Bringing Mulligan Home

INTRODUCTION

After Willis Robert Patterson died in York, South Carolina, on July 14, 1994, his son Robert opened his wallet. Inside Robert discovered a photograph of a man wearing a white T-shirt, standing with hands on his hips. The elder Patterson had carried the snapshot for nearly half a century and never told his son about it. The image was faded by years of wear, the face no longer recognizable. Blurred coconut palms and cone-shaped military tents formed a backdrop.

More than two thousand miles away, Steve Maharidge kept a yellowing picture of himself with that same man hanging in his garage. In it, the US marine wears a crook-brimmed hat with his arm casually thrown around Steve’s shoulders. Maharidge had kept it hanging where he would see it every day for decades. I know this because Steve Maharidge was my father.

Steve and Willis never met, but they were bonded by a picture of Herman Walter “Dick” Mulligan. Mulligan was Willis’s cousin, but he was more like a brother to him. Willis was desperate to know what had happened to him during the war. Though he didn’t tell his son about the picture, he had often talked about Dick Mulligan. When Robert was temporarily stationed at a Marine base on Okinawa en route to Vietnam in 1968, Willis had asked him to look for Dick’s grave there. But there was no grave. Mulligan’s body was listed as missing in action and “nonrecoverable.” It was a mystery.

My father, haunted by the death, knew exactly what had happened. But USMC Sergeant Steve Maharidge took that secret to his grave when he died on June 30, 2000.

Within days of Dad’s death, I began a quest to discover what occurred on May 30, 1945, and to locate and bring back Mulligan’s remains. Eighteen years later—on August 21, 2018—Mulligan got his twenty-one-shot salute and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery, about one hundred meters from my father’s plot.

This book is the story about what happened in between, and how Mulligan finally came home.

It was a long journey.

The picture of Daddy with the man from the war is one of my earliest childhood memories.

It was set on the gas meter at adult eye level, in the furnace room of our house in a village south of Cleveland. Ours was no ordinary basement. It contained massive cast-iron machines that weighed about a half-ton each. My father ran a side business grinding industrial cutting tools down there. By day he worked in a distant factory, but most evenings he labored in the furnace room, where the picture was positioned so that he looked straight at it while he worked.

Around the age of twelve, I began grinding with my father. He sometimes talked about the war when the machines roared. I knew instinctively never to ask questions. I just listened. I never broke this unspoken rule. Dad mentioned that the picture was taken on Guadalcanal. Except for one other time, he said nothing else about it.

My father had a depth of anger. The majority of the time he was a great dad. Then he’d snap, and he temporarily became the worst. The domestic violence began before I was born. “Joan showed up at our door and she had no nose,” my maternal uncle Robert Kopfstein told me once of my mother. “He had hit her across the face with a lead pipe.” I too witnessed this violence. One day in 1960, when I was four, he struck my mother. I remember the blood on the black-and-white wool wall-to-wall carpet at the base of the stairs. Mother bandaged herself to stop the bleeding at her temple. The image of that ugly splotch coagulating on the carpet remained in my nightmares for years.

Decades later Mom told me that she had issued an ultimatum after that attack—she’d walk if that ever happened again. Yet Dad’s fury remained. My brother Darryl told me that our father had once slugged me, that there was blood everywhere. But I’d utterly blotted the incident from my memory.

When I study my baby pictures, taken by my father with an Argus C3 camera, I smile in every frame. As a toddler, I grin from ear to ear, bundled up and wearing a wool cap while playing next to my sister in our side yard on an Ohio winter day. I was clearly a happy kid. In later pictures—age eight, nine, ten—however, I’m frowning, intense. My father’s rage had become my own.

The photograph of Herman Walter Mulligan came to represent everything that I didn’t know about my father and the war, and the inferno that burned within him. It was a great gnawing mystery as I grew up.

After my father died, I began a quest to learn Mulligan’s fate. He represented something that had happened to Dad, and I needed to know what it was. Mulligan was like a ghost I grew up with.

I began locating the men who were with Dad in L Company, “Love Company” in the military jargon of the era. Love Company, part of the 3rd Battalion, 22nd Marines, Sixth Marine Division, fought in the Pacific Theater during World War II. Over the course of the ensuing twelve years I spent ceaseless hours making phone calls; I have no idea how many. It was surely in the multiple thousands. I sent out hundreds of letters. Many men had common names—you can’t begin to comprehend how many Robert Harrisons and A. Robertsons that I telephoned, all false leads. And there were those with complex names who appeared to have simply vanished. (A startling number died between 1946 and 1950, and though the database that I used to find their records didn’t give causes of death, I’d learn that many drank themselves into early graves.) I got hold of sobbing widows, children who were more troubled than I was by their late fathers’ war experience.

A majority of the men from Love Company were dead by the time I finished the first edition of this book in 2013—over two-thirds by a rough count, though I’ll never know for certain.

I conversed with twenty-nine guys from the unit and got to know half of them really well. What’s remarkable is that most of these men, nearing the end, were talking. Many had spent their lives like my father, shunning any discussion of the war. These were, in some cases, essentially deathbed confessions. I discovered a World War II story impossible to get for over a half a century. The silent generation was finally speaking in their octogenarian years.

I found six guys who were present when Mulligan died. One Love Company veteran told me I was the first person in sixty-five years whom he’d talked to about the incident—he’d carried Herman Walter Mulligan’s body that day. Why, then, was his body listed by the military as “not recovered”?

I fixated on finding his remains. The motto of the US Marines is semper fidelis, commonly shortened to “semper fi.” It means “always faithful” or “loyal”—never leave a buddy behind. But I can’t say that I was personally motivated by semper fi. I was never a soldier. I never heard my father utter those words. Yet he lived them by keeping Mulligan’s memory alive his entire life. So in essence, for my father, I was abiding by semper fi as I sought to bring Mulligan “home.” That would, I felt, put some of Dad’s demons to rest.

The years spent researching this book were at times traumatic. For a period in the middle, when my mother fell ill with cancer, I gave up. Frankly, a lot of the story is horrific. I would have slept better many nights had I left it alone.

But I was pulled back. I needed to write this book because World War II followed a lot of men home. Ignored in many “good war” narratives is what really happened overseas—and most important, what occurred after the men returned stateside. Many families lived with the returnee’s demons and physical afflictions. A lot of us grew up dealing with collateral damage from that war—our fathers. Yet this is not a “trash your father” memoir, if it is a memoir. (I loved my father. At his core he was a good man. I also love the guys from Love Company, except for one—why will become clear later.) This is a reported book, told from a personal perspective, about the repercussions of war. After unearthing what my father went through, I’m amazed that he wasn’t more damaged. He grew less crazy-tempered as he aged, and near the end I saw perhaps the man that might have existed before he set off for the Pacific.

I initially focused my quest on learning about the man in the picture with my father. My search broadened, however, as I came to know the men of Love Company. The picture that I was obsessed with as a boy turned out to be the vehicle that propelled me on a journey toward something much larger, albeit fitting to the task of honoring the memory of Mulligan: an understanding of that war, and of my father. When I signed off on the first edition of this book in 2013, I was satisfied with that conclusion.

Yet I struggled to accept the fact that I’d failed to literally bring Mulligan home.

On May 31, 2013, I did one of the final media spots to support the first edition of this book. I was on the nineteenth floor of a building housing a National Public Radio studio, across from Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan, doing a pretaped interview via studio uplink for the show Here & Now. I told the host at WBUR in Boston about the e-mails, Facebook messages, handwritten letters—coming at a rate of about two per day—that I’d been getting from the children of World War II combat veterans. A week earlier a woman had e-mailed to say that her father had suffered nightmares that left him screaming—he’d ended those bad dreams by committing suicide in 1961. Another woman, Marie Browning, wrote that her father had served in the Battle of Guadalcanal and left that island with a damaged brain. At about age five, Marie witnessed her father severely beat her older sister. He chose to have a lobotomy to quell his fits of rage. At least two thousand veterans were given this “treatment” in the 1940s and 1950s.

“A preacher who knew my parents before Dad had his lobotomy spoke at my dad’s funeral,” Marie wrote. “He talked about how Dad made his choice to have the lobotomy, knowing what the outcome would be, because he loved us, and was afraid of hurting us. That is the one and only time I heard any kind of reference of love and my dad in the same context. After reading your account I began to wonder which of us was better off, you experiencing the constant, very real threat of rage from your dad or me experiencing no hope of emotional expression from mine. I quickly came to the conclusion that neither of us was better off.” Marie signed the e-mail, “Your sister in experience.”

I answered each person. I told most of them that “we are all sons and daughters of the same father.”

That evening after the WBUR interview, I flew to California, returning to my remote home overlooking the Pacific Ocean on the Lost Coast. My nearest neighbor was half a mile across a canyon.

I’d spent a dozen years trying to bring Mulligan home. I needed to hide out. I was utterly spent.

The eight-and-a-half minute Here & Now piece aired on June 13, 2013. That night, when I logged into e-mail on a tenuous connection from a Verizon tower perched atop a mountain ten miles inland, I found this message:

I accepted her offer in a brief reply, but I privately gave it zero chance of being successful. I had tried to get in touch with his relatives during my research to learn more about Mulligan and find people with whom I could share what I’d learned. I’d made hundreds of phone calls to his extended family in the Carolinas and sent two-hundred and fifty letters to people who might have been kinfolk to his aunt, Ruth Owens Patterson. I knew she’d been married to Heyward Parker Patterson and had three sons: Willis, Ernest, and James. But I had no luck.

I quickly forgot about Bridget’s e-mail and threw myself into the tasks of maintaining my remote refuge: chainsawing, splitting wood, and doing other off-grid chores.

What was about to begin, however, was akin to what happens when the late summer winds blow west over the top of Africa. After picking up the fine red sands of the Sahara that make these winds visible from outer space, they seed hurricanes over the warm waters of the Atlantic Ocean that eventually strike the eastern seaboard of the United States. It was as if I’d kicked up the dust by creating this book—other people carried those seeds forward and would churn them into a hurricane. That e-mail from Bridget was the first step in the formation of a team of amateurs, connected by the Internet, who set in motion the chain of events that led to the US government exhuming and identifying the body of Herman Walter Mulligan. As one of our group, Jean Patterson, said about us: “Sometimes, when you least expect it, people you need in your life suddenly appear out of nowhere.”

This ragtag crew covered a range of the American experience, from right to left: One voted for Donald Trump; another had been a hippie poet in the 1960s. It wasn’t about politics. It was all about what one of them deemed “the mission.” It was about doing the right thing. These people, whom I would not meet in person for years, carried me across the finish line.