Tom Brokaw (5 page)

My mother and father, with my newborn brother and me in the backseat of the 1938 Ford sedan that would be our family car for the next decade, moved to that hastily constructed Army ammunition depot called Igloo, on the alkaline and sagebrush landscape of far southwestern South Dakota. I was three years old.

It was a monochromatic world, the bleak brown prairie, Army-green cars and trucks, khaki uniforms everywhere. My first impressions of women were not confined to those of my mother caring for my brothers and me at home. I can still see in my mind's eye a woman in overalls carrying a lunch bucket, her hair covered in a red bandanna, swinging out of the big Army truck she had just parked, headed for home at the end of a long day. Women in what had been men's jobs were part of the new workaday world of a nation at war.

Jean and Anthony “Red” Brokaw at the time of their wedding, 1938

Looking back, I can recall that the grown-ups all seemed to have a sense of purpose that was evident even to someone as young as four, five, or six. Whatever else was happening in our family or neighborhood, there was something greater connecting all of us, in large ways and small.

Indeed there was, and the scope of the national involvement was reflected in the numbers: by 1944, twelve million Americans were in uniform; war production represented 44 percent of the Gross National Product; there were almost nineteen million more workers than there had been five years earlier, and 35 percent of them were women. The nation was immersed in the war effort at every level.

The young Americans of this time constituted a generation birth-marked for greatness, a generation of Americans that would take its place in American history with the generations that had converted the North American wilderness into the United States and infused the new nation with self-determination embodied first in the Declaration of Independence and then in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

At the end of the twentieth century the contributions of this generation would be in bold print in any review of this turbulent and earth-altering time. It may be historically premature to judge the greatness of a whole generation, but indisputably, there are common traits that cannot be denied. It is a generation that, by and large, made no demands of homage from those who followed and prospered economically, politically, and culturally because of its sacrifices. It is a generation of towering achievement and modest demeanor, a legacy of their formative years when they were participants in and witness to sacrifices of the highest order. They know how many of the best of their generation didn't make it to their early twenties, how many brilliant scientists, teachers, spiritual and business leaders, politicians and artists were lost in the ravages of the greatest war the world has seen.

The enduring contributions of this generation transcend gender. The world we know today was shaped not just on the front lines of combat. From the Great Depression forward, through the war and into the years of rebuilding and unparalleled progress on almost every front, women were essential to and leaders in the greatest national mobilization of resources and spirit the country had ever known. They were also distinctive in that they raised the place of their gender to new heights; they changed forever the perception and the reality of women in all the disciplines of American life.

Millions of men and women were involved in this tumultuous journey through adversity and achievement, despair and triumph. Certainly there were those who failed to measure up, but taken as a whole this generation did have a “rendezvous with destiny” that went well beyond the outsized expectations of President Roosevelt when he first issued that call to duty in 1936.

The stories that follow represent the lives of some of them. Each is distinctive and yet reflective of the common experiences of that trying time and this generation of greatness.

ORDINARY PEOPLE

When the United States entered World War II, the U.S. government turned to ordinary Americans and asked of them extraordinary service, sacrifice, and heroics. Many Americans met those high expectations, and then returned home to lead ordinary lives.

When the war ended, more than twelve million men and women put their uniforms aside and returned to civilian life. They went back to work at their old jobs or started small businesses; they became big-city cops and firemen; they finished their degrees or enrolled in college for the first time; they became schoolteachers, insurance salesmen, craftsmen, and local politicians. They weren't widely known outside their families or their communities. For many, the war years were enough adventure to last a lifetime. They were proud of what they accomplished but they rarely discussed their experiences, even with each other. They became once again ordinary people, the kind of men and women who always have been the foundation of the American way of life.

Tom Broderick in paratrooper training,
Fort Benning, Georgia, 1944

THOMAS AND EILEEN BRODERICK

“What's a handicap? I don't have a handicap.”

O
N THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF
D-Day, I was broadcasting from the American cemetery overlooking Omaha Beach at Colleville-sur-Mer in Normandy, one of the bloodiest battlefields in American history. The cemetery is at once haunting and beautiful, with 9,386 white marble headstones in long, even lines across the manicured fields of dark green, each headstone marking the death of a brave young American. The anniversary was a somber and celebratory moment, as veterans of that daring and dangerous invasion, unparalleled in the long history of warfare, gathered to pay tribute to those whose sacrifices were marked by the simple headstones and to share with the world their own remarkable stories of survival.

In the course of the extended
Today
show coverage on NBC, we concentrated more on the heroics of those who survived, but then the noted historian Stephen Ambrose interrupted to say, “I think we should talk about what was happening to so many men down there on those beaches. They were terribly wounded. Their stomachs opened. Their faces shot away. Their limbs blown off. That was the reality of that day and we shouldn't forget that.”

Ambrose brought us back to the savage nature of war that we often overlook on those occasions when wars are celebrated for what they achieved. For the warriors who live, the consequences of war become a lifelong condition. In its savagery, war strikes at the very idea of a sound and healthy body. In World War II, more than 292,000 Americans were killed in battle, and more than 1.7 million returned home physically affected in some way, from minor afflictions to blindness or missing limbs or paralysis, battle-scarred and exhausted, but oh so happy and relieved to be home. They had survived an extraordinary ordeal, but now they were eager to reclaim their ordinary lives of work, family, church, and community. The war had taught them what mattered most in the lives they wanted now to settle down and live.

Thomas Broderick was a nineteen-year-old premed student at Xavier College in Cincinnati in 1942, trying to decide which branch of the service fit his sense of adventure. This son of a south Chicago working-class family was bright and ambitious, so he enlisted in the Merchant Marine. “They gave us the best deal,” he said. “If you didn't like it, you could quit.” After ten weeks of training he went on a mission to North Africa on a supply ship. The pay was excellent. The food was abundant. He had a private room on the officers' deck of his ship, the
John W. Brown,
but the trip was long and boring. He wanted out of the Merchant Marine. He wanted to join the Airborne so he could be like those cocky paratroopers he saw stationed in Algiers. “I'd never even been in a plane before,” he says, “but it was the challenge I wanted.”

His superiors in the Merchant Marine were astonished. Here he was, ready to go back to the security of the Merchant Marine Academy for another eighteen months of accelerated training, and he wanted to quit to join one of the most dangerous outfits in the service. His officer offered him a thirty-day furlough to think it over. Broderick said, “No, my mind's made up.” When he returned home, his parents were equally appalled. When he told his draft board what he wanted, the clerk said, “You're nuts. I'll give you another month before we draft you, so you can change your mind.” Broderick declined, saying he wanted in now.

Tom Broderick spent seventeen weeks in basic training for the infantry in Mineral Wells, Texas, before heading to Fort Benning, Georgia, to become a member of the 82nd Airborne. When he finished his training, a captain offered him an instructor's job and the rank of sergeant. Again Broderick refused the safer alternative, saying he wanted to stay with his outfit and go overseas.

Broderick's unit shipped out to England as replacements for the 82nd Airborne men lost in the Normandy invasion. In September, Broderick made his first jump into combat, in Holland. He was in the thick of it immediately, the Battle of Arnhem. It was a joint mission of American and British paratroopers, and their objective was to take the Nijmegen bridge to help pave the Allies' way into Germany and to discourage any German counterattack. “We jumped at about five hundred feet because we wanted to be a low target. It was one-thirty in the afternoon.

“The first German I saw I couldn't shoot, because he was riding a bicycle away from me. I couldn't shoot at him because he wasn't shooting at me. Things were different ten minutes later. There were Germans all over the place—they outnumbered us about forty thousand to twenty-eight thousand. It was combat morning, noon, and night.”

On the fifth day Broderick made a mistake that would alter his life forever. “I remember being in the foxhole and . . . I was lining up my aim on a German. I got a little high in the foxhole and I got shot clean through the head—through the left temple.”

A Catholic chaplain arrived to administer the last rites, but after slipping into unconsciousness, Broderick somehow managed to stay alive until he awoke a few days later in a British hospital. He was relieved to be out of combat but he had a problem: he couldn't see. Why not? he asked. His doctors told him, “When that hemorrhage clears up, you'll be all right.” Broderick continued to believe them until he was sent to Dibble General Hospital in Menlo Park, California, one of the two facilities in the nation treating blind veterans.

Finally a doctor told him the truth. He would be blind forever. “I was stunned. I cried, ‘Aren't you going to do anything?' ” He rushed to a fellow veteran who had been hospitalized with him in England, a man recovering from shrapnel in one of his eyes. “I just cried and cried, and he said to me, ‘We knew the whole time, Tom; we just didn't want to tell you.' ”

Broderick was angry and disoriented. When the Army made him take a rehabilitation course in Connecticut, he said, “I rebelled—I just didn't want to learn braille. I told them I was going to work in my dad's trucking business just so I could get out of there.”

It didn't get much better when he returned to Chicago. He enrolled at Loyola University and the Veterans Administration hired a reader for him, but after only seven weeks Broderick dropped out and went to work for his father. His downslide continued. “They didn't know what to do with me. Dad had me taking orders on the phone because I could still write. But then I heard of people having to call back to get the orders straightened out. I thought, ‘Hell, I'm screwing up.' ” He quit after a month.

Broderick realized he'd have to learn braille. His Veterans Administration counselor also recommended he enroll in a class in insurance sales, a fast-growing field in postwar America. He learned the insurance business by day and braille by night. Before long the VA found him a job with an elderly insurance broker in his neighborhood. Not too long after that, Broderick had established his own insurance business. He was no longer the young man angry at his fate. He was now prepared to accept his blindness and get on with his life.

Broderick worked six days a week. When he wasn't taking orders by phone with his braille machine and dictating them to his secretary later, he was making house calls at night. He quickly developed a very keen audio sense; many customers he dealt with on the phone were astonished when they finally met him. He'd quickly call out their name when he heard their voice. Until that point they had no idea he was blind.

Later, when he and his wife were having children—seven in all—Broderick would tell each of them the same story as they reached the age when they could understand the real meaning of blindness. His daughter, Katy Broderick Duffy: “He'd tell us how he was hurt in the war and that when he came home he went with his mother to Lourdes, the famous shrine in France, to pray for a miracle. He said that before they put the water on his eyes, he asked the Lord for a favor: ‘If I can't have my eyesight back, could you find a girl for me to marry?' And that's how he met my mother. When you're little and you hear that story, you really think it
was
a miracle.”

Broderick's wife, Eileen, is a little skeptical of the story, but Tom insists it's true, although his version is a bit breezier. “I said, ‘I know we don't always get what we want, but what's right for us. I'm really hoping to meet the woman for me—and if you want to throw in the eyes, too, that's okay.' ”

Tom Broderick, feature in the
Chicago Tribune,
1944

Not long after that, Tom and Eileen met on a blind date, no irony intended. Eileen was a twenty-three-year-old nurse and Tom was twenty-seven. She fell in love instantly. “That night, after the date, I went home, woke my cousin up, and said, ‘I've met the man I'm going to marry.' She told me I'd been drinking too much and I should go to bed, but I knew.

“You didn't think about his blindness. It just didn't seem to matter. He was so unique. He ran a business by himself and didn't need help from anyone, although it was a little tricky when we went out alone. I'd have to take him to the men's room and ask someone to take him in. I'd stand outside. I think, being a nurse, I was a little more flexible. I understood that it was all just mechanics.

“My father was worried when I said I was marrying Tom. He just didn't understand how Tom could take care of me and a family. But after three or four years of marriage they became very close. Tom's mother started him off right. When he came back from the war she would not allow anyone to use the word
blind
in the house. Tom had to be treated with dignity and respect, and anything he wanted to try, he could do it. When he left his father's business to set out on his own, she was happy.”

Tom and Eileen had common roots as strongly faithful Roman Catholic Irish Americans. They settled into a life of the prosperous middle class on the south side of Chicago, where Tom's business continued to flourish and their family grew quickly. During one five-year stretch Eileen had five children, and then another two later. Eileen says, “He was very involved in their upbringing. There were things he could do and those he couldn't. It was kind of trial and error. He couldn't change diapers but he could give them a bottle. We never talked about how to make things work. It wasn't easy, but we did what we had to do.”

The Broderick children were part of the equation of making things work. Daughter Katy says, “The blindness was just incidental. I'd see other people who were blind and not well adjusted and think, ‘What's wrong with them?' Later I realized not everyone had the strength and determination of my father. When I was little, my friends would say, ‘Your father's not blind!' He could just do so many things it didn't seem like he was blind.”

Dan Broderick, one of Tom's sons, says his father worked out a system to take care of most of the household chores, including assembling an elaborate stereo system, washing and waxing the car, and changing the storm windows. He refused to succumb to his blindness. He even refused to let Eileen get disability license plates for the family car when they became available. “What's a handicap?” he'd say. “I don't have a handicap.”

But then Tom isn't much for cars. Since he can't drive himself, he likes to walk, and his family was expected to do the same. Katy remembers, “We walked everywhere. He hated getting rides. He thought it was a waste.”

During his introduction to the world of the blind at the rehabilitation center in Connecticut, Broderick and his friends formed an informal organization to help each other adjust to their new realities. It became the Blinded Veterans Association, and Broderick decided that he should share the lessons of his new life with other veterans who were struggling with their blindness. He began making trips to Chicago-area rehabilitation programs, counseling sightless veterans on the career possibilities in insurance, mortgage sales, and car financing—the hot financial service fields as America exploded out of the cities and into the suburbs.

“I'd tell them about my own struggle—how I was young when I became blind and I knew how they felt. I brought some of them down to my office so they could see the braille machine and what was possible. I don't feel any special bond with other blind organizations or blind people, but I wanted to help veterans. You have to do it. It was no big deal, really.”

Tom's son Dan remembers that, during Vietnam, the nearby Veterans Administration office would send over young men who'd lost their sight in that war. “When you first saw them you thought you were at a wake—some of them were suicidal, with their eyes blown out. Mom would go out and get a case of beer, and they'd sit on the porch with my dad and listen to the White Sox game. Then he'd navigate 'em around our house to show them what we had—five bedrooms, a big house. By the end of the night they'd be back on the porch, drinking beer but laughing now.”

Another son, Scott: “You know how everyone says their dad is the best. Well, do you know how many people I've heard that from about
my
dad? Friends, neighbors, clients. Every kid thinks it, but to hear it from other people is so gratifying. He never let his disability get in the way of anything.”