On January 23rd, 1941, Ory and Ethel (Lettie) Freeland signed the following:
“We the undersigned, being the father and mother of Maurice H. Freeland, a minor, an applicant for enlistment in the United States Army, do hereby give our consent to his Enlistment therein. We further certify that we are not dependent upon him for support and that he is not Married. No objections to Overseas Service.
The said Maurice H. Freeland was born on the 7th day of Nov., 1921 at Greenwood in the State of N.Y.”
At 19, Maurice joined the Army Air Corps, aiming eventually to become a flier and a second lieutenant. Shooting for the big bucks, $225 a month. On January 28th, 1941, it became official. In late October of that year, he sent his last letter from the Continental U.S. to his parents; the next letter that they received was written aboard ship (the transport President Coolidge) and postmarked “Honolulu”. The Coolidge left Hawaii for “eastern ports”.
I have a scrapbook filled with photocopies of letters that Ory, Lettie, and their daughter Beatrice sent to Maurice, from October until the end of the war, as well as some correspondence received from friends of Maurice, including his landlady Mrs. Telsch from when he was stationed in San Francisco, and the correspondence they received from the War Department. The letters that his parents and sister wrote him I think were all returned as undeliverable; they kept them, so that he could read them later.
Between November of 1941, through the attack on the Philippines and the bombing of Pearl Harbor, until February of 1942, the only thing they knew about Maurice was that he was in the war zone. On February 16th, they received a telegram reporting that Maurice had been seriously wounded in action on February 9th in defense of the Philippines, with no further details. This was confirmed by letter on February 23rd. The letters in the scrapbook reveal the details of how war news traveled around Greenwood, it’s probably much like you imagine it would be, in small town America in 1942. On March 2nd, Lettie’s opening lines to her letter to Maurice:
My Dear Son,
This must be the most honest letter I ever wrote to you. Dad and I just do not know how to write or what to say as we do not know how badly you are hurt but how we have prayed and will pray that you may be alright again some day. Marie and I kept writing to each other and to you and we hope you will get at least some of the letters.
The whole town of Greenwood seemed stunned when the news came from Wash. D.C. you were seriously injured. Guess they are all praying for you as much as we are. It surely has aroused this town to do all they can in every way for the boys. So while you are getting better somewhere I want you to know you are still doing you’re all through the knowledge of the people in this town that one of the town’s boys was cut down seriously. Dr. Hardenburg says food just doesn’t taste good and more knowing you are hurt.
I wonder how much of the difference between how the public felt about the boys in WWII vs. how they subconsciously regard the vets in Iraq or Afghanistan is embedded in the fact that in 1942 you just didn’t know what was going on with the boys for a long, long time… and today you have satellite phones. The whole town would have known how many men had gone missing, for months or more, and the collective unconscious would have been working that entire time, inventing horrible possibilities. You read these sorts of collections of letters and the stark nature of “not knowing” seeps through every line. The horror of hope.
The war in the Philippines went very badly for the U.S. forces. You can read more about it here and here, and there are dozens of books on the subject of course.
On March 6th, 1942 Maurice wrote this letter, the first non-“form” correspondence they received from him since that letter from Honolulu:
Dearest Folks,
It is very little news I can send. The radio and papers will tell you better than I could and a lot sooner. Please let Marie know that you heard from me. All my love to you, Mother and Dad, Sister, and all the folks.
Son
Maurice spent most of the rest of the war in Military Camp #3, in Cabanatuan, until he was transferred to Bilibid prison, where he was liberated in February of 1945. During that three years, only snippets of information regarding his status were received by his parents. Since the Philippines government had never formally surrendered to the Japanese, the Japanese didn’t provide official lists of POWs for quite some time. Troops who had been stationed in the Philippines were listed as “Missing in Action” for years.
Official notice was sent on the 18th of February, 1945, that Maurice had been rescued. On Feb. 22nd, Mrs. Telsch wrote:
Dear Mrs. Freeland and Family –
I hope by now you folks are as happy as I am and your good faith prayers are answered. No doubt you have received a telegram from the War department your son Maurice has been released from the prison camp in the Philippines. We rec. word here in Woodland over the teletype Friday. I was sitting in the show when I rec. the news. I can’t tell you how excited I was because Maurice just seems one of us. He was in that Bilibid prison camp, the worst camp there. I don’t know weather you read about it or not. They said they only put the very badly crippled prisoners in there. So I guess we cannot expect to see Maurice come back with all his limbs on him as I think there is some missing. But just to get him back will be wonderful. I think they are putting most of them in hospitals for awhile to build them up and get them well before they send them home. I just see by today’s paper they will bring them all to San Francisco…
This is the last letter in the scrapbook from Mrs. Telsch, written on March 5th:
My Dear Folks
At last I can say were are a very happy family and I know you folks must be too. Maurice arrived in good old U.S.A. Thursday, March 1 evening late and Friday they took him to a San Francisco Hospital. Saturday he called you folks and us up on the phone. My it did seem good to hear his voice. We were so overjoyed and excited.
Then Maurice called a friend of ours in San Francisco and he and his wife came to the hospital and got Maurice and brought him to Woodland Saturday afternoon in there car wich is about 75 miles from here. We had a very nice visit with him in the short time he was here. As he had to be back at the hospital by twelve o’clock that night.
I had a nice dinner for them and it seemed so good to have him at our table again, and that big smile on his face again. Maurice looks good, considering what he has gone through with. He is thin but has gained fifteen pounds in one month which shows he is in good health and another month or so he should be fine.
His mind is good and he is not shelled shocked at all and nerves seem to be very good which is wonderful. He does not look a bit older than when he left here.
I told him it did not make any difference how much the war had messed him up. As long as we had him back, and he could have come back much worse off. But I am sorry I half to tell you he has lost both of his Legs. He did not have the heart to tell you on the phone that day and asks me to tell you.
They took his legs of just between the knee and the hips about halfway. This why they are sending him back East to Washington D.C. to a hospital that makes the artificial limbs and fit them and then teach him to walk. When this is done he will be as good as new. I do not have any Idea how long it will take.
He left yesterday and I guess he is back there by now. He will send you his adress and you can go see him as he is only 300 miles from you. He bought himself a Wheel Chair and he gets arouond very good in it. It folds up and you can put it in a car. Very nice.
This is why he can not come home until he gets fixed. But they are feeding him good and doing every thing they can for him.
So I do hope you will understand and being good Christian people will not take it too hard. It did him a lot of good to visit us while he was here.
Yes I had to break the news to him about Marie getting married which was the hardest thing to do. She and her husband came over to see him while he was here. I thought she treated him very cold did not even shake hands with him. But her husband did when he did I could see Maurice wanted to haul off and let him have it. But he tried so hard not to let on he cared. But I could see it hurt just the same. But my girls helped to cheer him and he soon forgot about it. He has gone through so much I guess nothing matters any more. When I ask him if he wanted to see them he said “Hell I guess if they can stand it I guess I can”. But I wish she had waited until he came home. But that is the way life is, I guess.
I read your letter to Maurice and will forward it to him as soon as I get his address.
Yours Sincerely,
Mrs A.C. Telsch
Maurice lost both legs in a field hospital sometime between January 1942 and the final surrender of the Philippines in April of that year. A mortar shell had filled both of his legs up with shrapnel and amputation was required in a field hospital, with no anesthesia. Nobody in his family knew until Mrs. Telsch reported it. There is one undated letter in the scrapbook penned by Maurice where he mentions the amputation; it was never delivered during the war but arrived at Greenwood on May 11th, 1945, after the Army unearthed it from a collection of documents held by the Japanese. My mother told me that every once in a while when she was a child he would scratch at some part of his body and you could see little tiny flecks of metal that had only just wormed their way up to the surface of his skin. I don’t know how he survived the Bataan Death March, or who helped drag him through the mud and kept him going when his arms gave out. I once saw of a long line of POWs on the march, and in it you could see a legless POW pushing himself along with his hands, sitting on a little wooden platform with haphazard wheels. It was taken from the back; it may even have been him. He didn’t talk about the experience with his grandchildren, we were too young to probably even be considered conversational partners of such weighty matters. He died before any of us got old enough to have the audacity to ask him about it.
His childhood sweetheart (the aforementioned Marie) got married on February 15th of 1945; she had given up hope that he would return some time before. It has occurred to me to wonder more than once how Marie might have felt on the 18th of February, three days after her wedding, when she saw his name on the list of returning POWs in the paper.
Maurice was told by V.A. doctors that it was pretty unlikely that he would survive long. He showed them up by outlasting the lot of them, getting married, becoming a teacher, and fathering five children. Unwilling to become a morphine addict like a large number of returning veterans with chronic pain, he took too heavily to the bottle, which eventually led to his divorce. My mother, the second eldest of his children, remembers the day when she and her siblings and her mother were sitting outside the courtroom, waiting for the judge. Maurice came in, walked up to his soon-to-be-ex-wife, and said, “This is my fault, take whatever you need and take care of the children.” Thanks to the development of better painkillers, Maurice quit drinking and eventually got remarried. We saw him occasionally when I was a child, and then almost weekly when his health started to fail and neurological damage put him in the VA and then in assisted living. My mother’s family has some stories about VA hospitals in the 1980s that I’m sure families of Vietnam-era veterans can imagine. It was not our country’s finest hour, when it came to taking care of its troops.
Maurice was a not a perfect man. He was a terrible drunk when he drank. He probably scared the pants off of a generation of children that he taught when he was working as a schoolteacher, working through his reentry into civilian life. He was a man that had by all accounts one hell of a life, ending in a long drawn-out time when not only his body was a prison, but his mind was a slowly degenerating one. I remember once, after a stroke, seeing him in the nursing home and seeing a bright intelligence in his eyes even as he couldn’t speak a coherent sentence. My recollections, of course, are suspect from so long ago; I’m fairly certain this was in 1987, well after dementia had started to set in. If I’m accurately remembering, though, it must have been one hell of an experience for a man who managed to piece himself back together after his 20’s and 30’s, to see himself falling apart from the inside.
He died in 1988.
I don’t know if he qualifies as anyone’s idea of a hero. He didn’t win the medal of honor. I never heard a story of him bailing out a buddy in a firefight. I’m sure he’d say that whoever helped him on the march was more of a hero than he was. I’ll tell you this, though, if I ever am called to display any sort of fortitude in my life I hope it happens that I inherited some of his iron.
Happy Veteran’s Day, Grandpa.
My God, Pat, this essay is stunning. And powerful. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that the horrors we moderns associate with war have always been so.
If Rufus gets the anthology together, this will be the first thing I vote to include.Report
Tod – I agree. This should definitely go in any anthology. Excellent piece.Report
Wait, what “if”? It’ll take some time, but I’ll get it together and, yes, I agree this should be in there?Report
Thanks, guys.Report
A wonderful essay. Definitely to be included in the collection.Report
Wow.Report
What a tremendous story: heartbreaking, thoughtful, contemplative, and wise. Thanks for sharing!Report
A remarkable account, exceedingly well-written.
My grandfather and grandmother were missionaries in south west China to the Lisu people of the Salween River valley, a tributary of the Mekong River. My grandfather came down from the mountains to purchase supplies and met two Americans in Kunming, agents of the OSS. Mao Zedong had retreated west in good order on the Long March and those agents were watching him. They advised my grandfather to leave China, believing the Japanese would beat Chiang Kai Shek.
On their advice, my grandfather brought my grandmother down from the mountains on the back of a donkey, heavily pregnant with their fourth child. They took the train to extract their children at the mission school in Chefoo, that building now converted into the Chinese equivalent of Annapolis, the naval school.
The British who ran the school ridiculed the idea of any possible threat. The Japanese were not at war with the British or Americans. My grandfather pulled his children out anyway and took them all to Shanghai.
In the port of Shanghai lay two freighters, one American with three berths and a Japanese freighter with sufficient berths for his whole family. My grandfather bet on the Japanese freighter which sailed to Rangoon. From there, the family travelled to Honolulu and from thence to Seattle Washington, where they arrived on the first of December, 1941.
We all know what happened on the seventh. Most of my mother’s childhood friends died in Japanese concentration camps. When I began to learn that language, my mother had a bad moment. My grandfather is buried with his Chinese Bible.
My grandfather and grandmother went on to start the first Bible college for the education of black pastors in the USA, in an abandoned pool hall in East Point Georgia. My grandfather remembered Martin Luther King, Senior rather better than his famous son, who he remembers teaching in Sunday School class.
Time and tide have taken their toll. Those who told the tale to me are now dead. It was not my story in the telling but has become mine, the legacy of many cups of tea and idle scraps of conversation. I should have asked more questions, gotten more details. Patrick got those details and I didn’t. I have my grandfather’s letters, in his precise Chinese calligraphy. My own sloppy Japanese calligraphy can never match his. But then, I didn’t beat my kids the way he beat his, the way I was beaten. Though they were my heroes, I never truly accepted the burden of my parents’ and my grandparents’ legacy, becoming a fourth generation missionary. Stories only become safe when the participants are well and truly dead.
Count no man happy until he is dead, so said Sophocles in Oedipus Rex. I might counter with Patrick’s happy remembrance:
I don’t know if he qualifies as anyone’s idea of a hero. He didn’t win the medal of honor. I never heard a story of him bailing out a buddy in a firefight. I’m sure he’d say that whoever helped him on the march was more of a hero than he was. I’ll tell you this, though, if I ever am called to display any sort of fortitude in my life I hope it happens that I inherited some of his iron.Report
Stories only become safe when the participants are well and truly dead.
There’s a lot of truth in that statement.Report
Very well written piece Mr. Cahalan. And what Mr. Fox said.Report
That one postcard where he says, “Tell Marie not to wait” gets me every time. Every damn time. Although, I wouldn’t be here if she had, so…there’s that.Report
Thank you for sharing Pat.Report
Uncle John saw the post via Facebook and he tells me Grandpa Mo was awarded the Bronze Star in addition to the ubiquitous Purple Heart.
You learn things about your relatives every day.Report
It sounds like both were well deserved.Report
My goodness, Pat, just a remarkable, tour de force, deeply moving, heartbreaking, yet heartwarming post you’ve written. It’s very beautiful–dammit, you’ve given me a very large lump in my throat! I’m sorry, that line from Sophocles is just an awful, horrid, condemnation of the living. I much prefer Bach’s, “my dear sweet Lord and Savior, please take my hand and gently lead me on.” And how did Sophocles ever become the voice and spokesman of the dead? To the best of my knowledge, “Flatliners” wasn’t showing on the local Greek silver screens, and even back then, I’m not aware of anyone taking a trip to the other side and then returning to this side to gloriously proclaim the transcendental rapture that awaits us. These are the words of suicidal, doomsday cultists–their inability to accept and embrace life as it is and, like it or not, the pain and suffering, that comes with it. We are all with this and we are all in this journey, together. Pat, again, thanks so very, very much for the beautiful and thoughtful words about your grandfather. You have done yourself very proud and I have no doubt your grandfather has shed a tear or two at your beautiful, honest, poignant evocation. It’s a masterpiece–bravo!! The one and only member of the human race who has grasped the ultimateReport
Pat, not sure where that last sentence was going–if you can, please delete it. Thanks.Report
Pat, again many thanks for your beautiful words on Veterans Day. I printed this out and brought it to my parents. They were both moved to tears. My father is a veteran of Battle of the Bulge and somehow survived a German hand grenade blowing up a quarter of his body–ended up spending several months recovering in a French hospital. He was deeply moved by your eloquent words–he rarely will ever discuss his experiences in WW2, but he wanted to thank you from the bottom of his heart for your gracious words and thoughts on this most solemn of days, Veterans Day. Thanks, Pat. An incredible piece of writing, sir. A grand slam all the way around–you’ve touched many people and I’m sure all of them are deeply grateful as well.Report
Thanks, Bozo.
Tell your Dad I think he should write it down. Sharing this sort of stuff directly would be difficult to an extent I can’t imagine; I don’t know if I could sit down with my son or my eventual grandkids and talk about what happened to me in The War, if I experienced anything like this.
But people should know. Almost all we can do is guess about what Maurice did to cope with his experience… like my aunt says below the first she heard him talk about any of it was on his deathbed. He died with a lot of his experience going unshared and any way you slice it, that’s a horrible loss.Report
Terribly moving.Report
so many people are heroes in so many ways.
this was a marvellous read, pat. thank you for being the storykeeper and teller. mo would appreciate it tooReport
Beth sent me this- since I don’t do Facebook. Very lovely Patrick. Grandpa Mo was difficult, loving, brilliant and often very hard to live with. In retrospect, he suffered mightily and silently from PTSD. He was talking about prison camp in the ER on his deathbed in his delirium…and that was the first time I really heard anything about it. He had a lot of strength. LUV you – Aunt JoAnnReport
Thanks, Aunt JoAnn!
Say hey to George for me.Report
Pat, forgive me and I don’t want to appear petty after the beautiful masterpiece you’ve just composed but I’m pretty sure it’s, Veterans Day, not Veteran’s Day–it’s not a plural possesive. My head shall forthwith be delivered on a silver platter! Das tut mir Leid!Report
Egads, by gum, I’ve done and gone and made myself an embarrassment on teh Interwebs. Thanks, I’ll correct.Report
Pat, I’ve been thinking about this and I think a good argument can be made for Veteran’s Day as you had it spelled. Any grammar cops around here? And who cares? It might be time to pull out the old, people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones metaphor. And you are NO embarrassment!! You wrote one of the most beautiful, moving essays about Veteran(‘s) I’ve ever read. And no one can ever diminish the power and beauty of your words on such an occasion.Report
But then again, Pat, maybe you are right and then I’ll feel like a bigger heel than I already feel like right now. Sheeeeesh!Report
I only just now stumbled across this.
What a wonderful, moving remembrance. Thank you for taking the time to write such a wonderful piece.Report