Once More to the Reef

A hero's son fills in a blank spot on the family map
By Craig Vetter

I have no memory of him. A few black-and-white snapshots, taken on one of his brief shore leaves, show me riding his shoulders, but no matter how hard I've looked at those photos over the years, they've never been much more to me than limning on a map that is otherwise blank. Except for Okinawa, the name and now the place below me, a thousand empty miles south of Tokyo and Seoul, a thousand miles north of Hong Kong and the Philippines.

On our approach to the airport at Naha, a flight of five American F-15s came into view to the west and began peeling off for landings at the massive air base at Kadena, home to most of the 30,000 U.S. troops who are stationed here against whatever new fires might flare among Asian nations.

Sometimes called the Keystone of the Pacific, Okinawa, the largest in the loose spatter of islands known as the Ryukyus, has prospered and suffered its whole history because of its step-stone bearings in this typhoon-swept corner of the great ocean. For 300 years, beginning in the fourteenth century, it buzzed with trade as merchantmen and pirates sailed in with cargoes from China, Japan, Java, Siam, and Korea. It had its own language and own king until the end of the nineteenth century, when Japan invaded and annexed it as a Nipponese prefecture; then came World War II, making it a crucial dot on the war maps in Tokyo and Washington. Today, Okinawa is less than an hour by fighter jet from every major city in East Asia, which is how it got its other nickname: the Tip of the Spear.

The view of Naha from the air is grim testimony to the loss of whatever might have been proud or beautiful about this capital city. Set on rolling hills punctuated by sharp ravines, downtown and neighborhoods spill toward the sea in a jumbled swath of boxy stucco and concrete, the quick-and-dirty architecture of a city raised on its own ruins in a postwar rush to get the survivors out of the monsoon rains that each year turned the island to mud.

My father's ship, the Longshaw, was commended for its part in the destruction of Naha, which sits on the southwestern end of the island and was the center of the battle. The airport stretches along the water's edge on the western shore of the city, and just before touchdown I strained to catch sight of the huge coral reef, called O Se, onto which the Longshaw went hard aground. But there were reefs everywhere I looked: milky streaks and hooked scribbles that made it hard to imagine safe course through the choppy green waters.

It took a heavy thumbing through my phrase book to help the taxi driver find my hotel. They don't speak much English on Okinawa. Most of the road signs, billboards, newspapers, and magazines are in Japanese. On my way into town I saw only one sign in English: ARMY GO HOME, it read, reflecting a 50-year-old sentiment that had been newly enraged by the 1995 rape of a schoolgirl by three U.S. Marines. They had been sentenced to seven years in prison by Japanese judges, and I worried that my little pilgrimage might somehow be sabotaged by events that were, in a way, distant aftershocks of the disaster that had shattered my family so many years before.

My mother and her mother were left to raise me and my sister when the telegram from the Navy arrived in Palo Alto in May of 1945. They gave me no details in their accounts of my father's death, and I have no memory of the moment they told me he was gone. As far back as I can remember, it was just one of the essential first facts of my life, like my name, which at the time was Peter Simmons.

Actually, no one knew much beyond "missing in action" until two months after the battle, when a carefully typed letter arrived from the Longshaw's single surviving officer, a man named Bly. My mother put it in the last of six loose-leaf binders that contained every letter, every photograph, every scrap of paper she thought might someday help my father become something more than a ghost for my sister and me. Once she'd finished them, she never looked at the binders again, and reading Bly's letter, it's easy to understand why not.

He began by confirming that Robert Simmons was still listed as missing, and then described what he saw that blustery May morning as the ship took up its station to resume shelling Naha and suddenly drove onto the coral head. "It was impossible to get her off this reef without assistance," he wrote. "Japanese shore batteries commenced firing upon the ship, and despite the cool and heroic efforts of our gallant crew, who returned fire immediately, she received six shell hits which mortally wounded her."

Bly then described Robert taking command of rescue efforts on the fantail, at which point he wasn't seen again. He finished the letter by noting the "extremely slight possibility" that Robert had been blown overboard and managed to swim the mile to shore, which was still held by the Japanese. He then said that 28-year-old Lieutenant Simmons was well liked by officers and crew, that he had been recommended for a Bronze Star, and that his family should feel justly proud of him.

Pride was nowhere in my mother's reaction to Robert's death. Much later, she told me that the strongest of her feelings at the time was anger that he hadn't somehow found a way to save himself after the captain gave orders to abandon ship. For her, the awful truth that all of a sudden her husband "wasn't there" rendered words like "heroic" and "gallant" bitterly meaningless.

Ah, but they meant something to me, even at three and four years old. I filled the hat from his uniform with tissue paper and wore it while I dragged his long dress sword around. I stood at attention, learned to salute. I took the Bronze Star and Purple Heart out of their little boxes often. And I stared long and hard at my favorite of the photos: the unsmiling guy in uniform khakis, leaning against a bulkhead that was stenciled with the silhouettes of the Japanese ships and planes his destroyer had killed before he himself was finally killed in his last effort to save the wounded.

And I wondered: Am I brave?

In Naha, I bought a map and a cigar and made my way south out of the city in a rental car. I don't much like cigars, but this one was a little joke between Robert and me that came out of one of the hundreds of letters he wrote to my mother over his four grueling years at sea. She'd arranged the letters into the binders by date, and around the time I turned 30, I finally got up the curiosity and the emotional stamina to sit down and read them.

Robert had ambitions to journalism, something I didn't know when I took up the craft, and his writing was lively, clean and evocative, usually tinged with humor, sometimes despair. Every letter closed with his aching desire to be with the woman he'd married two days before he sailed for Pearl Harbor. "All my love, samples later," he promised her in one of my favorite sign-offs.

In many of the letters he talked about me. Robert was pleased by my mother's stories, which pretty much made his young son sound so bright that he didn't throw a shadow, but he worried that I was a boy being raised by women. "Two females is one over the quota," he wrote when I was barely six months old. "Somebody's got to roar and growl at him now and then...put that masculine note in his training. Maybe I'll buy him a rifle for Christmas."

Robert grew up in Seattle, where he spent time hiking and camping in the Olympics, fishing the Snoqualmie River with his father and grandfather. He was a sailor and even a boxer for a time, and all of it made him determined that his son should grow up a "roughneck." His tongue was always in his cheek on the subject, but his anxiety over my fatherless boyhood was real and he mentioned it often. When I was about a year old he suggested that my mother take me to the train yards so I could "talk things over with the boys who camp down there." Then he wrote, "Cuss him now and then and stick a cigar in his mouth when he starts teething. He's not to be a namby-pamby now."

I smoked the stogie down as far as I could stand it: south through the fishing port of Itoman, then into gentle hills that overlook the East China Sea. You're never far out of sight of the ocean on Okinawa. Even in the mountainous green of the north, 18 miles is as wide as it gets, and the twisting jungle roads break often onto vast blue seascapes that conjure the ancient, fish-eating loneliness of the place.

There was, however, nothing quiet about the island on April 1, 1945, the day the Allies came ashore. It was Easter Sunday, and the waters swarmed with 1,500 warships. Some of them, like the Longshaw, were there to bombard the island with a shelling so ferocious that it was later called the Typhoon of Steel. The rest of the armada waited beyond the reefs to deliver 183,000 assault troops onto the narrow beachheads.

The 77,000 Japanese soldiers on shore were hunkered in the natural limestone caves that worm beneath the coral crust of the island. This was to be their last stand short of mainland Japan, and they were resolved to make the price of allied victory awful. Dug in with them were 20,000 men of the Okinawan Home Guard, draftees who were not issued guns because of the historical mistrust the main islanders had always felt for their southern island cousins. The Home Guard fought with sticks that had bayonets wired onto the ends, and most of them were killed in the pitiless fighting that began that April Fool's Day and raged for nearly three months. When it was over, 72,000 Japanese were dead, along with 130,000 Okinawan civilians. The Americans--the winners--lost 14,000.

In 1995 a memorial to the victims of the battle was dedicated on the far southern coast of the island, 13 miles from Naha at a place called Peace Prayer Park. Nothing I'd read said anything about how beautiful it is. Typhoon-bent pines and fan palms dot grassy terraces that step their way down to the ragged edge of hundred-foot cliffs over which the last defenders of the island were literally pushed into the sea. It's nearly impossible to imagine the carnage that swept these hillocks until, on the central terrace, you come upon the polished marble slabs on which the killing is remembered, name by name.

The walls are about four feet high and set like open books in semicircular files that radiate from a central tablet called the Cornerstone of Peace. The names are cut into the marble in a way that's reminiscent of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, except that here the roster includes every man, woman, and child, soldier and civilian, Okinawan, Japanese, and American, who died on the island that spring: more than 230,000 of them.

There is no war memorial like it in the world, and I couldn't help wondering as I walked the paths through the stone folios what it would amount to if such a monument were carved for every battle of every war ever fought. I pictured a wall wrapping the earth the way string winds around the center of a baseball.

Most of the slabs are crowded with names cut in Japanese characters, and here and there on the grass around them Okinawan families sat with picnic lunches. I expected that my American face might provoke an unfriendly moment, but everyone greeted me with a smile and a nod. As the names on the walls turned to English, I walked casually into their ranks, up the alphabet, telling myself that Robert's name probably wasn't here. He was killed on a ship, after all, and though his body washed ashore and was buried for a time in a temporary cemetery somewhere on the island, I was prepared for him to be missing from this massive necrology; it seemed such an unlikely reach for the people of Okinawa to have put together an archive that remembered a man who grew up on the far side of the Pacific and whose fate here was to kill and be killed.

Then, carved perfectly into a wall covered with names that began with the letter S, I found him: SIMMONS ROBT N.

I was hit with a storm of tears, the kind of tears that American boyhood trains you out of. I stood there blubbering, feeling as close as I've ever felt to my father, talking to his name, a name we don't even share anymore. My mother remarried when I was seven years old, my stepfather adopted me, and for reasons that never made much sense, both my names were changed and Peter Simmons became Craig Vetter. I didn't think much of it at the time. Now it felt like just another piece of the whole damn robbery.

When my tears subsided, i laid a bushy bouquet of pink and white orchids under Robert's name and shared a little family gossip. I told him, among other things, that he needn't have worried about me turning out soft or timid. His wife, my mother, Win, had seen to my education as a roughneck as well as any man could have. She'd grown up an athlete in a time when feminine images did not include sporting competition. She rode horses, she played basketball and field hockey, and most of all, she swam. As a teenager in the 1930s she took her powerfully quiet freestyle into several California regional championships and always came away with medals, most of them for first place.

After the war she taught swimming, and I was one of her students. At around five I'd perfected a splashy little shallow-end dog paddle, and by six I could chop my way the length of the pool with some style and no fear. Which bothered my mother. The thing I remember most about her lessons was the admonition that if you didn't fear the water, you were a fool. For her, fear and respect were the same, and as long as you didn't let go of either, all kinds of otherwise dangerous doings became possible. Including a swim she made in notoriously sharky waters near Panama while the freighter she was traveling on waited for its turn through the canal. "Yes," she said. "I did that. But there was a man with a rifle watching from the ship's railing the whole time I was in the water."

Somehow, for her, courage was not something to prove or even admit to. For me, the son of a dead hero, it was the central question of character. I was 11 the first time I put on a uniform of my own and took an oath to be brave. The Boy Scouts had been designed along military lines, and though I never rose very high in the ranks, I loved the mock heroics--hiking in the mountains, learning the knots, practicing first aid and how to survive if you were lost in a hostile place with nothing more than a safety pin, a shoestring, a match, and a compass.

I never graduated to military service. Robert's death kept me from that through a deferment granted to sole surviving sons of men killed in action. I don't think I would have gone anyway. By the time I was eligible, Vietnam had begun to tarnish the good name that World War II had given to the fight for God and country. And by then, my notions of heroism were shifting onto those, like my mother, who had been left by the war to fight the day-to-day battles of ordinary life.

She was working for the telephone company and two months pregnant with me on December 7, 1941, the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Enemy submarines had been spotted off the California coast, blackouts were in effect, and the expectation was that invasion was probably imminent. The attack never came. Instead, six months later, my mother's grit was tested at my birth. I emerged foot first, at which point the doctors suggested that the only way to save her life was to take mine. She said no. What followed nearly killed her, broke one of my arms and dislocated the other, and left me in the hospital for six weeks.

Robert, meanwhile, was in a San Diego naval hospital, spitting up blood while doctors searched for an ulcer they never found and then took out his appendix because they couldn't think of what else to do. Not long after my mother brought me home, we went down to see him, the first of the two times my father and I were together. Then he went back to sea.

Now my mother's long letters filled up with me. My arms healed well and quickly, and when, at two months old, I tried to stand up in her lap, she reported it in the kind of proud detail that got Robert speculating on my athletic career. "So the kid is trying to stand up?" he wrote. "Has narrow hips, hey? Maybe he'll be a boxer, or a skier, or a swimmer. Whatever, it'll be with that deadly kind of intensity of his mother's, that do-it-or-bust attitude."

Water polo was as close as I ever came to boxing, but I did become a skier, a swimmer, a runner. I didn't begin my flirtation with dangerous games until, at around 30, I was offered a series of magazine assignments that sent me ice climbing, ski jumping, skydiving, cliff diving, and wing walking. I'd never tried any of them before, and I had no idea whether I was up to the marathon of fright that was in store. I told myself there would be no shame if I wimped out early in the project, but I didn't believe that. I'd read my father's letters by then, and though I thought I was past needing to know whether or not I was a brave boy, I wasn't.

My mother read the stories as they were published, one after another, for five months. Mostly she just rolled her eyes after each episode and said, "Be careful, will you?" I told her not to worry, that I had the best coaches and guides, that there was always a man with a rifle watching from the railing.

Kadena Marina, a small-craft harbor run by the U.S. Air Force, sat nearly deserted in the chilly morning wind. I walked the parking lot through a thicket of trailered sailboats, then found three men smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, and talking fish and politics at a picnic table overlooking the slips. I asked if I could hire a boat. "Might be arranged," one of them told me. "Dependin' on how long and how far you want to go." He had sandy hair, several days' worth of stubble on his cheeks, and a little bit of the South in his voice. "This is some of the worst weather of the year," he said.

His name was Larry Kramer, and it turned out he'd been on the island for 13 years, most of them as a sergeant in the Special Forces. He'd fought in Vietnam and was married to an Okinawan woman. He'd retired from the army a couple of years before, bought a boat, and began running fishing charters.

He listened as I told him the story of the Longshaw, and then the two of us huddled over an old map I had from navy archives and compared it to his charts. Our maps had the O Se reef in slightly different positions, which reminded me of a conversation I'd had with a Longshaw survivor at a reunion in Pennsylvania ten years before. He'd been an enlisted man and didn't know much about my father, but he did remember a navigational detail from that terrible morning that he thought might have made the difference between safe passage and going aground. "We knew that reef was there and we thought our course was clear of it," he told me. "But our charts were 20 years old, and the thing about coral is, it grows."

When I asked Kramer if I could dive or snorkel the site, he said no: The waters around O Se had been designated an ecological reserve and were off-limits to the heavy traffic of the scuba tours that visited the island each year. "But we can probably get pretty close," he said, "if the weather doesn't get any worse." He looked at the darkening patches leaking across the gray horizon.

We cast off through the narrow harbor channel aboard Kramer's heavy old 52-foot trawler, the Kajiki Maru. "Kajiki means 'billfish,'" said Kramer's 21-year-old-son, Lawrence, as he rigged trolling lines for whatever tuna, marlin, or skipjack might be looking for lunch along our ten-mile-course south into the waters off Naha. "And Maru means 'circle.' They put that on all Japanese ships, meaning, 'May we come safely back to the place we began.'"

Outside the breakwater, as we bucked and rolled our way down the coastline through the growing swells, it struck me that I hadn't seen any seagulls. Maybe driven inland by the coming storm, I guessed. "There aren't many seagulls around Okinawa," said Kramer. "After the war, food was so scarce that the people raided the rookeries on the out-islands for eggs. Wiped 'em out."

An hour and a half into our voyage it began to rain, the seas came up to 12 feet, and our bow spray began crashing over the cabin roof. "I don't think we're going to make it," said Kramer, wrestling the wheel to keep us on course. "And once we get around that peninsula"--he pointed to the spit of land ahead of us--"it's going to get worse."

"I'm sorry," he said, as he turned us back toward the harbor. "But at least you got some feeling for what it can be like out here--what your dad was probably up against in May of '45."

Before I left Okinawa I made a second trip to the walls in Peace Prayer Park. I bought more flowers and laid them, without tears this time. I took some photos and then wandered to the upper reaches of the park, where each of the Japanese prefectures had erected monuments to its lost soldiers.

Several days earlier in Naha, I had gone to see the only remaining Japanese shore gun left in place after the battle. The cannon was dug into a hilltop cave and pointed west over the airport runway, in the rough direction of O Se. A small plaque was fixed to a rock that stood in the shadow of the long barrel; a gardener with a Weed Eater was busy cutting the grass around it. I stood for a while, trying to imagine that May 18th, the Longshaw helpless on the reef, the noise, the explosions, but I couldn't make any of it vivid enough to feel the anger and sorrow I'd expected. What I felt instead was a deep gratitude to the Okinawans for having tended this garden of dark memories so carefully and for so long.

Now, as I walked cobbled trails through the beautiful bonsai forests that surrounded the memorials of Peace Prayer Park, a wrinkled Okinawan woman waved me over to her souvenir stand and asked me in bumpy English why I was here. When I told her, she bowed and said that she had lost both her parents in the battle. She had been nine years old, and when American troops found her she was terrified that they were going to kill her. Instead they gave her milk and chocolate and took her to safety. "American GI number one," she said. Then she asked about my mother and what the loss of her husband had done to her.

"She never really got over it," I told her. "But she was very strong, very brave."

Longtime contributing editor Craig Vetter profiled Yvon Chouinard in the January issue.

Illustration by Marc Lacaze