Excerpt from Black Glasses Like Clark Kent

From Robert Polito's Judge’s Statement

If the ego, superego, and id of traditional psychological case studies supposedly mimic the three floors in a Viennese bourgeois abode, Svoboda’s tale instead suggests a fever-dream horror house—her multistory structure is all angles, dead ends, ghosts, and trapdoors. As private Detective Svoboda trails the terrors: What if, for instance, Superman’s (or her uncle Don’s) disguise is actually a secret that he held on to for almost sixty years? And that secret spirals out from his Nebraska family back to that occupation of Japan after the Second World War? What if that occupation occasioned an intricate government cover-up of torture and deaths of U.S. soldiers spanning Tokyo to Washington? And this exemplar of “the Greatest Generation,” this Superman, skids and crashes in 2004 because of what he saw, what he perhaps did, as an MP in the Eighth Army stockade in 1946?

CHAPTER 1

My uncle is Superman. With black Clark Kent glasses, grapefruit-sized biceps, lots of brilliantined thick dark hair, and a solid jaw, six-four and handsome as all get out, he’s the perfect match for Kryptonite. He even keeps a photo of himself as a high school Adonis, veins bulging. Now, in 2004, after making millions in farming, restaurants, and real estate, instead of swooping down and rescuing people from burning buildings, he volunteers for Meals on Wheels, just what Superman would take on in his advanced years. I suspect this Superman schtick also has something to do with Nietzsche’s “will to power.” After all, grandma had more than a whiff of German in her Czech fierceness. Make the best better reads the ornately written note I find in her purse after her funeral. My uncle was her baby, he bore a golden sheen that lit his life, made him special, a man with muscle.
A few years ago he tried to convince me that his eighteen months in the army would make a terrific movie, or at least a great book. “I was there during the occupation of Japan, right after World War Two,” he said. They found out we were less barbaric than they were taught. It’s quite a story.”
I rolled my eyes. Superman had gone too far. I put his confidence down to the vanity of old age, the vanity of someone who still, at nearly eighty, held himself and his washboard stomach as proudly as any of the supermen, screen or comic book. But he was adamant, so sure of his story—and my taking it on as the writer in the family.
“War stories?” I laughed. “Let me tell you how hard it is to get a book published.”
“If you’re a real Svoboda,” he says, “you’ll figure out a way. It’ll be worth it to you.”

It was a beautiful day so I decided to walk several more miles out into the country. I came across a large orchard, perhaps an apple orchard. About a hundred airplanes were hidden under the leaf canopy. Most of them looked like they were general aviation planes and some old military planes. They were parked in nice neat rows. I wandered over to several of them. I’ve always been interested in old planes. They were poorly equipped with what I’d call makeshift armament, kind of old, with little bomb bays crudely cut into them. I never found out if these were general aircraft that people were trying to hide from our bombing, or if they were the kamikaze—kind of a last-straw type of thing. The sun was filtering through the leaf canopy and I was the only person there, going from aircraft to aircraft. It felt like the dying of a country, or a giving up. [recorded 01/99]

In spring 2004, reports about Abu Ghraib fill the newspapers; by April, the radio talks of nothing else. Especially the kind of radio that everyone in small-town Nebraska listens to, the Rush Limbaugh who rationalizes it all away: “We’re going to ruin people’s lives over it and we’re going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. . . . . I’m talking about people having a good time. These people—you ever hear of emotional release? You ever hear of needing to blow some steam off?”
My dad calls around then and mentions that his brother has fallen into a deep depression. “I think it has to do with what’s going on,” he says. “He’s got plenty of money, his kids are okay, his wife just bought a new Cadillac. He’s never been depressed before.”
The psychiatric ward my uncle checks himself into is dead in the center of the country. Only one shrink runs the operation; there are no more psychiatrists for 150 miles. The facility got its start by taking in the settlers who were driven crazy by the solitude that the Homestead Act had forced them into, pioneering one farm every 160 acres.
On the fifth of July he calls his daughter Chris and demands to be let out. Maybe he watched all the Fourth of July TV; maybe the military played their pageant music nonstop, surely there were World War II reruns up the kazoo on cable. He tells her he has to get out that very night or else. Chris hears that or else better than most—she is a psychologist with her own practice—and suggests that he hire a private plane and fly down to Texas where she lives. “He was too close to suicide for antidepressants alone,” Chris writes me later. I imagine that, professionally speaking, she hesitates. Perhaps she mentions how slowly antidepressants kick in—sometimes it takes as long as six weeks. But he is her father and nobody else close to him—or anyone else within those 150 miles—will take the professional interest she does. At 3 a.m. July 6, he and his wife hire a plane to fly to Texas. He can’t wait for morning.

Years ago, his son Tom tells me this story:
His dad’s sixteen and plowing one end of the field. My dad, two years older, plows from the other end. The tractors back then have no air-conditioning, no tape deck, no CD player, no shock absorbers, no cab to keep out the dust or even an umbrella to block a sun that’s so hot they’ve tied red snot rags over their heads, and the motor thrums as if it will wear the cartilage right off the spine. Sweat drips down their faces as straight as the row after row they make to reach the middle. They grin when they pass each other on the last four of these rows; they bounce so bad they have to grin or lose their teeth. Finally, nose to nose, they shut off their vehicles, carefully set their glasses on the tractor haunches, and jump into the cool dirt clods to wrestle, turn after turn, their sweat churning the dirt into mud, until Grandma, with her halo of bottle-bright red hair, hangs over them with a pitcher of lemonade covered with a cloth and a nice kolache for each of them. By this time my uncle has my dad’s face pushed down in the plowed row beside her and his arm pinned to a broken cornstalk. But my dad, being older, is still heavier. He flips his brother as soon as he lunges for the lemonade and shoves him down even harder. He calls out, laughing, “Uncle, uncle.”
“Why’d you say uncle?” Grandma asks after. “A big boy like you quitting?”

Abu Ghraib, Abu Ghraib. It could have been a Club Med destination it sounded so exotic, so far away. The city near the prison was known for the Abu Ghraib Infant Formula Plant that Western intelligence proclaimed to be a biological weapons production facility. But all they ever found were cans of formula.

From Black Glasses Like Clark Kent: A GI's Secret from Postwar Japan. Copyright 2008 by Terese Svoboda.  All rights reserved.