My Father Was an Anti-Fascist Too

I might’ve been eight when I first asked my father if he’d ever killed anyone.

“No,” was all he said.

But I asked again, and again, in spare moments, and the more I asked, the more he didn’t say.

It was the 1970’s and I had an obsession with WWII. I built model planes and tanks, painted them meticulously – P-51 Mustangs and Grumman Hellcats and even a P-38 Lightning and a B-1 bomber, spray-painted silver to look just like the ones that had carried atomic bombs to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When I grew bored with them, my friends and I set up crash sites in the woods and blew them up with M-8o’s and firecrackers, doused them with lighter fluid and set them ablaze.

I have no idea what my father thought of all this. He never said.

As I grew older, I learned that my father had indeed killed people. Dozens at least. Probably hundreds. Hell, possibly thousands. And for everyone he may have killed, he saw thousands more dead pile up around him.

As a marine infantryman in WWII he’d shipped out from Honolulu to the Solomon Islands and then, Iwo Jima. The name Iwo Jima still stirs the hearts of veterans and their families. Twenty-two thousand Japanese dug in on a volcanic rock in the Pacific. Some 70,000 US soldiers landed there to capture the island and turn it into a bomber base for the eventual invasion of Japan. After a month of fighting, the Japanese were dead, to a man. Of 26,000 US casualties, including 6800 dead, my father was among the survivors.

As an infantryman, my father, Private Conant — promoted to Corporal after surviving the bloodiest battle in the history of the Marines – was in the engineer corps. This meant that his job on Iwo Jima was demolitions – to lay explosives at the mouths of the tunnels excavated in the island’s black volcanic tuff and blow them up, collapsing the tunnels and burying the Japanese alive. He told me once that, as a young man he’d dreamed of building bridges — but that dreamed ended when he saw how easy it was to blow them up.

Myself, I’ve been fortunate to live a life largely free of violence. I’ve also been fortunate that, later, after my father’s true history as a soldier came to light, he told me that he renounced war. He wasn’t ashamed of what he’d had to do – he was proud, of course, to have served his country in a war that liberated the world from the evils of totalitarian fascism. But, like too many veterans, he carried the trauma with him forever, in his nightmares, in his silences, in the alcoholism that eventually consumed him. Like most, he never wanted to see such violence again. Nor did he want it for his children. He never suggested that I should join the military – and for that I am grateful.

Instead, he helped to set me on the path of peace. As a lawyer, a public defender, he instilled in me a deep regard for justice, and for the cause he had fought for — the struggle to free the world from totalitarian fascism and to defend the ideals of democracy, to believe in the US Constitution and its aspirational values — to bend the moral arc of history towards justice.

If I’ve served any cause over my 58 years, it has been the cause of peace, a cause inspired by many, many anti-fascist heroes and sheroes, among them discharged US Marine Corporal John Conant.

“Those who celebrate killing are either badly, badly damaged from having killed,” he told me once, “or they never have, so they have no idea how awful it is.”

Today, mass killing in Palestine, in Sudan, in Ukraine. A nation infected with political violence, right wing hate speech, criminalization of dissent. The National Guard deployed from Republican states to Democratic cities to inflict punishment, incite unrest and drain public money, massively. Neighbors disappeared by masked thugs; children left parentless; the population stricken with fear. Healthcare and farming, public services, civil rights, media, museums and universities, every institution of democracy being bullied and broken by violent extremists. A racist, fascist, oligarchic cult dismantling the fabric of US democracy, boding violence without end. This is not the country that my father fought for. This is not the country his entire generation fought for.

Nobody who loves democracy celebrates political violence. Those who celebrate killing are either badly damaged, or they have no idea. Long live the anti-fascists of history, may we honor their memory by our service to the cause of peace, with justice, with dignity and with love.