Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [206]
John Bartz returned home to Duluth and confronted demoralizing disbelief within his own home. “When I first came back my mother and all of us got together, the whole group, about forty of them, relatives and all. They wanted to hear the whole story. I started, and you could see skepticism come on people. I guess it’s hard to believe that somebody would take a hose and shove it up your ass and down your throat and pour water up both ends. It’s hard to believe that. You don’t want to believe it. So I just quit.”
He quit talking, but he could never quite keep his mind from sorting it through. “I couldn’t sleep,” Bartz said. “I’d wake up at night screaming.” He found a way to fight through it. He would leave the house in the middle of the night, get in his mother’s car, and “drive it like a son of a gun.” A few times he got pulled over by the police. The local cops learned who he was pretty quickly. “Oh, you’re that Bartz kid, prisoner of war?” they would say. “Well, I’m not gonna give you a ticket, but you’d better slow down. There are other people on the road.”
Slowing down was the last thing Lanson Harris needed. He came back from the war, reenlisted, and attended flight school at Pensacola and Corpus Christi. “I was flying for five or six years, and I was feeling pretty good.” His career kept him moving. He kept going until it came time to stop. Jane Harris said, “It came time when he was in twenty years, and we had our daughter then, and she was ten. And he said, ‘Well, I’d better get out of the Navy before I kill myself.’” He got an engineering degree. Working for Northrop, he tested parachute recovery systems for the Apollo program. In the sixties, tired of government waste, he turned to a line of work he found much more rewarding: teaching junior-high wood and metal shop.
“I was absolutely lost, like a fish out of water,” Otto Schwarz recalled. “I’ll never forget. I arrived in Newark late in the evening. I had taken the five o’clock from Washington. I was all alone. Now I hadn’t been home in seven years. Washington had gotten a call through the day before to tell my parents that I’d be coming home. I stood in the railroad station absolutely alone. I didn’t know what to do, but I knew that I didn’t want to be alone.” And yet going home meant returning to the broken home he had been only too happy to leave in the adventurous blush of 1941. That adventure was over, and 1945 showed him a bleaker, less certain vista.
“I spent the next three months just drinking my way from one bar to another,” Schwarz said. “Most of my old friends from the neighborhood were still overseas. I went back to Washington twelve days early because I was broke. I had to go back and get more money. Really, really absolutely lost! We should never have been left and released like that, you know. It’s a really strange feeling because you really don’t feel like a human being anymore after coming out of those jungles.”
Wisecup retrieved his manhood quickly enough by joining the Merchant Marine and going back to sea, where he stayed for seventeen years. His postwar career took him to Japan, where he met and married a Japanese woman, his third wife. She would outlive him, but his long correspondence to friends after the war reveal a man at peace with what war had forced him to suffer. John Wisecup died in Tokyo in 2001.