by Karen Piper
“And this kid says,” he went on, “he can give me a ride, but he’d have to shut down the airport first. I had to wait four hours!”
“Your suit must have looked a mess by then,” my ever-practical mom said. “Too bad they wouldn’t let me come with you. I could have ironed it before your interview.”
“You wouldn’t have enjoyed the barracks, Mary,” he replied. “Anyway, I got the job.”
“You did.”
As we drove, what had once looked like dollhouses thrown across the desert floor turned into real buildings with names. We passed Three Sisters Restaurant, Grumpy Bears Groceries, and a church made of sun-damaged lumber like the kind they have in John Wayne westerns. We passed a feed store with a life-sized plastic horse on its roof. Strangely, all the stores and houses were on the right side of the road while there was only a barbed-wire fence on the left, behind which was nothing but empty desert.
“Coyote,” I said, clutching the postcard harder, expecting to see a real coyote any minute. “Coyote.” I petted the imaginary postcard fur.
Finally, we went through the base’s main gate, where a U.S. Marine checked my dad’s badge. A sign next to the gate read “Loose Lips Sink Ships” in big red letters over a picture of a sinking ship. The marine saluted briskly when he saw my dad was a captain, and my dad saluted back, crisply and more sure than anything I had ever seen him do. “Makes you feel important, that does,” he said over his shoulder, “though they are so sloppy about salutes these days.” At our insistence, he demonstrated how a proper salute should be done, while my mom urged him to keep both hands on the wheel.
Past the gate, the street was wide and lined with sycamore trees and automatic sprinklers that sparkled like rainbows in the sun. But then we turned off the main road, and it was all tumbleweeds and dirt again, with rows and rows of identical duplexes on identical street blocks. The buildings were washed out and faded from the sun, their paint peeling. In this hostile environment, even the paint could not cling, so the houses were a cracking, flaking gray. The government seemed to love gray. The streets were a palette of light brown sand, gray houses, and black streets. At that moment I realized we were moving not to a world of brilliant wildflowers and desert antelopes, but to bland, blocky government houses. The desert did not know that I wanted flowers now; it did not care that time for a child is forever. I would have to wait.
Rounding the corner to our new house on Rowe Street, we saw that the lawn was a dirt patch with a few clumps of dried grass. The duplex, an ash gray box with a flat roof, looked like an abandoned cell block, with a front porch tacked on that may as well have been a half-finished room: just four cement walls with window-sized holes to look out from. It was not at all like the pictures in Life magazine, which showed a smiling family—including a beautiful teenage daughter—standing on a nice lawn surrounded by flowers and a picket fence. Another Life photo depicted the living room of their huge house, where the family sat around in suits and high heels, everyone laughing. ROCKET TOWN! the magazine headline had read. I felt betrayed.
Inside, the house smelled of cigarettes and vague foodlike substances trapped in the forest green shag carpeting. My mom rushed to her familiar Ethan Allen couch, which had been moved in earlier by the navy. My dad followed, and they sat in silence, staring down, as we watched them tentatively. Then my dad looked up at us and smiled, saying, “Well, at least I don’t have to stay in the bachelor’s quarters anymore. This is our home, Mary!” He patted her thigh lightly, more out of nervous energy than affection, like the way he sometimes obsessively tapped the steering wheel.
“Don’t do that.” She caught his hand the second time. “You know I don’t like it when you do that.” But he never stopped, for the rest of his life.
Our house in Seattle had azaleas, alders, and our blooming cherry tree. Our duplex had one dying cottonwood. It also had no garage, no garbage disposal, and no washer-dryer hookup. Instead, we went to the base laundry; my dad insisted we avoid the one off base, which was better. “He was probably worried about me being able to get on base again,” my mom explained later. She didn’t have a badge. In the bedroom, a loud swamp cooler hummed, and the kitchen had a stove and refrigerator that looked as though they were from the forties: round and white with a big “General Electric” logo in silver. A sign on the refrigerator instructed us to call Public Works, number 7177, for repairs or problems with the house. My mom pulled the flyer off the refrigerator and went into the living room. She sat again on her Ethan Allen couch, covered in perfect pale blue linen, and began to rub its arm as if to invoke some magical genie that would restore her real home. Christine and I stared at the walls of cement and asbestos slapped over chicken wire to avoid looking at her.
“You know there was no way to get a better house,” my dad reminded her, reading her disappointment. “Not until I’m promoted to G-12. At least we didn’t get a trailer.” He seemed to think this would make my mom appreciate the duplex more. I later learned she had assumed we would be able to move if we didn’t like the place the navy picked for us. My dad had broken the news to her shortly before we arrived. “The navy doesn’t work that way,” he had said. We were stuck.
Only as an adult did I discover the base housing regulations, tucked away in my mother’s files, which explained how it all worked. If my mom and dad had been childless, I found out, they would have been assigned a motel-sized room with only an electric range. If Christine or I had died, they would have also had to go to that apartment building, since our house had a two-child minimum. If my dad had packed up and left us, my mom would have had five days to move out. It was all in the housing regulations. Mom was completely dependent on him, and us, for even this tiny space. We all had to stay alive.
As for me, my only disappointment was that I had not seen any wild animals.
“Mom, uh,” I asked quietly, “where are the coyotes?”
No one replied.
Instead, Christine grabbed my postcard from me. When I tried to grab it back, she pulled my arm behind me and twisted, hard. I screamed, “Mom!”
“Say uncle, say uncle,” my sister commanded. And I did. As she dropped my little arm, I sighed in relief, feeling safe again, not knowing more elaborate dangers lay ahead.
Chapter Three
The Push to Weaponize
People don’t become weapons developers because they want to kill people. They build weapons because they want to do something else but cannot get a job in that something else. My dad wanted to build airplanes but was pulled into weapons when he was unemployed and worried about being able to feed his kids. Others wanted to build bridges or rocket ships. But once people end up in the world of weapons, they tend to stay. The benefits are that good. After a while, knowing that war fills your bellies, peace can feel like starvation. Even China Lake’s top brass once lamented “the rigors of peacetime malnutrition.” Without a war the money dries up, people start losing their jobs, and housing values tumble. We knew our town could be closed down and our homes bulldozed. It is hard to explain what a salve war can be. Even as it devastates one community, it feeds another.
My dad divided his life into three stages: poverty, orphan, war (POW). Once he got to the last stage, he never got out. To be clear, he was not a real POW—he was just a person who ended up permanently stuck in war.
Orphaned by age twelve, my dad had been born to John and Esther Piper in a small iron-mining town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. John Piper worked and died in the iron mines like his dad, William, whose arm was blown off in a mining blast when he was fourteen. William survived his accident and wrote a poem that started “There may be a crack in life’s wall somewhere / Where the tender roots may find their way / To a fairer clime, as some declare— / I’m unconcerned while on the way. . . .” The only religion my dad’s family observed was stoicism, and they were good practitioners. Eventually, William got a wooden prosthesis.
His
son John Piper was not so lucky in the Cornishman’s endless battle against the mines. In England, William’s dad had mined tin. In the U.S., it was iron. They kept mining like a hydra-headed monster, and John was just another fallen soldier. His death certificate said he died of “pleurisy,” or inflammation of the lungs, but my dad never trusted that explanation. His obituary presented a different theory, stating he “died of a broken heart.” I think that’s the version my dad believed.
My dad never spoke of his parents, which led me to grow up thinking no one had grandparents. It always surprised me when others disagreed. Eventually, to fill in that blank space and keep up with the grandparent stories of my friends, I would prod my dad about what his parents were like. “They were nice people,” was all I ever got. “Nice people,” he said, as if they were strangers he met on a bus and liked. I suppose it was the same for me, that they were only “Esther and John,” never Grandpa and Grandma. Nice people.
Esther had died the same year as John. “But from what?” I asked my dad.
“She had a headache for a year and then died,” my dad said simply, as if that were normal. Eventually, he added, “Her eyes were sensitive to the light, so we had to keep the blinds drawn.” Only much later did he confess to me that he thought it was his fault. When her headache was particularly bad, he said, he had insisted she get out of bed and take him to a Gene Autry movie. “I begged and begged, and the next day she died.”
He never insisted on anything after that.
Esther’s obituary claimed she died of heart disease, but this did not make sense to me either. Did heart disease make you want to live in the dark for a year? In the end, all I learned from my grandparents was that obituaries and death certificates lie—and that death does not like to be pigeonholed.
By the time John Piper died, my dad was already the lanky, undernourished-looking boy he would remain for the rest of his life. He had thin, light brown hair with, thankfully, a little curl to cover its sparseness, big ears, and a chin that seemed pointy only because his face was so thin. His sister, who was four years older, got married to avoid being sent to an orphanage, but my dad did not have that option. He was too young. Instead, he went to live with his aunt and uncle, the Bergs.
Unfortunately, Mrs. Berg died shortly after he moved in. My dad must have thought this whole family would be the next to go, that he might kill them too. Decades later, I found the invitation to Mrs. Berg’s funeral in my dad’s box of keepsakes. It read, “From the Berg Family. And Earl Piper.” I pictured him living in that space between his name and the Bergs’, dangling inappropriately at the end. In fact, I knew he would have remained indefinitely and elusively attached to the Berg family if not for Pearl Harbor. As it was, he stayed only four years, until he was seventeen and Pearl Harbor was attacked. As he told it, he had been working at a factory as a tool crib clerk, a kind of mechanic’s librarian, on that infamous day. When he heard the announcement on the radio, he knew he had to enlist, though he had to wait two more months to turn eighteen. Then he got a new uncle, one who would never die and leave him: Uncle Sam.
Like so many boys at the time, my dad had been enamored with Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart, and so he signed up to be a pilot. But his body failed him exactly three times, which left him where all washed-up pilots end up: as a navigator.
His first failure was not passing the weight test to get into the air force. He was always too little. But the recruiter, sensing my dad’s disappointment, had whispered to him, “Drink a lot of water and eat as many bananas as you can. Then come back.” If not for that recruiter, my dad would not have gone to war.
The second failure was during boot camp. Thrown into a pond and told to swim out during basic training, my dad sank and nearly drowned, which he attributed to having no fat. Someone had to jump in and save him, which made him afraid of water for the rest of his life. I still sometimes picture my dad’s eighteen-year-old body sinking down into the darkness of that pond where others would have floated. “Why me?” he must have thought. “Why me again?”
Nevertheless, he made it to the pilot training program, where his body failed him for the final time. He got the measles during the midterm exams and was abruptly kicked out of school. There was no time for measles in a war. No one jumped in to save him that time. Though my dad always looked embarrassed when he spoke about not being a pilot, he would undoubtedly end the tale with the part about bananas. “I had to throw up afterward,” he would say, chuckling at his own inadequacy. “But it worked.”
Soon he was navigating for transport flights out of Cornwall, supplying the battlefields across North Africa, Western Europe, and even the Caribbean. For the first time, it must have seemed the world was more than a spare room, an iron mine, or a forest in Michigan. He spent most of the war in a glass bubble on top of the plane, “shooting” the stars with a sextant, trying to get a “celestial fix” in a world that had become lines of latitude and longitude on a map. Because the movement of the stars across the skies had been calculated to the second, my dad could figure out where he was by finding one or two stars and triangulating his position. Then he could calculate, with the help of timetables and a mathematical equation, his place in the universe. His absolute position. Who wouldn’t want that?
Between flights, my dad would practice navigation by walking the ocean footpath at night from his base in St. Mawgan to Newquay, Cornwall. He claimed he got a feel for the stars that way, timing his paces to calculate his velocity. Speed plus time plus direction plus the stars. My dad taught us all the calculations of war. I think he wanted to pass something on to us, a way to always find ourselves in the world when we were lost. “The stars will help locate you,” he would say.
By the age of nine, I thought war was a difficult math problem. It never occurred to me that humans, other than the men with their slide rules, were involved. I knew there was an elaborate chart of moving pieces and equations that someone was solving far away, but it did not involve us. Besides, there were really only “operations” on the base—Operation Rolling Thunder, Operation Barrel Roll, and so on. There were so many of them that I stopped trying to keep track. There were no wars as far as I knew.
Only my dad had a war.
My favorite thing about my dad’s war was all the exotic cargo. My dad talked about flying bananas from Africa to England, where people had vitamin deficiencies. He talked about monkeys in Casablanca. He talked about flying blood. He carried children who had to get somewhere fast to stay alive. But he also flew illegal goods like rum and cigars from the Caribbean. He traded Chanel No. 5 from Paris for cigarettes in England. He brought silk nylons for girlfriends. To me, war sounded like a long sequence of barters: bananas for soldiers, Chanel No. 5 for cigarettes, nylons for girlfriends. It was a fabulous, globe-trotting holiday with lots of free stuff. Who wouldn’t want to go to war?
“I was just a rumrunner during the war,” my dad once said, and my mom, sitting next to him, punched him in the knee.
“You could still be arrested,” she warned.
My dad said all he lost in the war was a chunk of earlobe to frostbite, which could have happened anywhere. He said he never wore hats, even during Michigan winters, to the consternation of his parents. Instead, he would check for spots of frostbite in the mirror when he got home, then try to warm them up with his mittens. So he did not blame the war even for his ear. He blamed his own stubbornness.
After the war, my dad moved to Seattle and went to the University of Washington on the GI Bill. He graduated with honors in aeronautical engineering and was recruited right away to work at Boeing. If he couldn’t fly planes, he said, he could make them fly. Though everything in his life was going according to plan, something must have felt wrong, because at age twenty-nine, after seeing a poster on a street pole one day, he ended up at a Billy Graham tent meeting.
Long after my dad died, my mom showed me a note he wrote to himself after that
meeting, titled “Why I Became a Christian: My Testimony.” The sight of my father’s crisp writing style, fine-tuned from years of drawing perfect lines on graph paper for a living, shook me to the core like he must have been shaken then. “I realized I had no control over my life,” he wrote. “I didn’t like the way I was living but couldn’t do a thing about it.”
“Is he talking about drinking?” I asked my mom. She nodded. I knew my father drank during the war but never imagined it was a problem. He used to joke about “having a beer with the kids,” when we were no longer kids, simply to make my mom mad. But we knew he never would. Only after I saw that note did I realize that maybe war was not exactly what my father said it was. Maybe it was not all fun and games. After World War II, which killed around sixty million people, men and women started coming home with something they called “war neurosis” or “operational fatigue.” Now we call it post-traumatic stress disorder. Maybe that is why he felt he had “no control.” Maybe he knew some of those sixty million.
My dad’s note described Billy Graham, “He kept quoting the handwriting on the wall, and I knew if I were weighed in any balance I’d be found wanting.” So under that tent filled with ten thousand people, my dad walked down the aisle like hundreds of others. He found God, who became his new Uncle. There was Uncle Berg, then Uncle Sam, and finally Uncle God, who could not leave him.
After reading the Prayer of Salvation in the back corner of that tent, my dad was told to find a church. So when he saw a flyer outside the Swedish Baptist church that read, “After Billy Graham, What?” he must have thought it was a sign. Since he met my mother at that church, perhaps it was.