free a man who had been pinned underneath. Reading the letter he wrote to my mother that same evening took my breath away. Why had no one ever talked about his bravery? Why had I been ashamed of him?
I thought the answer to those questions lay in the horrible attitudes that Americans had toward military personnel during and after Vietnam. People treated us as if we were at fault. Military families who showed patriotism were spit upon; one of my mother's widowed friends who flew a flag on her house found a bag of dog feces on her front porch with a note saying "Babykiller." My own father had not been allowed to walk through the civilian airport terminal to greet us upon his return from Vietnam because people might be upset to see him in the flight suit he was still wearing, fresh from the battlefield. After he died, my sister's teacher blamed her misbehavior on our "broken family." No wonder our mother taught us to not tell anyone and to pretend that we were a fine, normal happy family.

After September 11, 2001, I knew I had to make sense of that hidden yet dominating event in my life, because there would be a new generation of young ones left behind. I determined they would not be left alone in shame and silence as we were. I began to research, scouring the internet for information. Slowly information came trickling in. I found an organization called Sons and Daughters in Touch (SDIT), a group of individuals who had lost their dads to Vietnam. I received emails from men who flew with my father. The man who had pulled my father's body out of the water sent me a detailed description of that day. It was the first time he had ever told anyone. I went to the reunion of my father’s squadron and met many kind men who have told me stories about my father's bravery. Even the gory details have been soothing to me.

I continued looking. One of my internet searches brought me to the WWII War Orphans' website (AWON) where I found their book, Lost in Victory: Reflections of American War Orphans of World War II. Published in 1998, this collection of oral narratives from adults who had lost their fathers to WWII came as a pleasant surprise. Until then, I had found no published work at all about U.S. war orphans, although plenty has been written about war orphans from many other countries. AWON reports that there were no statistics on U.S. war orphans from WWII, except for an estimate of the number of dependents who received benefits – 183,000. It amazes me that so many people could have shared this traumatic experience, yet none of the individuals interviewed had ever known another person who had lost a father to war. I was stunned. I had assumed that the shame and silence I had experienced had been due to the nation's conflicted ambivalence about the Vietnam War, but in this text I read tale after tale about similar emotional responses coming from a group of individuals who had lost their dads to a popular war. The mother's shame at not being married in post-war boom times, the children's need to fit in with their happier classmates. All this was my experience too!

I determined that I would research the stories of U.S. sons and daughters who had lost a parent to the Vietnam War. Through the university, I gained access to extensive libraries and search engines. But I found only one published memoir, “Daddy’s Gone to War”: The Second World War in the Lives of America’s Children, published in 1993 by William Tuttle. Only through word of mouth from members of SDIT was I able to find the two Vietnam War texts that I explore in this thesis. Karen Zacharias, author of Hero Mama: A Daughter Remembers the Father She Lost in Vietnam – and the Mother Who Held Her Family Together, is a member of SDIT. When I spoke with her, she told me that her memoir, although published in 2005 (while the Iraq War raged on and new war orphans were being made every day) and reviewed on National Public Radio, had sold very few copies. She said there was a very limited market for her book. Through Zacharias, I learned of another memoir, Gail Gilberg’s Snake’s Daughter: The Roads In and Out of War, published in 1997. If I had not met Zacharias, I might never have found these hidden texts.
I did not meet another war orphan until I was 43 years old. My experience – the silence, the shame, the secrets, and the interest in finding out later in life – closely matches the experiences of many others. I cannot express how soothing it has been to meet others like myself and to discover that my experiences were typical. It feels like I've removed a festering thorn.

In this thesis, I reveal the stories war orphans tell themselves about war’s aftermath. I investigate the assumptions and justifications U.S. citizens make about the dependent children of fallen soldiers. I intend to broadcast the voices of U.S. war orphans, so that those who follow will know that they are not alone.

Chapter One: Grief's Silence

2008-04-05T17:20:00.001-07:00

“I have been one of the unanchored survivors, imprisoned in silence and obstructed grief” – Gail Hosking Gilberg

At the June, 2007 exhibition of The Moving Wall in Redlands, California, event organizer and former Army advisor Bill Harden spoke to a reporter about the emotional impact of this traveling half-size replica of the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial Wall. "I'm overwhelmed. The wall was here for the mothers, wives, pals and buddies of those names who are on it. It was a time to remember, a time to reflect, a time to heal" (qtd. in Vargo A1). Undoubtedly those mentioned did find some catharsis from viewing the names of the dead chiseled into the black wall. However, there is one group of individuals affected by the Vietnam War that Mr. Harden forgot to include in his comments: the children of those fallen soldiers. I do not believe Mr. Harden intentionally neglected those children when he spoke. Instead, I believe his forgetfulness stems from an ingrained cultural amnesia surrounding those most vulnerable survivors of war.

At a posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor ceremony in 1969, a year when nearly one thousand U.S. soldiers died in Vietnam, Richard Nixon handed the medal to MSgt. Hosking’s only surviving son, Wesley Hosking, age 8. Reporter Richard Reeves said, "What can we say to fathers who give their sons, or to sons who give their fathers?" (qtd. in Gilberg 135). Reeves' ambivalence toward the pain of the surviving children rendered him speechless. His reaction is not unusual. Many people say nothing to the bereaved for fear of saying the wrong thing. U.S. citizens know how to memorialize the dead but struggle to acknowledge the bereaved. Losing a parent to war is hard, but the silence that stems from awkward reactions toward death and from the avoidance of war's aftermath deepens and perpetuates the hurt. It is natural to assume that this silence surrounding the children of the fallen originates from a desire to shield the child from further pain and the reopening of wounds. But like a shield, which both protects the vulnerable and signifies oppression, silence both protects and subdues (Foucault Sexuality 101).

Harden’s and Reeves’ comments, although spoken decades apart, signify a conflicted social discourse about the often ignored victims of wars waged by the U.S. – the soldiers’ orphans left behind. Portrayals of the grieving war widow, the anguished soldier sobbing over his comrade’s body – these are familiar tropes in American literature and media. The widow stands at center stage; her children hang by her side, peripheral to our gaze. Their fates play out as subplots, symbols of the aftermath. Perhaps their voices have been silenced into oblivion. Indeed, who gives voice to the U.S. war orphans’ special grief?

Although thousands of sons and daughters lost their fathers in WWII and Vietnam, very few memoirs have been published, and these are not readily available in libraries or bookstores. Yet revelatory memoirs about traumatic lives and books on military history steadily top the bestseller list. Where are the narratives of the thousands of Americans who have lost their fathers to war? In this thesis I claim that the scarcity of texts and the missing literature represents a self-silencing; these individuals do not tell their stories because the stories cause discomfort and stigmatize the authors as disturbed. Using Foucault’s “ascending analysis of power,” I trace the underlying civilian, military, and familial power relations that cause this silence (Society 30). I claim that the three memoirs I discuss in this project represent an emergent twentieth century U.S. war orphan literature, as these writers bravely take the first steps into uncharted waters. They may have intended to write so that others might learn from their experiences, but I claim that the essential activity of writing is a healing act for these individuals and part of their expression of delayed grief.

Although no specific studies have been conducted on how U.S. military children react to the wartime deaths of their parents, recent research on childhood bereavement due to trauma and natural disasters suggests that children commonly react to traumatic death by feeling flat or numb emotions (NYU Child Study 7). Yet resilient children are able to optimistically “manage strong feelings and impulses” (NYU Child Study 30). When a grieving child is silent, is she numb or resilient? How can we find out unless she speaks, and how can she speak unless we ask?

Gail Hosking Gilberg, the daughter of Army MSgt. Hosking, was 17 when her father was killed in Vietnam in 1967. She writes in her memoir Snake’s Daughter: The Roads In and Out of War that she "learned early on about this disease of secrets" as she made the transition from military life to civilian life (45). The culturally-induced and self-internalized silence that she experienced after her father's death obstructed her grief and caused her to build "walls around [her] heart, (163): "My silence assured everyone I was just like them – that our lives had been the same. 'Remember those high school parties?' a friend asked. I wanted to tell her about the twelve schools I attended, the housing project where I lived once… [and] about the war. I wanted to describe life in the fortress, but I never knew where to begin. I became a social chameleon instead…How imprisoned within myself I often felt – desperate for words"(162). Her silence reassured the civilians that a military pariah was not in their midst and protected her from ostracism. As civilians, who among us today would openly acknowledge that we avoid those damaged by war and prefer for them to hide their trauma?

Our conflicted stance toward these children who have lost a parent to war is reflected by the fact that contemporary English speakers have no specific name for them. In current military parlance, soldiers with families are "sponsors," all dependents are "survivors," and the wife is the "widow." Gone from today's colloquial lexicon is the term historically used for children left fatherless due to war: "war orphan." Both Presidents Lincoln and Johnson referred to the nation’s war orphans in public speeches. The term is still used in federal and state law. Children of active duty U. S. soldiers killed in war have been provided education benefits through the federal War Orphans Education Act of 1954, a component of what is commonly known as the G. I. Bill. Several states currently have similar support programs; many still use the term "war orphan" in the law's title. For example, Virginia's program is titled "Virginia War Orphans Education Program." The term "war orphan" is based on a dictionary definition that defines an orphan as a child who has lost one or both parents. It seems a more specific moniker than “the children of the fallen” or “military dependents of soldiers who have paid the ultimate price,” or any of several other lengthy and vaguely descriptive idioms in current use (which avoid mention of the orphan, war and death itself). This conflicted categorizing and naming act reflects the greater public and cultural discomfort surrounding the recognition and identity of those American children who, because of war, are left scarred and deprived of one or both parents and of the family unit that had provided nurturing and protection.

The image of a war orphan brings to mind a starving child, abandoned, begging on the streets. This horrific reality is occurring in war-torn countries around the globe; an uncounted number of Iraqi children have lost entire families during the current war. Their suffering cannot be overstated. Their eyes have witnessed the atrocities of war firsthand. My intent in writing this project is not to ignore the immense trauma of those children, nor to conflate the level of their suffering with that of the children of U.S. soldiers. This project's focus is the specific experience of U.S. war orphans whose fathers died in two twentieth century wars fought in distant lands and the invisible home-front trauma that ensued. Although their suffering may be mild by comparison, it is still worth exploring, for the unexamined damage of war blinds us to the devastation we cause when we wage war without consequence.

In this thesis, I borrow Foucault’s theories on govermentality and biopower to explicate the underlying causes of the war orphans’ silent position. Civilian/military/familial relations are the specific power and control structures the children learn to negotiate while their soldier-parents are alive, and this negotiation continues after bereavement and into adulthood. The particular operating dynamics of these entities contribute to the orphans’ self-masking behavior by encouraging the orphans to hide their grief and their status. To understand fully the war orphan’s experience, I explore the child’s relationship to and position within the family structure, the military complex, and civilian life. A military dependent plays an integral role supporting the soldier and the military mission, yet like civilians, military dependents require protection. Soldiers are trained to believe they work and die for the benefit of their tender and innocent loved ones at home. The dependents of soldiers exist in the margins of these two cultural constructs; they are both civilian and military at the same time. One tragic twist of fate in battle, and the military family has just played a role in its own demise.

Once the sponsor is dead, the child, who had been a part of the military/war complex, automatically becomes a civilian. Hosking writes that when she had to leave the military life and become a civilian, she was "caught between two poles…two separate people who never met each other. I was divided from myself…much the same way my country was divided about the war itself"(162). The orphan is now expected to exhibit the benefits of protection and make a success of herself, first in school and later in life; she must prove that her father's sacrifice was worthwhile. Societal expectations of healing might not match the realities of grieving. The child learns to put on a mask of stoicism. This, in part, explains the dearth of published letters, memoirs or diaries of these individuals.

The lingering scars and suffering of the divisive Vietnam War and its cultural and emotional aftermath on surviving military children in the United States remain hidden, like a guilty secret. It would be easy to assume that the unpopularity of the Vietnam War and the contentious political and cultural climate surrounding it would be the clearest cause of the distressed silence and shame that these war orphans felt. To some, their fathers’ participation in the war seemed like a meaningless mistake. Many sons and daughters, including those whom I have met through SDIT, grew up rarely speaking of their loss and never knowing anyone else who had suffered a similar experience.

However, the relative popularity of WWII did not alleviate the suffering of those young survivors left behind. These orphans report strikingly similar experiences of silence and shame. Ann Mix, founder of American WWII Orphans Network, writes in Lost in Victory: Reflections of American War Orphans of World War II, "We were not cared for. We were not recognized. We were not even known. Our condition as “fatherless” was somehow to be magically fixed by a government check, a mother’s remarriage, or a stepparent’s adoption. What was our status? Who were we? We did not know. So, like society, we remained silent. We withdrew into our fears and fantasies, doing our best to ignore or accept our loss" (Lost in Victory xviii).
Although both wars were fought within different cultural contexts, the fact that orphans from both wars experienced a similar isolation and loss of identity clearly suggests that underlying systemic and pervasive cultural causes were in effect.

Conventional wisdom assumes that U.S. culture was very different during WWII and the Vietnam War. Each war defined a generation; one was a popular war that saved the world from Hitler, while the other was an unpopular war that fomented riots and domestic unrest. Yet, orphans from both of those wars express similar emotional struggles. Children withheld their grief in an attempt to shelter their families and friends from discomfort. The causes of this discomfort stemmed not only from a reluctance to be reminded of the suffering of war, but also from a societal discomfort with grief in general. As Dr. E. James Lieberman, the former chief of the Center for Child and Family Mental Health said, “We are a death-defying, death- denying culture” (“American Families” 717). The wish to avoid reminders of war casualties transcends political specifics and is systemic in public culture.By stigmatizing their grief, American society defines the image of the U. S. war orphans of WWII and the Vietnam War as unnamed and invisible damaged goods. This image forces these children to suppress their emotions and hide their status. Within the surviving family unit, the pain is often so great that the silence and shame is perpetuated and internalized. Thus, the child's overwhelming sadness is marginalized to the sidelines of the public’s perspective and hidden within the internal monologues of the child herself. In the process, the orphan learns to live inside a carefully crafted psychological construct of “silence and obstructed grief” (Gilberg 172). When the child’s grief is ignored and erased, the citizenry is absolved from facing and embracing war’s aftermath. Thus, the devastating emotional trauma of war is sanitized and glorified in the service of justifying the military mission and alleviating complicity.

Although the Department of Defense (DOD) has conducted some recent studies on military families, researchers have little information about how military children are affected by wartime casualties. The military, assuming that the civilian sector will provide support, has conducted no studies on how widows and orphans fare once their sponsor is dead. In addition, although the DOD has paid survivors’ benefits since the early 19th century (Alt 94), the department does not keep or will not provide social scientists with specific data regarding surviving dependents, citing the importance of family members' privacy. In 1969, Dr. E. James Lieberman attempted to acquire records from the Department of Defense through the Freedom of Information Act. Denying his request, the Assistant Secretary of Defense sent Dr. Lieberman this terse reply:"Our problem lies in requests for specific replies for which the inquirer has a need but for which the Department of Defense does not…we do not have funds or personnel to do research for which no requirement yet exists…this is not a case of information being withheld; we do not have the information asked for at all" Lieberman “Statement” 199). By protecting our identities, the military plays a role in keeping our trauma hidden.

Nor will the DOD publish the total numbers of surviving dependents. Although I myself am one of these individuals and a member of SDIT, the total number remains a secret. SDIT estimates that there are approximately 20,000 sons and daughters who lost fathers to Vietnam. Department of Veterans Affairs estimates that around 183,000 dependent children received benefits as a result of their father's deaths in WWII (Lost in the Victory xix). As of 2005, an estimated 2,000 American sons and daughters have lost parents to the current Iraq War (TAPS). With numbers this high, the lack of information that might inform mental health professionals seems like a glaring omission of attention.

To discover how these children might be affected, I look at three published memoirs from adult children of fallen soldiers from WWII and the Vietnam War. Lost in Victory: Reflections of American War Orphans of World War II is a collection of 25 first-hand accounts from individuals who in many cases are speaking publicly about their fathers' deaths for the first time. Snake’s Daughter: The Roads In and Out of War is a memoir by the daughter of Army Master Sergeant Charles Hosking, a Medal of Honor recipient who was killed in action during the Vietnam War. Gail Hosking Gilberg recounts the shame she felt at her father’s service and sacrifice to his nation. Karen Spears Zacharias’ memoir Hero Mama: A Daughter Remembers the Father She Lost in Vietnam – and the Mother Who Held Her Family Together tells the story of how her mother, a young widow with a ninth grade education, raised three children and earned her nursing degree after her career Army husband died in Vietnam.

These three texts, all published within the past ten years, break through the barrier of encoded silence. These writers bravely express their delayed grief, no matter whom it pains. Resisting pressure to hide their trauma and engaging in the autobiographical act, these writers shape the chaos of sorrow into personal narrative and textual control. No longer withholding secrets, these memoirs are sites of revelation and self-healing. These writers revive their fathers from the ashen vaults of forgetfulness. By understanding their fathers’ deaths, they face their own lives. They defy the expectation that as survivors of patriotic fervor they will maintain the face of stoicism. Instead of surviving through numbness, they engage in the acts of painful remembering. By speaking, they gain power over a force that had overwhelmed and defined their lives. They enact their father's courage when they write their pain for all to see. By writing their stories, they renegotiate their identities and reinvent themselves.

I propose that the true cost for those who lose a parent to war is a conflicted emotional site with ramifications that can last for generations. Their deep trauma and loss are generally ignored by the very structures that are supposed to protect them: namely, the family, the citizenry, and the military. My goal is to uncover their hidden stories and to illuminate the realities of those who have had personal sacrifice thrust upon them, in the name of the security and safety of the United States. I ask: who is responsible for their trauma, and who is willing to listen to and learn from their stories?

Chapter Two: "Society Must Be Defended" (Social Theory)

2008-04-05T17:18:00.002-07:00

Michel Foucault’s social philosophies illustrate the cultural and psychological forces underlying the silence so many war orphans experience. In his seminal lecture series of 1975-76, Foucault lays out his foundational arguments underlying what would soon be published as Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977). In these lectures, published in English in 2003 as “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the College De France, Foucault refers not to a nation’s protective military complex, but to the internal mechanisms by which we control our own thoughts, beliefs and behaviors in an attempt to restrain impulses that, if enacted, we believe would be harmful to society. He traces the development of civil defense from the royalist knights of medieval times to the modern surveillance and self-monitoring systems that we create and participate in today. In essence, Foucault argues that modern individuals not only willingly allow themselves to be constantly scrutinized by each other but also freely engage in self-control (disciplinary) measures that will eventually eliminate the need for external punishment. Fear of punishment has been replaced by fear of ostracism. Society must indeed be defended, not solely from external enemies, but from internal perpetrators of rebellion (including deviant thoughts and behaviors) that threaten our sense of safety and identity (which are defined by social constructs that we agree to adhere to). The lines of defense have been redrawn, as we battle with our Selves, guided by guilt and fear, to monitor our own actions against some socially-constructed set of approved behaviors, whether real or imagined.
These behaviors function as inter-connected practices that create and define the relationships between dominant and subjugated individuals. This interplay, these actions, are like a power dance. Power, for Foucault, is not an abstract force that acts upon inert bodies; it is a function. It is “exercised through networks, and individuals do not simply circulate in those networks; they are in a position to both submit and to exercise this power” (Society 29). Individuals both enact and submit to the mechanisms and technologies of power, as manifest in strategic socio-political power constructs such as nations, families, communities, schools, and military defense units.
According to Foucault, an individual’s life, health, well-being and very existence are not only governed by these socio-political constructs, but are also threatened by them. This threat stems from two areas: the potential removal or absence of the laws that dictate behavior (for example, when one is ignored or abandoned by a social group) and the possible rebellion of the individual against the constructs that had formerly supported him. In either case, the threat of death looms, either in the form of actual biological death or the death of citizenship and cultural identity. When the living can no longer function within the social matrix that molded him, he then must either die or be exiled to a prison or to the life of an outcast. Those who desire to continue to function as part of a group must conform their thinking and behavior in a way that eliminates these threats and encourages cohesiveness. Those who have been abandoned by one social construct and are trying to enter a new one must learn the proper rules. Thus, the individual creates a set of appropriate behavior strategies that will increase the likelihood of participation and reward. If they are successful, they will be accepted and safe.
These techniques of power are centered on the individual body. A system of surveillance, record keeping, gossip and social invitations serve as disciplinary tactics that teach the individual the proper actions. While these minute exercises are focused on the individual, they at the same time function as important population and group controls (Society 242-45). This “biopolitics” or “biopower” is a technology of power and control that is mindful of not just social behavior, but also of birth and death, reproduction, fertility, longevity, illness, medicine, etc. (Society 243). These phenomena are not seen as epidemics that require sudden defensive measures, but as permanent and insidious forces endemic within the population and potentially inimical to happy, good lives. Renegades and madmen, illness and death serve as potentially dangerous forces that must be reckoned with. The state must control and conscript life into tightly controlled categories. Only certain types of life, certain lifestyles, are allowed to flourish under the state’s watchful eye. And since the state cannot maintain constant vigilance, each living citizen must ultimately be convinced to hold vigil over themselves. Biopower is now the state’s interest and responsibility; all must be protected from problems. Proper life is encouraged and improper life is vilified. Death and grief must be hidden, and the bereaved must quickly and stoically get back to normal.
According to Foucault, death in particular has lost its former element of public spectacle, and “the great public ritualization of death…began to disappear” in the late 18th century:
Death…has ceased to be one of those spectacular ceremonies in which individuals, the family, the group, and practically the whole of society took part – has become, in contrast, something to be hidden away. It has become the most private and shameful of all (and ultimately, it is now not so much sex as death that is the object of a taboo). (Society 247)
Foucault explains that death was once spectacular because it was a manifestation of one’s transition from being subject to the control of one power (the sovereign of this world) to the next (the sovereign of the next world). In addition, death marked the "transmission of power" from the dead person to the survivors in the form of ritualized last words and wills and testament (Society 248).
Now, however, the focus is not on honoring death but on preventing it. Our interest in improving life by eliminating accidents, randomness, and inefficiencies, has come with the realization that death ultimately cannot be controlled. “Death is beyond the reach of power…power has no control over death…Power no longer recognizes death …Power literally ignores death” (Society 248). Thus, death is privatized because biopower is now only concerned with the regulation of life.
Foucault then asks the question, “How can the power of death, the function of death, be exercised in a political system centered upon biopower?” (Society 254). His answer involves the State’s capacity to oblige its citizens to risk their lives willingly, to engage in self-sacrifice and martyrdom. “A biopower that wished to wage war had to articulate the will to destroy the adversary with a risk that it might kill those whose lives it had, by definition, to protect, manage, and multiply” (Society 258). This martyrdom was enacted during WWII to protect innocent civilians from evil forces that wished to undermine all that was good in humanity. Positing the Nazi and Japanese enemy as inferior and the U. S. as superior was easy during WWII, and the citizenry willingly complied by engaging in practices that supported the happiness and well-being of the American way of life. The discipline and training of the entire population had to coincide with that of the soldier. Total mobilization and focus required the binary mindset of good versus evil and the belief that one must kill or die in order to live.
Biopower's focus on correct life and its need for martyrdom also demanded the elimination of subversive and degenerate influences, thoughts, or actions. During WWII, the citizenry exemplified positive civilian-military relations. The public glorified military culture and denied any display of weakness. A military mentality prevailed wherein all citizens were expected to engage in mission support. State rhetoric of loyalty and patriotism informed private and public narratives and behavioral expectations. Almost one-quarter of all Americans either fought in uniform or had a family member who did. Millions of others worked in the enormous defense industry. Entire kinship groups actively supported the war effort. Everyone endured rationing of basic supplies such as food (sugar, meat, canned goods, etc.), shoes, gasoline, and tires. This shared sacrifice and hardship on the heels of the Depression served to create a social culture that glorified military strength, service, and stoicism, especially since the enemy all were fighting together was so obviously horrendous. Military service and culture was glorified in popular movies. Long-term sorrow was not popular and even unpatriotic. Thus, the dominant culture had the mentality of a large military installation. Public support of WWII was also illustrated by the economic support Congress provided for it. Total defense spending grew to comprise 45 % of the Gross Domestic Product budget in 1945 (Burke 255). The G.I. Bill, with its education benefits for veterans, widows, and orphans, helped thousands of Americans go to college and join the middle class.
Clearly Congress believed that it was important to regulate society by providing for survivors. This huge social engineering plan both acknowledged and soothed the loss and sacrifice of veterans and their families. Schools became a great social crucible by which grateful individuals could be trained to be productive members of the economic machine. By encouraging the earning strength and hard work of grieving and damaged individuals, and by emotionally ostracizing those who exhibited too much grief, the orphans became docile bodies of self-discipline with the state as their new father and care-giver. According to Foucault,
The art of government …is concerned with…how to introduce economy, that is the correct manner of managing individuals, goods and wealth within the family…how to introduce this meticulous attention of the father towards his family, into the management of the state.” (“On Government” 8-10)
If government was now the father of the individual, then the children were expected to show respect to the father and not go against his wishes or attempt to undermine his authority. These disciplined bodies learned to follow excruciatingly specific rules of behavior, and were, in effect, both subservient and powerful at the same time. A disciplined person organized his or her behavior in service of a proscribed goal, generating a highly defined message. Judged by insidious and ever present surveillance – at home, in schools, and in public – individual roles were known and observed by the community (Discipline and Punish 193-94). An orphan’s proper role was to serve as the embodied representation of either the success or failure of the state. This embodied representation functioned as a biopolitical mechanism which could only be allowed to represent success of the military mission. Sorrow was unacceptable; gratefulness and pride were the approved reactions of the orphan of WWII.
The grieving, traumatized WWII orphan stood somewhere outside of this public orthodoxy. They quickly learned that their grief should be private, and their public actions in their communities, at school, and within their family units should only show support for the war effort, effectively ignoring the fact that the war had decimated their lives. These orphans report keeping silent so they would not feel judged by civilians who approved of the war and who did not wish to acknowledge its trauma. The public wished to maintain patriotic fervor without blood on their hands. As several orphans explain in their memoirs, it was difficult to express gratefulness for their father’s death. The WWII orphans felt guilty for feeling sad.
The Vietnam War orphans, raised inside the post-WWII military complex of the Cold War, also expressed guilt. Although Foucault was referring to a different place and time, he perfectly described the social transition that occurred between WWII and Vietnam. "A society completely permeated by warlike relations was gradually replaced by a State endowed with military institutions" (Society 267). Just fifteen years after the end of WWII, when the build-up to the Vietnam War began, many of the same patriotic Americans who had mobilized during WWII remembered their duty to support their military protectors. During the post-WWII years, many Americans believed that the military was their safeguard against global (communist) aggression, and militarism remained fashionable. According to military sociologist Orrin Schwab, when the Vietnam War began, “American society had acculturated an entire postwar generation to support large military operations in the defense of ideological goals” (11). Schwab claims that the “global war[s] in the [early] twentieth century had militarized American society and culture” (10). This supportive attitude toward global military activity was operative when the U.S. began deploying ground troops to Vietnam in the 1960’s. Early in the Vietnam War, many civilians supported the war, especially in light of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident. As in WWII, civilians supported an active military response to perceived aggressors who were characterized as evil. Although the nation did not share in sacrifice at the same level as during WWII (only one-fifth the number of U.S. soldiers died in Vietnam compared to WWII), my investigation indicates that patriotism was very much alive in many American communities during the Vietnam War.
In addition, although total federal spending on defense has diminished since 1945, patterns emerged in regional defense spending and military presence. Between WWII and the Vietnam War, the military built many large, full-service military bases – Cold War by-products of the nation's largest standing peacetime armed forces. These military bases provided a myriad of services for family members, such as housing, schools, child care, recreation, and medical help. Between 1955 and 1996, the number of enlisted military personnel grew in the South (Burke 260). These large military bases in the Southern states played a central role in the creation of huge military towns. Loyalty to the state was still expected in communities near military bases where many widows and orphans lived. Both Zacharias and Gilberg had lived among a populace whose main economic engine was the U.S. Defense Department.
This new and separate military complex was a totalitarian system which controlled the family unit and the psyches of the family members. The military child was raised inside a fortress-like environment where the constant threat of war, frequent moves, authoritarian parenting and schooling styles, and expected behavior were informed by a militaristic can-do attitude. In this climate of high-stakes Cold War surveillance, improper behavior could distract the soldier from his constant state of readiness. The child was expected to approach the constant turmoil with no signs of disturbance: no rebellion, no embarrassing behavior, neither in private nor in public. The child was trained to maintain a mental state of denial and acceptance that was rewarded by simply being included, and not excluded, from the proper group. Eventually the child learned that to be taken care of meant to follow a set of strict behavior rules.
The lives of military families are illustrated in etiquette manuals of that period. During the Cold War, a series of unofficial advice manuals for military wives were published. These manuals, such as The Army Wife written by Nancy Shea, were like portable deportment and etiquette lessons for military wives. Shea’s books were revised and updated every few years for nearly three decades. She gives helpful upbeat advice about how the military wives and children should behave. In her 1956 version of The Air Force Wife, Shea advises military wives about childrearing. Shea cheerfully proclaims that military children are “tough, resilient, and self-reliant” (214). But these independent souls were heavily constricted in their daily activities. Warnings about staying away from restricted areas and danger zones are listed, along with the admonition to avoid making noise or playing in any way that could annoy anyone, especially neighbors or superior officers. She warns parents that “little pitchers have big ears,” and that one off-hand bit of official information could end up being repeated to the wrong person (237). Shea warns:
…realize that [your] husband may be judged…largely on how the children behave. This is true whether you live on a base or in a civilian community. You would not like to have your husband passed over [for promotion]… the CO [commanding officer] might think that an officer or NCO [non-commissioned officer, i.e. lower in rank] with such children must be lacking in some essential quality of leadership and discipline, even though the behavior might be due to your laxness and misguided mother love in spoiling Junior. (238)
Children and wives were clearly under scrutiny.
Shea also devotes a section of her manual to proper funeral and mourning etiquette. Claiming that the Air Force is like “one big family,” Shea relates the proper way to send flowers and write condolence letters. She reports that after a plane crash “there is no hysterical outburst or display of emotion. Life on the base goes on as usual in a dignified manner, and it is considered very bad form to discuss the crash openly…with base personnel or with civilians” (Shea 336). However, a few paragraphs later, she advises “It is well for the bereaved not to fight their grief or repress it…it is better to bring emotions out in the open rather than to have trouble from them later on” (Shea 337). The proper person for the widow to talk to is the base chaplain. As for the mourning period, she advises the widow to keep busy, since “a morbid preoccupation with one’s own tragedy is…distressing to others” (338). It seems that an initial display of grief is acceptable; any continued display is morbid and selfish. A widow with children is lucky, since she “must keep so busy that she has little time to think of herself and her loneliness” (343). There is no mention at all about how the children might be feeling.
Once the sponsor was dead, however, the family unit no longer served the system. But the family members had internalized the importance of remaining loyal to the party line. The high stakes placed upon the proper behavior of the family were then carried on into the post-military life. These habits were further exacerbated by the pressures placed upon them from civilians who expressed attitudes ranging from demanding patriotism at all costs to wishing away reminders of war and refusing to support it. Both Zacharias and Gilberg reported that the civilians they encountered near Fort Benning, Georgia and Fort Bragg, North Carolina seemed ignorant of the war. I believe the civilians who lived near military bases ranged from those who were either former military themselves who knew how to pretend everything was fine to those who did not support the war at all, but who still worked in businesses which depended on the military economy. The state-sanctioned national amnesia and child-like innocence of its citizens who were being protected could not be breached by too much crying and sorrow. Thus, the military orphan remained silent and struggled to negotiate the impossible psychological combination of fear of ostracism, the throes of grief, and the desire to be accepted by their new civilian social group.
As the result of these external and internal pressures, orphans from both wars learned that silence was the primary approved behavior. They learned to self-monitor and hide any emotions that caused discomfort in others. The children also discovered that curiosity about their fathers was the immediate (if not the actual) cause of discomfort for their mothers. The children soon stopped being curious. They learned to withhold questions from those who did not want to be reminded.
Children who lost fathers to both wars had been operating within the construct of the family unit, however it was defined, until war destroyed that unit. Due to the absence of the former family system, the child experienced identity loss. The sociological strategies and coded behaviors of the family structure were abolished. The children were abandoned by the father and removed from his love and support. In his place, the mother (and the state) tried to step in and fill the void. The child had to learn the new rules, often coded and non-verbal, so they would be loved and cared for. In addition, the children felt shame at not having a father in communities where they were often the only fatherless one. They and their mothers were seen as damaged individuals. The widow had her own demons. She, too, had lost the family unit along with all her dreams for the future. She was forced to begin again, often with meager or no emotional or financial support. Her attitude was key.
Widows and orphans face ostracism should they continue to grieve – thus refusing to fulfill society's expectations that one should not grieve too visibly or too long. They are divided from the norm when they do not behave normally. This social division arises from the repulsion the public and other family members feel toward the reminder of loss and error – the war must have been a mistake if it caused too much grief. By indulging in protracted grief, they become objectified and labeled as abnormal. Grief becomes equated with mental illness, furthering the impression of being permanently damaged and worthless.
In Madness and Civilization Foucault explores the role of mental illness in society. In his essay "The Birth of the Asylum," illness serves not only as a threat to the living body, but also to the state. Mental illness is a sign of degeneracy and social failure. He relates an experiment in which mentally ill people were subjected not to chains and physical incarceration, but to silence. The doctor instructed everyone to ignore and not speak a word to a particular madman. This individual was perfectly free to move about, but the "denial of attention" and "the indifference and silence of all those around him confined him." By continuing to give voice to his delirium, the madman found himself communicating "a truth which was not acknowledged and which he would demonstrate in vain." Ultimately he felt humiliated and became "a prisoner of nothing but himself…caught in a relationship to himself…and in a nonrelation to others that was of the order of shame. The others are made innocent, they are no longer persecutors; the guilt is shifted inside" (“Birth” 151). The doctor related that the patient eventually decided to stop his rants and join the society of the other patients (“Birth” 152). By accepting his position as a shameful and sick person, responsible for his own illness, the madman can socialize in subservient silence and peace.
Similarly, the silence politely awarded to the grieving orphan does not comfort, but instead disciplines and controls. The public averts its gaze, neither speaks nor listens, and gives no opinion or information. Thus the orphan learns the sting of isolation early on. Feeling guilty for desiring to express emotions that are not welcome, the orphan then internalizes this nonrelationship and separates from his own grief. He understands that grief is disturbing and will not lead to warm open arms but to ostracism. So the division becomes willfully internal; the orphan categorizes his grief within his psyche as being forbidden or secret, personal and unexpressed. The orphan feels that only he suffers from this internal plague, and the isolation of the problematic emotion is complete. The result of this is silence, both internal and external.
This now silenced body has been objectified and also acts as an objectification of emotions. The act of public silence serves to posit the child as a thing, a dependent to ignore, not as an emotional human being. The orphan's internal act of secrecy serves to objectify the emotion of grief, which can now be seen as a dangerous thing to be controlled and eventually eliminated. Expressing grief only draws disapproval or pity upon one's self; neither is nourishment for a growing child's soul. The orphan learns and chooses to control his own emotions because his status as a symbol of loss and error upsets people and creates divisions that are not in the child's self-interest. This forceful nexus of biopower operates to support the public's perception of itself as innocent and deserving of the soldier's sacrifice, and serves to silence and marginalize the orphan who might disturb that perception and bring guilt and responsibility where it is not welcome. Excessive grief is treated as a psychological disorder; the orphan is expected to find inner strength, to silence his outbursts, and to join the others. This pressure to eliminate grief comes not only from society, but from the widow and extended family as well. They do not wish to be seen as unable to control, assuage, and heal a damaged child.
In addition, the nation’s health depends upon correct mental states and correct behavior: the happy, healthy citizen avoids negativity even when traumatized by the policies of the very state that purports to protect him. The school and home are the mechanisms of power and surveillance as well as the judges of aberrant behavior. The school especially is an apparatus of discipline that "clears up confusion" and "neutralizes the effects of counter-power" such as revolts or unproductiveness (Discipline and Punish 219). Controlled by either the State or the Church, schools served as apparatuses that subjugate and train children to be producers of labor and wealth. Maximum efficiency is sought by the strict control of knowledge, time, physical movement, and emotions. In the same way that illness must be cured, so is grief an illness that must be treated, heavily controlled, and proscribed as to place and frequency.
Further proof of the control and categorization of grief about war loss can be seen in the national remembrance days of Veterans Day and Memorial Day. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault analyzes the institutions that create "docile bodies" that can be used by the state. By controlling the orderly expressions of grief from the fallout of war in both time and space (parades, graveyard speeches, and rituals on those days), the state restricts potential for subversion. At the same time, these rituals force any subversions to be separate from nationalistic approved discourse about the war. All expressions of grief outside these ordained and sanctified parameters can be seen as subversive (Cindy Sheehan, for example) or ignored completely. Sympathy is only allowed during politically proscribed times, or grief expressions are used for political or economic gain - to sell newspapers, or to influence elections or policy decisions.
If an orphan seeks solace, pity will be given. But even pity functions to train the child in the correct way to feel and act. Feelings of being pitied, the constant state of being pitiable, causes shame for the orphan. Pity is the yoke the orphan bears, and is a kind of power-knowledge that holds the orphan in a state of subservience. Pity always has a tinge of resentment, because the feeling of pity is uncomfortable for many – it is a reminder of error. The orphan desires to participate in a power dynamic that "induces pleasure, forms knowledge, and produces discourse" of the kind that creates easy relationships (“Truth and Power” 61). Their goal is the lack of need for pity, which is felt as the condition of having been healed. When one is not crying, sad or angry, then one is healed. The path to healing is silence. Once silence is maintained, the orphan receives love and support as if they were normal. When orphans are silent, citizens can rest easy that they did not make a permanent mistake, and that sacrifice does indeed lead to growth.
The external battle between the orphan's need to grieve and the public's interest in silence creates an internal battle within the psyche of the child. It is this intersection between internal self-monitoring behavior and external power/control structures that the war orphan must negotiate. Like walking through a mine-field, the orphan (the one who was supposedly protected – whose life was an object worthy of blood sacrifice) risks an encounter with extensive emotional danger. No longer a member of the family or military society, and not a part of the institutionalized civilian/citizen society either, the orphan is an “other,” marginalized into silence. The irony of ignoring the uncomfortable realities of those children who also sacrifice for war, who should be honored for their own patriotism and sacrifice, and who understand that expressing sorrow will only bring rejection, is not lost upon the child who grows up knowing first hand the pain and suffering that war brings.
American society has come to believe that wars should be fought off site, and that the protected should remain safe within the cocoon of the nation-state. This happy state of affairs is akin to constantly feeling protected by unseen angels. The public feels comfortable knowing that danger has once again been diverted, thwarted, contained and beaten; peace once again prevails. The crying orphan blasts open that cocoon. As Foucault said, "Politics is the continuation of war by other means" and "peace itself is a coded war" (Society 48-51). The two armies in this particular war fight over truth. They both use perceived truths as weapons to win what they need (Society 52). They both engage in "lapses of memory, illusions and lies" that they use to justify their positions (Society 51). Forced silence is a "technical procedure that [is] used to perpetuate the victory" (Society 55). The orphan, whose grief could disturb the public's illusion of innocence, is subjugated through silence into a position of weakness. The truth used to silence them is the specter of exile and abandonment should they not comply. By remaining silent, the orphan develops a secret identity and thus, gains acceptance.
The raw emotions of the oral histories of the war orphans discussed in this thesis are effectively weapons of empowerment that could awaken our consciences. Speaking from the bottom of ignored historical voices, these individuals express a "fundamental…crude and naked irrationality…which proclaims the truth" (Society 55). They express the "confusion of violence, passions, hatreds, rages, resentments, and bitterness" of their experience (Society 54). Their personal struggles are political, and they battle for the right to be heard, fighting against their own internal fears and a public that keeps its hands over its ears, refusing to hear.

Chapter Three: WWII War Orphans

2008-04-05T17:18:00.001-07:00

War stories teach the living, soothe the wounded and honor the dead. In a war memoir, the storyteller willingly relives trauma and horror in his/her imagination. The telling of war stories is an act of bravery involving reliving emotional pain, suffering and loss. Who is willing to revive the painful memories of trauma and speak of death? When those bereaved by war relate their anguish and loss, who is their willing and engaged audience? Taming ingrained internal fears, risking ostracism for speaking about what makes most of us recoil – why would anyone do it?
The adult sons and daughters of fallen soldiers write their war stories not to establish their own heroism, but to create a healing catharsis that shapes trauma into a tangible expression of identity more beneficial than silence and shame. The impulse to grieve publicly, to mitigate forgetfulness by telling one's own story, and to craft a cohesive narrative out of loss and abandonment provides an alternative to the culture's limiting expectations of the damaged war orphan whose silence indicates patriotic stoicism. Some of the writers of these memoirs claim that they write to establish the legacy and honor of their fathers. Many claim that writing their stories was an act of healing.
Ann Mix and Susan Hadler both lost their fathers to WWII. Hadler is a psychotherapist and Mix a historian and the founder of the American WWII Orphans Network (AWON). They had both grown up in shame and silence about their fathers’ deaths. Both of their mothers had tried to erase any memories of the soldier, and both their mothers died without sharing much information. When they reached their forties, they both began seeking information about their fathers. They met and found they had a shared experience. They discovered that there were no statistics on war orphans and no studies about their lives. So they collected and published a collection of 25 oral narratives, Lost in Victory: Reflections of American War Orphans of World War II. AWON also maintains a website that serves as a repository and guide for those seeking information about their fathers.
In Lost in Victory, almost every individual relates experiences similar to mine. Most of their mothers did not speak about the death and the kids felt ashamed to ask about their fathers for fear of renewing sorrow. The children felt isolated and different at school. Often they were the only fatherless children in their communities. Their mothers had often thrown away material objects that belonged to or referenced their fathers, essentially destroying the child's heritage. Kids were made fun of by their peers, and they were left out of social events that involved fathers. Some children knew what their fathers had done in the war and some knew details of his service, but many did not. Their lives spent without information about their fathers, the youngest orphans were already in their fifties when their stories were published in 1998. All express a longing to hear stories and get information about their fathers. Several claim that they still get suddenly emotional at odd times when they are reminded of their loss. It is clear that the reactions of the widows and their extended families were important in how the orphan dealt with the loss.
The WWII orphans in this text ranged in age from not yet born to 12 years old when their fathers died. Many had never attended a funeral and had no grave to visit since WWII soldiers were often buried overseas. These orphans are now making pilgrimages to Europe to see where their fathers had died and had been buried. They express amazing catharsis, relief, and closure at visiting these places. The adults who answered the call to submit their experiences for this collection share their memories in retrospect; some had hidden their suffering so long that neither their spouses nor their own children had ever heard them speak of it.
Ann Mix’s father had been drafted after the exemption for fathers was eliminated in 1943. He left behind a wife and three children, ages 6, 4, and 4 months. He was killed after only three days in combat and 19 days before the Germans surrendered. Ann was 4 years old. The notification scene she describes is eerily similar to my own experience:
There is no crying in the world like that of someone who has just received such terrible news. It is an ocean. My brothers and I were surrounded and swept up in this ocean of grief with no adult able to support or care for us…Sydney took me by the hand and led me away to take care of me as he had been told to do. He was now the man of the house. We went off to wander in the spring day, not knowing what to think or what to do. He explained to me that our father had died for his country, that he was a hero. His was the only explanation I ever had. (92)
According to Ann, her mother began drinking heavily and eventually remarried a former Marine. Theirs was a violent relationship that lasted 10 years. “Our mother was unhappy, she was lonely, and mostly she ignored us" (92). The children went to live in their maternal grandparent's remodeled chicken coop. In addition, her mother “burned every photo of my father and all the letters he had written” (94). Ann's mother eventually died of cirrhosis of the liver, estranged from her daughter to whom she had not spoken in two years. Their falling out was over Ann making contact with a member of her father's family. The children had been forbidden from seeing their father's family even though his immediate family lived in the same town of Bakersfield, CA and had plenty of money. Ann was in her forties when she visited a paternal aunt in a nursing home. Although she was welcomed with open arms by her long-lost relative, Ann’s mother refused to speak to her again (95).
Susan Hadler's father, David Johnson, died in 1945, leaving behind Susan, aged 3 months and her brother David, 3 years old. She never knew her father. Susan remembers how she felt as a child during a moment of silence on Veteran's Day in her school:
I secretly want people to know that my father is one of the soldiers we were remembering….I want someone to touch me on the shoulder and say "I'm sorry your father was killed." Then I could say, "Oh, it's alright, but thanks." I can be sort of a hero, like my father. But I will never tell. What if people have nothing to say? How pathetic I would feel, needing comfort, attention, and getting none. Or they might tell me that he was a soldier and soldiers die or that I should be proud of my father who "gave" his life. Then I would feel ashamed of myself for wanting someone to recognize our loss. I keep my secret safe and private. (218)
I know from my own experience that people often have nothing to say. Desiring empathy when one should be feeling pride is one underlying cause of the silence and shame. For the Vietnam orphan, desiring empathy when all those around you hate the war, in effect, has the same result.
Another prevailing emotion is guilt. Susan felt ashamed at feeling sad while others were honoring her father’s patriotic sacrifice:
Society, teachers, ministers, talked about WWII in a way that left me feeling that my father's death was something good, something "sacrificial," something godlike. I was confused. Death was sad. It was lonely. It was scary…When I began to feel my loss, I would feel guilty and unable to trust my pain. I felt empty and lost because my father died. Yet his death meant others lived, so how could I be so selfish as to complain or speak of my own loss and hurt? I didn't speak of it. (222)
In all cases, the existing family unit was destroyed by the soldier’s death. One WWII orphan, Connie, revealed her thoughts upon visiting Arlington when she was in her fifties, “there’s one grave marker, but there’s a whole family under that marker, a whole family that’s interred with that one person who died. It doesn’t just affect the person who died” (52). The extended family feels the impact. The family of the soldier, his parents and siblings, often exhibit confusion about how to help the widow and her children.
Socioeconomic status seems to have been a factor in the reactions of the families. Many of them were already living in poverty themselves and could not help financially and did not know how to help emotionally. Jim remembers that his mother was only sixteen when she was widowed, and she had come from a farming community where self-reliance and isolation were the norm (156). Some family rifts occurred over who should receive the survivor’s benefits. In some cases, the couple had married so quickly that the soldier’s parents were still listed as beneficiaries. Joyce’s paternal family lied to the VA by claiming their son was not married so they would get his benefits. It took her mother “a good while” to fix the lie and receive benefits (32). An uncomfortable number of individuals report that the soldier’s parents kept the money and did nothing to help the widow. Many of the 25 orphans experienced financial troubles while they were growing up. During post-war prosperity, such economic trouble was a further cause of the isolation the children felt. Several mothers worked jobs to earn extra income to supplement their widow’s benefits. At a time when most mothers did not work outside the home, this caused additional social stigma for the children.
Frequently orphans report that their mothers and families refused to speak about the father. The silence amounted to a taboo. This confused the orphan and effectively negated any acknowledgement of their childhood suffering. Roberta thinks that “the adults were [thinking,] ‘You’re a little kid and you don’t understand what’s going on.’ So they don’t try to draw you out, they don’t try to explain anything to you. You’re just left alone” (165). Anne writes:
When you are a very small child, you learn there are things you should not ask. I believe there was so much pain that my mother never shared or expressed…it was terrible and it was a time when people didn’t sit down easily with someone who could help them through tough times…I think she just shut the door. (12)
Bill relates the shame he felt: “…the first thing my mother said when my father died was that we shouldn’t tell anybody. We shouldn’t be in a position that we were victims. Don’t make yourself into a victim” (24). Ellen writes that sometimes she wanted to talk to her mother about her father, but “it was embarrassing because it was awkward. Maybe it was just so emotional that it hurt her to discuss it” (77). Ellen speculates that her mother wanted to close that part of her life and look to the future. “A grownup wouldn’t need to remember it…I guess you wouldn’t realize what a child was feeling, that a child wanted to know the answers to all these questions” (80). Joyce, who never knew her father because she was 3 months old when he died, does not know the circumstances of his death. Her mother never remarried and never talked about it, claiming it was too painful. “I used to get aggravated at her because she wouldn’t talk about it. But she gets aggravated at me because she thinks I want to talk about it too much. Almost everybody thinks that. They say I’m hooked on WWII” (32). Some of the orphans in this text relate how the widow destroyed any tangible evidence of her husband. This same experience has been echoed in conversations I have had with members of SDIT. Perhaps the widows wished to start their lives over and to eliminate the sorrowful memories. While photos and personal mementos can be like ghosts in the house for the widow, they can provide solace for the bereaved child.
These widows did not seem to understand how their refusal to keep the father’s memory alive impacted their children. Some of the wives were so traumatized that they did not think about how their children were feeling at all, falling into a pattern of turbulent relationships with men and often alcoholism. The outlook for a happy future for a widow in the 1940’s was bleak. Connie writes: “Back then, another man just did not want a woman who had four kids he would have to take care of or think he had some kind of responsibility for, because she was a package deal” (54). Many women never dated or remarried, choosing instead to develop careers and focus on their children. The reasons for this might have stemmed less from eternal love and devotion to their dead husband and more from their cultural status as damaged goods.
For some widows, the children were constant reminders of the father and speaking about him only made their pain worse. The widow’s silence may have stemmed from an avoidance of painful memories that could overwhelm them during times when they needed to be strong. Gail thinks that she “was a burden because I was there and I was a reminder” (200). What these mothers did not realize is that they already had years of a life lived without the soldier, but their children had not. A child’s father makes up half of the child’s identity, and the loss of that identity, coupled with an inability to recover it, creates an impact that is different and perhaps more deeply felt than the loss of a husband. Many orphans express that they felt distanced from their mothers. The differences underlying their respective grief may explain this.
Anne’s father was drafted while her mother was pregnant with her. She never knew her father. Her comments reflect experiences echoed by many of the orphans:
There was so much of him that was unspoken…We talked a little bit but it was scary at times. I don’t know what is so scary. I’ve talked about many things that were much worse in my life. I don’t know what is so taboo. The questions I have are really about the other half of me and how that comes together. Who I am. I never talked about it at school, because everybody else had fathers. I was the only one. I was so different and I was ashamed of being different. There was a feeling of being insecure and different.” (13)
Several orphans related stories of feeling ostracized by their peers. Joyce claims “When I was a kid, I got make fun of, laughed at…because I didn’t have a daddy” (31). Eric remembers teachers calling roll on the first day of school and including parents’ names. He was forced to go up to the teacher’s desk in front of the class and whisper that his father was deceased. He remembers being the only child at a day camp fair who did not have an adult with him; one family with a young boy his own age befriended him and paid his way for events at the fair. Later, the young boy demanded repayment, telling Eric that “you owe me a lot of pennies.” This cruel comment caused Eric to feel humiliated, so he vowed to keep quiet in the future about his missing father. Clint says he was picked on by bullies who said, “Yeah, your father was a big war hero but you’re sure not!” (85). Ellen states that in her community “We were very isolated and very different and I knew it” (80). She claims that orphans knew that they needed to fit in so no one would notice their position. Twins Clatie and John write “Do you know how many people get really uptight when you say, ‘my father was killed in the war?’ You’re automatically shunned. It’s like a sin, they can’t deal with it” (104). And Anne asks, “Why isn’t it natural to talk about it? Nobody did, and that is why I can’t and that is why I don’t” (18).
However, the internal trauma that these orphans report illustrates that no matter how invisible they kept their pain on the outside, they suffered from intense internal psychological pain. Many report fantasies that their fathers were not really dead and would one day appear. This might be an effect of never seeing the body or attending a funeral. Being buried overseas was an emotional conflict for these individuals. Several of them express that when children don’t know where their father is, they feel as if he could be walking around anywhere. Vince thought that his father probably just had gotten a case of amnesia and would one day remember his family and return. Vince would watch war movies, crying and looking for his father in the background (4). Joyce claims that she believes her father’s spirit visits her. She also dreams about him. Dreams are a common occurrence. Jim claims that he would talk to his absent father while he was outside playing. He hid this from everyone (158).
Many report feeling disadvantaged and traumatized by their father’s death; often they say they didn’t feel whole. Clint wonders, “There was something there that needs to be looked into that was universal. How was it that we didn’t count?” (87). Anne reports feeling extremely self-consciousness, insecure, and worthless (93). Clatie and John both feel forgotten, “…he died for his country, but [no one wants] to be reminded that this happened. We [orphans] were left and nobody knows how many…In the United States we don’t accept responsibility…” (103).
Several expressed conflicted feelings of not living up to their father’s image. Men and women often expressed that they felt ashamed at not being as strong as their fathers. Anne had been told that her father was a hero, so she felt she needed to be a hero too. “My part was to be good and be brave” (93). Clatie and John state “Our father was a ghost figure…[and we knew] this is what he wants us to do…honor, duty and country.” (103). Bill relates that his mother held up his father as a paragon who couldn’t be matched. For Bill, the strong military tradition in his family was reflective of the nation as a whole… “At that time, [we] were a different country. There was a very strong, very enduring military tradition that went with it. We believed firmly in the government…in the military…and we continued to support it and did what we were told to do” (26). However, his father’s name was seldom mentioned at home, so he never really knew how exactly he fell short. “I never had any sense that he existed…there was no connection to his life…I don’t know anything at all about him, nothing, nothing at all” (25). Yet he was expected to be like him.
Many continued to struggle as they grew up. Susan relates an experience that I also share with several other orphans I have met – we did not know what name to call our fathers. Susan writes that the name "Daddy" is too familiar, since she did not really know him. Other orphans repeat similar conflicts. Ellen relates that she felt embarrassed and uncomfortable about what to call her father so she settled on “my father” (77). I remember realizing one day that I was twenty years old and was still calling my father “Daddy,” as if I were stuck in my childhood relationship to him. Others my age had long since referred to their fathers as Dad, so I consciously made a choice to change to Dad. Somehow it felt like a betrayal, like I was changing my relationship to him without his permission.
One striking element of these individuals’ experiences is a lasting aftermath into adulthood. Perhaps the fact that these people were willing to write about their experiences makes them an unrepresentative sample. A common reaction is that no one could understand unless they had gone through it, and most WWII orphans never met anyone else who had lost a father to war until they were in their fifties attending an AWON meeting. Vince writes that “There has not been a day that has gone by that I have not thought of my father and missed him…It never went away” (3). Vince tried hard to live a perfect life. He married, had four children, and attended university on a scholarship, but instead of finding success has battled depression, alcoholism, and divorce. Anne claims that her own marriage suffered from her feelings of being “outside of the marriage” and that her fear of abandonment (another common reaction) caused her to feel that she should go it alone. “I have worked all my life and been fairly successful…that comes from believing you can’t rely on anybody because they will go away” (14). Anne relates that her father’s death is something she can never forget. “I can be trucking along through my life and something can happen and I feel like I’m sideswiped by tears” (18). Bill dropped out of West Point, completed a PhD in history at a different university, and then drifted from job to job. He has weathered two divorces and alcoholism. He claims the trauma will extend beyond his generation, since his troubled relationships impact his own son (28). Connie was in her thirties when she saw a neighbor buying a birthday card for his 40-year-old daughter. She went home and cried, feeling anguish for the first time that her father had never sent her a birthday card (56).
Some had relatives who did speak about the deceased. Ellen’s grandparents and aunts and uncles “talked about him and he was real. So I always felt like he was there" (75). The trauma was made easier when the mother spoke of him often and kept photos, letters, and medals readily available to the kids. Sometimes the widow’s remarriage ended up happy. Sometimes the stepfather provided a good life and understood the child’s need to hear about the father. In most other situations, however, the remarriage caused resentment. It is obvious that those families who spoke often and lovingly about the deceased provided solace for the child. Often it was the grandparents or extended family who did this.
The mechanisms that damaged the lives of these individuals were similar to those that impacted the lives of those orphans from the Vietnam War. In both cases, war created painful emotional wounds and forever altered children’s lives. The two memoirs that follow were both written by women who remember the pain of losing a father to the Vietnam War.

Chapter Four: Karen Zacharias/After the Flag is Folded (formerly titled Hero Mama)

2008-04-05T17:16:00.000-07:00

Karen Spears-Zacharias was nine when her father, Army Staff Sergeant David Spears, died in Vietnam in July, 1966, leaving behind one wife and three children: Linda (6), Karen (9), and Frankie (11). Zacharias' father was a career soldier who had already fought in Korea before he met Shelby on a blind date; she was 16 and he was 22. He had dropped out of school in the 8th grade, and she left 10th grade, pregnant, to marry him. The family moved frequently to locations as widely diverse as Eastern Tennessee and Hawaii. Born on a military base in Germany, Zacharias lived most of her life near or on military bases. Zacharias reports that her mother enjoyed being a proud military wife. All her friends were also military wives. They supported each other during deployments. Shelby Spears had never sought a career for herself, and was terrified that she might have to support her children alone. She depended on her husband and enjoyed being known, not by her own name, but as “Sgt. Spears’ wife” (18). She had given birth to her youngest child Linda and raised her alone while Spears was deployed for 15 months to Korea. She loved to dress the kids up and show them off on base at social events.
While Spears was deployed to Vietnam, his third deployment to a war zone, the family moved back to the couple’s home town of Rogersville, Tennessee, to a trailer in Slaughters Trailer Court, to await his return. Shelby's disabled father moved in with the family. Before he left, S/Sgt. Spears told his children they needed to be strong for their mother. He told his son Frankie that he was now the man of the house and to take care of his mother and two sisters (7). He gave similar directions to Zacharias. When she went to bed and cried, her father came into her room. Sitting beside her on her bed, he assuaged her fear that he would not come home. He promised that he would come back. Then he told her “But I need for you to stop your crying, Okay? It upsets Mama” (8). Zacharias remembers forcing herself to stop crying so she wouldn’t upset anyone
The first night after the notice of his death, Zacharias felt afraid when she tried to go to sleep. She was frightened by her mother’s crying (20). She had heard that her father's head might have been decapitated, and she feared the same thing might happen to her. She writes “With him gone, we were headless. It was as if somebody came into our home with a machete and in one swift slice decapitated our entire family” (15). She reflects:
It’s hard to explain what losing a father does to a family. Daddy’s death is the road marker we kids use to measure our life’s journey. Before his death, ours was a home filled with intimacy and devotion. After his death, it was filled with chaos and destruction. (14)
The family held special status in Rogersville because Spears was the town’s first decorated war hero since WWII. In 1966, the war protests had not consumed the attention of most people in that small town. Yet during the shopping trip for her funeral dress, Zacharias remembers feeling “something like embarrassment or shame” when the clerk stared at her and asked if it was her father who had died in Vietnam. She felt like “we’d all done something wrong for which Daddy had paid the price, and now the whole town of Rogersville was talking about us” (36). The lady then began talking about another tragedy she must have read about in the same newspaper, a car wreck. “Some folks treat tragedies like jokes. They get on a roll and start telling all the one-liners they know…” (36). Partly because of the clerk’s reaction, Zacharias hated that dress and felt ugly in it. Her experience at the local VFW, where the family attended a ceremony to receive Spear's Purple Heart, taught her that “there were a lot more reasons to be sad than proud when a daddy dies a war hero” (70). By feeling sad while others were expressing pride, her reaction closely mirrors that of Susan Hadler's in 1945.
Zacharias relates that she walked into the funeral parlor for the viewing of the body and saw some kind of a trunk. It had not occurred to her mother to explain to the kids what they were about to see. Zacharias felt frightened and confused, asking her mother repeatedly why the corpse was blue. When they got into the car, her mother turned and yelled at her, “Because he’s dead! She left off the ‘stupid’, although I heard it in her tone anyway” (42). Zacharias felt as cold as the corpse they had just seen. She rocked back and forth in the back seat of the car and hummed a hymn “Just as I am without one plea, but then thy blood was shed for me.” She claims that she still weeps for her father the way she did that day at the funeral home and that even today her mother is troubled by her tears (43). Zacharias was so impacted by viewing her father’s dead body and by conflicting stories about the way he died (the military gave a different version from eye-witnesses) that she devotes three chapters of her memoir to his funeral. At the funeral she remembered what her father had told her about not upsetting her mother with crying, so she wept quietly and tried to “swallow as much bitter water as I could” (59).
But Zacharias lived in private fear and guilt about her father's death. Newspaper reports of her father’s death stated that he had been killed by one of his own misfired shells. Zacharias had been raised a Southern Baptist and wondered if God was punishing the family for wrongdoing. She wondered if her father had done something wrong to deserve to die. She also wondered if she had done something wrong, and soon convinced herself that she was somehow at fault for her father’s death (21). She wanted to tell her mother that her father had died because she had been a bad girl, but feared that her mother would abandon her. She kept silent about her fears (26). She believed that God was teaching her a lesson (27). She also questioned whether an “omnipresent power… [orchestrated] who died and who didn’t in wars… (65).She became devoted to the Christian message of salvation out of fear she might never see her dad in the afterlife (69). She says "Being the daughter of a dead man made me feel dirty inside, as if I had done something so wrong, so nasty, so unforgivable that God's only recourse was to take my daddy away" (121). She wanted to "spit in God's face and tell him what a pathetic mess he'd made of things." She didn't realize then that "most of the mess had been manmade" (121).
But she found little solace among her extended family. Family taboos about older children expressing neediness impacted her feelings of loneliness. She writes that her little sister Linda was welcome to stay close to their mother, but that she and her brother were considered too old. Her aunt had made several critical remarks about another relative who allowed her son to sit in her lap long past the proper age. But Zacharias “longed for such comfort,” and when it was not given she “just pretended my hurt wasn’t as big as Linda’s because after all, I was the older sister” (23). However, her grandmother opened her arms and let her cry as long as she liked. She didn’t have to hide her grief or pretend she wasn’t hurt, and “unlike other folks throughout my life, Granny never ever told me I needed to get over my father’s death” (24). Yet by Thanksgiving of that year, when they went to Granny’s house, “Daddy’s death had been relegated to the list of things our families didn’t talk about anymore” (81). Her disabled grandfather (who also lived with the family in the trailer park) never spoke to her about any family matters at all. Her aunt refused to allow any war movies in her home, claiming she couldn't tolerate anything about war since her brother's death (124). Zacharias never discussed her sorrows with her own brother, "…the attitude of the day just didn't allow for such discussion, not even behind closed doors" (292). Zacharias speculates that her family was afraid to speak of her father’s death because they feared giving her too much information that might “shatter my soul and all that’ll be left of the girl they love will be dangerously jagged edges. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I’m afraid of the same thing myself” (49).
Zacharias also expressed discomfort with pity shown to her by well-meaning visitors. She didn’t understand why they were saying they were sorry, as if they had done something wrong (25). She claims she learned to not speak of her position because she did not want to be the “object of other people’s sympathy” (60). This is the same feeling expressed by many WWII orphans. Zacharias disliked the look in her teacher’s eyes when she was greeted with sympathy for her father’s death. Like so many others before her, she “didn’t like being singled out as the only girl in fifth grade whose father was killed in war. I didn’t want to be fatherless at all, but if I had to be, I didn’t want the other kids to know about it” (68). She made no friends at that Rogersville school. During her school years she remembers the kids saying only hurtful things. One classmate said to her, "It really bothers me that you don't have a daddy. I don't like being around you because of that" (121). She learned at an early age that the "death of soldiers in Vietnam didn't evoke much concern from others…nobody really seemed to care that [we] were growing up without a father…so we bore our sorrows in silence, to keep from offending anyone…" (121).
The family finally moved back to Columbus, Georgia to live near Fort Benning to receive services for which they still were eligible. However, this time they lived on the poor side of town. Zacharias' teenage years were impacted by living in 4 trailer parks in 5 years and by her mother’s struggles to develop a nursing career. In this civilian community so near a large military installation, silence and a hidden status settled in and enveloped the family. Zacharias relates its effects:
Mama accepted her assignment as the war hero’s widow with unwavering reserve. It was her duty, her obligation, and one she fulfilled with headstrong determination and very little emotion. There was never a moment in the days, weeks, or months following Daddy’s death when Mama sat us kids down and tried to explain anything to us, and it never occurred to us to ask. From the get-go, we did not discuss Daddy – not with Mama, not among ourselves. It was almost as if our entire history as a family of five had been erased from the chalkboard of our memory. But of course it hadn’t. Daddy’s absence was emblazoned across our hearts…It felt as though each one of us had been marked and marred for life. (69)
At her 6th grade promotion ceremony, Zacharias thought her mother "felt out of place among all those other mothers who had their husbands still" (273). That day was the first time her mother broke silence about her husband to tell Zacharias a story of how he used to dress his daughter up and take her around to show her off to his buddies on base. Zacharias writes that although her mother had quit saying his name once he died, Zacharias had always longed to hear stories about him but, "we couldn't bear to ask about the things that would surely stir her to sadness." As her mother spoke:
Tears, salty and hot, streamed down my cheeks. I didn't dare look at her or say anything. I didn't know what had caused Mama to lift the veil of silence that had shrouded her since the day Daddy died, but I didn't want to give her any reason to stop talking now. I had waited umpteen thousand days to hear Mama speak Daddy's name again. She could've told me a zillion stories of "Dave this" and "Dave that" and I would never have tired of them. (274)
Zacharias writes that she began using writing as a “tool to bring order to chaos” as soon as her father was buried when she wrote a letter to her teacher explaining her absence (19). After her mother began dating other men, she also began having recurring dreams of her father appearing at the front door and claiming his death had been a mistake. In her dream she had to tell her father that her mother is with another man. She wakes up feeling angry at her father for abandoning them and at her mother for her infidelity (109).
One of her mother's boyfriends, a military man from Fort Benning, proposed marriage, but Shelby did not want to give up her widow's benefits. Finances were a constant struggle for the family, although Zacharias' mother refused to acknowledge that in her later years. Her mother had grown up in a house with no running water, sharing one tub of stove-heated bathwater with her siblings. Zacharias writes that her mother vowed to "never again let herself be vulnerable – emotionally, mentally, or most important, financially. She would not be dependent on a man…she would take other lovers, but never again take another husband" (127).
As Zacharias grew into her teen years, she became more aware of the politics swirling around the war. The famous trial of the My Lai massacre was never even discussed at her high school. Although most of her classmates and teachers at Columbus High were civilians, they were very patriotic and loyal to the military community at Fort Benning. Although Lt. Calley, charged with murdering 102 Vietnamese civilians, was a respected citizen in Columbus (his hometown), it was taboo to discuss the situation:
Teachers weren't given any edict about avoiding discussion of the trial; it was just part of the constrained society in which we all lived. It was considered uncouth to discuss unpleasant topics. The trial that made…headlines was largely ignored at dinner tables and in civics classes. (191)
Zacharias' brother Frank had already been in serious trouble with the law and was in military school during this time. He told her that the teachers in his military community felt that Calley was being used as a scapegoat. But his classmates debated the subject hotly, accusing Calley of being a "bloodthirsty maniac." Frank never revealed to his peers that his father had fought in Vietnam since "the attitude was that all American soldiers were just like Calley." He was made to feel ashamed of his father's war experience (191-92).
Zacharias' memoir illustrates that regardless of civilian attitudes about the Vietnam War itself, attitudes toward the orphan were just as conflicted as those reported by the WWII orphans. Zacharias found solace during her teen years by becoming active in her local church, where she found supportive friends and adults. Her life was tumultuous – an abortion, frequent moves from one trailer park to another, but she writes lovingly of the church friends who opened their arms to her.

Chapter Five: Gail Hosking Gilberg/Snake's Daughter

2008-04-05T17:15:00.000-07:00

Gail Hosking Gilberg was seventeen years old when her father, Master Sergeant Charles “Snake” Ernest Hosking Jr. died in Vietnam on March 21, 1967. He was forty-two years old and left behind four children and one ex-wife. His military career had spanned WWII and three tours in Vietnam. He had been a paratrooper and a member of Special Forces. His medals included 5 combat Stars, the Bronze Star, the Purple Heart, three Presidential Unit Citations, and the Congressional Medal of Honor. Yet, his daughter was ashamed to speak of his military service both while he was deployed and after he had died. Her mother had been only 16 and a farm girl when she married Hosking; she gave birth to Gail one year later. With the family destroyed by Hosking's death, Gail's mother eventually drank herself to death.
After keeping her grief locked up inside for over twenty years, Gilberg finally broke her silence, reliving a horrible sadness she had spent years trying to ignore. Gilberg claims that by writing her memoir Snake’s Daughter: The Roads In and Out of War she is "back in the field putting together my father's mutilated body, limb by limb, remembering what was once dismembered. I am removing the masks of secrecy, stoicism, and denial I learned as an army brat. I am offsetting this forced amnesia” (168). Gilberg found closure by speaking truth, by writing sorrow, fear and loss, and by remembering what it was like to grieve in silence and guilt, ashamed of her father and humiliated by her tears.
Gail grew up on military bases, and strongly feels that being brought up “inside the fortress” had a serious impact on her life and how she dealt with her father’s death. During her childhood, Gail had attended twelve schools and lived in base housing, all facts that if told to civilians would draw uncomprehending stares, or worse, pity. “My silence assured everyone I was just like them, that our lives had been the same…I wanted to describe life in the fortress, but I never knew where to begin” (162).
Gilberg remembers her life at Bad Tolz, a Cold War-era military base in Germany. She was in the fourth grade. The soldiers there were on constant alert for war with the Soviets. They would leave for work in the morning and perhaps not come home that night or for weeks at a time. Their families never knew when their soldier would be called to duty. The officers lived on one side of base and the enlisted lived on the other. Officers and enlisted soldiers did not mingle. Gilberg remembers that all the children went to the same school and played together there, but she was always aware of who was an officer’s kid and who wasn’t. When at home, they generally did not cross territory to play together. To associate with enlisted was a taboo (65). Gilberg learned early on that she was categorized and sequestered, the daughter of an enlisted man, who was considered of a lower class and rank. She learned that one’s social position was key for knowing how to behave, who to make friends with, and how to communicate one’s feelings with others.
She felt anonymous in the man’s world of the military base. All the base-sponsored swimming lessons and camping activities seemed as if they were just attempts to keep the kids out of the way. Defining the true status of a military dependent, the soldiers “could function without us, but we couldn’t without them” (158). Gilberg did not know what it meant to be an American. She learned about America from movies (as I did). There was no American television on base. Off base, surrounded by strangers who spoke another language, she felt “anonymous both to my country and to the foreign country in which I lived” (159). Her mother mitigated her own feelings of loneliness by being a good wife and finding fun on weekends, dancing and drinking with her husband to relieve the stress.
She remembers her father’s confidence as a mask he wore that also became part of her self-image: “This illusion of perfection and invincibility he carried around became second nature to me as well. As the years went by, I struggled with letting go of this notion. I was terrified of being left bare without the mask my father had shown me” (38). But underlying this mask was the reality: “There is an unspoken sense in the army that everything is ephemeral: friendships, peace, even my father’s life” (37). And after his death, loyalty to family evaporated.
Gilberg was raised with the idea that “you can find happiness and peace under the command of an omniscient power" (91). Her father was an authoritarian who held his children to a soldier’s standards of perfection. He conducted bedroom inspections and required the children to wear slippers in the house at all times. “We were destined to internalize his model” that perfection was possible, and she claims to have been frightened of him. Her mother warned the children to not tell their father of their mistakes. Gilberg grew up trying to meet his impossible expectations, expectations that she later struggled with as she tried to let go of her silence and free herself from the guilt of her bottled-up emotions (41).
Gilberg describes the base:
each building was the same, as was the lifestyle of those inside…Looking normal is the mask an army base uses to survive. The children playing, the women in coffee klatches, the mailman delivering mail hide what a stranger might see if he entered one of those doors. (43)
What would be found behind those doors is a constant state of readiness and a hypervigilant awareness (and paradoxically, a studied avoidance) of the world’s events and how they might impact the family. When will the soldier leave again? This was combined with an unspoken rule against asking the soldier questions about the reason for the war or the deployment (44). Entire families would discover they had only one month to pack up and move to another base. Gilberg remembers feeling rootless because of her family’s constant mobility. This nomadic existence led her to answer whenever people asked her where she was from that she was from “Everywhere and nowhere” (39). This still affects her to this day, as “that delicate balance of outsider and insider still tips one way and then the next after all these years” (39).
Gilberg remembers that the waiting wives weren’t allowed to have jobs or to express their opinions. They lived in a constant state of denial and stoicism. Often classified secrecy was involved, and a constant mask must be worn at all times, even when with their husbands or children (158-59). Children must be kept calm, happy and in check at all times. To express frustration or fear could upset the soldier and impact his mission readiness.
Gilberg wonders why her father had volunteered for a second tour to Vietnam. She believes that although her father’s friends told her that he had gone to war to fight for his family, his comrades, his country, and his mission, “in that order,” she believes that once he was in the jungle, “his comrades and mission filled his mind, while country and family faded into the distance of what used to be home” (92).
While her father was deployed on his last Vietnam tour, Gilberg moved back to North Carolina to live in a civilian community near Fort Bragg. She recounts how isolated and odd she felt when as a high school girl she “didn’t remember one person in that small midwestern town ever once speaking about the war” while her father was deployed (5). It is telling that Gilberg thinks of Fort Bragg as being a midwestern town, when it actually is located in a southern state. Perhaps she was referring not to the town's physical location, but to the mindset of those living there. She "kept a cheerful face with Girl Scouts, friends, school, pretending to the world and myself, particularly myself, how absolutely normal everything was. The subject of war or being a soldier's daughter never came up" (91). She was:
teaching strangers how big my smile could be. I taught them that war didn’t affect families and that daughters could be safe without fathers. I tried to teach my sisters that if we ignored the obvious empty chair at the table, by magic it wouldn’t affect us…I conveyed my teachings in silence. (96)
She claims that she had to “rewrite [her] personal script” (160). To do this, she “drew a line down the middle with my father’s army life on one side and our civilian life on the other, as if one touching the other would wash it all away” (Hosking 185). She felt “a stranger among those who had known each other all their lives…among those who had no real clue what the cold war meant” (160). She kept silent about her father’s deployment at her school. She could not explain to the civilians about the war because she wasn’t even sure about it herself, whether her father was on maneuvers or in a real war. The civilians around her were either uninterested or not involved in the war, or they had lost their loyalty to it. Her loyalty to her father conflicted with anti-war sentiment. As a teenager, she “numbed out” as news reports of the war escalated on TV. She was ashamed and did not want to be identified with the army or with Vietnam. She was ashamed to bring friends to her house in case they might see the hollowed-out mortar shells her father used as bookends (160-61). While her girlfriends were already wearing stockings and lipstick, she, having come from “the protected environment of guarded gates, still wore anklets and played with dolls” (160).
Gilberg remembers being unable to cry the day they delivered the news of her father’s death. Instead, she got dressed and went on a date. She carried that stoicism with her to college one year later. At college, she “tried to show that I could bear my father’s death. After all, hadn’t my life with the military taught me to ‘carry on’? Wasn’t I the real trooper my father taught me to be?” (7).
After he died, Gail became a “social chameleon,” keeping silent and anonymous when her friends reminisced about their lives in the sixties (162). She and her siblings had moved in with relatives because their mother could not take care of them. She remembers a social worker telling her that “People will be good to you in time of crisis…but they will help out for only so long” (117). Her aunt and uncle had children of their own, and Gilberg speculates many years later that their cousins had resented having to share their dinners, rooms, parental attention. Her cousins never spoke of the war or of her father's death.
Two years after her father's death, the White House invited Gilberg and her siblings to a ceremony posthumously awarding their father the Medal of Honor, the highest medal a soldier can receive. She remembers telling a professor why she needed to reschedule an exam, and the look on his face. She could not tell if it was “respect or disgust,” nor did she ask. She “added his look to the silence I carried” (161). She and her sisters never spoke about the war. When she returned from the ceremony, she told no one where she had been. At college, surrounded by protesters, she was “divided from myself, the protesters, and the soldiers, much the way my country was divided about the war itself. The only thing I knew was that the warriors were not faceless or inhuman” (162).
Gilberg relates that her grief would leak out unexpectedly throughout her life. One day she was driving and saw a Memorial Day exhibition in a park. The music she remembered hearing as a child and the familiar sight of a helicopter landing caused her to break out into tears (7). On another occasion, during the Gulf War, a group of military families were gathered in a park to welcome their soldiers home. As they were standing on a nearby porch watching, two of Gilberg’s friends discussed the situation. One said, “Isn’t it disgusting that they’re all there?” The other agreed and reported that her veteran brother-in-law had recently cried at a Veteran’s Day parade. “He’s still talking about that war! Can you believe it?” Gilberg reports that she stood speechless at their ignorance (44).
She recounts how she began to break her silence. She explains that it took her 26 years to “articulate a collected and collective shame and a silence [she] could no longer bear” (195). She had kept hidden her father’s photographs, feeling “as if my father's presence and his uniform would not be tolerated by anyone who entered my home” (163). When she went to the Wall for the first time, “It was the first time I allowed myself the public affirmation of having been part of that war, of having lost someone irreplaceable. I had not expected to feel anything at this wall…because I had grown accustomed to the walls around my own heart” (163). She refuses to involve herself with the SDIT organization and their Father’s Day events at the Wall in Washington DC. She fears that seeing the sheer numbers of them together will remind her that she is just a number, “just another grown child in a hotel convention room. Just another body returned in a bag” (145). She says she is occasionally overcome with feelings of rage:
My body tightens like an AK-47 rifle before it shoots, and I want to explode like the grenade that finally killed him. It’s as if I am like my father, continually mobilized for battle. Like soldiers driven to a berserk stage, I want to lash out at someone, I just want to kill. After my screams wind down and I’m resting the way I would after a long night’s reconnaissance, my eyes close and the years get buried again. (146)
She speaks of the “disease of secrets” that she grew up with, secrets of military men that a daughter should never be told (45). When her search for her father’s military record proved futile, the records archivist told her that the army had shredded tons of records; he called it the government’s “forced amnesia” (167). She writes that by shredding what her father had fought for, the country was preparing to move on to its next conflict before it looked closely at the war or asked too many questions of its leaders (167). She is angry at a country that seems too big to take on (169).
When she finally found soldiers who knew her father by advertising in two military newspapers, she relates how important their stories were for her to feel increasingly close to her father (147). Their stories about her father echo “what Homer knew so long ago, that telling stories is a healing art” (173). She writes that she keeps looking at endless books about Vietnam hoping to find her father in their pages. “Maybe I believe he will come to life for me through someone else’s words” (168). But the images seem to her propaganda – soldiers showing their strength, holding Bibles, eating cookies from home. She tries to write the truth and not what she knows the government would like her to write. Defiantly claiming that survivors cannot be silenced, she refuses to let the images have the same brainwashing effect “that the government had on us as a people” (168). She asks, “Just what does a daughter of a dead warrior do all these years later?” (169). Her answer is that by writing her memoir, she is finding her own lost identity, offsetting and retaliating against a nation who forgets. She is bringing her father back to life by finding his courage inside herself. She will not let her “children, like tiny ants on a trail of sugar, carry that silence into their futures” (174).
All of these war orphans risked great emotional pain to break the silence and write their stories. They both stand as living testimony that the devastation of war continues long after the coffin flags are folded. I know from personal experience that curiosity and longing for information about our fathers never really goes away. Many of us have had to wait until well into our adult years to receive information about our fathers. Gilberg had boxes of photographs to help her investigate and piece together a story that had almost been lost. Zacharias' mother had kept her father’s letters and telegrams for decades. She finally sent them to her daughter in December 2001, just four months after the destruction of the World Trade Centers, a horrible tragedy that they both knew would bring another war and create more orphans.
Zacharias is not the only war orphan who was affected in important ways by Sept. 11, 2001. Most all of those I have recently met say that that event woke up buried emotions and was the impetus for action, usually to seek information about their fathers. Zacharias writes that the words in letters can
“breathe life into a dead man and make a daughter remember her father’s voice. Words can resurrect time forgotten and love lost. Perhaps it’s only for a moment, but for a daughter who has spent a lifetime without her daddy, sometimes that is enough" (32).
So many orphans have expressed how important letters are to them. Also important are the stories told by soldiers who knew him. Zacharias longed to hear a first-hand account of how her father died. Her contact with his comrades was not always smooth, and was sometimes uncomfortable, but it was worth it. She writes that it was hard to hear about the battle where her dad died, but that she feels her fathers strength enabled her to "handle the toughest moments in the battle for truth" (317). And like so many others are saying today, she hopes that her work illustrates to policy makers the realities and the true costs of war.
As an adult, Zacharias visited Vietnam with SDIT to see where her father had died. There, she saw a three-story high statue of a woman in the center of Da Nang. Her Vietnamese guide, whose own soldier-father had died in the "American War," told her that the statue was a depiction of Hero Mother who represents all women who grieve the loss of their sons, husbands and brothers in the American War. He told Zacharias that the citizens honor her sacrifice by building the women houses and giving them gifts and money.
Recently, Zacharias's mother finally spoke about her experiences as a war widow. The new war in Iraq was her inspiration to speak. She claims she and others like her were denied permission to talk about how difficult their lives were.
Once he was buried, the Army was gone. Their whole attitude was 'We've done our duty'…I'd been an Army wife since I was sixteen. I didn't know how to be a civilian. Where do you go? Where do you live?... Once your sponsor's dead, you're not part of the Army anymore…you're totally cut off. I wanted to tell the Army: But you killed my sponsor! I think about it all the time. Especially now, what’s going to happen to all those guys who are coming back…from Iraq now and those who aren't? And their families?" (358)
A nation that denies the power of death, is focused on the locus and control of proper life, pities yet blames the unfortunate for their plight, and seeks to eliminate the weak is a nation of individuals who do not know what to do when faced with a war orphan. Can we hope that the new orphans of the Iraq War, whose numbers increase every week, will fare better?

Chapter Six: The Current War

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Several recent articles in newspapers and magazines suggest that the children of today’s casualties will suffer much the same way as those who have gone before them. However, recent organizations have been formed that are trying to help mitigate the pain of military family bereavement. No one can eliminate the sorrow and lasting impact of such tragedy. Although most citizens are still blissfully unaware of the traumas affecting those around them, more services are available to today’s war orphans.
The U.S. Army recently commissioned a 2007 update of their 1993 study “What We Know About Army Families.” Although the bulk of the report concerns itself with family reactions to military life, including deployment, bereaved military children are briefly mentioned. The release of this study prompted New York Times reporter Lisa Foderaro to interview bereaved military families and write her article “Old Enough Now to Ask How Dad Died at War.” Young Mya Williams (age 8) is just now asking her mother questions about her father’s death in Iraq three years ago. The child had been told that “Daddy’s in heaven with the Care Bears,” but after attending a grief camp run by the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors (TAPS), she learned about Improvised Explosive Devices (I.E.D.) and roadside bombs. She began asking her mother for information, and upon hearing the true story of his death, “the rest of the day she was withdrawn and quiet and said she didn’t want to hear anything else.” Her mother, Brandy Williams, said, “When she asks me and I start talking about it, my voice gets cracky and tears roll down my face…I see Mya hurting more now because she’s understanding more. In school, when we have family events, that’s the toughest for her. She sees the mommy and the daddy, and it’s just me.” Without knowing how many single mothers attend these events in the Williams’ community, we cannot know whether Mya feels different because she has no father or whether some other cultural and psychological forces influence her reactions.
Today’s orphans express similar emotions to those already explored in this thesis. At a recent Good Grief Camp sponsored by TAPS, 17-year-old Letitia Imel expressed her gratitude at the opportunity to meet other kids like herself who had lost a loved one to the Iraq War. She said, "At school, everyone looks at you differently, and they don't really understand" (taps.org). Paul Syverson, 10, tried hard not to cry when remembering the day the notification soldier came to his door. Seeing the soldier, his mother had started crying and sent the boy next door to play, intending to protect him from the news. Scott Rentschler's grandmother said that moving off base was difficult for Scott. She claimed that, "society and schools make few allowances for children in their second year of grief…'People think he should be all fixed up'" (Alvarez). These stories sound very familiar. Can the orphans of the Iraq War look forward to more of the same military apathy and civilian misunderstandings?
I believe that although these children are already expressing similar experiences, there is one noticeable difference: they are being interviewed by reporters, they are attending a Good Grief Camp organized by a non-profit civilian group, and their stories have already been published in several newspapers, magazines and online sources. There is a heightened concern for their plight.
TAPS is a non-profit civilian support network of current and retired military servicemen and women, bereavement professionals and peer volunteers who work to help surviving families of those who died in service to the U.S. The organization conducts the National Military Survivor Seminar and Good Grief Camp for Young Survivors. They also monitor a crisis line, an online-chat group, and other grief and trauma assistance. This organization is growing and was recently invited to conduct the Seminar and Camp on Camp Pendleton Marine Base. Similar events are planned for 2007 at Fort Carson, Fort Hood, and Fort Lewis. This coordination between civilian and military organizations dedicated to helping the widow, orphans (and more recently the widowers) of current wars is a sincere attempt to improve civil-military coordination regarding the impact of war casualties. The military is beginning to see the need to take care of its own beyond the sponsor’s death.
The Department of Defense has conducted several studies and hearings about the living conditions and mental health of military families. The large number of Reserve soldiers fighting today in Iraq and Afghanistan, coupled with an increase in the number of soldiers with dependents, have inspired the military to enact several policies to help maintain the all-volunteer force at needed levels. An estimated 1.5 million school-age children had parents on active duty in 2004 (Lamberg 1541). The DOD’s June 2007 report “An Achievable Vision” states that mental health assistance for military members impacted by war is currently inadequate. The goal is to provide better education and coordination of services for servicemen, their family members, and their survivors (ES 3-4). In addition, Congress held a series of hearings in 2003-04 on current support for military families with children (Subcommittee on Children and Families). And in 2003, the Dept. of Veterans Affairs finally added bereavement counseling to their benefits package (VetCenter).
Some new policy changes are now in effect. After 2005, the military changed the rule allowing the widow and children to live on base for 6 months after death; they now have one year before they have to move (Military Widow, 144). However, according to the Department of Defense Survivor's Benefits booklet, the surviving spouse has only 72 hours to produce documents such as birth certificates, marriage certificates, divorce settlements in the case of previous children of the service member, a morass of paperwork and applications for benefits, taxes, funeral arrangements, etc. More realistic policies about the need to produce all these documents so quickly could help the widow.
Several private organizations are developing assistance programs. The largest non-profit organization is TAPS. In addition, the non-profit Military Child Education Coalition has created a church-based initiative called "Living in the New Normal" for survivors near Ft. Hood. Their support program promotes "resilience and non-victimization" and encourages civilian support and education for the surviving children (militarychild.org). In addition, private charity organizations are organizing programs. Snowball Express is a charity that brings together such civic groups as the American Legion, the Rotary, and Vietnam Veterans of America to give children a weekend of entertainment to ease the sting of grief. In 2006, they brought nearly 1,000 widows and orphans to Orange County, California for a day at Disneyland and other events. A similar event is being planned for December 2007 (snowballexpress.org). In addition, Oliver North's Freedom Alliance provides college scholarships to children of military heroes (freedom alliance.org).
However, these small improvements are in the very early stages of development and their effectiveness remains to be seen. In the absence of longitudinal or cross-sectional studies by social scientists or mental health professionals, much misunderstanding about military children’s specific grief still exists. Published in 2006, the book Military Widow: A Survival Guide was the first text devoted to the needs and concerns of surviving military families. Co-written by a military widow certified in trauma counseling and a military trauma nurse specializing in traumatic grief and crisis response, this text takes a realistic approach to military death. Yet a close look at this text gives evidence for the confusion about how to handle grieving children. In the chapter titled "Dealing With Kids", the authors discuss behaviors in children considered cause for concern, such as acting out or showing aggressive behaviors like temper tantrums or hitting, regression to bed-wetting or thumb sucking, withdrawal from family and friends, problems at school, alcohol or drugs, and fantasies about dying or reuniting with Dad (Military Widow 113). However, after listing the above behaviors as warning signs, later in the same chapter the widow is told that normal reactions include “children may want to spend more time alone and will isolate themselves” and may be more physical acting out their grief, which could “escalate to out-of-control behaviors" (111). They may not understand that death is permanent, or may secretly worry that Mommy might die too. They may “try to protect you from their feelings. They may not mention their father or cry in front of you if they know it upsets you” (112). The authors suggest that these normal reactions could be signs of mental problems. There is no mention, however, of how much time should pass before these “normal” behaviors should become concerns requiring the advice of a counselor. The gentle tone of the advice, combined with the monumental and permanent trauma being described, belies the fact that few really know what exactly to do to help the children. What is needed is scientific research in addition to loving care and concern.
In response to a 2001 congressional initiative, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is currently sponsoring some mental health studies. In 2006 the New York University Child Study Center published a guide for parents and professionals who care for kids affected by trauma, disaster and death. Although the focus for this study was children who were affected by unusual and sudden trauma such as acts of terrorism (such as the destruction of the Twin Towers in NYC) or natural disasters, the study’s results could apply to children affected by war. According to Dr. Robin Goodman, children exposed to trauma are susceptible to post-traumatic stress symptoms like sadness, anger, sleeplessness, distractibility, etc. (Lamberg 1541). Some of these children may develop childhood traumatic grief, which could last indefinitely as they mature. In addition, the National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN) is currently studying the effects of childhood traumatic grief, which medical professionals define as “a condition that children may develop after a loved one dies under circumstances that they perceive as traumatic” (nctsnet.org). According to Dr. Alicia Lieberman, “Children who lose loved ones under unexpected circumstances can develop post-traumatic stress symptoms.” Depression is another consequence, and “secondary adversities” such as changes in place of residence or school and disruptions to family financial stability can impact the dynamics of the caregiving situation of the child. A military orphan experiences all of the above adversities.
The message of the study is that expressing grief is essential to healing. Children must learn to handle memory triggers such as reminders of the loss or of the lifestyle changes. If children cannot create a trauma narrative (words, drawings, or other methods of expression) or directly confront their traumatic memories, they may deal with triggers by avoiding the subject or becoming emotionally numb.
The study also explores the importance of family members’ reactions and the difficulties of a situation where the caregivers are themselves distraught by grief. According to the Army’s aforementioned 2007 Update, several studies on childhood separation and bereavement indicate that “the mother’s reaction was the most important factor in how well children adjusted to the death or indefinite absence of their Soldier parent” (89). Goodman claims that adults often assume that children will get over traumatic situations or that it wasn’t that bad for the child. These findings could explain the debilitating effects of the widow’s impulse to destroy any reminders of the orphan’s father and to remain silent about him to her children. When the widow, extended family and community avoid any reminders of the death, an unhealthy silence descends upon the children. Clearly, the widow needs sustained and appropriate assistance with handling her grief and the grief of her child.
Children sometimes do not manifest their grief in the same way as adults. The goal is for the child to learn to assimilate the trauma into their lives, so they can move on and not be stuck in the trauma (nctsnet.org). Arguably, losing a parent to a distant war is not the same traumatic event as directly witnessing a death (as the children in the NCTSN study have). And, because none of these studies focused specifically on war orphans, my impressions are only assumptions. However, the anecdotal evidence expressed in the memoirs and oral narratives discussed in this thesis indicates that war orphans experience similar emotional and behavioral responses to those experienced by traumatized children. These stories reveal the true costs of war and teach us important lessons that might help a new generation of war orphans whose fathers and mothers are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan today.
In a sense, this paper represents my own trauma narrative. As Dr. Darcie Sims told me at a recent TAPS Good Grief Camp held on Camp Pendelton Marine Base, by sharing my story I am someone else’s path to healing. My involvement with TAPS and my strong interest in helping the kids who are living in grief now is testimony to the healing power of confronting the loss directly and using that knowledge to help others. No one should have to feel ashamed of their parents’ willingness to risk their lives to defend their national interests. All politics aside, we should help the children of those brave souls.
On August 3, Commanding General Lehnert of Camp Pendleton Marine Base welcomed TAPS participants and volunteers to the first on-base Good Grief Camp. He spoke words of solace and pride, expressing the adage that “cultures and nations should be remembered by how they honor their dead and care for the elderly.” This exceptional gentleman and soldier welcomed the widows and children who had lost their loved ones in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of them under his command. Peer-group bereavement meetings at the officer’s club were followed by dinner on the lawn of General Lehnert’s home. If this is any indication of an improved military and civilian attitude toward those bereaved by today’s war, then there is hope for our nation to be remembered as one that matured into a true understanding of responsibility and respect for those who have sacrificed on our behalf. One could imagine Foucault pointing out that a kind-hearted paternalistic state still limits true freedom, but I'd prefer to serve a nation that acknowledges and respects my sacrifice.

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2008-04-05T17:08:00.000-07:00

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