Here's a hypothetical for you: what would you do if you woke up one day and found that your life was a lot different than you thought it was, that there were many things you hadn't known about yourself, and not only that, but also that these things had deliberately been kept secret from you? And what if, on top of that, you learned that these secret things were out-of-the-ordinary things, even extraordinary in some cases? How would that make you feel?
Now, what if - on top of all of the above - you went on to discover that even though you hadn't known about the secret things pertaining to your life, there were people who had known about them, maybe not in full detail, but at least in part or through rumor. And what if you further found out that these people had used their knowledge of your life, however accurate it may have been, to take advantage of you without your knowing it? And you wouldn't know it because you wouldn't have known that your life had any secrets.
But these people did know that. They knew your life had big secrets behind it, and they used that knowledge to gain access to you, or maybe their parents did.
Perhaps you'd inherited a great fortune at birth, and were never told, yet your friends knew about it for all the time you'd known them. How would that make you feel? Would you feel that they never were your friends?
It's an interesting premise to consider, especially if the secret (or secrets) didn't involve a fortune but something far more powerful than money.
Now here's another hypothetical, and it's a strong one: what if you woke up one day and found out that your father was a Nazi war criminal? That he'd been involved in the death camps and heinous mass murder, long before you were born. How would that make you feel? And what if this news didn't jibe with the father you knew? Would you even believe it? You might not, especially if your father was an upright, mild-mannered citizen and community member.
But what if, later in your life, evidence started to pile up in that direction, that - yes indeed - your father had been a guard, or a thug, at a death camp, but as the years passed and the insanity receded, he had successfully "remade" himself as a professional man in a foreign country. But let's say he was not entirely reformed. He only seemed that way and presented a good "false front." Let's say that, in his new country, he learned the ropes through an established, ethnic gang of fellow emigrated Nazis, or Nazi sympathizers (posing as anti-Communists, perhaps), and that this clique had the power to allow him to, say, run a drug gang for profit? Or even a sex-and-drugs gang. Would you be shocked to find out all this stuff about your dad, if you knew him as an architect or engineer? You might indeed be stunned, if you didn't already suspect it or know about it.
This is how it was in the Mafia, or so we hear. It's the old Legitimate Businessman Theory. I'm sure there were children and even some very naive wives who thought dear old dad really was just an insurance man, when really he was rubbing people out. I'll bet there are plenty of Italian-American folks who could tell childhood stories of finding out their dad was a hitman.
But in our hypothetical situation, the reality is even worse. Dad turns out not to have been a hitman, but a mass murderer. Remember John Demjanjuk? The Cleveland auto worker? He was suspected, in the 1980s I believe, of being a guard at Treblinka, known to the inmates as Ivan the Terrible. He was tried and found not guilty, though many suspected he got off with a free pass.
Anyhow, as with our first hypothetical, it's an interesting, if awful, premise to consider, that you could wake up one day and find out that your dad had been a Nazi, and a murderous one at that. And that after the war he had relocated, say, to America, and you only had ever known him as dear old dad.
It would be incredibly tragic for the child in such a situation.
Now, imagine that our two hypotheticals are somehow intertwined. This is our Thought Exercise for today.
I did watch a movie last night, another documentary, called "The Thunder From Tinian", made in 1995 to commemorate 50 years since the end of the war. I was interested because of the Enola Gay, but also because Roy (Pearl's husband and one of my earliest male influences besides my Dad) was stationed on Tinian at the time the Enola Gay took off. The documentary features interviews with the surviving crew members, and also goes into the phenomenal amount of construction work that was required to turn the small island into an air base. The Navy's Seabees are featured. Their contribution alone is worth watching for. It's a harrowing story of the state of the world in 1945, and the film concludes with the crew members, to a man, saying that's impossible for anyone from a future generation to understand the position they were in, and that - had America not dropped those bombs, with all the horror they created - the end result of the war would have been a lot worse. They also point out that Japan and Germany were both close to creating their own atomic bombs, and what if they'd dropped theirs first? Humanistically speaking, it was a lose/lose proposition for those young men to be placed in the position of dropping those (or any) bombs, and yet, in the documentary, they all state that it was the only thing to do, in order to end the war. I happen to agree with them, though I wasn't there either, and (as they say) I can't possibly understand the position they were in, nor can a person with a condemnationalist opinion.
An important book on the subject, concerning the air offensive against Germany, is "Bomber Command" by Sir Arthur Harris, Commander of the Royal Air Force during World War 2. And for the perspective of those on the ground (the recipients of bombs), read "Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany" by Thomas Goodrich, a book I mentioned in the last blog.
Well, that's just about all I know for today. I mean, I know a lot more, but it's way too much for this (or any) blog. I am also thinking of San Diego Naval Air Station. Now called Naval Air Station North Island, or NAS North Island, it is part of the vast Naval Base Coronado that is spread out along the San Diego County coastline. According to Wiki, Naval Base Coronado, of which San Diego Naval Air Station is a part, is the largest aerospace/industrial complex in the United States Navy. I mention it specifically because I can remember going to San Diego Naval Air Station when it still went by that name. Perhaps my Dad took me to an air show there when I was very small. And maybe he had someone to meet at the airbase, as well. At the greater Naval Base Coronado, there used to also be the Miramar Naval Air Station. We went there, too, and in later years, when I became an adult, I used to get it confused with San Diego Naval Air Station, and think they were all the same thing.
Miramar, Coronado, San Diego Naval Air Station.....I lumped them all together. When I was between the ages of about 8 and 12, Dad used to take me and my brother and Mom down to San Diego to go to the beach. He loved it down there, and we'd go to different places, like La Jolla, Oceanside, and Coronado Beach itself, which had a famous old mansion near the sand, where Dad said all the old Colonels lived. Maybe it was a retirement home. But for sure it was a big mansion. Dad would point out the Navy's fighter jets roaring overhead. Miramar was, I think, home to the Blue Angels (but I could be wrong about that), and it was turned over to the Marine Corps in 1996, according to Wiki. We stopped going to San Diego, and the beaches, after 1972. But the trips to San Diego Naval Air Station that I am initially referring to happened way back in the "dark ages" of my memory, like when I was three or four.
In 1977, Dad announced that we were moving to Colorado Springs. "I'm joining NORAD, son." NORAD stands for North American Aerospace Defense Command. 1977 was a rough year for Dad. He'd broken his leg in a fall (caught his ankle on a bedpost) and he had a cast up to his hip. He'd been suspended from his job prior to that (Dad had a drinking problem), and he eventually lost his job at MGM, where I later worked. I remember telling him, that Summer in 1977, "Dad, if you don't go back to work, it'll be the worst decision you ever made." This was before he broke his leg. But it was his life, and his choice, and he did not go back to MGM. Instead, when his leg healed, he announced that we were moving to Colorado Springs, and for a while (maybe a couple of months) he was adamant about it. It was "NORAD" this, and "NORAD" that. NORAD, NORAD, NORAD. I just chalked it up to Dad's drinking and his military fascination. "We're moving to Colorado Springs, son." I even tried to find a brochure on Colorado Springs at the library, just in case we did move (there was no internet in those days or I could've looked it up).
Now, our move to Colorado Springs so that Dad could join NORAD was almost certainly a figment of his imagination. I say "almost" certainly, because I can't be 100% certain, only 99.9%, and that's because my Dad also almost certainly had secrets about his life, much like the person in our first hypothetical proposition, stated above. But in Dad's case, he did in fact know his own secrets (unlike the person in the hypothetical). Dad knew his own secrets, and they certainly had to do with the military, and possibly more than that, and the thing about Dad, was that he was able to keep those secrets. He had the discipline to keep them for his entire life. They may have even been what caused him to drink.
My own fascination with all things military comes from Dad, and things like our trips to San Diego Naval Air Station, and to Miramar, and to San Pedro to tour the battleships, and to Point Mugu, and Vandenberg.
I've had a persistent memory-image (call it a prehistoric memory, or even a dream) that I call The Red Elevator. In it, I am inside a Red Elevator, that itself is inside a tower made of red steel crossbeams. The tower is high, and we are going up very fast, or at least it feels fast to me, and I can see the red crossbeams going by as we go up. "We" means me, and a man I think is my Dad, and another man who is "in charge" of this trip. My Dad (I think of him here as my "formal Dad") is wearing a black suit and is carrying a briefcase. He is "squared away" as they say. With his free hand he is holding my hand, so I am guessing I am very small, maybe three? And there's three of us in this elevator, but the main thing is the elevator itself, because of the Red and the Crossbeams. And the height of the tower.
And when we get to the top, we get out onto a platform (also red), and there's a big white object there, and someone opens it up, and from the platform you can see as far as the eye can see. ///
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