The One Story

There’s a photograph of my father on the deck of a ship. I don’t have it, only a picture of it on my phone, and I couldn’t tell you where the print went. He’s nineteen. Cigarette in the corner of his mouth, hands on his hips, deck jacket open over a sweater, looking straight down the lens like the camera owes him money. A crane behind him, a deck winch beside him, ships out on the water. He is the only thing in the frame that isn’t working.

James Russell Sylvester. United States Navy, Second World War. Nineteen and colder than he wants to be.

He didn’t talk about the war. What I had growing up was that he worked in the kitchen and made ice cream. For most of my life, that’s what my father did in the Navy. He made ice cream.

He made it on a ship, in a war that ended before I was born. I never tasted any of it.

The one he told

There was one story.

Before a landing craft drops its ramp, it has to hit the beach straight. Come in sideways and the next wave takes it broadside and rolls it. Turtles it, was the word at our house.

So men went over the side into the surf with ropes, holding the boat square while it ran in. My father was one.

I don’t know the island and never will. I couldn’t tell you whether he said eight men or two, and I’ve caught myself telling it both ways.

The Navy had a name for the rope. Anti-broaching line, printed in the manual with a diagram, held by a beach party that came ashore with the third wave. On a real beach, in the first wave, the rope existed and the hands didn’t.

Whatever my father was doing out there, he was improvising a fix for something the Navy had written down and not yet manned. He never put it that way. He gave me four sentences and was done.

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What my brother told me

At his memorial service in July of 2022, on what would have been his birthday, my brother told me our father had been the cook for the executive officer and senior staff. The wardroom. He fed the men who ran the ship.

I was sixty-nine years old, standing at the end of the Santa Barbara breakwater with my family, and that was new information.

I’ve spent my working life around kitchens. In the summer of 1971, at eighteen, I learned to cook in a diner in Auburn, California, flipping pinto beans in a dry pan until I could do it without spilling them, and weeks later put two eggs in two pans on Van Nuys Boulevard and landed them clean. That’s the whole reason I had the career I had.

I knew my father worked in a galley. I did not know he ran the officers’ mess. Nobody told me until he was dead.

I asked my brother again this week. Nothing more, and I’m fairly sure he’s forgotten he ever told me about the wardroom. So what’s left is my memory of my brother’s memory of a man who didn’t talk.

The list

There’s one more piece.

When the ship made port, my father was handed a list and sent ashore to do the buying. The officers didn’t eat out of the ship’s stores. He walked into markets in countries he’d never seen and bought the food.

For twenty years I traveled the world for the software company I helped start, and the best mornings were the ones I got up early in some city and went to the food market. I couldn’t cook on those trips, I was there to work, and I went anyway every time and couldn’t have told you why. Nobody told me about my father’s list until years after I’d left that company.

I’d have liked to walk one of those markets knowing he’d done the same thing.

The sentence

I said something this week I’ve said for years. I don’t have veterans in my life. I care about the work and support people who do it, but I’ve never sat with one. Everything I know is secondhand.

I said it four days after standing in the lobby of a TEDx in Columbiana, Ohio, with my arms around a Green Beret.

That’s Lieutenant Colonel Scott Mann, United States Army, retired. Twenty-three years in uniform, nearly eighteen of them in Special Forces. He goes to that TEDx every year to coach veterans through their talks, and I see him there and hug him because I love the man.

Doc Diego was there too. He’s a psychologist, he works with Scott, and his whole subject is what soldiers carry home and can’t put down. We talked twice, at length, and I could have gone all day.

The first sentence

This week I went back and reread a piece I published in February of last year.

It opens like this.

My best friend, Tom, just got his draft notice. Vietnam is calling, and that’s it. That’s the final push we need.

July of 1971. I’d graduated from high school a month before. Tom’s notice came, we got in the car and left Los Angeles with six weeks to burn. Somewhere north, around midnight, a pickup pulled up beside us at a red light and Tom went rigid. It was his father, the one he hadn’t seen in years, in a town neither of us could have named. He motioned us to follow.

We followed the taillights to a house on the edge of Auburn. Tom and his father went inside. I stayed on the porch with a borrowed blanket and the crickets.

That is the last of Tom. Two thousand more words about a kid learning he could survive a hundred plates on a Friday night, and the man whose draft notice started the car is gone by paragraph two.

I published that eighteen months ago and never noticed.

He reported. My number came up the following February and was never called, because the draft ended that December. He went and I didn’t.

Then I lost touch with him. That’s the phrase I’ve always used, and it isn’t true either. Tom married a girl we met on that trip. She outlived him, and she has been at the edges of my family ever since, close to people I love, one phone call away for thirty years.

His widow never went anywhere. I did.

I didn’t lose Tom’s world. I stayed right next to it. I lost Tom.

He’s dead now. I don’t know when, or how, or what he brought back with him, or whether anybody ever asked him.

The habit

In November of 2019, Scott walked onto our TEDxSantaBarbara stage and gave a talk he called The Generosity of Scars.

He opened it in character, dying, a medic working his chest. Then he stepped out of the scene and told a theater full of strangers about the afternoon he stood in his bedroom closet with a loaded pistol and no intention of coming out alive. He heard his son get home from school. That’s the only reason he walked out.

Six months later he told that story to a friend from Afghanistan who was somewhere darker still, and watched the color come back into the man’s face.

He’d written a play about all of it by then. Last Out, four actors, twenty-eight cities. On our stage he cut scenes out of it and set them into eighteen minutes, stepping in and out of character and back again. My wife Kymberlee helped him build it. She was his speaking coach.

I was in the wings, where I’ve watched a hundred talks go out. They were on their feet before he was off the stage. I watched that from behind him.

I’ve been repeating that phrase for seven years like a man who understood it. The generosity is in setting the thing down where we can see it, on purpose, knowing the price, and it only works if somebody picks it up.

My father put four sentences on the table and I let them sit for fifty years. My brother filled in the rest four years ago and I still said this week that I don’t have veterans in my life. Tom’s whole war I turned into the first paragraph of a story about myself.

Neither of those men was out of reach. One of them lived until 2022.

I have his widow’s number. I called her this week and she hasn’t called back. She has known for thirty years what happened to Tom, and in thirty years I never once asked.

My niece married a Marine. Brian stood honor guard at Arlington, folding flags into triangles for widows he’d never met. When my father died he arranged a ceremony there for a Navy man who isn’t buried in that ground. He had a flag flown in my father’s name, and he brought my brother and me each one.

We didn’t scatter him. My brother has an urn and so do I.

My father’s ashes are in this room and the flag is right next to them.

A surgeon rebuilt my left shoulder on Tuesday, so I’ve spent this week sitting still, talking into a phone because I can’t reach a keyboard.

Sitting a few feet from both of them, saying out loud that I don’t have veterans in my life.

If you’re a veteran in crisis, or you’re worried about one, the Veterans Crisis Line is 988, then press 1.

Here are the lyrics to Four Sentences

Nineteen on the deck of a ship

Cigarette in the corner of his lip

He is looking at me like I owe him

And I don’t know the half of him

He made ice cream out on that ship

In a war that ended before me

I never tasted any of it

And that’s the whole of what I knew

Four sentences about the war

And then he never said no more

Four sentences on the table

I let them sit there fifty years

Four sentences on the table

Nobody comes and clears

Men went over into the surf

Ropes to hold the boat from the roll

Was it eight of them or was it two

I have told it both ways, that’s the truth

He bought the food in foreign towns

Handed a list and put ashore

I walked those markets twenty years

And never knew he’d walked them before

Four sentences on the table

I let them sit there fifty years

Four sentences on the table

Nobody comes and clears

There’s a boy on a porch in Auburn

With a blanket and the crickets and the dark

His best friend’s inside with his father

And a draft notice folded in the car

I said I don’t know any soldiers

I have said it half my life

His ashes are here in the room with me

And a flag folded up tight

Four sentences on the table

I let them sit there fifty years

Four sentences on the table

And now there’s nobody to hear

He made ice cream I never tasted

I never once asked him about it

He was in the room the whole time

He was in the room the whole time

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