World War II had been over for more than a decade when Dale Maharidge was born, but he still sees himself as damaged by that war, in particular by the Battle of Okinawa, in 1945. His father, Steve, a Marine sergeant, brought that battle home with him, to a suburb south of Cleveland. It lived on, taking the shape of desolate anger, forever on the edge of violence, of pain that he parceled out to his wife and children over the rest of his life.
Mr. Maharidge, who teaches journalism at Columbia University, published a book in March, "Bringing Mulligan Home," that revisits that haunted battlefield and unearths the damage done to his father, his father's war buddies and his family. I sought him out after reading that Bill de Blasio, the candidate for New York mayor, also had a father, an Army veteran, who fought at Okinawa. He was badly wounded, went home and was lost to alcoholism, and killed himself in 1979.
Mr. de Blasio has said little about his father, and declined my interview request. But Mr. Maharidge believes — from his own story, from having tracked down 29 surviving Marines from his father's unit, Company L, Third Battalion, 22nd Marines, and from long letters, phone calls and e-mail exchanges with readers — that many families of World War II veterans have more in common than they might think. His book, subtitled "The Other Side of the Good War," looks at the untreated battlefield trauma that caused untold numbers of men to suffer in silence, self-medicate and bring harm to themselves and their families. When Mr. Maharidge makes a bold assumption — "I imagine Bill de Blasio had the same father I had" — it does not seem unreasonable.
"We always thought we were the only family like this," Mr. Maharidge told me, meaning the hair-trigger rages, dinner-table screaming and terrorized children. One idle threat from his father to his misbehaving young brother — "I could kill you" — ruined his brother's sleep for decades.
It all spilled from the older Mr. Maharidge's horror stories, from Guam and Okinawa, like the time he used the corpse of a Japanese soldier he'd shot as a shield in a firefight, while screaming at his fellow Marines to stop whimpering for their mothers. The Battle of Okinawa killed more than 250,000 people, including about 150,000 civilians, in three months of bombardment and cave-to-cave, hand-to-hand combat. It flattened the island down to mud and coral. It was sickeningly brutal, even by the debased standards of 20th-century war.
"My dad came back and was drunk for four years," Mr. Maharidge said. He was surprised while researching the book to learn how many vets died in the years right after the war. "A lot of guys just drank themselves to death," he said. "My father, if he hadn't met my mother, he wouldn't have lived."
Steve Maharidge died in 2000, and most in his generation have gone to their graves. Vietnam veterans now form the cresting wave of the sick and injured, though veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are suffering in alarming numbers, too, strained by multiple deployments and scarred by blast injuries. They are coming home with grave wounds that would have left their predecessors buried on the beach.
Maybe Shakespeare's Caesar was wrong: maybe the valiant taste of death over and over again. Mr. Maharidge found that his subjects' war memories seemed to grow clearer and more vivid as they grew old. Joe Lanciotti, a sharpshooter in L Company, was 86 years old when he wrote to Mr. Maharidge last year, urging him to finish the book. Without the expletives, the e-mail reads:
"To me it was a state of confusion and FEAR with shouted hysterical commands, screaming, shells exploding, darkness and flame from flares and fire. I was there and I never saw the enemy but knew he was out there somewhere. Trying to kill us.
"When your father and I, and the other kids walked, crawled and stumbled down from Sugar Loaf with wounded minds that probably never healed we did not know whether the cause was artillery blast or mortar shells. We were reduced to the point of insanity from the general horror and fear of ... war. Slobbering, crying, shaking, vomiting ... screaming, mumbling, trembling, swearing. FEAR FEAR ... FEAR — combat fatigue my ass."
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