Honor Thy Father (eBook)

1. Who Are You?

What makes us the way we are? Is it our upbringing? Is it our genetic makeup? My opinion: it’s a combination of the two but not necessarily in equal parts. What about toughness? Is that upbringing and genetic makeup? Or purely mental? Mind over matter? I don’t know the answer to that. I’m not even sure I know the answer to this question: Who was my father?

I do know my father, Joseph Johnson, was one tough son of a gun. He might have even said he was a tough bastard. Literally. After all, he was born out of wedlock as were all of his siblings. He was born in 1931, the second oldest. His father was forced to marry their mother just before she was committed to a sanitorium. Then he turned the boys over to the state of Massachusetts and gave the girls up for adoption. He did this so that he could return some day and have the boys take care of him in retirement. God’s honest truth. My uncle told him to go to hell when he came back.

People say the older generation were tough. They probably were. I do know that my father was from an older generation and he was tough. He was forced into a foster home when he was about eight years old. He was abused. To what degree I don’t exactly know as he never really talked about that. He did tell me he had to eat what the foster family didn’t. He used to joke that if they threw up the food they were given, at least it was warm the second time down. How’s that for a childhood memory?

Another story I did hear was about the times he and his little brother stood outside restaurant windows staring at the people eating inside, hoping to be given something to eat. I can’t imagine that. How horrible—but I don’t think it compared to the abuse.

The abuse was so bad that after my father enlisted in the Army at age seventeen, he went back to the foster home and threatened the parents. He told them that if he ever heard of them abusing any of the children he’d come back and kill them. I assume he didn’t do that because he never went to prison. Perfect murder(s)? Nah.

My father was only nineteen when he was shipped off to Korea in September of 1950, a member of the 1st Calvary Division. Made it almost to the border of China before the Chinese kicked their butts at the Battle of Unsan. You should Google it. I’m surprised he survived.

He didn’t talk much about the war. Only a few stories here and there that I had to pry out of him. He never acted like it was a big deal. He didn’t consider himself to be a combat soldier even though he carried two bandoliers of ammunition all the time (think Pancho Villa). Survived the winter there and it was unbearably cold. He preferred to sleep outside using 2 sleeping bags!

I remember at one dinner, when I was young, my mother got angry because he told a joke that was in bad taste. She sometimes called him “Johnson” when she got ticked off, so she said, “Johnson, that’s gross!”. He just said, “I used to eat next to dead bodies so that doesn’t bother me.” He said it in such a matter of fact manner I wanted to know more, but when I was that age, he wouldn’t tell me. I had to wait until I was in my fifties.

In the sixties, while in the Air Force, he went to Vietnam. I’m fairly sure he was in country (67-68) during the Tet Offensive but the only story he ever told me was that he had a guy following him with orders to kill him if it looked like he was going to be captured. I never knew if he was serious or joking.

I remember the day he left and the day he came home like it was yesterday. We took him to a bus terminal in Riverside, California. As the bus pulled away my mother had her arm around me, and my father waved goodbye. I don’t know if she was crying (probably not being the stoic Japanese that she was) but I was.

It was almost a year later when he returned, unexpectedly early. My uncle brought him home. I answered the door one day to see my uncle who said he had someone with him. I looked at my father and said, “I know you!” Hey, I was only around eight.

As a child my father was my hero. I wanted to be just like him. My teachers told my mother that I was proud of my father and would brag about him. I don’t remember the bragging. I do remember wanting to be so much like him I insisted that my hair be combed just like his.

My father had curly hair. So curly it looked like he’d used a curling iron. Just over his forehead was a curl so big you could imagine surfing on it. I wanted that curl on my forehead. Bad. I would get my parents to try and create that curl but no matter how hard they tried they couldn’t do it. I was bummed.

Decades later my father worked for the Department of State. The neighbors thought he worked for the CIA because he was always traveling to different countries and didn’t say much about what he did. They called him “I spy.”

He didn’t work for the CIA. I knew who the spooks were at one of the embassies and the section they worked, and he didn’t work in it. Besides, the spooks were always paranoid, and my father most definitely wasn’t.

He was “Mr. Quiet.” Although, with belt in hand, he did chase my brother around the school playground once. Can you imagine that happening in this day and age? Maybe there was some carryover from his upbringing?

While stationed at the embassy in Oman he was driving near the border of Yemen with my mother, when a military jet strafed (shot) the car in front of them. When he got back to the Embassy everyone was concerned how close they had come to being killed. My father’s response: “He wasn’t shooting at me.” Classic. Mr. Cool. I only heard about it in passing over a decade later and I still have a hard time wrapping my head around it.

In many regards my father was a loner. The only men he associated with were the husbands of my mom’s friends. Most of them were retired military men also married to Japanese women. Even when he worked at the Department of State, he didn’t really have any friends except his boss from his first post.

I know why he didn’t have friends. He told me he didn’t trust anyone, and he told my wife the same thing. The lack of trust almost certainly stemmed from his childhood and Korean War experiences.

He was best friends with someone in his “outfit” as he used to say. They were shipped out from Korea separately and father was supposed to bring back a war souvenir for him—some sort of weapon. It was in my father’s sleeping bags which got confiscated by the Army. His friend didn’t believe him and called him a lying S.O.B. Never spoke to him again. That event, on top of my father’s earlier experiences of foster “care” pretty much shaped him for the rest of his life.

My father rarely cussed. I never once heard him say the “F word.” He was more likely to say “Damn Sam” than anything else. In later years he’d say, “no good nick.” Something I picked up and while talking to him would use. It’d go something like this: “The no-good nick dog peed on the floor.” And, if he did swear, he’d follow it up with “pardon my French”. Sometimes I’d use that expression as well.

His refraining from cussing didn’t rub off on me. The F word just rolls off my tongue. As an equity trader it was the norm. I haven’t traded in a long time and I’m still the same way. I’m terrible.

But I was like that in 8th grade. On one occasion my father tried to get me to tone it down when he heard me laying into the guys on my team as we played football. He told me it wasn’t worth getting all riled up over a game especially at the risk of losing my friends. I needed to calm down.

That talk didn’t have an impact on my profanity, but it did make me look at playing football differently. It was just a game. No reason to get excited about it. I lost that intensity and was never the rah-rah type when I played in High School. I didn’t get it back until I played in Japan and got knocked on my ass. Even have the video LOL.

My father did have a sense of humor—a sick one. His jokes tended to be on the gross side, something I inherited.

Example: My parents were in India because my mother always wanted to see the Taj Mahal. They were on a train when my mother spotted a guy hanging out the window butt first, and naively asked what he was doing. Classic response from my father: “That ani’t no cigar, lady!” It still makes me laugh.

So, is this what makes the man? What shapes him? When my father was in the hospital (one of many stays) the palliative nurse (who happened to be a Sister) asked me why he was so tough; what his upbringing was like. I told her about the foster home and the abuse. She understood, she said. It all made sense to her. For me? I don’t know. I just know he was a tough son of a gun.

God only knows everything he went through growing up in foster care and the Korean War. I have only a vague idea. I do know he survived at least eighteen different bouts of aspiration pneumonia! Throw in multiple UTIs (urinary tract infection) with at least one of them requiring a PICC Line and IV Push of antibiotics for three weeks while recovering from said pneumonia! Toss in some sepsis (that’ll kill you), C. diff, MRSA (both can be dangerous bacteria) and who knows what else and you wonder how the man could have survived as long as he did. Yeah, he was one tough bastard!

On top of all that he also had to survive me taking care of him. I can’t imagine what it was like to have a 10-inch tube stuck down your throat in order to suction mucus out of it. Every day. Multiple times a day.

I know his gag reflex was suppressed...