Breaking the Code: A Daughter's Journey into Her Father's Secret War
Published November 1, 2012; Sourcebooks
Genre: memoir
"Scraps of Paper,
and Eggs Benedict: The Unlikely
Journey of a Memoir"
by Karen
Fisher-Alaniz
Snippets of a life. Questions written on scraps of paper.
A father with a photographic memory, who couldn’t remember. Breakfast at Mr.
Ed’s diner every week. That’s how our journey
began.
My father, a WWII veteran,
started having nightmares and flashbacks at the age of 81. When he gave me more
than 400-pages of letters he wrote during the war, I knew there was far more to
the story than he’d ever told.
I took the letters home
and started to read. I was immersed in a time and place that was unfamiliar to
me. My father was stationed on Oahu, Hawaii during the war. His service to his
country began in 1944. He’d told the stories so many times, but the stories he told
gave me no reason to suspect he’d experienced any kind of trauma, or that he’d
done something so critical to the war effort, that he’d been told he’d be shot
if he ever revealed it.
But over the months, that
rolled into years, that’s the story I heard. All I wanted was to help my
father. I wanted to take the nightmares away. So, each night, I read a handful
of letters. I wrote questions down on whatever was handy; the back of a bill, a
receipt from the grocery store, a scrap of paper. When we met on Wednesday’s
for breakfast, I took out the motley bunch of papers and asked the questions on
them. Over eggs Benedict, my father began telling his story. Often haltingly,
he shared tiny pieces of the puzzle. And what I learned about my father was
unbelievable. My sweet, humble father, who’d taught me to ride a bike, was a
top secret code breaker!
Trained to copy the code,
based in the Japanese, Katakana, my father wasn’t sitting in an office as he’d
told me so many times. He was in the middle of battle, in submarines and on
ships off of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. My father was a hero. But it was this work
that also laid the foundation for the greatest trauma of his life, and the
reason he started having symptoms of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder more than
50-years after the war.
Once I’d heard the story,
I set out to do research. I searched books, old magazines, and the internet.
Every road lead to a dead end. There was very little information on this group
of code breakers. In fact, I didn’t find any at all. And that lead me in a
different direction; the military itself. I sent for my father’s military
records. He was terribly disappointed when the records didn’t mention anything
about his top secret service. But he wasn’t surprised. He’d was told that
records would not be kept; the men involved would not carry records with them,
for fear of being captured or discovered. Still, my father wanted nothing more
than a simple confirmation of some kind; a note in his file, the name of a ship
or submarine. But there was nothing like that. So, again I turned to the
military.
I
left messages on reunion group websites, and frequented WWII and military
forums, where I asked questions and made connections. I knew that somewhere,
somehow, there had to be information. When a retired, 26-year Naval Intelligence
officer offered to help, I was ecstatic and so was my dad. He helped me to send
for Dad’s records a second and third time, each time honing in on what exactly
we were looking for. And that’s what did it.
I
received a request from the military to sign something for information that was
not kept with his regular military records. I was so excited. I just knew this
was it. I waited a few more weeks. Finally, I received a thick package in the
mail. I looked for words like Katakana, and code breaker, but there was nothing
that specific. When I relayed this to the officer helping me, he said that
sometimes it’s hard for a civilian to know how to read military records.
I
sent a copy to the Naval Intelligence Officer, who took his time looking at
them. When he got back to me, he said that instead of looking for the key
words, as I had done, he looked at the timeline and the locations, and
training. But he also took note of things that were not there, but should have
been, like the names of the ships he was on. His conclusion was this; my father
was where he was, when he said he was there. There were blanks in his records,
or sparse information, when it wouldn’t make sense to leave it out. The only
logical conclusion, he said, was that my father was working in Naval
Intelligence, doing top secret work.
The
information wasn’t as specific as I’d hoped, but it was an answer. My father
was pleased. So was I. What started as scraps of paper changed to something
else. First, I wanted to simply transcribe my father’s letters so that each of
my children could have a copy. But curiosity got the best of me. When I started
writing the story between the lines, my father’s story really started to take
shape. And when a fellow writer encouraged me to write about what this journey
meant to me too, a memoir was born.
Our
journey began more than 10-years ago.
The book changed and grew, as we made our journey toward truth. And our
father-daughter relationship changed and grew too. When someone tells you their
story, it is a sacred trust they are putting in you. You can’t help but be
changed by that honor.
Note:
Since our journey began, more information (but still not a lot) is available
about the role of code breakers who broke the Japanese, Katakana. My father is
91 now and likely the only surviving member of his five-person code-breaking
team. As far as we know, this is the only book that tells the first-person
story of their heroic service. I’m humbled and honored to have been a part of
it.
Thanks to the author and WOW- Women on Writing for providing this guest post.
