Letters from Inside the Whale

A little girl asked her father, "What did you do in the war, Daddy?"

Tucking his child in bed, he answered with a fantastic story about a whale. A tale she wholeheartedly believed, until she didn't. He never talked about his war again.

Coming of age during the Vietnam era, the daughter watched war play out on TV, listened to broadcasts of the draft on the radio, faced the mirror of a Vietnam Memorial engraved with names of the dead, joined the protest movement as a secondhand participant. During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the mother of three saw young men and women come home damaged in body, mind, and spirit.

The child's original question launched a lifelong quest to understand this thing call war. What was it like, being there, in real time? When her father died in 1992, she believed he'd taken his true war story with him. Only years later would she find a thick packet of letters he'd written to his mother dated from early summer 1944 to April 1946, rich with stories from the Pacific front.

Decades after the fact, the boy who went to war came to life again, took his daughter by the hand, and carried her with him. The two weren't alone on the journey. She'd brought numerous traveling companions along for the wild ride--Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Kurt Vonnegut, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., Mary Oliver, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and others. Slipping the last letter back into its envelope, what could she do but write him back, respond to compelling pieces of his story, resume the conversation they never had . . . about his war.