MetroWest Daily News, MA
Marotta: Listen to words of our veterans
By Terry Marotta, Gatehouse News Service
GHS
Fri Sep 21, 2007, 12:19 AM EDT
Ken Burns’s seven-part documentary "The War" starts Sunday night on
PBS’s and I can’t wait to watch it.
There is so much I still don’t understand about this second 20th
century cataclysm, which claimed an almost unimaginable 72 million
lives, when civilian and military deaths are taken together.
I also just finished reading Selected Chaff: the Wartime Columns of Al
McIntosh, which Ken Burns drew from to make this epic study and had
been looking forward to talking about it here – until something
amazing happened when I was visiting my own Uncle Ed.
Who turns 87 in a few weeks.
Who spent the bulk of his 39-month Army service in the South Pacific.
And who has never until now spoken more than a single sentence about
his time there.
I’d gone to his apartment this one day with one meal to eat with him
and a different meal to leave and was just rising to say my goodbyes
when he interrupted me.
"I have something for you," he said, and, cane in hand, began making
his slow way into a back bedroom from which he emerged holding a worn
three-ring binder."
"During my three-and-a half years in the war, I wrote pieces for "The
Hairenik Weekly", the Armenian newspaper. The clips are all in here."
Now I have known Uncle Ed since 1968 and in the last year especially
the two of us have grown very close; and yet I now see that in a way I
knew him not at all.
Even his name was different then because in ’42 when he joined up, his
family had not yet decided to change their name from the Haydostian to
the more Americanized Haydon.
I’d like to share portions of these dispatches written by young
Sergeant Haydostian, son of two people "from Asia Minor" as the paper
says, "born in 1920 and a graduate of the Boston Latin School."
In them he speaks only once about himself, saying "I look like an
Italian, a Jew, a Greek even an Arabian," then sets all personal talk
aside to report on what he saw and thought during the five separate
landings he and his brothers-in-arms made in the Allied effort to
drive back the Japanese armies.
"Water drips from every leaf, and lizards scramble about by the
dozens," one entry says, "and the ocean glistens in the sunlight."
"But what seemed from the landing vehicles to be waving palms are in
fact burned and lopped off in the middle. Enemy supplies and food lie
scattered and rotting. Fragments of planes strew the ground.
"Exploded shells are everywhere and the stench of death is keen in the
nostrils. Now a discarded helmet, holes in its sides (we think of a
blasted skull) now a jacket or shoe (where are their owners?)
"Episode and contrast," he ruminates.
"But let us return to this same beach from which we came.
"Let us go back down the hill to the shore and close our eyes to the
scenes of devastation there and open the recesses of our hearts to
what is also there:
"The water is deep blue in its depths and azure at its surface. The
rising sun skirts the billowed clouds and bathes all in brightness.
"What wonders we have seen and can recount as the years pass and the
world is at rest!"
But soldiers often do not recount their experiences, once they are
home. Uncle Ed certainly didn’t.
Ken Burns says he couldn’t have made this documentary 15 years ago
because the men were not yet ready to talk.
They are ready now, it seems. If we are wise, the rest of us will
listen.
Terry Marotta can be reached both at [email protected]