Chasing Ghosts

Chasing Ghosts describes how, near the end of his life, the daughter of a veteran of World War II comes to terms with her father, emotionally wounded by his military service through the stories he tells her about his childhood, about his military service in the Navy in the late 1930s, and about his wartime experiences and through her research undertaken to understand her father's life in the context of history. Told through the voice of a daughter seeking answers to her father's life, the narrator journeys into her father's history and the context in which it enfolds. She learns that her father's response had been a mixture of rage and silence and she begins to understand why he has chosen her as an object of his abuse. The narrative provides an understanding of working-class World War II veterans who performed the behind-the-scenes work, like the narrator's father's work as an aviation machinist's mate, necessary to waging war--work that was not conventionally heroic or, until recently, considered worthy of historical or cultural attention. By juxtaposing historical moments in her family's and the country's life, Chasing Ghosts engages in the current necessary conversation about the often unrecognized effects of war and its trauma on World War II veterans, and reinterprets the experience of her father and other such veterans in the context of contemporary understanding about the psychic cost of war and its cross-generational impact on families. In the process, the narrator's lack of knowledge is replaced with empathy for what he's experienced and an understanding of his place in history.