Sassy, Sad Tales Draw on Vivid Images of WWII

On my desk is a collection of “trench art,” the handiwork of soldiers, sailors and airmen who fashioned various useful objects out of the detritus of war during their idle hours at the front--a cigarette lighter made out of an aircraft nut and a couple of uniform buttons, for example, or an ashtray made out of the brass casing of an antiaircraft shell. I began to find these objects--so clever and yet so poignant--in antique shops throughout the West over the last several years as the aging veterans of World War II (or, I fear, their surviving children) cleaned out their trunks and footlockers.

Something like the literary equivalent of trench art is on display in “Old Man in a Baseball Cap: A Memoir of World War II” by Fred Rochlin (HarperCollins, $20, 146 pages). Rochlin, a prominent Los Angeles architect who is married to historian and novelist Harriet Rochlin, was in his 70s when he enrolled in a storytelling workshop with monologuist Spalding Gray. Rochlin rummaged through his own collection of war stories to come up with raw material, and the end product is “Old Man in a Baseball Cap,” a series of short, sassy, spirited tales of what it was like to serve in “the good war.”

Rochlin was 19 when he enlisted in the Army Air Corps, and after only three weeks of training at Mather Field in Sacramento, he was assigned to an American air base in Italy as a navigator aboard a B-24 bomber. What allowed him to survive 50 combat missions over Europe, as we learn in “Old Man in a Baseball Cap,” was a combination of technical competence, physical courage and raw superstition.

“I wore my wristwatch on my right wrist on all even days and on my left wrist on all odd days,” Rochlin recalls. “Before takeoff, we all stood around and peed on the nose wheel. That was a given, it was mandatory.”

Rochlin’s experience of World War II owes more to Joseph Heller than Norman Mailer. His very first briefing focused on how to avoid catching a venereal disease, and the specific advice he was given cannot be printed in a family newspaper. Neither can the ingenious device that he used to avoid exposing certain body parts to frostbite when flying at high altitudes.

At moments, “Old Man in a Baseball Cap” is laugh-out-loud funny, as when Rochlin explains how the African American fighter pilots who accompanied his bombardment group extracted a certain delicious revenge on the racist colonel from Mississippi who commanded the mission. But Rochlin always returns to the hard truth of war, and the book is more often harrowing and even heartbreaking.

One day, for example, Rochlin helped save the life of a pregnant 14-year-old in a nearby town by assisting in an emergency caesarean delivery. A native of Nogales, Ariz., Rochlin spoke Spanish, and that was “close enough” to Italian for the Air Corps. The next day he participated in the bombing of a Hungarian village that had been mistakenly identified as a military target by faulty intelligence reports.

“Isn’t this insanity?” he asked the flight surgeon who had performed the caesarean. “First, you follow orders and do what you’ve been trained to do,” the officer lectured him. “Then just forget it. And if you can’t forget, then pretend. And if you can’t pretend, then deny, deny, deny. And that drink you’re having, finish it, and have another and another.”

Much of what Rochlin recalls from his service in the Second World War rings true, not only the compelling details of air combat but also the scandalous sexual adventures, the petty embarrassments of living with 120 men in barracks with only 20 toilets, the survival strategies for dealing with tedium and the ones for dealing with terror. Still, a few of his yarns, including an unlikely adventure that began when he was shot down over Yugoslavia and ended with a comic romantic liaison with an amorous female partisan, are almost too good to be true. And Rochlin himself is candid enough to warn his readers that truth is not always the essential ingredient of a well-told war story.

“The older I get,” he cracks, “the more I remember things that never happened.”

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Russell Charles Leong, the poet and filmmaker who serves as editor of Amerasia Journal and the publications of the Asian American Studies Center at UCLA, offers his own take on the Asian experience in America in “Phoenix Eyes and Other Stories” (University of Washington Press, $30, hardcover; $16.95, paper; 208 pages), a collection of startling and unsettling short stories that are mostly set in the landscape of contemporary California.

Some of Leong’s rich and evocative stories confront us with the horror of what might be played for cheap exoticism in less skillful hands. “Daughters,” for example, introduces us to a woman at work in a suburban brothel in the San Gabriel Valley and shows us how she was forced into a life of prostitution at 14 by her own father, a fate that followed her from Asia to America. Abruptly, the tale shifts from the mundane details of a prostitute’s life--the Norplant implants, the can of Lysol spray in the bathroom, the Tic Tacs that are chewed three at a time to conceal a recent meal of “fish paste and garlic and sweet oyster sauce and ginger and black beans and chili”--to an almost mythic scene of crisis and redemption.

“Now the moon was full and her blood was flowing freely,” writes Leong of the prostitute called Haishan at the very moment when both body and spirit fail her. “Unable to avert her eyes, she saw everyone whom she had known as if in a waking dream. For an instant, she even saw herself as a nun. She would shave her head as she had threatened to do long ago and toss the filaments into the burning temple oven.”

Other stories in the collection are more restrained, but Leong always shows us how memory and identity persist even in the melting pot of America. “Bodhi Leaves,” for example, is a fable that focuses on the efforts of a pious monk from Vietnam to transform an Orange County tract home near Little Saigon into a proper Buddhist temple, a project that relies on the exertions of Mexican day laborers, the concrete statues of Buddha on sale at a Korean nursery in Hollywood, and the efforts of one young Vietnamese artist who works to the strains of Jay Z’s “Hard Knock Life” and another who spends more time surfing than at prayer. The monk is thankful to be out of the refugee camp in Thailand, but he is not entirely at ease in his new homeland. “He did not feel as liberated in America as he had hoped,” Leong sums up with a deadpan shrug.

“To see life as it happened, and to imagine other possibilities” is how Leong describes his own mission as a writer. Both of these qualities--his acute powers of observation and his poet’s gift for capturing the experience of transcendence--are given full expression in the pages of “Phoenix Eyes.”

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West Words looks at books related to California and the West. It runs every other Wednesday.