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I was taken aback that Sandburg would even josh about getting a tattoo. And he in turn must have been surprised at my strong reaction to the idea. After all, I’m a veteran of law enforcement and, before that, the military; in both worlds, ink often is a big part of what Sandburg would surely think of as the deep-seated tribal culture.
So, he probably presumed what folks think when they learn my position on the subject. That I’m against it because I have the “my body is a temple” fetish of the stereotypical bodybuilder. Or that I’m too damned conservative — Sandburg’s a tad young to know the expression “square” — to realize that tats are hip, happening and now. Maybe he even would conclude that I hold with the Old Testament prohibition against marking one’s flesh.
Those are reasonably good guesses all, I suppose. Except it’s not any of them.
The night before I left for the Army after finishing my ROTC course, my father (I prefer to think of him as William, which gives me some much-needed emotional distance) and I got drunk together. First time, only time. And it was the first time, only time, he ever told me anything about his own stint as a GI.
He was one of the youngest ever to serve in World War II, that last good war, volunteered toward the end, lied about his age by two years to enlist, so during the event in question, he was still seven weeks shy of 17, way younger than I was at the same point in life. Surely that’s why what happened hit him so hard . . . and why he never talked about it before, or, to my knowledge, since. Probably not even to Grace — Mom — and for sure not to Stevie.
Here in Major Crimes, I’ve seen some really rough scenes, lots of bodies. Hell, way before that, as an Army Ranger in Peru, lost in the jungle after a secret mission gone wrong, I buried seven of my own men by myself, digging the graves one by one.
But I’ve never seen anything like William did when he was still a boy.
General Eisenhower himself had thrust the camera into his hands. Every man not assigned other duty had to shoot film reels and take photographs. Document it all, the future president sternly ordered, so that, down the line, no one could ever claim that reports of horrific atrocities were mere wartime propaganda. They have, though, anyway, these past few decades, those damned Holocaust deniers.
So William took pictures, all day, all throughout the concentration camp. Of the dead. The dying. The living skeletons. And many of them, on their living, dying and dead forearms, had tattoos in blue. Just numbers, because, to the Nazis, they didn’t deserve names.
William had drunk more than enough Scotch by that point in the conversation to be bleary-eyed and teary-eyed. Truth to tell, so had I. But I never forgot what he said next -- his exact words -- though it was nearly half my life ago.
“Can’t stop you going in, Jimmy. Can’t tell you what to do about anything -- you’re a man. And a man could do a lot worse than fight to defend his country, this way of life, democracy.
“Gotta ask you one thing, though. Don’t ever get a tattoo. Don’t ever give one. Or ever let anyone you love get one. The tattoo -- it’s the devil’s own mark of humiliation and victimhood!”
It’s one of the few things he ever said that I’ve been glad to comply with all my life.
I didn’t tell Blair any of this. Much as I care about him — and it’s more than he would guess, even after my comment — I probably never will. Some things are meant to stay between father and son. I can’t help wondering, now, though. What else about his early life has Dad never told me?