Semper Fi
My daddy as a Marine.
My three siblings are ten, fifteen, and eighteen years older than I. They had a very different father from mine. Though he was the same man, by the time I came along, he was a very different person. I wish they could have had the father that I did, but he, like the rest of us, was doing the best he could at the time.
My father graduated high school at sixteen, having skipped a grade in elementary school because he excelled in his classwork. College was expensive, though, and his parents were not wealthy. By high school, Daddy found himself at odds with the form of authority he found in institutes of education, so instead of heading to college, he signed up for the Marines. I wish now that I had asked him how he came to this decision that would forever inform the way he interacted with the rest of the world.
He did not talk a lot about being a Marine, but what he did share was heartbreaking for me. Daddy would occationally tell a story about basic training in which the new recruits were instructed to swim across a body of water near Parris Island, South Carolina. All of the young men (because in the 1950’s female recruits just were not a thing despite the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act of 1948) were decked out in full gear, including a backpack full of all of the gear that the USMC declared necessary for survival, and they were told to start swimming. In my memory, they were swimming across a river, but honestly, that river could just as easily be of my own creation. Logic would lead one to believe that these young men had had their swimming skills tested prior to such an exercise, but this was the Marines of the 1950’s, and civilian logic did not always align with the making of a strong Marine. Having grown up on the beaches of Florida, Daddy was a strong swimmer, but not all of the young men around him were. One, in particular, started struggling from the beginning, and all his years in the water told Daddy that this fellow was not going to make it across. So my father kept an eye on him, and when that young man could no longer keep himself afloat, Daddy swam the two of them across. He didn’t tell me that story to make himself sound like a hero. He told me that story to illustrate how the Marines who trained him would have let that boy drown in their efforts to make him a “Man”.
Over the years, Daddy would also allude to the “brainwashing” soldiers went through during training, but I was in my twenties before he gave me any further insight into what he meant by that.
My mother was 42-years-old when I was born. I don’t remember ever not knowing that, and at some point early in the course of my life, I began to believe that I was the result of a poorly timed mistake, one that made my parents’ lives harder at a time when they should have finally been becoming easier. That belief was a heavy burden for me to carry, but I wagged it around for years before I brought it up in conversation one day to my dad.
I’m not sure how it came up or why, but I remember refering to that “mistake” in the course of one of the discussions Daddy and I would have when I was home from college. On those weekends, often the quiet hours of Sunday morning were ours while Mama went to church. He and I would sit in the living room, him in his recliner, me on the couch, and we would dig into the tales of his past or the history of the world, or a particular Biblical passage one of us had been studying recently. These conversations were not superficial but, instead, would span hours probing deeply into the nuances of meaning and implication and typically meandering to other loosely related but equally compelling topics. Somehow, that day, because of some fluke of the wandering conversation, I found the courage to put to words the worry that had followed me for years, that I was a burden borne of an irrevocable mistake that would ruin what was supposed to be their “golden years.” I suppose that I thought that had never crossed Daddy’s mind because even though I don’t remember the exact words of his initial response, I do remember the love with which they were said and the story that followed them.
According to Daddy, I was not only a choice, I was his chance to try to be a better father. My brother David, the eldest of us four, was born while Daddy was still in the Marines. Apparently, he was just as much of a stinker as a toddler as he is now, and if the photos of him then are any indication, he was just as much of a charmer, too. Daddy said, though, that he could remember watching David playing when he was about 2-years-old, and as he watched and thought about what a cute child David was, he suddenly became acutely aware that he felt no attachment to that little one he was seeing. He specifically said he felt no love, and in that instant, watching his toddler son, he understood the gravity of realization.
My father was a deeply introspective man, and this awareness about his first born child started a course of contemplation that would last decades. Over that time, Daddy came to understand that what he had initially felt for his young family as a Marine was more duty than love and that that feeling was the military’s desired result of his training. For a Marine in the 1950’s, detachment was one of the traits most entrenched in the indoctrination. The fallout of that, however, lasted well past his years in the Marines, and in the early seventies, as he looked as his three children, he realized it had stunted his ability to be the father he had wanted to be. So, according to him, he approached my mother to discuss another chance to get it right. I was the result of that conversation.
I wish I had revisited this subject with my dad, but we only addressed it tangentially in the following years. I think I was afraid he would tell me he had made it up to make me feel better, and I know what he perceived to be his failures as a father pained him. I have never been one to pick at another person’s wounds.
Recently, in the course of attempting to devour everything Pat Conroy wrote, I read The Great Santini followed quickly by The Death of Santini, and with them I felt I caught a glimpse of the father my siblings had and the Marine Corps that helped make him who he was. The Great Santini was written first, and while it was technically a work of fiction, it was close enough to the truth of Conroy’s upbringing that it caused a significant and long lasting rift in his family. It tells the story of a young man coming of age under the crushing thumb of his Marine fighter pilot father. The follow up work made no effort at fictionalization, and it is a story of forgiveness and redemption. In my opinion, one should only ever be read with the other. Even though my father was not the almost heartless man in these books, and he was not a career Marine or a figher pilot, I was able to understand him more clearly thanks to Conroy’s portrayal of the Marine Corps and its expections of its men. I think I was also able to understand a bit more about the father my siblings had and how he differed from mine. David is currently working his way through the two books, and I look forward to hearing how he feels about them. I’m hoping I can get my other two siblings to read them, too.
I no longer have the option of talking to Daddy about his time in the Marines or of asking him if he ever felt that he had redeemed himself in the eyes of his first three children though I know he spent half a lifetime trying. I can’t ask him if he ever forgave himself what he perceived to be his failures. I wish I had had the wisdom twelve years ago that I have now. I wish I understood then that sometimes the hard questions and the hard conversations are where we grow the most, and I wish that I had picked a little bit more at those wounds.
Maybe, though, I can use the magic of books to start some conversations with my siblings, and maybe through those, we all can better understand the man who reared us and the legacy his being a Marine left in our lives.
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