If there is a better way to enjoy a Joe Garland book than reading it in a dim lonely light, it is having the author read it to you in a dim-lit room filled with fellow appreciators of Gloucester's senior wordsmith.
So it was that the crowd that filled the auditorium in Cape Ann Historical Museum's basement got the fullest taste possible of Garland's impossibly moving memoir of growing up a soldier amid a bunch of buddies doing the same as long as the war allowed.
In the case of so many, that wasn't long enough; for Garland at times, the long, productive life he's lived since surviving the war was torturously, guiltily long.
"Unknown Soldiers" is his "magnum opus," his publisher Laura at Protean Press, opined.
She introduced Garland to discuss and read from the monumental work, literally the work of a lifetime — 508 pages, more than 30 of them footnotes — countless pictures and maps, thumbnail biographies and a group memoir of the journey through Europe of his platoon in 1943 and '44 set inside an assiduously researched history of the conflict in that theater. All in all it is a work of such stamina and emotional vulnerability that it would be as apt to wonder how he got it done in 65 years than to wonder at the time it took to write.
It was tied up in invisible emotional knots for the longest time in the decades after Garland came home, in one piece but weighed down with survivor's guilt.
He read the "Up Front" introductory section which skimmed over the struggle to understand and master this guilt, finally liberated to write his masterpiece only after deep introspection and therapeutic assistance.
When Garland announced at the podium that "I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do tonight," he had before him carefully selected sections of his book, never knowing when he would break down in tears at the poignancy of this life the war left for him.
As it was Tuesday night — not coincidentally Veterans Day — with difficulty, and with wife-partner-advisor Helen sitting three feet away in the first row, he kept his emotions pretty much in check through a range of reactions to his own writing.
"We occasionally pulled off what we had to do. ... Yes, we were killers. ... Had they listened to me those two men would not have died. ... Fortunes of war? Fortunes or war, my ass. ... Not guilty, guilty is not the right word, not being able to go back up haunted me, 65 years later, I understand it, but it still haunts me. ... (Jerry) Waldron, my dearest buddy, he got my diaries, without my diaries there would be no book."
But Waldron saved the diaries for Garland, so there is a book, and it is dedicated "To Monk, Jerry, Jimmy and Doug. And to the rest I know of, departed, yet with us still."
"... It's been so private... turned down by 22 publishers ..." Garland said.
Garland came closest to a tearful explosion near the end of his readings over 45 minutes.
He explained that he'd never had a post-traumatic nightmare until the night after he saw on the news that the Bush military was bringing soldiers home on leave to be with family before sending them back to war.
"It's an unwritten rule of war," he pronounced. "You do not do that. I woke up screaming. It's the one and only time that happened to me."
He confessed that he began raising the American flag over the Black Bess homestead on Eastern Point on the day after the election.
After he read, he signed books happily and enjoyed the company of his Gloucester buddies.
Richard Gaines may be contacted at rgaines@gloucestertimes.com.
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