Brother of the Wars

As a kid I remember my older brother John, from my mother’s first marriage, coming to our London flat with a duffle bag stuffed with his British Army uniforms. He was returning from the Far East, wherever that was. My two brothers and I were more interested in dressing up in John’s Army clothes, playing soldier and pretending we were at war.

The atmospherics helped. Wilson’s Department Store across the street remained a pile of rubble years after the formal end to World War II. The government offices behind our flat remained badly damaged. The North London Crouch End area was still pockmarked with corrugated steel bomb shelters that were perfects places for our childhood games.

I don’t think I had met John before this occasion but learned to love him deeply. His father fought in the World War I and spent time in the trenches in France. He fathered three children and then died from the effects of chlorine gas on his lungs. Family chatter suggests he encouraged my mother to put the children in an orphanage, which she did. The oldest daughter was eventually returned to our mother due to a bout of diphtheria. John and his sister Freda spent about ten years in the orphanage, with my mother apparently visiting them on birthdays and holidays.

John went into the British Army after leaving the orphanage and then was shipped out to the Far East aboard a British naval transport. I have assumed the British Army was sending its military to see what was left of what was left of its empire. I later learned from John that he was sent to Japan for cleanup operations around the southern island of Kyushu.

That reference didn’t mean much to me until, as an immigrant in America, I joined the U.S. Navy and was assigned to an ammunition ship. After Guam our first stop was Japan and some courtesy calls at a number of cities, including Nagasaki and Hiroshima. We donated blood and met with local Japanese, including some who still carried the scars from the atomic bomb blasts. Through a translator I spoke to one young man who was hoping to get a Fulbright scholarship to the states. I wasn’t sure what that was.

I was young but felt it rather odd for an ammunition ship to visit the sites of such destruction, even on a goodwill visit. The visit haunted me for years and became the title poem in my “That Kingdom Coming Business.” (The book is out of print but I’m glad to send you a copy of the poem if you’re interested).

Years later I remember traveling to Canterbury, England, with John to bury our sister Freda who died of a cerebral hemorrhage. We were advised not to view the body because she was apparently badly disfigured from the operation. We met with the surgeon who seemed more interested in an upcoming family trip to Disney World than our sister’s fate.

Since our family was scattered around the world, I suggested to John that Freda be cremated. He responded angrily that our sister had been annihilated all her life and he was not going to let this happen to her in death. If was the first and last time I heard him summarize what he seemed to see as the arc of his sister’s life and perhaps his. I would beg to differ.

I never spoke to John in detail about his military service, that is, until a few years before his death at a get-together in Tucson, Arizona, thanks to my late brother Desi. John was showing the effects of Parkinson’s, especially in his hands. After a couple of gin and tonics, John became chatty and started to talk about his military service. John was a part of a British Army unit that was sent into both Nagasaki and Hiroshima to test for radiation levels before the engineers could move in and help restore the infrastructure. We listened. John spoke of the destruction he saw and charred bodies that had not yet been removed. I had never seen him so talkative. It was as if he had a tale to tell and wanted to get something off his chest. It was as if he had waited a lifetime for this moment.

That was the last time I would see him. Years later, I called him on his cell phone and heard him say, “My phone,” and a voice, presumably a nurse, telling him that he must try harder to straighten his leg. Then the phone went dead.

John was largely self-schooled and read about higher mathematics and philosophy for fun. He seemed to graduate directly to classical music. Perhaps what he learned in the orphanage was a perverse kind of compensation for what he had given up.

I asked him once whether he ever really wished for something in the orphanage. He responded yes: “A ripe English tomato.”

That was John.