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Nothing to Report

Harry Percy Stratton, 1882–1957

There is a document that places Harry Percy Stratton at Villasis, Pangasinan Province, Philippine Islands, on June 1, 1900. It is the federal census of that year, which the Army administered in its occupied territories with the thoroughness characteristic of the new American empire, recording name, age, state of birth, military unit, occupation. He was eighteen years old. He had been there for nearly two years. The island had been at war with the United States for sixteen months.

The document does not record what he had seen. No document could.

He was my father’s half-brother — Frank’s first son, from the marriage no one in the family discussed. He died in Seattle in 1957 of lung cancer, having told no one what the island took from him. He left a silence, and the silence is a record too.

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Marion, Indiana, 1882

“Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.” —Oscar Wilde

Harry Percy Stratton was born in March of 1882 in Marion, Indiana, the first son of Frank Nelson Stratton and his wife Sarah C. Dunn of Knox County, Tennessee. Frank was twenty-one years old. Sarah was twenty. They had married the year before, and they had a baby, and then Sarah and Harry disappeared from the records.

Not Sarah alone — both of them. No death record, no divorce filing in the Grant County courts or anywhere else that has been searched. She was twenty years old with a child not yet a year old, and then neither of them was in the record anymore, and Frank was left in Marion with no explanation that has survived the distance between that time and this one.

She surfaces again in Missouri in August of 1890 — remarrying, a man named William Kuark — and that marriage record is the first evidence she had survived the years of silence. She would have been twenty-eight. Harry would have been eight years old. We do not know what those years contained for either of them.

She appears one final time in a burial transit record, recording her death on 25 June 1913 and her burial at Crown Point Cemetery in Kokomo. She had come back to Indiana, or her body was brought back. She was fifty-one years old.

Harry does not appear in any document between his birth in 1882 and his military enlistment in 1898. No census, no school enrollment, no trace. The 1900 federal census, when the Army recorded him at Villasis in the Philippines, is the first reliable record of him after his birth. The reasonable conclusion — the one the evidence supports without asking it to carry more than it can — is that he went with his mother when she left Marion, and that he lived with her through the Missouri years and whatever came after, until at sixteen he made the decision that would define the rest of his life.

By 1888, Frank had married again — Otilie Schellschmidt of Indianapolis, daughter of a musical family, a woman of evident intelligence and considerable patience. Three more sons followed: Frank Arthur in 1890, Frederick in 1896, Ferdinand in 1898. Harry was not part of that household. He was in Missouri with his mother, or wherever the years after Missouri took them. He was not the extra son in a house that did not quite know what to do with him. He was simply elsewhere — with Sarah, out of Frank’s reach, and out of the record entirely.

The Fever of 1898

“A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.” —John F. Kennedy

In the spring of 1898, the newspapers were full of Cuba and the Maine and Admiral Dewey and the glorious work of liberating the oppressed from the heel of Spain. The fever that moved through Indiana that spring was genuine — young men in Kokomo and Marion and every other town in the state were presenting themselves at recruiting offices with a fervor that the officers found gratifying and sometimes inconvenient, because a number of them were not quite the ages they claimed to be.

Harry Percy Stratton was sixteen years old in the spring of 1898. The documents are, as noted, ambiguous about his precise age at enlistment — this is not unusual for the period, when a determined boy of sufficient size could generally find an officer willing to believe whatever he was told. What is not ambiguous is that Harry enlisted, and shipped out, and was on his way to the Pacific before the summer was over.

Whether this was patriotism or escape, or the particular combination of the two that moves a sixteen-year-old boy with a complicated home situation toward a recruiting office, cannot be known from this distance. Both things can be true simultaneously. What matters is that he went, and that Frank — who was thirty-eight years old and working his way toward the bar exam, with a household that now included four children and a law practice that was not yet a law practice — let him go, or could not stop him, which in practice amounts to the same thing.

Whether letters passed between them in those years — Frank at his desk in Kokomo, Harry on the far side of the Pacific — I cannot say with certainty. I hope they exist somewhere, in a box no one has opened. I expect they don’t.

What They Said They Were Going To Do

“No man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent.” —Abraham Lincoln

The official story of the American mission to the Philippines in 1898 and 1899 was a story of liberation and benevolent uplift. Admiral Dewey had destroyed the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay on May 1, 1898, in about seven hours, and the United States had found itself in possession of something it had not precisely planned for: an archipelago of seven thousand islands and eight million people who had been fighting Spanish rule for two years and who had, reasonably enough, assumed that the Americans were there to help them finish the job.

The Filipinos had their own revolutionary government, their own constitution, their own army under General Emilio Aguinaldo, and their own flag. They had been promised, or had understood themselves to be promised, independence. What they received instead, in December of 1898, was the Treaty of Paris, by which Spain ceded the Philippines to the United States for twenty million dollars — a transaction in which the Filipinos were not consulted and to which they were not party.

President McKinley explained, in a speech that has been quoted with varying degrees of irony ever since, that he had prayed on the matter and God had told him that it would be wrong to give the islands back to Spain, wrong to turn them over to France or Germany, wrong to leave the Filipinos to govern themselves because they were, in McKinley’s considered theological opinion, “unfit for self-government,” and that therefore the United States had no choice but to “take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.”

The Filipinos, who had been Christian for three hundred years, declined to be uplifted on these terms.

The boys shipping out in the fall of 1898 — Harry among them — were told they were going to liberate an oppressed people, establish order, and make the Pacific safe for American commerce. They were not told that by February of 1899 they would be at war with the people they had come to liberate.

February 4, 1899

“All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” —Viet Thanh Nguyen

The Philippine-American War began on the night of February 4, 1899, when Private Willie Grayson of the First Nebraska Volunteers shot and killed a Filipino soldier who crossed into American-controlled territory near Manila. Within hours, fighting had broken out along the entire line. By morning, it was a war.

Whether Private Grayson’s shot was provoked or accidental or deliberate — whether it was the inevitable flash point of an occupation that was always going to produce exactly this result, or whether some other outcome was possible — is a question historians have argued since. What is not arguable is what followed.

Harry Percy Stratton was in the Philippines when it started. He was sixteen or seventeen years old.

The Philippine Republican Army under Aguinaldo fought the American forces in conventional engagements through the spring and summer of 1899, and the Americans — better armed, better supplied, fighting in ways they recognized — won those engagements consistently. Aguinaldo retreated north through Luzon with what was left of his army, and by the fall of 1899 the Americans were pursuing him through Central Luzon, through Pangasinan Province, through the towns and rice paddies and bamboo groves of the countryside Harry had been garrisoned in.

General Wheaton’s column took Dagupan, the provincial capital of Pangasinan, in November of 1899. The conventional war in the province was over by the end of that year.

The guerrilla war was just beginning.

Villasis, Pangasinan Province

“The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.” —James Baldwin

Villasis is a municipality in the interior of Pangasinan Province, perhaps thirty miles south of Dagupan, set among the rice paddies and sugar fields of central Luzon. It is agricultural country, flat and open and brutally hot, the kind of landscape that wears a man down by its sameness if the heat doesn’t do it first. The garrison there in 1899 and 1900 was small — a company-sized element at most, responsible for maintaining order and suppressing insurgent activity in a province where the insurgents moved through the population like water through rice, because they were the population, because the line between a farmer going home from his field and a guerrilla going to his next ambush was not always a visible one.

This was not a war Harry had been prepared for. No one had prepared the boys in the Indiana regiments for what counterinsurgency actually looked like, because the Army itself had not yet worked out what it looked like. They had been trained to fight formations, to hold a line, to advance or retreat in recognizable tactical patterns. What they found in the Philippine countryside in 1900 was something older and more difficult: an enemy who appeared and disappeared, who fought and then was gone back into the daily life of the province, who used the terrain with the fluency of people who had lived on it for generations and who had no particular reason to make it easier for the Americans.

The Army’s response to this, in Pangasinan as in Samar and Batangas and the other contested provinces, evolved over the course of 1900 and 1901 into methods that were reported to the Senate Military Affairs Committee in 1902 and that caused, at home, a scandal that lasted about a season before the public’s attention moved on. Villages suspected of harboring or supplying guerrillas were burned. Food supplies were destroyed to deny them to the insurgents, which also denied them to the farming families who grew them. Prisoners were subjected to the “water cure” — a technique of interrogation in which water was forced into a prisoner’s throat until they were on the edge of drowning and could be made to answer questions — that officers testified to routinely, because they did not initially understand that what they were describing was a crime.

Harry Percy Stratton was garrisoned at Villasis through at least June of 1900. The 1900 census places him there, eighteen years old, occupation soldier, state of birth Indiana. What he saw and did in those months between the end of the conventional war and that census date is not recorded in any document I have found.

He never said.

The Scar

“The truth about a man lies first and foremost in what he hides.” —André Malraux

The Philippine-American War is sometimes called the Forgotten War, the war that came between the splendid little war of 1898 and the Great War of 1917, the one that does not fit comfortably into the American self-narrative and therefore tends not to appear in it. American casualties were roughly four thousand killed in action; Filipino military deaths are estimated between sixteen and twenty thousand; Filipino civilian deaths from combat, famine, and disease are estimated in the hundreds of thousands, the range being wide because the record-keeping was poor and because the parties responsible for the record-keeping had reasons to keep the records imprecisely.

The anti-imperialist movement at home — Mark Twain was its most prominent voice — called it a war of conquest and said so loudly, and was ignored, and was eventually right. The veterans who came home from it came home to a country that was not sure what to do with them: not quite heroes of a glorious liberation, not quite participants in something that could be straightforwardly celebrated, trailing a war that had turned into something nobody had wanted to look at too carefully.

Many of them said nothing. The silence of Philippine veterans is documented — not as an official policy or a deliberate choice, but as a pattern, a tendency, a thing that happened again and again in families across the country where a man came back from the islands and simply declined to account for what he had seen. The silence was not always guilt. It was sometimes the impossibility of explaining, to a wife or a child or a neighbor in Indiana, the particular texture of a counterinsurgency in a tropical country, the way the enemy looked like a farmer until he didn’t, the way a village could be burning at dusk and the smoke rising into a sky full of stars that were nothing like the stars over Kokomo.

Harry Percy Stratton carried the silence for fifty-seven years, from the time he shipped home until the day he died.

He was not, by the accounts that can be gathered, a damaged man in any visible way. He worked. He was present in his life. He was not a man who drank himself to sleep or woke screaming or could not hold a conversation. The scar he carried was the quieter kind — the kind that shows up not in what a man does but in the territory he will not enter, the subject he will not approach, the room in his memory that stays locked and that he does not discuss and eventually does not even indicate exists.

The Philippines: he did not discuss them.

Seattle

“A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.” —George Moore

He settled in Seattle, which is the Pacific city — the one American city that has always faced west toward the ocean, toward the trade routes and the fishing grounds and the islands beyond the horizon. Men who have unfinished business with the Pacific tend to end up in Seattle. Men who want to be near the water they crossed without being on it anymore. Men who are done with the ocean but cannot quite turn their backs on it.

He worked. The records are thin here — Seattle records of the working class of the early and middle twentieth century are not always comprehensive — but he was employed, and he was present, and he made a life in the ordinary sense of the phrase. He was not famous. He was not particularly notable. He was a man who had come back from a war that nobody talked about and had decided, in keeping with that established precedent, not to talk about it.

He would have known men like himself in Seattle. The city was full of veterans of the Pacific campaigns, men who had been in the Philippines or who had come through the islands on the way to somewhere else, men who spoke in the shorthand of shared experience — a look, a particular kind of quiet — that requires no explanation because both parties already know what is not being said.

His father Frank had imagined the sea from a desk in Kokomo, writing stories about places he would never go, inventing gold rushes and guerrillas and far-country characters out of magazines and midnight oil. Harry had actually been there. He chose a city that put the ocean at his back doorstep and then, apparently, never explained why.

The Lost Passport, Okinawa

“We travel not to escape life, but for life not to escape us.” —Anonymous

At some point — the record is incomplete, the date uncertain, the circumstances not fully documented — Harry Percy Stratton was in Okinawa and lost his passport there.

This is a small fact, the kind of small fact that would mean nothing about most men, a clerical inconvenience and nothing more. But for Harry, who was by then in his sixties and living quietly in Seattle and not a man with obvious reasons to be in Okinawa, it means something. It means he went back.

Okinawa in the years after the Second World War was an American administrative territory, occupied — the word applies again, and the irony of it is not lost on a man who had done his own occupying fifty years earlier — by the United States military. The battle of Okinawa in April and June of 1945 was one of the costliest engagements of the Pacific war: twelve thousand American dead, over a hundred thousand Japanese military dead, and somewhere between forty and a hundred and fifty thousand Okinawan civilians. The island had been burned and shelled and bombed into something that bore little resemblance to what it had been before the spring of 1945.

By the 1950s, when Harry may have been there, it was being rebuilt, the American military presence substantial and permanent, the island in that peculiar condition of postwar occupation that he would have recognized in his bones — the foreign soldiers in the markets, the local people moving around them with the practiced neutrality of people who have learned to coexist with a presence they did not invite and cannot remove.

Why was Harry there? This is one of the questions I cannot answer. Seattle was a port city with Pacific trade connections; he may have traveled for work, on a merchant ship or a supply vessel or as part of some civilian contract operation connected to the military presence in the Western Pacific. He may have gone for reasons more personal — to see, one more time, what the Pacific looked like from the inside, to do some interior accounting that required proximity to the ocean rather than distance from it.

He lost his passport. He found his way home. He said, as far as the record shows, nothing about what he had seen or why he had gone.

The Lung, 1957

“Do not go gentle into that good night.” —Dylan Thomas

Harry Percy Stratton died in 1957 in Seattle, of lung cancer. He was seventy-five years old.

The cancer that kills you in your seventies is generally the cancer that has been growing for decades, seeded by something you breathed or ate or handled in the years when you were young enough not to think about consequences and old enough to be somewhere that had consequences. The question of what, specifically, Harry breathed is one that can be posed but not definitively answered.

He had been in the Philippines during the burning phase of the counterinsurgency, when villages and food supplies were destroyed by a military that had learned the technique from the Indian Wars and was applying it now to tropical rice agriculture with the same disregard for the people who lived downwind. He had been in Okinawa, which was still carrying the chemical and physical residue of a battle that had involved incendiary weapons, naval gunfire, and the burning of a city. He had lived and presumably worked in Seattle, which in the first half of the twentieth century had a working waterfront that exposed its laborers to coal dust and asbestos and the various industrial compounds that shipbuilding and shipping have always generated and that we did not understand to be toxic until after they had already done their work.

And he had smoked. Men of his generation smoked. It was what men did, as natural and unremarkable as breathing, which is precisely the problem.

Any of these things could have killed him. All of them probably contributed. The lung does not keep records, and the cancer does not come with an explanation of its origin. What we know is that Harry Percy Stratton breathed the air of the Philippine insurrection and the air of postwar Okinawa and the air of a twentieth-century American working waterfront, and that in 1957 his body called in the accumulated debt of all of it.

He was seventy-five. He had outlived his father by fifty-two years, which is something. Frank was forty-four when he died, still reaching.

What He Kept

“We are all haunted by our pasts, but some of us carry the ghosts more quietly than others.” —Anonymous

I have thought about Harry Percy Stratton for a long time and I still do not have a word for what he was. He was not a hero in the celebratory sense — the war he fought was not the kind that generates celebrations, and he was not the kind of man who sought them. He was not a villain; he was a seventeen-year-old boy in someone else’s country doing what seventeen-year-old boys do in wars, which is what they are told by the men above them who have the authority to tell them. He was not quite a casualty — he survived, he lived seventy-five years, he made a life.

He was something else. He was a man who had seen the inside of something that his country preferred not to look at, and who had drawn the reasonable conclusion that the preference extended to him personally, and who had honored it without being asked. He was a man who had gone to the Pacific when he was barely old enough to shave and had come back carrying something that did not show on the outside but that shaped everything — where he lived, what he said, what he did not say, what ocean he chose to face and what he would not account for about why.

His father Frank wrote a story in 1903 called “The Little Brown Man,” about a Filipino father who walks across an island to find his son and dies placing the boy’s hand in a stranger’s keeping, and the story is full of the sympathy that Frank felt from his desk in Kokomo for the people his son had gone to occupy. Harry was on the island when Frank was writing that story. Whether Frank knew that what he was writing was about his son’s situation — the blue-shirted boy, the occupied country, the father reaching across an impossible distance — I cannot say. I think he knew. I think the whole story is the distance between a father and a son who is somewhere too far to reach, translated into the only language Frank had for that distance, which was fiction.

Harry Percy Stratton went to the Philippines a boy from a complicated household in Indiana and came back a man who would not discuss what he had been part of, and who moved to the edge of the country and faced the Pacific for the rest of his life, and who lost his passport in Okinawa one day without explanation, and who died in 1957 of the things he had breathed in the years when he was young and blue-shirted and a long way from home.

He kept the silence. We cannot give it back to him. What we can do — what this history is — is say his name, and say that he was there, and say that what he carried was real, even if we cannot know the exact shape of it.

Harry Percy Stratton. Marion, Indiana. Villasis, Pangasinan Province. Seattle, Washington. Okinawa.

He was Frank’s first son, and he was there.

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Harry Percy Stratton (1882–1957) was the son of Frank Nelson Stratton and Sarah C. Dunn Stratton of Knox County, Tennessee. He enlisted during the Spanish-American War and was enumerated in the 1900 federal census among military forces at Villasis, Pangasinan Province, Philippine Islands. He settled in Seattle, Washington, and died there in 1957 of lung cancer. He is the half-brother of Frederick Nelson Stratton and the great-uncle of the author. Primary sources include the 1900 federal census and family records. Historical context drawn from Senate Military Affairs Committee testimony (1902) and Stanley Karnow’s In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines (1989).

Frank Nelson Stratton’s story “The Little Brown Man” (1903) and the full literary essay on Frank’s writing life are in The Midnight Oil.