NINETEEN

RIPPLES

1946-PRESENT

Even as the memories of World War II began to fade into the past, the world never stopped remembering and honoring my grandfather for his singular courage, self-sacrifice, and indomitable spirit in battle.

On November 21, 1948, combat correspondent Robert Sherrod, who accompanied the marines at Tarawa, sent Alex Bonnyman a telegram to say that “A few of us gathered tonight and drank a toast to a thousand brave men who died five years ago. We especially remembered Alexander Bonnyman, Jr.”1

A gold star bearing my grandfather’s name adorns the window of his former dorm in Blair Hall at Princeton University; I’ve had active-duty marines from Camp Lejeune, NC, approach me to say they enjoy drinking a beer or two at the Bonnyman Bowling Center; you can drive across the First Lt. Alexander “Sandy” Bonnyman Bridge on the Pellissippi Parkway west of Knoxville; and the Maersk Line’s 1st Lt. Alex Bonnyman plied the high seas as a marine pre-positioning ship until it was decommissioned in 2009. Marines born thirty, forty, even fifty years after Sandy’s death know his story; people who recognize the Bonnyman name sometimes approach his descendants, right down to his twenty-something grand-niece, to ask for an autograph or handshake.

But before he left for the marines in July 1942, my grandfather was a black sheep in his prominent Southern family. Stubborn and rebellious, he had a habit of drinking too much and picking fights, and proved less than reliable when it came to other people’s money. And as romantically appealing as his story has been to those crafting the legend, Sandy’s appetite for adventure and danger led him to make choices that were not always in the best interests of his young family. Gordon Bonnyman dearly loved, admired, and missed his older brother, but he always said leading men into battle suited him better than leading the life of a husband, father, and businessman.2

A legend is a story that grows over time with embellishments, exaggerations, and, just as often, strategic editing. In my grandfather’s case, irresistibly dramatic details were being offered within weeks of his death through second- or third-hand accounts—the flamethrower, the hand-to-hand combat, that final, stoic smile.

A more-subtle shift also began to take place, as his rougher edges were smoothed away and his life was gradually reduced—and that is the right word for it—to only those truths that seemed to suit a hero. Embalmed in legend, my grandfather was enclosed in a suit of silver armor, placed upon a white charger, and placed behind glass, forever frozen within a spotless diorama.

“He became the great mythic hero of the family,” said his nephew Robert McKeon, a Catholic deacon. “But when we idealize people, we overlook the reality that all human beings are very complex.”³

Bonnyman family members, spanning generations, have described Sandy as everything from “spoiled” and “impetuous” to “fearless” and a “rock star.” He was all that, and more. But where the historians, authors of legend, and propagandists have always had the luxury of ignorance, only those who most loved Sandy Bonnyman—his children, wife, parents, and siblings—had to live with the shattering consequences of the valor for which he is so justly admired.

“The nation glorifies World War II; it was called the Great Crusade, and we now idolize the men of the Greatest Generation and immortalize the dwindling legions of these heroes constantly in film and in literature,” writes historian David P. Colley. “In so doing we have lost touch with the immense pain and suffering caused by the war and the ripples of sorrow that still flow across America from that devastating conflict. We know little of the men who gave their lives and nothing about the struggles of their families.”4

Encouraged by politicians and generals, many Americans—certainly a great majority of those with no close connection to the mere half-percent of the population that serves in the all-volunteer armed forces—today view all things military with sentimentality and uncritical admiration, unburdened by the harsh realities of war borne not just by those who fight, but also their families.

I met US Army Capt. Don Gomez Jr. not long after I returned from my first trip to Tarawa. He served two tours of duty in Iraq with the 82nd Airborne Division before stepping out to earn a degree from the London School of Economics and get married. He re-upped in 2011 and redeployed to the Middle East in 2014.

“Sometimes I think my decision to go back into the military is very selfish. I’m doing it, frankly, because I like the lifestyle. I think it’s exciting and fun,” he said. “But I’m married now. What happens if you get hurt? How heroic are you then? What if I’m permanently injured and my wife has to take care of me?”⁵

Col. Bill Bower, one of the pilots who bombed Tokyo with Jimmy Doolittle’s Raiders in April 1942, was a surrogate grandfather to the kids in the neighborhood where I grew up in Boulder, Colorado. He helped us build and launch Estes model rockets, fixed our bicycles, and always had a Jolly Rancher candy if you stopped by. We all knew “the colonel” had done something in the war, but Bill wasn’t one to push his stories, and we didn’t ask.

I saw him last in August 2010, right after my return from Tarawa. I had hoped to hear his thoughts about heroes and heroism, but by then he was suffering from advanced dementia and offered only a wrinkled brow whenever I spoke. Later, however, as he dozed in a wheelchair in the shade of a ponderosa pine, Bill suddenly opened his eyes and spoke to me as lucidly as when I’d been six years old.

“I didn’t do anything heroic,” he whispered, blue eyes bright and watery. “The real heroes are the guys who raise a family. The men who stick by their families.”

Those were Bill Bower’s last words to me. He died a few months later at ninety-three. When I told his son Jim about his last words at the funeral, he told me something I never knew: Bill’s father had abandoned his family.

Sandy Bonnyman did not abandon his family; he is not responsible for the terrible tragedies that befell his daughters. But in coming to know my grandfather, I’ve come to believe that we must never allow tales of “perfect” heroes, legends, or bright, shining lies distract us from the brutal realities and consequences of war. As Hemingway wrote, “Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”6

“Your grandfather deserves to be honored for his extraordinary deeds, as do a lot of other people,” US Army Special Forces and Vietnam combat veteran William T. Hathaway told me in 2011. “But that should always be coupled with the thought, ‘What about his family? What about the little girls who had to grow up without a daddy?’ You grew up admiring that mythical hero on the wall and there is nothing wrong with that. But there are costs. There is a downside when the hero story is told in isolation, used to whip up emotions. We should remember that.”⁷

Whether, like Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, Jimmie Russell took up with my grandmother to gain access to her young daughters, will never be known. But I will not judge family members who knew he was abusing Sandy’s little girls, yet did nothing. My great-grandmother Blanche Bell felt such terrible shame about the situation that it prevented her “from looking even into the face of God and praying.”8

But it was a different time.

As they grew older, my mother, Fran Bonnyman, and her younger sister Alix, showed some of their father’s pugnacity, going so far as to confront their abuser at the dinner table one time. Russell did not deny the accusations, but my grandmother, alcoholic and suffering from neglect and emotional abuse in her marriage, refused to believe them.⁹ She was, sadly, not equipped to protect her children.

Fran, the oldest of Sandy’s three blondes, had a stubborn streak a mile wide that her stepfather did not appreciate. Surely that’s one reason she was packed off to St. Mary’s Hall, a girls’ school in San Antonio, at age fourteen. She felt bad leaving her sisters, but, possessed of a childlike acceptance of things she could not change, she made up her mind to “just have fun in life.”

Courtesy of her father’s careful planning, Fran lived well, traveling to Europe and being toasted on social pages from Knoxville to San Antonio. Kicked out of Connecticut College for Women for “partying too much”—she was, after all, her father’s daughter—she eventually graduated from the University of New Mexico, where she met and married my father, Clayton Anthony Evans. He later graduated from the University of Colorado School of Medicine and they raised my sister, brother, and me in Boulder.

Sandy’s youngest daughter, Alix, attended Santa Fe High School before also being sent to St. Mary’s Hall, and graduated from the University of Arizona. She, too, traveled, but also spent much of her young adulthood caring for my grandmother and my aunt Tina, whose addictions she attributed to neglect and abuse by Russell.

“Jimmie stifled my mother. He had such a terrible reign over her. He wouldn’t let her do the things she always loved to do, ride or go skiing. He made her perform like a circus pony in front of their friends,” Alix said. “She became alcoholic after she married him.”10

My aunt met her late husband, Carroll Prejean, a true-blue Cajun and marine veteran from Lafayette, Louisiana, in the jungles of Ecuador, where she was teaching and he was working as an oil roughneck. They bought a ranch in Hackett, Arkansas, where they raised Peruvian Paso Fino horses, Beefmaster cattle, and their daughter Alexandra, and in the 1990s, moved to the remote paradise of Hana, Maui. Tough, irrepressibly social, and insistently affectionate—she takes special delight in doling out hugs to presidents, generals, and marines—Alix is, like her older sister, a survivor.

Sandy’s middle daughter Josephine, my Aunt Tina, was not. Mocked by her mother for her neediness as a child, she was to become “Jimmie’s favorite,”¹¹ and—not coincidentally—seemed destined for alcoholism from the moment she took her first drink as a teenager. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, and was a ski bum in Taos before she married and had a daughter. But drinking led her into dangerous situations and away from motherhood. She was also a lot of fun; as a boy, I loved watching Outer Limits with her and visiting her mountain A-frame cabin.

Eventually, she was placed in a mental institution in Galveston, Texas. There, in a gambit for freedom, she married a male nurse, an abusive former Nazi paratrooper. Sandy’s shy “curly blonde” was just forty when she died. Her husband, who once shouted, “I’ll kill you just like I killed those Jews!”¹² while choking her, had my aunt cremated immediately. Her daughter is not the only family member who considers her death suspicious.

My grandmother Jo also drank too much, and suffered years of cruelty and neglect as the wife of Jimmie Russell. They finally divorced in 1964, and Russell married a former high school classmate of Alix, then 24. Russell managed to win the lion’s share of the assets. While he continued to live in their spacious home in Santa Fe with his new wife, Jo lived the rest of her life in a small apartment across town.

Jo got sober late in life, but for my sister and me, it was too little, too late; we told my mother we didn’t want to see “Mimi” again after she refused to allow our three-year-old brother to enter her home. She died during abdominal surgery in 1976 and is buried in Santa Fe. More than any other person, except perhaps my Uncle Gordon, I wish I’d had the opportunity to talk to her about my grandfather. Whatever their difficulties, and despite her weaknesses, I believe she knew him better than anyone and loved him fiercely. Given her propensities and deep insecurity, I suspect she, too, may have experienced abuse as a child.

James Hobart “Jimmie” Russell lived a charmed life. His 1999 obituary omitted his age, date, and city of birth (ninety-seven; September 9, 1902; Fairland, Oklahoma) but described his many accomplishments, including his role in the formation of the Santa Fe Opera, the fact that he had “almost” been drafted by the Republican Party to run for governor, and his role in creating the New Mexico Film Commission. “He was,” according to the tribute, “a good friend and advisor to many people for the seven decades that he resided in Northern New Mexico and a generous contributor to variety of community organizations and charities that in turn have recognized and applauded his warmth and generosity.”13

The obituary did not mention his two-decade marriage to my grandmother, his friendship with local hero Sandy Bonnyman, whom he had “loved . . . as a younger brother,” the three blonde girls who grew up under his roof, or his involvement with the Guadalupe Mining Company.

Perhaps that tragic history is the real reason for the curious silence about my grandfather I encountered while growing up. My sister and I spent time with our Granny Great at Bonniefield each summer until her death in 1968, swimming in the same pool where Sandy had made his daring dives, eating homemade blackberry ice cream and grits under the watchful eye of a British nanny. We loved roaming the estate’s remaining ten acres, catching lightning bugs, and exploring the woods, just as our grandfather had. Granny continued to tell stories about her beloved son, but never to my sister or me; perhaps we were just too young to understand.

We also spent time around our great-uncle Gordon who was stern, but kindly; we were fascinated that he’d trained his hunting dogs to ride in the trunk of his car. The simple fact is, Gordon Bonnyman succeeded in every way that his famous older brother had failed, graduating from Princeton, enduring his father’s difficult tutelage before taking Blue Diamond to new heights (annual revenues soared to $12.5 million dollars during his tenure, well beyond $100 million in inflation-adjusted terms), and marrying a beautiful girl from a prominent, respectable Knoxville family. Gordon’s military career was no less outstanding: He earned a Silver Star and Bronze Star while serving with Merrill’s Marauders in India and Burma and retired from the US Army as a major.

Given that, I was surprised and saddened to find many letters in which his father compared him unfavorably to Sandy and bluntly described him as lacking in imagination and unexceptional. My great-grandfather even (wrongly) judged that his younger son’s “work was not spectacular” during his time overseas.14

Yet family members never heard Gordon utter a bitter or resentful word about standing in his brother’s shadow. In his final years, Sandy was much on his mind.

When interviewers from the University of Tennessee Veterans’ Oral History Project asked him to talk about Sandy, he spoke just a few sentences, ending with “and then he got killed at Tarawa.” The interviewers then turned off the recorder to give him time to compose himself. There was no more talk of Sandy after they restarted the interview.15

And in the days leading up to his own death in 2004, George Gordon Bonnyman experienced visions of only one person: the beloved older brother he’d tried so hard to bring home.¹⁶