Once my siblings and I broke this traditional silence and started talking about Daddy Jim, the enormity of what we didn’t know about him hit us hard. The paradox of the wartime loss - a lifetime of trying to see the loss as heroic when in truth we felt resentful and confused by it - had not only silenced us, but diminished our father. Like others I was meeting who had lost fathers in WWII, we Coe’s had no sense of Jim’s character or what he had gone through. We had no idea what he achieved, what he meant to our mother, what their marriage was like, nor how, where, or even why, he died. We didn’t know when his birthday was, what year he’d died, or how old he was when he was last heard from. We had no grave to go to, no idea whether he was ever missed, mourned, or memorialized. We never heard about a funeral, had no idea when or how to commemorate his loss. We never went to a Memorial Day service or Veteran’s Day parade, didn’t speak or think of him on those or any other days. There were no friends who stopped by to reminisce about him, no war buddies who checked up on us, not even a picture displayed in our home to remind us of him.
I came to learn that we had adapted, at a formative age, to a wider cultural silence. The nation had been triumphant, and the message in the late forties and fifties was to not look back at losses, but move on, make up for lost time. The culture ignored widows and orphans, while glorifying their lost men into empty abstractions. No wonder I’d been confused!
Now, after breaking through the silence around my father, I drive down to Portsmouth, New Hampshire each Memorial Day, to stand beside the old sub vets as they lay wreaths and toll the bells at the submarine memorial. I’m honored to be among them, knowing now what their patriotism means. “I wake up in the middle of the night and think of them,” said Charlie Witt, veteran of the S-39, about my father and the other S-39ers who went down on Cisco. “I wonder where they are.” At the memorial service, especially during the tolling of the bells in which a sub vet calls out the name of every lost submarine, I can feel the minds of these old men move down to the depths, wondering where their lost shipmates are, and wondering why, oh God, why them rather than me?
