A Purple Heart Mystery

The Purple Heart was an unexpected discovery. I was helping my dad sort out some of his things and found it, not with his other service medals or in a box, just dusty and wrinkled with some of his other miscellaneous memorabilia. Imagine! My Dad had a Purple Heart! I knew my dad had been injured when he fell on a tin can during an air raid. He had a noticeable scar on his back, a half circle of puckered flesh about the size of a 28-ounce can, and some odd divots in an oblong above it. He’d explained how it came to be when I was very little. But… the Navy gave out Purple Hearts for falling on tin cans? Well, who was I to doubt the crazy days just before the proposed Invasion of Japan?

I took the Purple Heart to my dad. My dad, who loved stories and telling them, looked very grim, almost angry, and said nothing. But I understood. Since it was the early 1980s and PTSD was just becoming a common topic, I thought that the trauma around getting the Purple Heart explained it all. I set it back reverently, whispering to myself – my dad! A Purple Heart!

When he died years later, I was putting together a display about him and wanted that Purple Heart. It was nowhere to be found. To say I was upset was an understatement. My retired Air Force uncle was rather confused because he, my dad’s best friend, had never been told about a Purple Heart. However, understanding that I was distraught, he went to the commissary on the nearby Air Force base and picked one up.

A few years later, I found my dad’s all-important DD-214. This piece of paper is an abbreviated record of a military career – dates, ranks, awards, and discharge status. But… where was the Purple Heart? I decided to write the Department of the Navy and get to the bottom of this. How dare they leave it off? Even with the confusion of the end of the war, it was too important to omit. Cooler heads or rather, the onset of early motherhood and all the chaos surrounding it, put that plan on the back burner.

When I had time to think again, I began putting together random stories from old family friends. Allow me to pull back the mists of time and travel to a Naval base in the Philippines in the spring and early summer of 1945.

A young SeaBee from the high, dry state of Wyoming stood on the landing outside a two-story Quonset hut. Air raid sirens screamed of an impending Japanese raid. Rather than immediately heading for his post, he looked up and stepped back to see the planes, instantly pitching over the railing to fall twelve feet into the trash heap below. He landed back first on jaggedly opened tin cans, rats, and godknewwhat germs. The wound must have been spectacular because the resulting scar was impressive.

Once the air raid was over, my dad went off to the base hospital for stitches, a tetanus shot, and quite probably the 1940s version of a dope slap. For my dad, the story was over. However, tales of the air raid my dad’s injury, and a Purple Heart wafted their way across the Pacific, ending up on the local newspaper editor’s desk. He immediately called my grandfather, a prominent man in both the town and state. My grandfather had received no letter or telegram from his son. He wrote my dad immediately. My dad was notoriously bad about letter writing and he did not respond. My grandfather had little patience with this lack of news and did what any frantic parent would do. He picked up the phone and called the governor, the federal representatives, probably a few judges, and anyone else he could think of in Washington. The request for information about my dad ended up on the Secretary of the Navy’s desk.

At this point, I imagine the request began rolling downhill, bouncing from desk to desk, from ship to shore, gathering invective and foul language, until it landed with a splat on the desk of a young ensign in the Philippines. Bringing my father to his office was left to the tender mercies of the NCOs. My dad was called before this man, handed a pencil and paper, and told TO WRITE HIS FATHER A LETTER and BY GOD, DO NOT EVER DO THIS TO ME AGAIN. My dad wrote the letter. The letter was sent, I rather assume, through a courier mailbag rather than the normal channels.

Here the mists of time obscure our view of that base. Somehow all this was involved in the mystery of the Purple Heart. Could my father have self-awarded it? Never. He was no megalomanic and his reminiscences of his scar with a headshake for having been inexcusably stupid and young. Could this possibly have belonged to a friend? Again, no. That did not fall within my father’s character. He would have returned it to the family. I could come up with no decent way to tie all the pieces together.

I decided to lay out the story for my oldest son who had just finished four years with the Marines. Immediately, he started to laugh because the answer was immediately obvious to anyone who had served. So let us pull back the mists of time once more, to the mess hall, probably during the most crowded time of day.

The story of my dad’s injury, the involvement of the Secretary of the Navy, and the mythical Purple Heart had made their inevitable way throughout the base. My dad’s buddies decided that if the Navy would not give him a Purple Heart, then they would. And so, my Marine explained, they cornered my dad and awarded him the Purple Heart with rude humor and great fanfare designed for maximum amusement of all but my dad. They probably even gave him an inappropriate nickname or two.

And so the mystery of the Purple Heart was solved. My dad’s grimness explained. The eventual disappearance put into context. I imagine that my dad did not want to puncture my purple-tinged view of him, but he also would not have lied about it. My feeling is that he, who could dish out and take a good practical joke very happily, had not found the experience funny. He might have eventually relaxed enough to tell me, but then again, those really painful chapters are hard to relate. At any rate, I may not say ‘My dad- a Purple Heart!’ I can say, ‘My dad – what a great story!’