Self-Identity

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened in the Fall of 1957, after my 8th birthday. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

My new school was Van Asselt Elementary at Beacon and Myrtle. It's almost virtually unchanged from 1957. What's more, I was assigned to a class that met in the old building, which was the school building my Father attended when he was 8. What's still more than that, my teacher was one of his former elementary school teachers.

[Above: Van Asselt today, showing the 3-story old building that was the school when my Father attended. The long low building in front and to the right of that is a "modern" 1-story addition that was present in 1957. The other smaller structures are portables. We had those in '57 too. The only significant changes from the 50s are the trees in the foreground, part of the beautification of Beacon Avenue. Interesting that from the 20s to the 50s, all the change was to expand the school, while from the 50s to the next millennium, all the change was to pretty up the road passing it by.]

Army Brats regularly have the problem of having to reprove themselves over and over again at each new school and in each new neighborhood. But you usually don't have to prove yourself to people who have expectations based on who your parents are. This was a weird situation.

This is how I wrote about it a few years ago for a writing exercise. (I've brought up this incident before in these memoirs in A Tale of Two Parents I.)

Self-Identity

My father was stationed in Korea at the start of hostilities. He was part of an Army Intelligence team assigned to break the Chinese code. He was shot at, once. The sniper missed his heart but nailed his soul. When my father returned on my first birthday he took it out on me. I'd be dead today, except for the intercession of the memory of a certain red bird, which prompted a response from me that saved my life.

Speaking of red birds, I'm reminded of something that happened in the third grade.

The first day of class our teacher, Mrs. Haugen, took note of my name and asked if I was any relation to John Wesley Browning, who had been one of her students more than thirty years earlier. I said yes he's my father and then she went on and on and on in class about what a great student he had been and how if I was even half as bright as him I might be the best student in the class.

This was not complete hyperbole since my father got nothing but A's in all his classes in all his years of school from 1st grade through 12th; I know because I've seen the plaque the Seattle School District gave him in commemoration of the achievement. But my own school records showed C's and D's from the first two grades so there was no chance that I was going to get a plaque like that. And anyway I had already decided that I didn't want to be just like my father. There were things about him I didn't care for and if he got that way by being a perfect student then maybe being a perfect student wasn't worth it. So all in all I didn't appreciate the comparison, and in hindsight I think it might have shown.

A few days later Mrs. Haugen had given us all a reading test and based on the scores she assigned us new seats. She put the high scorers in the file furthest right, the next highest in the next file over, and so on. Then she told us that according to which file we were seated in we were Bluebirds, Robins, Finches, Sparrows, etc. As I had gotten one of the highest scores I was therefore going to be a Bluebird.

That was too much for me. I said, "I don't WANT to be a Bluebird!"

She laughed and said, "But you ARE a Bluebird. Bluebirds are the best and your score was ..."

"I don't care. I don't want to be a Bluebird, I want to be a Redbird."

"Well, we don't have Redbirds, the closest we have are Robins and you wouldn't want to be a Robin, Robins don't read as well as you do."

"I'd rather be a Robin than a Bluebird, at least they're a little bit red."

All through this the class had been laughing (except for the Robins, of course) and Mrs. Haugen had been grinning like I was playing a cute joke on her, but I meant it. If I was going to be a bird I was going to be a red one and that was that.

Then with mock seriousness she said, "You can be a Robin if you want but that means you'll have to sit with the other Robins and people won't know what a good reader you really are."

So I said OK and got up and picked up my books to move to the Robin's file and now everybody got quiet because it wasn't funny anymore.

Mrs. Haugen told me to sit back down where I was and there was a long silence, as she just stared at me as if she was trying to decide whether or not to call for the men in the white coats. But finally she smiled again and announced, "All-RIGHT class, we have Sparrows over here, and Finches in this file, ..., and over here on my left we have five Bluebirds and one VERY unique, STRONG-HEADED, Redbird."

More Loose Ends

Besides the day Robert was born and died the hardest event of Hawaii to place in time is my Father's second stint in Korea. I am so confused about it that I wonder if there wasn't a third. What is certain is he went back. There was talk about how active duty in a combat zone would help him get promoted. Also that being shot at the first trip out was a fluke. It was just because the Army was caught off guard. My Father kept saying there was no danger because his work usually put him far from the actual battles. He worked with a typewriter not a rifle. I remember that it wasn't a whole six months the second time. It was cut short for some reason.

But when? One clue to timing the memory of the second stint was that when he first heard me speaking Hawaiian around the house it was a surprise to him, and my Mother said, "He started doing it when you were gone."

Also there was a change in the rapes that had a bearing on the timing.

Before the change, the rapes were entirely vicious in nature. She was enjoying seeing me suffer, but not using the rapes to get sexual pleasure. At some point, the rapes tended to take place more often in the bath than in diaper changing, maybe just because my toilet-training at home was progressing. Then she started occasionally pulling her own pants down during the rapes and rubbing herself. She was using her anal raping of me as a form of live pornography to masturbate to.

Later on I found that she used rape in that way on a regular basis when my Father was unavailable sexually. So it always happened when he went on active duty. It also happened when he got onto drinking jags, when he would get drunk within an hour of arriving home every night. But that didn't go on so much until I was 8.

So, putting it all together, I think the second stint in Korea took place around the time I was meeting Lani and Lono and learning Hawaiian from them, up to and just past my first Hawaiian words. Roughly Autumn, 1951.

Calm Before the Storm

Here's my Father, now Captain Browning, in Korea outside a tent, being a Sentinel of Security (Vigile Salutis!) for the Army Security Agency. This probably was taken before the war broke out in June 1950. I guessing it was too hectic for this kind of thing during the two weeks between the North Korean invasion and my Father's departure.

While Dad was getting the light bulb shot out over his head, I was back in Schofield Barracks with my Mother in a little two bedroom shack in the officers' housing. The officers' housing area looks like a low-income suburban housing project. Here's a shot of the base of one of the neighbor's house that was taken a couple of years later. I'm showing it now because it's the only shot I have that illustrates the ample crawl spaces under the houses. There are no basements. I think it's because of the monsoons.


The weeks before my father came home there were no heavy rains. It was very hot. My Mother drank a lot and ignored me, allowing me to crawl around outside in a shirt with no diapers so she wouldn't have to ever change me. Just hose me off at the end of the day. To escape the heat I learned to crawl around in the space under the house. It was dusty but cool. I remember it being a huge relief whenever I could get in there, and I didn't mind that I wasn't near my Mother, except when I was hungry.

I don't remember it but the story is that I couldn't handle my Mother's milk and a doctor advised filling bottles with warm papaya juice, which I loved. What I do remember are solid food feeding sessions in a high chair filled with cursing and yelling.

Back before the heat wave when my Mother kept me in diapers in the house there were attempts to toilet train me. One feature of this early toilet training that stands out in my mind was that whenever I completed a bowel movement my Mother would say, "Look, you made a present for Daddy!" At the time I didn't know what the words meant.

With the heat wave the tension was reduced, thanks to neglect. My world almost collapsed into the shady world of the crawl space. It was like a return to the womb. Maybe I didn't miss my Mother because I'd rediscovered her in the earth. There were grubs and cobwebs growing in her, but I didn't know I was supposed to mind.

The Red Bird

Two weeks after my first Christmas, around a week into January 1950, my Father had to go to Korea. The Korean War hadn't started yet but it was already a hot spot in the Cold War. My Father was apparently assigned to a cryptanalysis unit that was trying to decipher coded messages in the field to and from all the parties. I say apparently, because he took his oath of secrecy seriously and never told me or my Mother what he actually did there, except that he was in a tent typing a lot and got shot at after the war finally did break out. The sniper missed my Dad but shot out the light bulb that was hanging inches away over his head.

At the time, I knew nothing at all from wars or armies. One day my Dad drove us down to Honolulu and my Mother sat down with me in a downtown park, while my Father said his goodbyes, with a camera up to his face.


At first I was too cold to care. Hawaii is usually warm but it can get chilly sometimes and this was one of those days. It was January after all. My Mother put a hat on me to warm me up and I could pay more attention to Dad. Just then though, a red bird landed on a branch above me. He's just out of sight in this next picture, about 4 or 5 feet above and to your right. I heard the fluttering of his wings and looked up in time to see him land on the branch.


My Father didn't show any awareness of the bird. I was mesmerized by it. First it danced from one end of the branch to the other, then danced back again. I was starting to think I recognized my self in the creature, as if I was looking in a mirror, when he began to sing. When I heard his song I was sure that I had finally met someone who was like me, like what I was meant to be.


[Click the I'iwi to hear him sing. ]

All this time my Father was saying, "Say 'Goodbye Daddy', Goodbye Daddy!" over and over again as if he actually thought that I was going to say my first words at exactly that moment, and they were going to be precisely the words he commanded me to say. And I only heard him as an annoying background noise to my glorious new life's model. But I did hear him, somehow, and that would turn out to lead to salvation.

Finally, a khaki Army staff car drove up. Dad put his camera away and left.

As soon as he was gone my Mother shooed the bird away. "Stupid fucking bird, get out of here! Why'd the fuck you have to show up then? And you! You little filthy BRAT! Why couldn't you just say 'Goodbye Daddy'? Once! Creep." And she put me in our car and drove me back to the house in Schofield.