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Tuesday | February 12, 2008 | Volume 1 | Issue 611

Book Review: Black Glasses Like Clark Kent

Black Glasses Like Clark Kent: A GI's Secret from Postwar Japan by Terese Svoboda (Graywolf Press, $14, 9781555974909/1555974902, February 2008)

Since Terese Svoboda is the only published writer in her family, her 80-year-old Uncle Don asked her to help him put together a book about his World War II experiences. She told him she was very busy with her own projects. Her uncle countered that his time with the Military Police at the Eighth Army Stockade in Nakano during the U.S. Occupation of Japan would make a terrific story. Still she passed.

A few years later Svoboda's gregarious, vigorous, happy-go-lucky uncle suddenly sank into a deep depression. Her father suggested that assisting with Uncle Don's book might make him feel better. What else could Svoboda do? She yielded to family pressure and called her uncle; as she says, "I thought I was following a tidy coming-of-age account of a young soldier in postwar Japan." Little did she know!

Her uncle sent her tapes of a portion of his story. When she listened to them, the violent undertones to his memories made her wonder if it was only a coincidence that his breakdown came right after the revelation of abuses at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. Sensing that something equally horrifying had gone on at the Stockade in 1946, she was both appalled and curious to learn the whole story. When she telephoned her even-more-depressed uncle, he excused himself from divulging more because of his condition. And then he committed suicide.

In too deep to stop, Svoboda embarked on a Kafkaesque journey through military records and interviews with other veterans. What she found raised questions and more questions but clearly suggested multiple incidents of extreme racial tension, abuse of prisoners, undocumented executions by hanging and more at the Eighth Army Stockade. Out the window went all those reassuring stories of World War II as the Good War whose soldiers were uncomplicated members of the Greatest Generation.

Combining excerpts from her uncle's memories with her own reflections as she struggled to unearth facts supporting her suspicions, Svoboda makes us confront the possibility that during World War II atrocities occurred that have yet to be revealed. What's more, that so-far suppressed history may be a tale, by its untelling, that has damaged many people besides Don Svoboda. Svoboda's insightful, disturbing and moving dual memoir stands as a testimony not only to her bravery and persistence in following an obscured trail but also to all veterans who have harbored secrets until they were eaten up by them.--John McFarland