Homeland America

Editor's Note: This is an excerpt from 'Homeland' by Dale Maharidge with photographs by Michael Williamson (Seven Stories Press).

My father's cremated remains lay beneath an American flag held by four soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery, a year after 9/11. Seven other soldiers each fired rifles three times. Steve Maharidge gets twenty-one shots and a hole in the ground here because they gave him a Purple Heart after he was wounded in the bloody South Pacific island fighting. He got a piece of Japanese steel in his back that they never could get out, and it was there somewhere amongst the ashes.

Dad never talked much about the war. After he died, I sought out and found guys from his unit, L Company, 3rd Battalion, 22nd Marine Regiment, 6th Marine Division. George Popovich told me about the night on Guam, July 25, 1944, when he and Dad were in a trench on the Orote Peninsula battling the Japanese just feet away. A mortar round or a grenade blew behind my father, killing the two men on either side of him, spraying shrapnel into his back. Come morning, there were fifteen dead Americans in the trench, two alive – Dad, wounded, and George.

The injury was no ticket home. They patched Dad up and on April 1, 1945, he and 239 other men hit the Okinawa beach. The unit was among those that took Naha, the first and only Japanese city captured in the war before the atom bombs were dropped. According to information from the government, only thirty-one of the 240 came off the island alive.

It was near the end of the "good war." In the Okinawa campaign, the northern portion of the island was quickly taken – the prize being the Yontan Airfield, to use in launching attacks against Japan. There was political pressure to crush the Japanese, and so my father and thousands of other U.S. soldiers were ordered to march south. Among the many critics of this campaign was General Douglas MacArthur. He argued that the Japanese 32nd Army, dug in on the southern third of the island above the city of Naha, could not meaningfully threaten U.S. troops. MacArthur said a frontal attack would be "sacrificing thousands of American solders."

He advocated starving the Japanese out, rather than press a head-on assault against the formidable Shuri Line, culminating at Sugar Loaf Hill. With ship and air support cut off, the Japanese would weaken as the weeks wore on. MacArthur was ignored, and the bloodiest days of the Pacific war were to come as the Americans taught the Japanese a lesson.

In the end, 12,281 Americans were killed in the entire campaign, and well over 200,000 Japanese and Okinawans.

I once asked Dad about attending veterans' events – why didn't he go to parades and so forth?

"Fuck that!" he said. "There are no heroes. Just survivors." A pause, a vacant look, not at me or anything in the room. Then looking me right in the eye, quietly: "You just survive."

Dad never owned an American flag. Never flew one.

Weeks after burying Dad, I spent Thanksgiving in Chicago, at the home of Dick and Nancy Cusack. Dick had also been in the war. We talked about it, how that war affected his generation. Some guys were like my Dad, who came home and stayed drunk for four years. Dad coped in a Hemingwayesque manner – in an eternal quest to forget. Others were like Philip Berrigan, Dick's roommate when they were at College of the Holy Cross, and who that fall of 2002 lay on his deathbed halfway across the country.

Dick recalled how World War II affected Phil. Berrigan and my dad may both have been sickened by combat. But Berrigan was no Hemingway. Phil became a Roman Catholic priest, a pacifist, who grew increasingly active against what he saw as "the American empire." Dick talked about the time during the Vietnam War when the FBI went after him and Nancy, accusing them of helping Berrigan and his brother, Dan, who were then fugitives from the FBI after the brothers broke into draft offices and destroyed records, sometimes by pouring blood on them.