From the story, When Murray Met Helen
What Helen found in the next crate was both unbearably sad and astonishing.
In his own handwriting, with a pencil, Murray tried to tell his story of how he survived the “Typhoon of Steel”—the battle for Okinawa. Two weeks after VE Day, and on the same day that Shuri Castle fell to the Marines, Murray’s battalion had overrun an embedded Japanese position. From the opposite end of a tunnel that was embroiled by a flame-thrower, a single Japanese soldier emerged to end his life, not by shooting himself, but by walking upright, slowly, firing at the Marines who now controlled the hillside.
Murray fired the shots that pitched him backwards to the ground.
“I have killed my last,” he reported.
His name was Kenshin and in his pack were letters from his wife; pictures of his three small daughters.
It looked to Helen as though Murray had given up on the pencil because he was having trouble steadying his hand. So he typed the day out in its details, as if the journaling were a form of exorcism.
Kenshin’s oldest daughter would commit suicide upon learning of her father’s fate.
Helen would only know this because, as Murray reported with his typewriter, he’d sought the family out, after the war, and found them living just outside of Kyoto.
The faded color photo, attached by a lightly rusting paper clip to his journal entry from Okinawa, was of the two remaining daughters, and their mother, circa 1948. There was another photo beneath it, of Murray with Kenshin’s wife, solemn faces against the canopy of a green hillside. Beneath the photo was his draft of a note for the surviving daughters.
“I did not bring this war. I did not thirst for this battle. I did not invent the inventions of death. Against all this, I am guilty for firing the bullets that killed your father. You are free not to forgive me. And still I ask for your forgiveness.
Murray Trager.”
