I tried to be the perfect daughter, but my Daddy died anyway. — LDJ

That is a sentence that I have written before, but which has gone no place. I even tried it once in poetry:

To my Father in Fiji, 1942

Francesco Dini

In this picture you are twenty

The smallest in your unit by far

Certainly the only Italian

Wavy black hair and an eager smile

Odd for someone so young and in such a place

You are ready for anything

Tailored and wiry like a terrier

You waited 50 years to tell me about this mission,

About your work out there in the South Pacific

As a child I always imagined warm breezes and wacky sailors

Star-crossed lovers never letting each other go;

Flying overhead, keeping the islands Safe for Democracy

Or, if not that, for an endangered way of life

Instead, I find out how the government got you from New York

A photo I probably shouldn’t even have

To San Francisco to Hawaii, not yet a state, and how you had

To hitchhike from there to Australia on your own.

No protection, no cover, just get there son, and if you make it

We’ll tell you what to do next

I want to write about the madness of those open orders

I want to write about how you were an aerial gunner

Hanging off the belly of the plane

Daddy on the left

I want to write about how dangerous your missions were

How the very reason I have these pictures is because

You were gunning for a unit that did recon photography missions,

Going out to map the place by plane so Uncle Sam would know

Exactly where to drop the bombs

I want to write about the islanders in the pictures

Before they fade away completely

But you’ve told me so little, and the notes on the back

That you wrote to my mother provide very few clues

You told me you trapped fish in holes in the coral reefs

And ate coconut and chickens

You said the islanders were kind to you

You said that when you went to Australia for R&R

You got ration books that you traded for socks and toiletries

And that the MPs bought you liquor

I want to crawl inside these pictures and grab

All you beautiful young men by the shoulders and say

Thank You/Damn You/What the hell made you go on?

————————————————————————

Dad’s Navy Box

That’s as far as I have ever gotten. There was never an answer to my “What did you do in the war (WWII), Daddy?” question. My father never talked about it. Not until I was about 50 years old and he and I were sitting together on his back porch in Florida years after my mother was gone. He said he needed to tell me something. It was about the war. It was about what he did. He pulled out a bunch of photographs. And then he gave me the metal box they came in – a box that he had to make in the Navy. Hard rivets, like on an airplane, made from airplane scraps. Everybody made one.

I don’t know if he ever killed anybody, but I doubt that you could have been an aerial

Daddy (third from left) in Fiji

gunner in the war and not killed anybody. I only know that he survived and came home. He came home with a tropical infection that almost cost him his arm and an ulcer that cost him much of his stomach. Still, he held it all in. Daddy was like that. The important things stayed stuffed, while the little things caused explosions. I’d give anything for another explosion right now.

Tim and I read Unbroken when it first came out (listened to it on CD, actually). We were totally enthralled. Last Friday we watched it on TV and were terribly shaken. I still haven’t stopped thinking about it. What were these people made of? Both the courageous and the cruel. Who were they?

After writing about Campo 78 in Abruzzo and then finally seeing Unbroken, I felt compelled to tell this story, however incomplete it is. I’ll never know what really happened, but I’m grateful for what my father was able to share all those years later.

Buon viaggio

Linda Dini Jenkins

Linda Dini Jenkins is a card-carrying Italophile, travel planner, freelance writer, and amateur photographer. Travel is her passion, so writing about her travels just comes naturally. She hopes all her travelers find a way to express their joys, surprises, and fears as they travel and gives every traveler a nifty journal to help smooth the way. Learn more…