They earned it

Leonard Fahlgren went through hell so he could write poems about his beloved Washburn, North Dakota.

"Washburn is a little city, located in central N. Dee," he wrote for the city's centennial in 1982. "And for years it has been noted for both its friendship and beauty."

I'm pretending my great-Uncle Leonard is reading his poem to his brothers, who are all gone now. They are seated around a big corner booth in a sunny restaurant, awaiting breakfast and recounting their lives over cups of coffee. They're laughing quietly at their good fortune, talking of their towns, the North Dakota and Montana towns of their youth, and the cities scattered across the Pacific Northwest where they settled after World War II.

I'm in a booth across the aisle, listening. Thanks to a sheaf of photocopies my Aunt Patti recently sent me, a collection of news clips over the decades, I can imagine the conversation among the brothers, the way conversations go, tacked full of unfinished sentences and random segues and snags of memory.

I wonder how much of their conversation would turn to the war. A year ago, I wrote about four of the brothers (I incorrectly said five) who survived the attack on Pearl Harbor, 71 years ago today.

They'd get around to the topic, I pretend. Tatters and snags of war talk.

Poetry was Leonard's reward, I gather, for serving 550 days on the front lines in World War II, with Army tank destroyers grinding through North Africa, then Italy, southern France and into Germany.

He went to war to come home and farm, and be the poet laureate of the town near where Meriwether Lewis and William Clark spent winter with the Mandan people on their way west. The town where my mom was born.

In the lore my mom brought to our family, Uncle Leonard's story is not as well known, overshadowed by Glen, Gordon, Vern and Warner having served together on the repair ship U.S.S. Vestal at Pearl Harbor. The Vestal was tied to the doomed battleship U.S.S. Arizona. Two bombs plowed through the Vestal, which would have sunk too except one bomb hit the stacks of metal repair plates the Vestal had just laid in, blunting the damage. Torpedoes that helped sink the Arizona ran just three feet too deep to hit the much smaller Vestal. Instead the Vestal was cut loose and run aground to keep it from sinking.

The Vestal and the Fahlgren boys lived to fight again.

Leonard's best friend died in battle in Italy. He married his friend's widow when he returned, and raised their son.

Younger brother Ervin joined the four aboard the Vestal, the repair ship U.S.S. Vestal, about a month after the attack; he was training in San Diego during the attack, not aboard ship. Ervin passed away in March, the last of the brothers. My grandmother Irene Gibson, their only sister, died more than 20 years ago.

The youngest brother, Carl, tried to join the Navy at 17 but couldn't pass the physical exam then or when he was drafted at 20.

I've often wondered how Carl and Ervin and Leonard felt about their siblings' notoriety, their names sometimes spoken in the same breath as the five Sullivan brothers who died aboard the same cruiser, prompting the military to stop assigning so many siblings together. Over the decades, some newspaper or other has told the Fahlgren boys' Pearl Harbor story, and when they could they attended the reunions.

Chances are the other three are proud and didn't care whether Pearl Harbor took the family spotlight. Carl once wrote with admiration of his big brothers' service. I'm leaning across the aisle, just the same, hoping to hear them tell it.

Chances are I'd hear instead the quirky miscellany of war:

• How all the brothers agreed the United States would eventually join the war and those of age would enlist in 1940 rather than being drafted later.

• How the captain of the Vestal got knocked off the ship in a blast, climbed back aboard and berated some mess attendants hiding in his cabin for not being at their battle stations. New arrivals, they hadn't been assigned any.

"So he (the captain) said, 'If you can't do anything else, throw spuds at them,'" Gordon told a reporter 35 years ago. "They told the story, and it got around the ship. We had a pattern maker who was kind of a self-styled cartoonist, and it wasn't long before he had a cartoon of these boys, throwing spuds at Japanese planes, but using oranges for tracers."

• How Gordon left out the part about breaking his neck as a kid when the Navy medical examiner asked if he'd broken any bones.

• How the brothers scraped together enough money so Vern could get a tooth filled — his only failing during his Navy medical exam. Once stationed in San Diego, the Navy took out all their fillings anyway and replaced them with military-issue fillings.

• How a Japanese reconnaissance plane flew along the Vestal so close, Glen could see the pilot's face.

• How Glen immediately wrote their mother that he and his brothers were fine — even though he couldn't find Vern and Warner for a couple of days after the attack.

• How three of the brothers — Glen was hospitalized in New Zealand — spent nearly three years at the equator, with only coral reefs to break the horizon, while ships sailed to them for repair. They sometimes built the parts needed, and slept on deck in the tropical heat and nearly went mad. 

• "The best reward, however," Gordon told a reporter, "was that we all went through the war without receiving a scratch."

In the collection of news clips, the brothers praise their mother, Theresa Lindstrom, who raised seven children through the Depression by herself because their dad died young of cancer. She later married William Lindstrom and moved to Montana from North Dakota.

The Navy honored my great grandmother, for sending six sons to war, by having her christen a gasoline tanker, the U.S.S. Susquehanna, in 1942.

The brothers came back from war and lived lives they earned, attending to business, contributing to their communities.

I benefit from their service, and so do you. Every day.

Last of a breed

Ervin Gilbert Fahlgren,

Photo courtesy of his daughter, Bonnie,
who was named after my mom.

Three of the Greatest Generation — and the last of one family's generation — have passed away this month.

One is my Great-Uncle Ervin Fahlgren, one of five brothers who served together aboard the same ship which was disabled in the attack of Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941, died March 11 at 92. He survived all of his six brothers, all World War II veterans, and a sister — my grandmother, Irene Gibson.

Another is Joseph P. Murphy Jr., the father-in-law of my wife's twin, who died the same day at 89. The retired Sonoma County Superior Court judge, fought as a Marine at Guadalcanal and in the battle of Iwo Jima.

Another is Joe Davey Jr., a man who with grace and a huge smile served the poor and the desperate in the neighborhoods around our church northeast of Sacramento. As a Marine fighter pilot, Joe fought in the Solomon and Philippine islands.

They had so much to teach, and did. Still, I had so much more I could have learned.

Great-Uncle Ervin would have been the only one remaining to read a post I wrote commemorating the Fahlgren brothers' Navy service aboard the USS Vestal, a repair ship moored to the USS Arizona when Japanese bombers attacked. The Fahlgrens in the Navy — brother Leonard joined the Army — survived the attack and Ervin joined his brothers when the Vestal was repaired and put back into service, until the military stopped letting so many siblings serve together in the same small units.

The Fahlgren children: Ervin, Warner, Carl and Glen in back;
Vern, my grandma Irene, Gordon and Leonard.

Since writing about Great-Uncle Ervin and his brothers for the 70th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, I have connected and reconnected with some of the members of the brothers' families; through them I learned of his passing, and through them I'm beginning to put a puzzle  together.

Ervin came home from the war and raised his family in Klamath Falls, Ore. I remember visiting his family — my second cousins — at least once, probably on our way to Spokane, Wash. to visit my grandma. Klamath Falls was a timber town then, if I remember correctly, and great-Uncle Ervin was a driver there. Giant blackened upside-down cones, the sawdust incinerators, peppered the landscape, like Paul Bunyan's fencerows. Mountains of sideways trees lay next to the cones, and the air carried the sour smell of wet campfires. Oregon's landscape has changed considerably since then. Ervin his family moved to Wilsonville, south of Portland, where he and his wife managed a trailer court.

Ervin and Warner in front,
Vern, Glenn and Gordon in back.

Funny the moments on which we snag our memories. For me, the thought of Klamath Falls takes me immediately to a moment running around with cousins — I must have been five or six — and falling headlong on a gravel alley, scraping up both palms. The cousins and my great-aunt Edna tended my wounds and tried to soothe my howls; I remember feeling embarrassed, because I didn't want their memory of me to be this kid who screams out of all proportion to his hurts.

Now we are grown and our parents are passing away, and in their passing we are reacquainting.

Like Great-Uncle Ervin's children, the children of Joseph Murphy, and their children, gathered this week to remember him. I have always known him as the retired judge, gentle-voiced, quick to gather you in on a conversation, quicker with the driest, sharpest wit I may ever have heard. And easily the most devoted fan of baseball I will ever meet.

He loved baseball's numbers, finding in its 150 years or more of history a rich mine.

What I didn't know, and didn't think to ask about, is his wartime service. In a Press Democrat story recalling Joe Murphy's life, one of his daughters says the experience, and the loss of friends in battle, deepened his appreciation for life and informed his compassionate ways as a judge. At his retirement, attorneys called Joe Murphy "the embodiment of what a judge should be."

A retired attorney at Joe Murphy's wake said he might lose a case in the judge's court and feel better about it than if he had won, because Joe Murphy was fair and compassionate.

Nor did I know that he led a protest against the United States' role in its attack on Iraq in 1991. Though I shared his beliefs, I didn't know it, and he proved far more forthright than I in acting on his beliefs. What a conversation, missed!

Joe Davey and I briefly shared in acting out our beliefs, when we volunteered for the St. Vincent de Paul Society at our church. Joe remained active until he couldn't be active anymore. My lame excuse is a cattywhampus career path that detoured when I went to teacher school.

Though engaged in similar jobs helping the poor within the society, Joe and I rarely worked together. Didn't matter. Joe greeted me like an old friend. He was glad to see me and it showed. He made everyone glad to be seen. He smiled thoughtfully at what I had to say, practically watching the words come out of my mouth so he could join fully in our conversation.

As a Marine, he flew Corsair fighters during campaigns in Okinawa, as well as the Solomon and Philippine Islands, during World War II. He settled in Carmichael and worked as the sales executive for a tool company. And probably made clients feel glad and welcome.

I take from Joe Davey a reminder to greet others as I want to be greeted and welcomed, to emerge more often from my mask of reserve. From Joe Murphy I recall his easy, comfortable way, and his children's remembrance of him as one who treated everything and everyone with patience; though I could never match wits with his wit, I will listen to Giants games with the idea that they play on, and generate the numbers he love, in his memory.

From Ervin Fahlgren, I take the rootedness that lived on in my mom, his niece, who, though full of mirth, regarded life with a hard edge of common sense and practicality. Maybe it's a Midwest, North Dakota/Montana sensibility. My dad, a Korean War veteran, deeply admired people like Ervin Fahlgren and his brothers, for what they provided for him.

From all of these World War II veterans, who lived through horrors, I try to take something from their model, their coming home to carry out in thought and deed the free country they sacrificed to protect, to make possible all that that I am able to do and think, and strive to make something of this opportunity.

Unworthy offspring of the Greatest Generation

Seventy years ago tomorrow, five of my mom's uncles, the Fahlgren brothers, somehow survived the Date Which Will Live in Infamy — the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Empire of Japan, that plunged the United States into World War II.

Vern, Ervin, Glen, Warner and Gordon
Fahlgren, all served the Navy at
Pearl Harbor Dec. 7, 1941

The date … the horrible war … the immense sacrifices by people stateside … the incomprehensible triumphs that came of a nation working as one … all dim at an alarming pace as the world twists on itself and we become removed by time.

The brothers in San Diego

The Fahlgren men are my grandmother Irene Gibson's brothers, of which she had seven. The oldest, Gordon, joined the Navy with brothers Warner and Vern in February 1941. Leonard joined the Army a month later. Brothers Glen and Ervin joined the Navy in July. Carl, the youngest, was turned down for military service.

Three of the Fahlgrens were assigned to Pearl Harbor: Gordon to the USS Vestal, a repair ship; Warner to the battleship USS Oklahoma; and Vern to the destroyer USS Hovey. At the brothers' urging, their mother — my great-grandmother, Theresa Fahlgren Lindstrom — asked the Navy to assign all her sons to the Vestal.

My great grandmother, Theresa Lindstrom,
christens the USS Susquehanna

Admiral Chester Nimitz said yes, and complimented the boys' mother for her patriotism, sending six sons into the service. In 1942, the Navy honored her patriotism by having her christen the tanker USS Susquehanna out of Tacoma, Wash.

(I'm getting all this information, by the way, from an account great-Uncle Glen had written for his family. The Billings Gazette based its own story, commemorating the 60th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, on Glen's report. The Fahlgren boys grew up in far northern Montana.)

The Vestal was readying for war, its welders sealing the portholes of all the warships in the harbor. It tied up to the USS Arizona Dec. 5 to begin work on her. The Fahlgren brothers took liberty Dec. 6, returning to the Vestal at midnight.

Glen arose before dawn Dec. 7, 1941. A baker, he was preparing coffee cake and pumpkin pies, when after daybreak the Vestal's officers began shouting at sailors to man their stations. Glen emerged from the galley to see smoke rising from the Arizona, and a Japanese plane diving toward the Arizona and strafing the Vestal with machine gun fire. The Vestal's anti-aircraft gun jammed immediately in the fight, the commander and some of the crew struggling mightily to get it working again.

A bullet hit Vern, and shrapnel struck a ship's cook. Their chief master-at-arms was killed instantly. Minutes later, a Japanese bomb raced through the mess hall, 20 feet from where the brothers stood, the concussion knocking them flat. Another bomb at the same time plowed all the way through the Vestal and destroyed its rudder. Sailors used axes to sever the lines mooring the Vestal to the burning Arizona. A Navy tug later pulled the listing Vestal away and shoved it into shallow water to keep it from sinking.

When the Arizona's forward ammunition magazines detonated from the blast of a final, fatal Japanese bomb, the force blew the Vestal's commander and many sailors and Marines overboard. Before the commander — covered in oil — could swim aboard again and rescind it, an order to abandon ship had already been given by the executive officer. While Glen took advantage of a lull to look for his brothers — coming upon the body of a sailor blown onto his ship from the Arizona — Gordon, Vern and Warner had already gone into the water.

Gordon made it back to the ship after the attack. Vern and Warner went missing for days, and all became separated. None knew until days later that they each had been put on guns along the harbor's beaches, bracing for more Japanese attacks which did not come. I never heard — or forgot if someone told me — what became of great-Uncle Vern's wound.

The five Fahlgren brothers served together again aboard the Vestal, which was eventually returned to service in April 1942, until November of that year, when the five Sullivan brothers from Waterloo, Iowa, all died with the sinking of the light cruiser USS Juneau. After that, the Navy prohibited so many siblings from serving together. The Fahlgren brothers were scattered about the Navy, and after the war came home safely.

They did exactly what we imagine men and women did after serving in and surviving World War II. Having helped save the world from evil, they came home and carried the United States onward and upward. All went to their homes, assumed their roles in their communities, raised their families, fulfilled the promises they forged by their sacrifice and their witness to horror. I don't know that they even talked much about their time at war; I really don't know much about them, to my shame.

I met the Fahlgren men only a few times as a kid; played at events few and far between with their children, my third cousins (if I have the lineage correct), about whom my memories are also dim.

The Fahlgren children: Ervin, Warner, Carl and Glen in back;
Vern, my grandma Irene, Gordon and Leonard

My mom told me stories about her uncles, which have since become vague summaries in my aging brain. I have always remembered the part about the Vestal captain being blown overboard; I seem to remember my mom telling me the bomb blast forced my great-Uncle Glen to throw an armload of dough overboard too.

I remember great-Uncle Gordon the most. Because he lived closest — near the C&H Sugar factory on San Pablo Bay in Crockett, Calif. — I saw him the most, which still wasn't more than two or three times. Though in youth he looked much like his brothers, he had thickened and reminded me of a friendly bulldog; even the long thin nose, a feature of the Fahlgren children, had somehow become pugnacious and friendly on Gordon, at least in my mind. One — I don't know which! — lived in Klamath Falls, Oregon. I'm not certain where the others lived.

It is sad and beyond stupid that I don't know much about them, how many are even still alive; of those who survive, I do not doubt they are meeting with the remaining survivors of Pearl Harbor somewhere, remembering the thousands who died, maybe wondering how they survived, and whether they had made the most of the life left to them.

I know only enough about them to know they did.

My grandmother passed away almost 20 years ago, and my mom nearly three years ago. Mom was my gatekeeper to her side of the family, the keeper of the stories, and in her stories and my faulty listening habits, the Fahlgren men have melded in my mind with the men of Lake Wobegon in Garrison Keillor's stories, with their Midwestern, Swedish names. I don't come across any people named Warner or Leonard or Irene. My mom said Lake Wobegon was so much like the North Dakota and Montana towns in which she was raised. I imagine the Fahlgren men as somehow stoic and mirthful.

The last I saw most of the Fahlgren men was a family reunion in 1987, two years after we got married. I joined some of them and two of my cousins for a round of golf (by the way, if you're thinking of learning golf, the worst way to start is with a bunch of people who play golf well, on a South Lake Tahoe course, on the Fourth of July, on the easily contested assumption that golf is easy); I lasted four holes before risking my well-being trying to escape the course; it is nearly impossible to walk off a fully operating golf course partway through a game.

Before I did finally leave, I sat with one of my great-uncles on a bench above the third tee — I am a piteous fool for not knowing which uncle! — who told me, "Beware the man who plays a good game of golf. It makes you wonder how well he's looking after his business and family."

In some way familiar and strange, what he told me lives in me as the legacy for which the Fahlgren men fought.

Tomorrow I'll say a prayer for them and us.