I Skype my parents every Monday morning at 7 a.m. Thai time/ 8 p.m. Sunday night Boston time. Yesterday, upon arriving to the Internet I opened a text message from my mom that had been sent the night prior that read, “Hope you had a nice Easter. On a sad note, Papa died in his sleep sometime last night. I will keep you posted.” Talk about an early morning blow. Upon Skyping with my mom, I learned that on Saturday night my Papa, who was not sick at the time, attended Easter Mass, sang in the choir, arranged the music for the next morning’s Sunday Mass, had a glass of whiskey, went to bed, and sadly did not wake up the next morning. While it is comforting to know that he went peacefully, and for a man of faith, on Easter Sunday of all days, it has still been a big blow for me. Being so far from my family definitely does not help with the grief either. However, I know that I am in good hands here in Nong Khai, amongst a group of people who know death and grief and suffering so intimately. Thank you for all those that have reached out to me in the past hours – it brings home a little bit closer.
I still haven’t fully processed the news of the death of my grandfather yet. It is still very raw. But I wanted to share the following piece, which was written during my freshman year of college as a writing assignment based on an interview with a family member. Some of the numbers in the piece, including number of grandchildren and grandchildren, have been updated to reflect the last five years.
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March 1958. One thousand men. Together as one. As they stand on the shore, their futures lay ahead of them, beginning to roll out just as the pure, crisp waves before their eyes. Even as the sun tries to peek overhead, a brisk wind cuts through their green fatigues. The picturesque background of soaring evergreens and cascading mountains still enchant the men, even as their minds’ are elsewhere. These men have come far and wide, from Minnesota to New York, to stand at the banks of this Seattle shore. Now, as they leave Fort Lewis, Washington, a unified force, their paths are destined for foreign waters. Most head toward Korea, but one lone member waits for his journey to Japan to unravel.
This is a scene Sergeant Dick O’Brien, a member of the Army Security agency headed for Japan, could have never imagined. He can’t help but remember that just three years earlier, in 1955, he had been a student at St. Mary’s Seminary College in North East, Pennsylvania. He had been studying to be ordained as a Redemptorist Brother. In 1955, he had already been a member of the seminary college for six years. However, in May of that year, just weeks after his twenty-second birthday, Dick realized that “the four walls of his life seemed to be closing in on him”. Life as a priest was not for him. Coming from a close family, the oldest of four children from a small Boston neighborhood, he finally admitted to himself that he would love to have a family of his own. He wanted to have someone to care of him when he grew older, just as he, as the oldest child, had the responsibility of caring for his dying father.
As he stands at the shores surrounding Fort Lewis, he cannot help but think about his father and his recent diagnosis of cancer. Had he stayed in the seminary school, he would have been ordained in June of 1961. He wonders if the inevitable loss of his father would have pressured him to drop out of the seminary school, had he not already dropped out six years earlier. Would he have had the strength to continue through? He thinks about how different his life would have been had he become a priest. He would not be standing there, a Specialist Second class in the U.S. Army, about to leave for Japan. He would not have a wife and a baby son waiting for him at the Army Linguistics Base in Monterey, CA. Yet, as he stares at the General Sumner, the hulking gray transport ship approaching the shore, he is grateful for the time he spent in the seminary. Had he not, he would never have developed a knack for learning foreign languages. He could have never imagined this skill would have taken him from his home in Mission Hill to Fort Dix in New Jersey, then to the Army Linguistics Base in California, to Fort Lewis in Washington and now to Japan.
Who would have thought that studying Latin and Greek at St. Mary’s and French for a semester at Boston College would have led to a job as a traffic analyst for the United States Army? Dick had never planned on joining the Army. He was planning on becoming a history teacher after leaving the seminary. Therefore, he would not have thought that his previous language training would lead him on such a path. In fact, he had only been accompanying a friend who was enlisting in the Army the day he decided to enlist himself. After being asked about his schooling, he told the recruiter about his time in the missionary and at Boston College and his language studies. Impressed, the recruiter offered him a position at the Army Linguistics base as a Russian Specialist. He immediately took the proposal because he would rather have had a secure, safe job in the Army, rather then being drafted as a member of the infantry, something that seemed inevitable in the current state of the Cold War.
Dick had previous knowledge of the current Cold War. The “Red Scare” seemed to be in all the major newspapers. Now as he prepares himself to leave for Japan, he could not have possibly imagined the direct influence he would have on the fight against Russian communism. The main effort of his force is to make sure that the Russians do not share their atomic weapons. To do so, they are particularly concerned with the fall of neighboring nations to communism, a theory known as the “domino effect”, and are equally interested in the Russian space program. By intercepting Russian transmissions, they would be able to monitor the Russians’ movements throughout Europe and Asia.
Although he knows what he is getting into, Dick could never have imagined that he would soon know by name every pilot in the Russian Army that was stationed in Siberia, which is just one hundred miles from his base in Hokkaido, Japan. He could not have imagined having to send every message of interest to the National Security Agency for review and priority characterizations. He could have never imagined that by intercepting Russian radio transmissions, he would know where the Russian pilots lived, who their girlfriends were, and where they were at all times. From dropping out of a seminary college, to intercepting, interpreting, and analyzing Russian radio calls, Dick’s life was nothing that he once imagined.
There are so many things that Dick can not see on that bitter March day as he glares into the vast Seattle horizon. So many aspects of his future are still untold and unwritten. His contributions and events of the future could not truly come to light until his discharge. Believing he would not see his loved ones for two full years, he cannot imagine that his wife and son would join him in Japan in just six months. He could not have imagined on that day that his life would become one cloaked in secrecy, so that he was not allowed to tell his wife about his day at work, even when his station had monitored three failed space missions that took the lives of nine cosmonauts. He could not see that one day he would nearly be shot and killed when a fellow officer cleared his gun without looking. He also could not see in the pale blue of the rolling tide the close bonds he would make in Japan, bonds that would lead to yearly visits to Army buddies in Minnesota and Wisconsin.
He could never have imagined that he would some day be married for fifty eight years, or that he would have not one, but ten children to care for him as he got older. He could have never imagined that he would be eligible to go back school as a federal subsidy for being a Vietnam War veteran. He could never have imagined that he would return to college at the age of forty to earn a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology with a minor in Spanish and History from Bridgewater State College, or that he could graduate on the same day as his ninth child’s baptism. He could never have imagined as he peered into the glimmering sea the reflection of me – one of seventeen proud grandchildren and four great-grandchildren, who wishes they had been told his story earlier.
~ Richard Kenneth O’Brien, Sr. (May 24, 1934 – April 5, 2015)
