Free The Souvenir by Louise Steinman Page A

Umingan.
    Pacific Ocean, 4 January 1945, Saturday night
    Dearest Ruthie,
    This is my very first letter to you. I have been very reticent about writing; I can’t explain why. Your Mother has been telling you so many stories about me that I don’t have to introduce myself, and I fervently hope that when I do come home, I can live up to all of them.
    I am writing this letter while sitting on the top berth in a hold of a ship. It is very crowded, cramped, smelly and hot. The sweat just pours off you, whether you sit, write, read or sleep. This is the last letter I will write before we disembark and “Make History” as some bigwig once told us trying to impress us.
    Your Mother writes all about you, every detail all around the clock—and I love every word of it. I was a little cross with your Mother when she didn’t send the pictures of you at first—she didn’t realize that I am getting ready to go into combat and how badly I need to see what you looked like. But I’m sure that she understands now.
    I’d like to tell you a little of what you mean to me. You are the fulfillment of a great desire, and a symbol of a beautiful love of two people.
    Every man wants a child. It is a fulfillment of his function as a member of society. I especially wanted a daughter—one to take the place of my sister, a wish that I’ve wanted for some sixteen years. My childhood was very incomplete, and with her passing that void was never filled until you arrived. You are the first of the five that we always planned on having.
    I pray that we will be meeting soon—you, Mother and I. Until then, I promise you that I’ll always be thinking of you—I won’t try any heroics but of course my job and orders come first. I’ll be as cautious as humanly possible. I have the Russianattitude of “nichevo”—just Devil may care—and it is a good attitude right now.
    As for you—just keep Mother happy and busy so that she won’t worry too much during this period of waiting. I adore you both, Your Daddy
    The convoy reached Lingayen Gulf at 0000 (midnight, military time) on the eleventh of January 1945. When my father wrote this letter to his daughter, he was just days innocent of combat. Ruth was still healthy and whole. Nichevo was still strong enough to sustain him. The enemy was, though just barely, “over there,” in a place where Norman Steinman had never been and to which, after the war, he would never return except in memories he either tried to abandon or kept strictly to himself.

C HAPTER F IVE

Speculation
    D URING THE MONTH I spent at Fort Worden reading and rereading my father’s letters, certain phrases jumped out at me. It was shocking to come across the soldier’s blunt, monosyllabic descriptions of his foe: “Those Nips don’t give up until they are dead. So we have to kill them all.” This language was so alien to the vocabulary of the liberal and tolerant postwar father I thought I knew.
    I logged those comments and checked dates. Most of them appeared after January 1945, after the Twenty-fifth Division landed at Lingayen Gulf, the Philippines. From his references to “Hal Rubin’s gift,” my mother deduced her husband was on the eve of combat, and in one of the few of her letters that was preserved she wrote consolingly, “Being ruthless is a new experience for one as sweet and peace-loving as you.”
    How does one transform a “sweet and peace-loving” man into a soldier, someone who is expected and willing to kill? Most World War II GIs were civilians hustled from dry goods stores in the Bronx, farms in Tennessee, mines in Colorado, banks in St. Louis. What happened to them when they encountered gruesome combat against the Japanese in the swamps and jungles of the Pacific Islands? What enabled them to kill other human beings? And, just as important, what psychological scars did they bear after they