Category Archives: memoir

Helping Heal Wounded Warriors

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By Peter H. Green

Yesterday I had the privilege of making a presentation to a small group of military retirees being treated for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, who had enrolled in a Warrior Writers workshop at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in St. Louis. As each introduced him- or herself and told one personal fact that wouldn’t be readily apparent to an outsider, I got a sense of what troubles they had seen. A combat nurse whose father had recently died —a veteran himself, exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam and only after nine years of trying had received government disability benefits; a pilot of B-52 bombers who had flown missions in two Mideast wars; a sergeant who used to drown his military sorrows regularly at the bars and now is clean, and an officer who had the task of debriefing secret operatives, not realizing he had the stress syndrome until the doctors told him.

I had been briefed about keeping the identity of the participants confidential, but was told I could talk about their situations. Part of the introduction to this new workshop group was a discussion of how beneficial the VA had found writing to be in the process of recovering from traumatic stress.  A strikingly high percentage of veterans who had written about their ordeals had been able to overcome their symptoms and begin the long process of recovery. One of the patients in the class had become so interested in the process that he had studied it in depth at the University of Missouri and plans to go on and get a PhD in the beneficial effects of storytelling. As I listened to each participant reveal his or her story, I began to remember the effects that writing my book on my father’s World War II experience had on me–how many times I had broken down in tears at my keyboard as I reread Dad’s World War II letters and realized how much he cared about his family, and me in particular. Suddenly I knew how to begin my talk.

I pointed out that I had military stress very young when my father left home for the Marine Corps. I was barely five years old, and my baby sister had just been born. While my father had doted on me and lived for me, he was gone. My mother not only had to cope with keeping the car repaired, the house warm and the family budget under control, while staving off the unthinkable dread of Dad’s assignment to the next island invasion, now she had an abruptly orphaned new baby and a dispossessed son on her hands.  I realized even better how to relate to the members of this class.

I mentioned how hard it’d been to lose my father at age 68, and said I couldn’t bear to let go of him. I never realized why until I wrote my book, Dad’s War with the United States Marines, when it dawned on me that that it was because of this early deprivation of him as a child. I recounted how my idea for writing the book came about,  on a nostalgic college reunion trip to the East Coast, where we visited Mary Oates Johnson, a school friend of my wife, who was an editor and writer, in Andover, Massachusetts. She suggested that we take a weekend jaunt up to Annisquam to revisit the locale where I had spent my sixth summer at a cottage my aunt and uncle had rented while Dad was off to war. The rest is history; in fact, reading 400 letters Dad sent from the Pacific theater revealed some World War II history that had never been written before. The rest of my presentation was easy. I reminded my class that a disproportionate share of the world’s history has not only been created but written by members of the military. Starting with Homer and Julius Caesar, the list continues with Ernest Hemingway, Ernie Pyle, Winston Churchill and Dwight D. Eisenhower, to name just a very few. I told them, “If you don’t write down your history, much of it known only to you personally, it will die with you, and the world will never know.” I had begun to do it. Now. It was their turn.

That in itself was a very healing thought.

For more on this book, Dad’s War with the United States Marines,  see my website.

Till next time, good words to you,

Peter

Peter

Wartime Holiday Thoughts of Distant Loved Ones

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By Peter H. Green

For families separated from their loved ones by military service in faraway places, the holidays are particularly poignant. When Mom would read Dad’s letters sent from Mare Island Naval base, formerly near Vallejo, California, I would look at the sketches Dad drew for me on the pages of his letters, to show me where he was and what he was doing. My dad, Ben Green, had enlisted in December, 1944, as so many men did in those days, to defend our country from foreign aggressors,  leaving Mom,  my baby sister and me–just five years old–to fend for ourselves in a drafty, scary old Victorian house on the South side of Chicago. But he loved us with all his heart. They had a conversational correspondent across the miles–ultimately 8,000, separating Chicago from Guam in the Marianas–writing each other almost every day. He he wrote Mom to tell of his plans to send me Christmas presents and ask what he could send me, such as the scarce corduroy pants I needed–were they size five or six?–or a tricycle, items hard to find at home, that he might be able to buy on base or in San Francisco. “And what about the bike?” he wrote. “I see some advertised secondhand out here – this is a very transient population and people are always getting rid of hard to move things. It’s a world full of electric iceboxes nobody wants.” The following excerpt from my book, Dad’s War with the United States Marines, tells how he was feeling to be so far away from home.

Dad made sketches in his letters for me, since I was only 5.

“Ben clambered downstairs to the first deck of the barracks. There was Goldie with his wife and children – two darling little boys, he thought, one about Pete’s age and the other about two – he was just going to guard mount. As Goldie kissed his wife and headed out the door, Ben held first one and then the other boy up to the window so they could see their father, and that was almost too much. He said. “When the younger put his arms around his neck and asked, “Is that my daddy?” tears came to Ben’s eyes.”  –P. 75

As Christmas approached, Dad coordinated with Mom on presents for the children, including a wagon for me. He spent Christmas eve with friends, Lt. Burns and her fiancé, and arranged for a phone call home. In those days, that took about eighteen hours and involved several conversations to set up. ‘The operator and I started chinning and shooting the breeze in a very friendly fashion, and I think she must have put me in ahead of turn, because it really only took eleven hours, and the day operator acted as if she had known me all my life when the call came through. Pete seemed thrilled to talk and for once had lost his ‘allergy to telephone conversations.’ ”

Dad admitted to singing afterwards. His holiday loneliness was also eased when he dressed and went to dinner. “…it was such an elegant affair,TABLECLOTHS and a printed menu, which I am sending you… free cigarettes, a bag of nuts and an orange and a really marvelous turkey dinner.” Afterwards he went up to his bunk. “Then I had the glow of my wonderful presents all around me. The watch is positively beautiful and keeps second perfect time. It’s one of those good Swedish watches, which in case you didn’t know are the only ones left that still carry Swiss movements, since they alone can get them. The wallet is slick and just right. It fits snugly, either inside my pocket or in my trousers.”

Today’s soldier has a few advantages: occasional cell phone calls back home, e-mail and, if he or she is lucky enough to be in a well provisioned base camp, the opportunity for a video chat with loved ones. But there’s no escape from the tension and boredom of both soldiers and their families–the endless waiting, and loneliness, made only worse by austere conditions and the terror of not knowing if or when the family warrior will be involved in an invasion, a battle or a surprise attack. It’s no wonder that Mom’s favorite song from the Bing Crosby Christmas album was “I’ll be home for Christmas.” It held out hope for the five million families involved in the world’s biggest war that things might return to normal very soon.

I recall during my own Army basic training, even in peacetime,  how welcome a package from home felt when it arrived at my bivouac site. out in the boondocks with K-rations left over from the World War 2,  damp sleeping conditions, sand and mud everywhere. It was such a relief to know that Mom and Dad cared enough to send me dry towels, flannel wiping cloths for cleaning my rifle, candy bars, snacks and homemade cookies. Having these real, tangible things reinforced their cheerful news of  activities back home. At the time I didn’t think about it, but they had been through it all before and knew from hard experience what a soldier in the field missed most.

To read more about our family’s funny, sad , and heartwarming World War II adventure, please visit the website page about my family memoir and biography of my father, Dad’s War with the United States Marines.

Here’s hoping you and yours have a warm and happy holiday season.

Till next time,

Peter

Buddy Blattner, Member of the Greatest Generation, Pioneer of the Play-By-Play

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This week the world lost a buddy: my dad’s lifelong friend and Marine Corps pal, a mentor to hundreds of inner-city youths that he helped with sports programs and a once familiar voice to baseball broadcast listeners across the country. His name was Buddy Blattner.

A sports celebrity in his day—famous as a teenager for worldwide championships in table tennis, a stint with the New York Giants, where before the war he rivaled his teammate Johnny Mize in runs batted in, and the Philadelphia Phillies—he became known to radio audiences across the country. Starting in 1950 he called games for the St. Louis Browns, alongside Dizzy Dean, the Hall of Fame pitcher. They developed a style where Dean made the colorful commentary, while Blattner described the action in a form that has come to be known as the play-by-play. He told me, “At the time I was the only major leaguer to do baseball broadcasts.” By 1953 He and Dean were on television, broadcasting ABC’s Game of the Week.

When I interviewed Bud in September 2000 for my 2005 book, Dad’s War with the United States Marines, he explained how he learned the art. “In 1946 in the off-season I begin to practice commenting on games. I would take a recent game, recall about four innings and call the game. I would go over the commentary until I could make it sound better, more exciting or better description of the action. In those days, I did the commercial layouts, filled in my own background on the players and worked with just an engineer. I learned play-by-play and not in New York, but in St. Louis, which had a more forgiving atmosphere.”

From there he went on to broadcast for the St. Louis Hawks and spent two seasons reporting for the St. Louis Cardinals before migrating west to work for the California Angels. A measure of his contribution to his art is the fact that when he left he was replaced by Dick Enberg, who then joined the Angels’ broadcasting team and later became an institution in sports broadcasting as anchor for a new venture called ABC Sports.

I asked about his World War II experience: how he reconciled his fortunate position, coaching recreational activities for the troops on the island of Guam, with the nastier job of the guys in combat. Bud said, “We were where they put us. I didn’t want the war: not one of these kids wanted the war. I never felt self-conscious. You do what you’re told. We toured the forward area in a DC-3—Peleliu, Kwajalein–trying to hit a little spot of sand in an ocean that extended as far as the eye could see. If you chickened out you had a miserable life. Anybody who enlisted and spent a reasonable amount of time in service was a hero. My God, I never could have believed I would live.”

Bud still fondly recalled his days with my dad, Ben Green, at WXLI, the Armed Forces radio station on Guam, as one of the highlights of his tense but humdrum Pacific war experience.  Bud wrote and Dad produced a sports quiz program for the station. “Perhaps we could give away beer,” he said. “Whether the show was any good or not, we would be giving away the nectar of the gods.” With permission from headquarters to give away the beer, they created a show called “Sporting Chance.” Dad arranged for it to be broadcast before live audiences of 2,000 to 3,000 troops at theaters that existed all over the island. “It became the most popular doggone show on the island,” Bud recalled. “It was more difficult to write every week—there wasn’t exactly a research library or panel of experts to ask on these questions.” He noted that the winners and even the losers got cases of beer for their units for being part of the entertainment. The generals, admirals and the troops alike praised the new sound of WXLI, and the radio station’s beer ration increased. “Life on Guam had turned the corner,” Dad said. “This post-surrender duty, if you had to do it, wasn’t so bad.”

Let’s hope that Bud and Dad are now happily reunited. I’m sure they’re already negotiating with The Man Upstairs for an increased supply of beer for the troops.

For more of Dad’s and Bud’s hilarious adventures on Guam, read my World War II memoir and biography, Dad’s War with the United States Marines.

Staff Meeting at WXLI, by L. L. Rogers

More next time,

Peter

Peter

Peter H, Green

An architect who writes: what’s up with that?

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Peter
Welcome to “the green grapevine.” web log that is part of our new look for 2009. I figure with half a million people blogging around the world, perhaps one more can sneak in without doing too much additional harm. I haven’t read enough of those efforts, so I am more than likely to repeat all of their mistakes. Bear with me here while I report our little victories and defeats, funny encounters, random thoughts and a journal of my progress toward that elusive goal we all chase, self actualization.

What is an architect and planner doing writing anyway? And he writes books also, you say. It’s a long story, starting with parents, a housewife and an ex-Marine, who were both writers and publicists, a grandfather who was a construction contractor and me, a person that just loves to tell stories. My choice of architecture was a matter of interest and aptitude, but it also had something to do with finding a “practical” way to earn a living. And for a long career I have designed buildings, planned development sites and promoted my firm, all activities that I still enjoy. My favorite among these, however, was always describing the projects and getting people excited about hiring our team. This resulted in millions of words cascading from my computer screen over the years. That’s a lot of writing practice when you think about it. Then, after a nostalgic trip to Annisquam, the scene of my sixth summer in 1945, I was aware that there was a story worth telling (see my Foreword ). When I stepped down a few years ago from my day job (temporarily, as it now seems), I had time to peruse some 400 letters that my dad had written home during World War II, some funny stories he wrote about his personal war with the Marine Corps and a script Mom wrote for Dad’s surprise “This Is Your Life” 48th birthday party. Then over the next year, the story, which I had only begun in fits and starts, poured out and became my nonfiction family memoir, Dad’s War with the United States Marines.

The rest is the history that I’m here to tell you, if only in little bits and pieces. Once the writing was done, it was merely necessary to find an agent and a publisher. In case you haven’t checked lately, unless you’re the next Tom Clancy, literary agents rarely look at your work. That’s often because–despite your book’s readability and potentially wide appeal–you’re not hot enough to spark a bidding war over your next great novel with the five or six big publishers that remain in the English-speaking world. Most of those charming little presses like Borzoi Books and Doubleday, Doran & Co. have been snapped up by the great leviathans that today rule the commercial book world.

But just as I was about to give up all hope, Roger Hayes, the published writer of a Vietnam war story (On Point, St. Martin’s Paperbacks, 2001), whom I met through my military clients in St. Louis, said, “Forget everything you’ve been told: just approach the publishers directly.” My search then began in earnest, and I discovered that, as small to medium-sized publishers were acquired on the demand side, even smaller firms were being created or still existed on the supply side. After a renewed Internet search and a new flurry of inquiries and submissions, on a day in May 2006 one of my e-mails brought an answer. I met Jim and Lynne Rock of the Seaboard Press, an imprint of an established publishing house, one of those boutiques that still do exist. The tender loving care that they invested in the publication of my work, especially their fascination with my father’s hand drawn sketches sent home in his letters for me, his six-year-old son, was far in excess of what I might possibly have coaxed out of Simon & Shuster, even if they had beat down the door to publish it. I was on my way.

As the fall publication date neared, I put on my publicity hat and let the local press know that my dad had played a special role in the war’s history. On August 14, 2005 Harry Levins of the Post-Dispatch broke the story, on the anniversary of V-J Day, that it was my father who scooped the news of the Japanese surrender to the world sixty years earlier (See News and Reviews page) from his outpost at Armed Forces Radio Station WXLI on Guam. Other media attention was soon to follow: John Pertzborn interviewed me on KTVI Channel 2. From there, I dashed over to a downtown hotel, where Charlie Brennan was broadcasting a Veterans’ Day program on KMOX radio, raising money to provide phone cards for the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. He devoted the entire morning to interviews appropriate to the day’s celebration, including one with me about my book. In our lively exchange, Charlie couldn’t get over the fact that during the war we used to save bacon grease and other meat drippings in Mason jars and take them to the butcher. We were told that the government could turn them into explosives for our troops, although I still have no idea how they did that. (If you know, please post a comment.) That same day I held two other presentations and book signings in St. Louis and the book’s sales campaign was underway.

This, then, is a brief explanation of of why an architect attempts to write books. You can be the judge of how well I’m doing. It has been a fulfilling and a wonderful experience, although I miss my friends back in the office.

And my next book? It’s called “Crimes of Design,” a mystery about an architect who must turn sleuth to save his life, rescue his family and spare his beleaguered city. But this you can check for yourself back on my website.

Good reading until next time,

Peter