Arrived at about 1730 yesterday, got skinned alive. In other words, my wavy locks are almost a minus quality.—April 28, 1944
As I made my way through the next batch of letters, I was struck by the enthusiasm in my father’s writing after he got his orders to ship out.
January 9, 1945
Dear Folks,
Well, here we are but where are we going? That is the question. So darned many things have happened since my last letter that I don’t know where to start. In fact everything is censored so can’t say much of anything. We can say that we had an uneventful trip but not as smooth as the plane trip to Frisco. In fact I was very squeamish all the way. The minute we sighted land tho I came right out of it and went on deck. Aside from being a little weak I’m feeling like a million. Oh yes, we can also say we are at [cut out by censors]—Just get all the books you can on the Hawaiian Islands and you’ll know as much about it all as I do.
I’m just bubbling over with enthusiasm for the place. That’s sure not like my Navy career prior to this time. But it’s just like another dream—off that darned ship and on this plane. We have everything around us here you ever read or heard about the islands. I’ll try to send some souvenir booklets. You know, I’d like to visit or even live here in peace time. Here it is January and during the day it’s just like spring at home. Just a little on the warm side, but seems like a light breeze blowing most of the time. Then at night it’s real cool. Use just one blanket but I don’t really need it and sleep like a log. This place is just like a rest cure. It’s sure not a disappointment from what I’ve ever heard of the islands. Everything’s green and fertile. You never see any brown dirt. It’s all a brick red color and tracks into everything. Really is fertile tho. Seems like everything grows in it.
We have the best food here since I’ve been in the Navy. And plenty of it. We have nice clean barracks—all kinds of facilities for entertainment, even an outdoor theatre where you sit on a grassy bank and watch the show.
I’m still swaying around as if I were still aboard ship. Sure hope I can get an island base somewhere. Haven’t had any work to do yet and did nothing aboard ships. I’m beginning to think we just wasted our time in school. Nothing to do with radio yet.
Well, we lost some more of the gang yesterday. Some of them went on from here on the transport. Took us off alphabetically to the Mc’s and so that cut us in two again. Won’t be much of the original gang left when we get to our final destination.
Haven’t had any liberties yet but don’t care at all except maybe to see a couple of the cities. It’s so nice and green and quiet right here that I don’t even care to see a city for awhile.
Keep writing and often. Use this new address until further notice and either send airmail or V-mail. Send all the fotos you can get your hands on. Maybe when I get settled a little I can send for the whole album.
Well, you know right about where I am, how I am, and all about Oahu now, so everyone should be happy—including the censors. Of course still have no idea where or when from here except doubt very much if we go east (fat chance).
Write and tell everyone else to. Lots of Love, Murray
I laughed to myself. I found it funny that with a war in full swing he was talking about the green grass. You see, my father had always had the most plush and green lawn in his neighborhood. He was obsessed with having the greenest, thickest grass. I don’t know if he was competing with the neighbors or only with himself. As kids we could never leave anything on the lawn for fear that it might leave a burn mark, which in southeastern Washington with temperatures often in the nineties was a real possibility. He studied the best times to water and timed his waterings perfectly. He even invented a lawn mower.
Yes, I was the only kid I knew whose friends came over to watch her dad mow the lawn. He had built an electric lawn mower, long before they were produced and sold. It was low to the ground and required no handles. Operated by remote control, a long, thick electrical cord followed it across the yard. It mowed a long strip and then quickly turned to do the next. He’d sit on the front porch, elbows resting on his knees, and mow the lawn.
It was amazing to me, as I read the letters, to see pieces of the father I knew in this young man who in other ways seemed so different. I dove back in, wanting to know more.
Jan 15, 1945
Dear Folks,
Just a line tonite—seems funny to be writing just as if I were in Helix or somewhere else. Nothing more going on here than there either. Of course it’s all settled after the little bout three years ago [the bombing of Pearl Harbor]. Lots of Orientals all over the place mixed with soldiers, sailors and marines from all over the world. It’s quite a place but I can see it would get tiresome after a while.
Had to work a little today. Went into an office and stapled sheets of papers together for three hours. What a life. Wonder if I’ll ever see a radio any more.
Well I have my choice of three movies, a stage show, or a boxing match—think I’ll see the stage show.
Still no mail—saw one guy get 31 letters all at once the other day. Hope I do the same soon. I doubt if they get the mail forwarded from Treasure Island for quite a while.
Guess I better take off and see a show. Goodnight. Love, Murray
After reading the letter, I paused. Something seemed different. In the course of six days, he went from wanting to live on Oahu during peacetime to feeling it could get tiresome. The hopefulness of his first few letters was quick to fade. Was that because of the war or simply because he was away from home?
Jan 22, 1945
Dear Folks,
Just a line or two—finished first day of school. It’s just a refresher course in everything we had before, mostly just to pass the time I’d guess. The instructors don’t hang around much and nobody studies much.
Weighed myself in Waikiki the other day—guess what? I weighed 150 pounds. This climate must agree with me. I eat meals and between meals continuously. Even the gang are beginning to have hopes for me.
They announced we could send laundry to the officers’ laundry today, so I bundled up all my dirty clothes and sent them off.
Also my address is Ad.Com.Phib.Pac., which is merely an abbreviation for Administrative Command Amphibious Pacific—which is just what we wanted to stay out of. However seems like the entire Navy including larger ships come under amphibious forces now so nothing to get excited about.
Better get busy. Write. Love, Murray
With this letter though, there was no denying the change; he seemed more listless, less forthcoming about everything he was experiencing. The last paragraph of his letter made me think for the first time about my grandmother, who was receiving the letters. My father was in Amphibious Forces, but he seemed to be trying to soften that fact.
A quick Internet search revealed the reason. The Amphibious Forces, or Amphibs for short, had a very high mortality rate. If your submarine was hit, you wouldn’t survive. He was, I figured, trying to spare his mother unnecessary worry.
I wondered, though, if my grandmother saw through my father’s words as I had. And if she had, I knew she would have been overcome with the same feeling I had now: that something about his letters wasn’t quite right.
I sat in the dim light of the living room and looked across the street at my neighbor’s house. Their children tucked in hours ago, only the faint glow of perhaps a nightlight crept across the walls of the sleeping house as I finished reading my last letter for the night. Up the street a bit was a place in the road where there was too much distance between streetlights. It was a piece of darkness that seemed out of place. I sat alone with my thoughts and alone with the unanswered questions. I struggled to understand. Had my father purposely kept the letters a secret? And if so, why?
Over the years, I’d read magazine articles about veterans who came home from the various wars unable to cope. Plagued by terrible memories, they’d never been able to resume any semblance of a normal life. That wasn’t true for my father. He came home from the war and went on with his life, seemingly unaffected.
But then, less than a year ago, at the age of eighty, something changed. My mother first noticed it shortly after the tragedy of September 11, 2001. He was distant and disengaged from the life that swirled around him. He was reading WWII books and watching hours of war movies.
She was concerned and so was I, so I started to ask questions. He responded to each one with a slightly different variation of the same answer. The war stories he told were the same ones I’d heard all my life. They were about the adventures afforded young men away from home. He told us about going on liberty and goofing off with friends. He told us about Mary’s Steakhouse and the Waikiki movie theater. This was my father’s war. He served his country from behind a desk. It wasn’t an exciting story to tell, but it takes all kinds of soldiers and sailors to support the war effort. But if it was so simple, why hadn’t he shared the notebooks full of letters when I’d first started asking questions? Why had he kept them a secret in the first place?
“Who are you?” I whispered looking down at the letters. “Who were you?”
Had his experiences in the Navy shaped who he came home to be, even years later, as a husband and a father? Or was I just overthinking this, reading something into it that wasn’t there? I’d had a happy childhood; I had no complaints. So why was I questioning everything now?
Wishing I could just pull out a reference book on Murray William Fisher, I came up with the next best thing. Perhaps if I made a list of what I knew about my father, something would shake loose, some revelation. Maybe I knew something but didn’t realize it. That was possible, wasn’t it?
“OK,” I said. “What do you know about your dad?”
I grabbed my son’s spiral notebook from the coffee table and tore out a page. “What I Know,” I wrote at the top. I listed everything I knew about my father: where he was born, where he worked, how many siblings he had, how many children and grandchildren. I added his likes and dislikes. When I couldn’t think of anything more, I’d only filled one page.
I glanced out the window and then back at the page. Everything on the list was so general, so generic. I read each item again, trying to expand on them, but couldn’t. How could I be my father’s daughter and know so little about him?
“This is nothing,” I said frustrated.
I wadded the paper into a tight ball and threw it across the room. Then I sat puzzled by my own action, my own words. I was angry at myself for not knowing more about my father. But why was this affecting me so? Before he gave me the letters, I was satisfied with what I knew about my dad; I thought I knew everything there was to know. I shook my head and then picked up the paper and flattened it out. I read it aloud.
“This can’t be all there is to you, Dad,” I said quietly. “There’s something more. I know there is.”
We are all molded by our life experiences. Being sent off to war was one of those experiences for my father. But by all accounts he was one of the lucky ones who never saw any action. He’d been on ships and submarines but not in battle. In fact, after its bombing in 1941, Pearl Harbor was probably one of the safest places to be. And he’d spent the whole war there. It was just a two-year span of his life—nothing more. They were tumultuous times, yes, but he was protected, doing his work in an office. Over the last few years, I’d heard him say many times, “I wasn’t in the war. The guys who were in hand-to-hand combat, they are the ones who were in the war.”
Turning off the light, I stood at the picture window. I looked past my birdfeeders, silhouetted in shadow, and stared at a dark place in the road. I gave my eyes time to adjust but I knew it wouldn’t matter. That one place, too far from the streetlights on either side, remained dark. I shook my head.
“I wish something could be done about that,” I whispered. “It’s just too dark.”
Feb 1, 1945
Dear Folks,
Well, I’m just about alone again now. All the rest of boys went out today except Jonesy (our ex section leader at Farragut). He was up to the Navy hospital getting a check-up on his back so guess he won’t go for a little while.
Feel pretty lost today. Our school course just fizzled out. All the boys drafted out so guess it just ends. Was supposed to last until Saturday anyway. From now on guess I’ll just loaf around twenty-four hours a day until I get my glasses.
I’m going to take a traffic management course thru the educational institute. That should help me later, when I go back to working for the railroad. It costs just two bucks at the start and you can take all the courses you want from then on for nothing as long as you keep your grades up, and hand in at least a lesson a month. Haven’t any books or anything yet. I’ll send my money order down to the office today and should get started in a few days. If I don’t go to school I think I’ll work out a school schedule of my own to pass the time away.
The only other railroad man that was here left yesterday. The whole thing makes me feel rather low. Was next to being home having anyone around that went thru radio school with me. It’s a small world tho. I ran into one of the Farragut teachers this morning and had quite a gab session with him.
Didn’t get any mail today on top of everything else. Mail at mail call always fixes up any boring long day. Maybe I’ll have some tonite tho.
Be sure and rush along that foto album if you haven’t already done so.
By the way, did you ever get those pictures of the Fiat and Cord developed? Rush them too. But above all—Write. Love, Murray
Feb 2, 1945
Dear Folks,
The tone of these letters should be changing about now. Got another from you today. And dated the 27th too. They’re starting to come to my new address at last. That’s pretty good service I’d say. Let me know how long mine take in getting there. Sure makes a guy feel like licking the world when letters come regularly.
Everyone is gone but Jonesy and myself now. We have a tent to ourselves now. We tell everyone that wants in that it leaks like a sieve when it rains (only it doesn’t rain).
Keep all the letters coming this way you can, even if you have to resort to carbons. They mean absolutely everything. We watch the clock like on a monotonous job, waiting impatiently for time for mail call.
Say Gerry, when you write you can spend the entire time telling me about the latest on the Fiat. I enjoy that as much as anything. If possible, let me have some other pictures of you guys and the Fiat. I would especially like to see those new seats when they are installed. Be sure they slope back rather than remain level. You said you were thinking about covering them with Indian design blankets. I’d think they would sail away awfully easy and be hard to clean. Why not get some good fiber seat covers, something like I had in the ’39 Buick and cut them down to fit? That way you could wash them at any time too. Of course I guess you could always cover any material you put on with these covers if you wanted to. Tell me all about it. I’ve heard from Iris [sister] just once so far but then that’s about all the time she’s had.
Well Dad, as long as Gerry is busy working on junior, why don’t you limber his skis up for him. At least it would keep you off of street corners.
Days are kind of long with no school, no work, no nothing—Jonesy and I just sit around and gab about our families and friends and home. Then we look over each other’s pictures again to see if we missed anything. Rush the album—we’re running out of something to do.
Better go eat. Write. Love, Murray
I closed the notebook as sadness washed over me. My dad was hurting. He was lonely. Although the events took place long ago, his letters made them feel more immediate. His words transcended decades.
I thought back to the only time of true loneliness in my own life. It was a childhood memory. The summer after I turned nine, I went to Girl Scout camp with my best friend Kim. When she became sick with strep throat, her parents were called and quickly came to pick her up from our mountain cabin. I wandered around aimlessly, trying to fit in with the girls who’d already formed close friendships. I was miserable and I wanted to go home. In fact, I was so lonely that I faked strep throat, even gargling with Listerine for the nurse, several times a day. And it worked. My parents were called and I got to go back to the love and comfort of my family. And they never knew the truth about why I came home.
But reading my father’s letters, I realized I’d never known loneliness, not really. On the base, two thousand miles from home, he wanted mail so badly that he would settle for carbon copies. He just wanted something from home. He wanted to look at the date at the top of the letter and know that someone had been thinking of him on that day. He imagined them sitting down at a place he could picture in his mind, perhaps the kitchen table or a desk by the bedroom window. His mother or father had taken a pen from the holder he’d touched just a few weeks before. And they’d taken the letter to the post office, just as he himself had done so many times.
He wanted news from home. He wanted to know about his brother’s car and his mother’s garden. He and his comrade, a friend due to circumstances, even read each other’s letters after they’d memorized every line of their own. That sort of loneliness is profound.
As I sat on my comfortable sofa, knees drawn up to my chest, I held the fragile letter in my hand. Then a solution came to mind, a way to help him. “I should go get some stationery and my purple pen. I’ll write him a quick letter and send him photographs of the kids. That will cheer him up.”
I shook my head, unbelieving. How could I think such a crazy thought? More than fifty years had passed since he wrote those letters, and yet, for a fleeting moment I had a solution.
The door opened wide, I let myself imagine what it would be like, if only I’d been his daughter then. Perhaps I’d start a letter-writing campaign. I would sit my sons and daughter down and explain to them how lonely Grandpa is.
Danielle is sixteen. She’ll want to make her own card, writing encouraging words with colored markers. She’ll attach stickers and draw hearts and swirls around the edges. Then before sealing the envelope, she’ll sprinkle glitter inside.
Micah is twelve. He’ll feel badly for Grandpa. He’ll want to do something, but won’t be sure how to go about it. He’ll go with me to pick out a card. After analyzing each one, he’ll choose the one that is the most meaningful. Then he’ll ask me to tell him what to write. I’ll give him several ideas and he’ll write carefully.
Caleb is seven. I’ll have a hard time getting him to sit still long enough to listen. But once he does, he’ll begin by grabbing a piece of copy paper from the printer. He’ll tell Grandpa about his soccer game and the goal he scored. He’ll write quickly not worrying about spelling. Then he’ll draw a quick picture: he’s smiling and one leg is raised kicking the ball, scoring the goal. Then he’ll hand me the letter as he runs out the door.
I smile imagining it all. And then I feel silly for entertaining such a thought.
My father had been lonely and homesick during the war. But the war was long past.
“If only I’d known him then,” I tell myself. “I would have been the kind of daughter who was there for him. I would have. I would. But now?”
Now there is nothing to do. It was over, and I couldn’t be there for him.