Leander is back in Sheboygan, living with us in the house and working once again at the Atheneum, which has made Thea and me happy. After his brief return from Spokane, after our sad little family reunion to remember Mama, the funeral trip to Farsala that Thea and I planned with Maggie but never took, Leander quit his job as a teaching assistant, traded in his rusty old Datsun for a van, loaded up his possessions and made the long drive back to Wisconsin while Thea and I readied his room. His short stint at the Atheneum had apparently persuaded Leander that his true calling was, after all, in a restaurant kitchen and that Maggie was the one who could channel her energies into changing the world.
Thea and I talk to Maggie every two or three weeks, always on Sunday afternoons. So it is unexpected when she calls on a Thursday morning, as Thea and I are getting ready for work, and it is a particular surprise when she opens by asking about Nicholas.
What exactly do you want to know? I ask. There are moments almost every day when I think about my brother. But it has been months since I have talked about him to Thea, and probably years since I have mentioned him to any of our children.
Maggie pauses for a few seconds before replying. He died in Okinawa, didn’t he? Right near the end of the war?
Why are you asking, honey? Thea is on the extension, and she poses the question before I can.
Maggie begins with a confusing and circuitous answer. The paper is doing a story on how Black servicemen were treated in Vietnam. It’s not my story. There’s a team working on it. But after the first story ran, one of the reporters heard from a veteran saying that the story of mistreatment in the military wasn’t new, and that it used to be a lot worse.
I wait for more, but it seems that Maggie is waiting as well. OK, I say finally. I still don’t understand why you’re asking about Nicholas. And what you want to know.
It takes my daughter another long time to get the words out. I have never heard Maggie this awkward, this hesitant. I am trying to picture her in her apartment, pacing around the room and wrapping a loose strand of hair around her index finger. It was one of those idle, impatient, mechanical motions she made as a child and never overcame. Can I come up and talk to you and Mom? she asks finally. Me and that reporter I mentioned? I think he has some information about your brother. How he died.
It feels suddenly as if everything is crashing down on my head. All of the suspicions and suppositions. All of the memories, either suppressed or deeply buried. The man in the Western Union car. The visit from Seargeant Hawkins. The unsigned letter from St. Louis and the mysterious followup letter from Los Angeles. The three redacted letters from men who served with Nicholas. My parents died without ever knowing the truth about their son’s death, and I had resigned myself to the same fate. The possibility that the truth might reveal itself, almost forty years later, is overwhelming.
Thea asks the logical question, recognizing that I cannot. Can’t you tell us on the phone, honey? We’d love to see you, but tell us what you think you know.
I’d rather come up there. We can be there tonight. When you get home from work.
Twelve hours. The thought of having to wait another twelve hours for news that Maggie could simply tell me now, news I have yearned to hear for all of my adult life, recharges some synapse in my brain and loosens my tongue. I clear my throat. Will you be here as a daughter, or as a reporter? I remember that my daughter was promoted to an editor job last year, so she is no longer a reporter, but I trust that she understands the nature of the question.
Dad. I’m your daughter AND a journalist. I don’t know how not to be both.
You know what I mean, I tell her.
Maggie’s answer is quick and decisive. And, finally, reassuring. I’ll always be your daughter, she says. If you want it to be one or the other, I’ll always be your daughter first. But, Dad, I want to talk to you face-to-face. We’ll be there when you get home from the restaurant. I promise.
I have the rest of the day to think about it. I tell myself that it is pointless to speculate when Maggie and her reporter friend will be at the house in a matter of hours. But the mind has a rhythm and direction of its own. The newspaper, Maggie said, has been running a series of stories about the treatment of Black soldiers in Vietnam. This prompted someone who had served in the Second World War, someone who had apparently served alongside Nicholas, to come forward with a story that had some relevance, some vague racial element. The letter from St. Louis had said that Nicholas did not die in combat. The packet of letters from Hawk said that my brother had served with honor, but not one of them referenced his death. I am trying to fathom how any of these pieces fit together.
She’s on her way up, Thea reassures me. It is four o’clock in the afternoon – four hours before we close the restaurant, and about five hours until we arrive back at the house. The place is empty aside from a couple I do not know who have wandered in, ordered coffee, ordered a second cup, and are scrutinizing the menu as if studying for an exam. Leander and I are in the kitchen making dinner preparations. Thea has been eyeing me all day, knowing that my head is somewhere else.
Of course, we have told Leander about Maggie’s phone call and about the purpose of her trip. If he has any thoughts as to what we are going to be learning about the way Nicholas died, he is keeping them to himself.
When we get home, Maggie has let herself inside. She is standing in the kitchen with a glass of water on the counter in front of her. She introduces Jordan Kipp, who is standing on the opposite side of the counter. Jordan Kipp has been a reporter at The Daily Defender for three years. He and Maggie worked on several stories together before my daughter’s promotion, a full nine years after she was hired. I know from Tessa that Maggie has had romantic relationships with at least three of the reporters during her tenure at the paper, but if there is any chemistry between her and Jordan Kipp, I cannot detect it.
Thea herds everyone into the living room. You’ve come a long way, she says. So this must be important.
Maggie has seated herself at one end of the sofa. She sets down her water glass on the end table, puts her hands on her knees. I’m going to let Jordan talk. He came to me, but this started out as his story.
Jordan Kipp is a good-looking lanky young man – probably too young for Maggie, I think. He is relatively light-skinned and, at least for his appearance today, has dressed conservatively. He has seated himself next to Maggie, in the center of the sofa. He looks directly at me, nods, and begins, glancing down occasionally at his reporter’s notepad.
Maggie told you about the series we’re working on. About Vietnam. We started with a story about how Black veterans were treated when they returned to their communities. How they had problems getting jobs. Some white people wouldn’t even acknowledge them as veterans, and some Black people thought they were fools for fighting a white man’s war. I talked to a woman whose husband ended up killing himself because he considered himself a hopeless misfit. Worthless. Less than worthless.
Anyway, one story led to another. We did a followup piece on this one group of white soldiers in Vietnam who had invented this brutal and degrading hazing ritual for any Black serviceman who was assigned to their unit. That was their form of initiation. You know what was one of their refrains? If we had been born a hundred years ago, you’d probably be my property. True enough, but not very brotherly, right? And of course they didn’t haze any of the white soldiers who joined. Anyway. That story led to another story, and it was Maggie’s idea to turn it into a series.
We were about four days into the series when this older guy showed up at the office. I don’t mean older like he was a hundred years old. But he was a lot older than the Vietnam vets I had been interviewing. Also, he was Asian. This sounds racist, I know, but I figured he was either Korean or Chinese or Japanese. Whatever he was, it seemed weird to me, since most of the paper’s readers are Blacks in Chicago, obviously. Anyway, it was lunch hour, and the newsroom was quiet, and I was the only one in the office, so I sat down with him to see what he had to say. What he told me was that the Vietnam series was interesting, but there was nothing new about minority soldiers being harassed and mistreated and abused by white American soldiers who were supposed to be on the same side. He told me he had been in the Army during the Second World War, and he said he could tell me stories.
I was still pretty focused on wrapping up the Vietnam series, but I wanted to hear what the guy had to say, so I asked him to meet me at a bar down the street after I got off work. I wasn’t sure he was on the level, but I figured he’d either show up or he wouldn’t. And if he did, I’d find out if there was a story there or not.
Well, he did. And there was.
The guy’s name was Ren Matsuda. Japanese-American, right? Japanese enough that he had been sent to an internment camp in Arizona with his parents and younger brother in the spring of 1942. Had lived there for more than two years. Enlisted in the Army as soon as he turned eighteen. A week after D-Day, actually. Incredible, isn’t it? Being held for two years in an internment camp and then enlisting to fight for the country that was still imprisoning your family. Of course, by D-Day, a lot of people thought the war was almost over. So Ren wasn’t sure if he’d see action, but the war in Europe wasn’t the end of the war. As you know.
Ren’s parents were born in Japan, and there had been some Japanese spoken within the family. In private, for obvious reasons. So Ren had skills that would made him a pretty good interpreter, if the Army chose to send him to Asia, where Japanese servicemen were being captured and interrogated. So that’s what happened. After basic training, he was shipped to the Asia Pacific theater and assigned to work with one of the Army units as an interpreter. He moved around a lot, but when the Americans landed on Okinawa at the beginning of April 1945, he was right there, along with quite a few other Japanese-Americans who were there mostly doing the same sort of intelligence work. Nisei Soldiers they were called. Second generation, most of them. Japanese parents. American born. Almost crazy patriotic.
There were plenty of American heroes on Okinawa. I didn’t know any of this, but I read all about it after I met Ren Matsuda. There was a Marine who was killed leading the charge up Sugar Loaf Hill. And another Marine who fell on a live grenade to save his comrades. And there was an Army medic who declined to carry a weapon, an actual conscientious objector, who pulled dozens of soldiers to safety and refused to evacuate as long as there was anyone still on the battlefield. Real heroes. But there were also these little cliques of narrow-minded American soldiers who hated their Nisei comrades every bit as much as they hated the Japanese soldiers who were trying to kill them. No difference, as far as they were concerned. Blind hatred.
The Battle of Okinawa went on for weeks. For a time, it looked as if one side was winning, and then the tide would turn, and then it would turn again. Units were fighting and dying over who would control a few hundred feet of space. Both sides were desperate to control the island. The Japanese Army went so far as to force schoolboys as young as fourteen to put on uniforms and take up weapons. Hundreds of these boys died. The war kept Ren busy interrogating Japanese soldiers who had been captured and brought into camp. Most of them wouldn’t talk. But others, he managed to get some useful intelligence out of.
But when war drags on, there is always the occasional boredom and quarreling and little internal feuds that turn into something bigger, because everyone is living in close quarters and all the ugly emotions are laid bare.
Things started out small. Some of the white guys would refuse to eat alongside a Nisei soldier. Or they would steal their uniforms when they were in the shower. And sometimes Ren or one of the others who’d had enough would retaliate in some small way. And then things escalated. One night, three of the white soldiers dragged a Nisei soldier out of the tent, blindfolded him and tied his arms behind his back, marched him into the woods and beat the shit out of him, pardon the language. Even with his eyes covered, he knew who they were. They had talked to each other during the beating, and they had talked to him. But because the guy was blindfolded, the officer in charge said he wouldn’t pursue it and he wouldn’t support having charges brought against the men. I guess he thought he needed them to help carry on the actual battle against the actual Japanese.
But that incident hardened both sides, and at least a few of the white soldiers who had been sympathetic to their Japanese-American comrades decided that it was time to take a stand. So they did little things to show their loyalties. They made a point to sit alongside a Nisei at mealtime. They snubbed their racist brothers and were very open about it. They even instituted this practice of standing up when a Nisei soldier entered the room, which was especially appalling. And when a white soldier decides to stand up, literally, and ally himself with a Japanese-American soldier in what has basically become a race war, he’s likely to be targeted for the same treatment. In some ways, the treatment is going to be worse because he’s considered a race traitor.
So a couple of nights later, the same three white soldiers dragged one of these so-called race traitors out of the tent and into the words, where they beat him within an inch of his life. They didn’t even bother blindfolding the guy, maybe because they figured he’d either die from his injuries or be too scared to identify them.
But the soldier didn’t die. Not right away. He made his way back to camp, and a couple of the men carried him to the field hospital, and for two or three days he was in and out of consciousness. He was able to tell the doctor what happened, and he named the three guys who beat him. He was visited in the hospital by all of his friends, including Ren Matsuda. The doctors prepared Ren for the worst. They didn’t expect his friend to live. But Ren believed that his friend was strong, and he sat with him, hoping that he would recover. He told himself that, as long as he was there with his friend, his friend would not die. But eventually, Ren was told to report for duty. Meanwhile, his friend kept drifting in and out of consciousness. Finally, his friend died. The only person in the room to see him take his last breath was a nurse who happened to be on duty and who somehow recognized that this man was in his final hours of life.
The three men who killed Ren Matsuda’s friend were discharged and sent home. There was a war going on, and there was apparently no appetite for publicity and a trial, so the Army concocted a story that the men had started a fight that had gotten out of hand. They received dishonorable discharges – but as far as Ren knew, that was all.
I asked Ren the names of the three men who did the killing and the name of the man who died. I suppose you’ve guessed that Nicholas Pappas was the soldier who died. Ren remembered the name of one of three soldiers who were discharged. I did a search and found that he had been killed in a bar fight in Baton Rouge in 1956. The other two…I guess that will always be a mystery. But I imagine they lived the same sad and short life as their friend. I have to imagine it that way. Nothing else makes sense.
I sit there for a long time, lost in my own thoughts. Everything about Jordan Kipp’s story makes sense. It has been years, but I have never forgotten about Akiko Kobayashi – the classmate of ours who was there one day and suddenly gone the next, just weeks after Pearl Harbor, sent away with her parents to a place like the one where Ren Matsuda had lived for two years of his young life. Akiko’s exile had bothered both Nicholas and me. But the injustice, I realize now, had troubled my brother in a much more profound way. Nicholas was always the sort of person who would be deeply offended by irrational abuses committed by men with real or perceived power over others, and he would not have endured the offense silently. That he would act as he had acted in Okinawa is not at all shocking. That others would find his behavior so provocative that it required a savage beating – this is much harder to imagine. But if war brings out the savagery in men, is it surprising that the savagery cannot always be controlled and directed outward, at the true enemy?
There are, I realize, a cocktail of emotions I will need to sort through before I can absorb everything I have heard tonight. Including gratitude. I want to tell Jordan, before he leaves, that I am grateful to him for taking Ren Matsuda seriously, for making the decision to listen and to bring the story back to Maggie, and to me. Of course, I also recognize that my brother’s story – at least his identity and his role in the story – would never have come to light if Maggie had not taken the job at The Chicago Daily Defender after college, and had not stayed there for nine years, probably fighting racial fights of her own, both internal and external, in Maggie’s inimitable way. I have not discouraged her in her job choices, over the years, but I have also not said much to encourage her, which is something I am ashamed to say.
I’m proud of Uncle Nicholas, Maggie says, finally breaking the silence. It is the first time I can remember Maggie referring to my brother as Uncle Nicholas.
I tell her that I am proud of him as well, and I am proud of Maggie. As a reporter. As an editor. And as our daughter.