BRATTLEBORO — The year was 1976. I was a freshman at the University of Vermont, where I'd just gotten my first taste of collegiate fashion trends.
“You should see this shop, Dad,” I said, wide-eyed and excited. “All it has is 13-button Navy pants!”
His brow was knit.
“Everybody is wearing them, Dad!”
He didn't get it.
“You're telling me,” he said, trying to take in what to him was an outrageous fact, “that this is a store where all they sell are used Navy pants?”
“Yes!” I said.
“Dress-blue Navy pants. Like I used to wear?”
I nodded.
“Where do they get them all?” he asked me.
I told him how the shop owner had a friend who'd advised him that World War II Navy pants were popular and that he should try to track down a Navy surplus distributor and open up a shop in a college town.
I was fascinated the day I walked into his store. All my life, I had begged my dad for stories of his experiences during the war.
At 17, he had enlisted in the Navy by lying about his age. He would have turned 18 in September and been drafted anyway. He decided he'd rather choose the arm of service he was assigned to.
He'd shipped out to the Pacific to fight the Japanese but, since he had first-aid skills, the Navy traded him to the Marines to serve as a medic when he got to the island of Pavuvu.
* * *
When I was a kid, I'd beg Dad to tell his stories and was engrossed in every single word.
I loved to hear how his buddies called him not his given name, Clarence, but “Clem” or “Slim” and how they managed to scare up a bottle of locally-made joy juice on his 18th birthday and how the flamethrowers were sent into the caves into which the Japanese were dug in.
Later, much later, when I was an EMT serving with Rescue Inc., he shared what it was like to help the Japanese soldiers who ran out of those caves, burned over most of their bodies. He gave as many as he could a little morphine before they died to ease their pain, something he was not supposed to do.
The day I walked into the store in Burlington which held those hundreds of pairs of Navy pants, all I could think of were the fathers who had owned them, men just like my dad. The store felt like a shrine to me.
What would those pairs of pants say if they could talk?
* * *
“How much are they charging for the dress blues?” my father asked me.
“Thirty dollars,” I replied.
“Thirty dollars!” he said, gesticulating in disbelief. He repeated the amount. “Thirty dollars!”
I rolled my eyes. My father had grown up during the Great Depression. I was tired of discussing prices with him.
“Did you buy a pair?” he asked.
“No!” I said, knowing this fact would please him. “I can't afford them.”
His face fell a little bit. The plus side of having a father who grew up during the Depression was that he had a great deal of empathy for anyone who couldn't afford something they truly desired.
“Let's see if I can fix that,” he said and motioned for me to follow him down to the basement.
* * *
I walked behind him as he descended the stairs. His injuries were most noticeable to me on a staircase. The bullets had torn through his hip, shattering his pelvis and breaking his leg in several places. He was told he'd never walk again but had managed to beat the odds. He was 60 percent disabled.
In the darkness, he stood over his cedar chest and, bending his 6-foot frame low, he opened it up. He shuffled newspapers and bank statements aside and piled a few family pictures on top of them.
He lifted out his Marine wool blanket and showed me where he'd stitched his name with thick black thread on the corner so that he wouldn't lose it.
Then he took out a stuffed dog he'd made out of another wool blanket and stitched together by hand. It had been a project a woman from the Red Cross had helped him with when he had been bedridden in a body cast at the Naval Station Great Lakes hospital in Illinois.
Then he smiled as he pulled out his very own 13-button Navy dress pants and held them before me.
“Think they'll fit?” he asked with a twinkle in his eyes.
I was overwhelmed.
“These are yours?” I asked.
“Yup, these were the pants I wore when I had my official picture taken when I enlisted. We all had to wear the dress blues. See these laces in the back? They pull out and adjust so that all the men look the same no matter what size they are.”
I ran upstairs to try them on. They were too tight in the hips, so I pulled the black laces in the back wide open, and Dad helped me adjust them correctly.
“Boy,” he said, “These bring back memories of this big locker room that they herded us all into to get dressed formally for our portrait. We didn't know how to get the laces right either, so we all helped each other.”
“See, you get the pants centered on your hips like this, then you pull the bottom lace tight until the pants lie flat on the front and the back. A sailor could get demerits if his uniform wasn't just so,” he said.
“What would happen if he didn't get it right?” I asked as he continued adjusting my new pants.
“K.P.!” he said with a laugh. “You might get stuck peeling bushels of goddamned potatoes in the kitchen. A few poor suckers learned that one the hard way.”
When he finished with the laces and the pants fit perfectly I turned around to face him. He couldn't speak, and his eyes were red with tears.
I knew him well enough to know that he was in that place he got to sometimes, where he'd be telling me a story and his voice would trail off and he'd get lost in thoughts he would never share. Sometimes I imagined his memories got the better of him.
I asked him what he was thinking about.
“You,” he said plainly.
“If anybody ever told me when I was 18 years old that I'd actually live through the war and have my daughter at the same age standing in front of me in my own Navy pants, I would have never believed them.”
Then he backed away from his emotions.
“Well, there you go - I just saved you 30 bucks,” he said.
* * *
Those pants meant the world to me. They were a little too long, but I never hemmed them because my Dad had done it himself with his own hand. I didn't want to remove his stitches.
Four years later, I graduated from college and moved back in with my folks. I wore the pants on long winter walks with the man I would later marry. My dad's pants became such a common sight on my legs my father no longer commented on them.
I continued to wear them until the winter of 1985, when I'd let the laces out of the back as far as they could to accommodate the breadth of my father's grandson.
After the birth, I put them in the bottom of my own cedar chest.
* * *
Fifteen years passed. My father ignored the signs of prostate cancer for almost a year before I dragged him to the doctor.
Like many veterans living in denial of his life experiences and holding in all those terrible memories of war, sometimes he would ignore important messages from his body and tried instead to tough it out, as he'd done in the service.
The doctor gave him less than a year to live, and Dad decided not to prolong the fight. As he got closer to his dying day, the stories poured out of him.
Gone were the Gomer Pyle–type goofy stories of getting lost in the jungle or drinking too much hooch.
Instead, he told me how he had almost died as he fell behind his unit treating the injured and had to drop down between the dead bodies, pretending he was one of the casualties.
A Japanese soldier bayoneted each of the men around him in the abdomen to be sure they were dead. One of them bent down and rifled through my Dad's pockets and took a can of his K-rations and a picture of his mother. He believed the only reason they didn't bayonet him was because he'd left his eyes open.
He cried.
He apologized for having to kill or be killed. He sat in front of a camera for two hours and told his stories so that his four grandchildren would understand the horrors of war.
And then he died.
When he left this world, he took with him all the stories he still couldn't bear to say out loud.
The ones that gave him lifelong nightmares.
* * *
When my daughter was 19, we had a tag sale. We went through bunches of boxes of stuff. Kate was pulling clothing out of a box. I saw her lift out the Navy pants.
She looked up at me.
“What are these?” she asked.
“They're your grandfather's dress-blue Navy pants,” I said quietly. “I wore them all the time when I was your age.”
Kate excitedly tried them on. I showed her how to use the laces in the back, as my dad had showed me.
My Dad's Navy pants were over 60 years old. He wore them when he was 18 in 1942, I wore them when I was 18 in 1976, and then his 19-year-old granddaughter was wearing them 65 years later. I'd like to believe that Kate's children will be wearing Dad's pants, almost 100 years after the first time he had put them on.
All I know is that they belonged to a great man - a courageous kid, really - who kissed his mama goodbye and, like the majority of the boys his age, sailed off to unknown destinations where, like most veterans I know, he did unspeakable things that punished him all the days of his life.
I don't believe in wars. But I do believe in the men and women who fight them.
If the stories that accompany one ancient pair of wool pants can continue to educate another couple of generations of people, maybe, just maybe, what my dad and so many others had to experience will make the world a better place in ways they never ever dreamed possible.