Books |
My Father’s Secret War
Lucinda Franks
By
Published: Jan 01, 2007
Category:
Memoir
The greatest thing about The Greatest Generation is how little they burdened their kids. They fought demonic Nazis and maniacal Japanese, and after they won the war, they came home and picked up their lives where they left off. And if they didn’t talk about what they’d done between 1942 and 1945, all the better — who really wants to hear war stories?
The underside of myth is nightmare. Yes, many World War II vets sucked it up and maintained radio silence to the end of their days. But not without paying a high price — what we now call “post-traumatic stress.” If you are the child of a vet, you may have seen these symptoms: damaged relationships, alcoholism, chain-smoking, suicide and other forms of early death.
Silence turns out not to be such a virtue after all.
Lucinda Franks was the youngest journalist ever to win a Pulitzer Prize. But for most of her life, she had very little interest in finding out why her father was so remote: “The Man Who Wasn’t There.” With good reason — Tom Franks was a world-class jerk.
When she was just 7, Lucinda learned — from her miserable mother — that her father had a girlfriend. Late at night, she heard the sounds of Daddy slapping Mommy. And in her bedroom, her father thoughtfully stored a gun under her mattress. When Lucinda was in college, he proposed that she meet his lover. Later, when she was covered in glory at The New York Times, he retreated.
“My Father’s Secret War” begins with an eviction notice. Lucinda’s mother is long dead, Tom’s world has shrunk to cigarettes and coffee and gun magazines, and now he’s about to lose his home. Lucinda drives up to make some sense of the chaos — and, in a carton, finds World War II maps and an Iron Cross, symbol of the Nazi party.
And with that, the book takes off — Lucinda will turn her reportoring skills on her father, racing to learn who he really was before he topples into dementia and dies.
Many of us had difficult fathers, some as remote as Tom Franks. I did, and it never occurred to me to mount a multi-year probe of his past. A few facts suffice; the conclusion is obvious; move on.
But Lucinda Franks — she’s a pit bull. She strips away layer after layer of her father’s defenses. The process runs the gamut. She can be sweet and seductive. And she can be bare-knuckles brutal, reducing her father to blubbering.
You know how the story ends: no reconciliation, no book. It’s the road traveled that is so compelling. If you like war stories, here’s a twisted one: a veteran who takes wartime secrecy so literally he can’t open up, even after half a century. And if you like family dramas, here’s a story of a father’s love masked as indifference and a daughter’s need for a father so desperate it drives her to her own kind of brutality.
In the end, we are re-introduced to Tom and Lucinda Franks. In this telling, he’s a hero — a real one. And although she never says it, isn’t she a heroine for penetrating his armor and learning his story?
There are two books here. For most of us, this book will be a first-rate psychological detective story that’s perhaps a bit too richly reported. But for adult children seeking reconciliation with their aging fathers, it’s more like a gift — an ice breaker, a way to start a conversation that might bring revelation and closure before the old man shuffles off. For those readers, “My Father’s Secret War” will be less like a book and more like a public service.
Three cheers for both books.
To buy “My Father’s Secret War” from Amazon.com, click here.
