RSSLetting it out
Writing helps ease horrors of warYakima Herald-Republic
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The War Years – Special SectionWar Years Photo Gallery
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- Letting it out
- Aboard the Superfortress
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- Grim and grimy
- Before Pearl Harbor
He's cheerful, joking here and there about his service in World War II, shrugging off most of the trauma he endured with a breezy, "I was lucky; I only lost my hearing."
He laughs about hurrying home from the war in the Pacific to reclaim his sweetheart and get married.
It's a pleasant way to pass an hour, and as he talks, he's warm, engaging and friendly.
But as I stand up to leave, the 82-year-old hands me seven pages of legal pad paper written in his longhand. He says it's a letter I might want to glance at sometime.
And that's where Howard Burke's war wages still.
"The dead, the burned, shot and mutilated fellow sailors around me, buried at sea, haunts me almost daily," he wrote about a year ago in the letter.
Even though he hasn't been in battle for more than 60 years, his grisly memories remain disturbing.
"It's like a cancer on my mind that just about destroys me every time I think of them, which is almost every morning."
Burke served in an era long before post-traumatic stress disorder was diagnosed, long before it was even named. World War II veterans simply came home and quietly settled back into normal life. They didn't have nightmares, didn't relive the horrors of combat. Or so we thought.
Yet Burke, similar to many other World War II veterans, has had trouble ever since the war, trying to make peace with the sights he saw and experiences he endured.
Burke was inches away when a friend, climbing up the ship's ladder just in front of him, was blasted in half by strafing from a Japanese bomber.
Then Burke witnessed the horrors of a battle's aftermath on a remote Pacific island. As part of a crew sent to assess the damage, he found body after body of Marines who had been tortured.
"It was the most horrible sight of my life seeing dead Marines butchered and mutilated. The smell of burned human flesh still lingers with me today," Burke wrote.
Writing down his recollections helped, freeing him a bit from waking up in the middle of the night, reliving the horrors aboard the Navy's USS Sangamon aircraft carrier.
His ship engaged in six major combat engagements with the Japanese between January 1944 and May 1945, including Leyte Gulf, the war's largest naval battle involving 286 Allied ships.
Burke earned three medals and two citations and was also wounded in the line of duty -- his ears were damaged and his hand and arm were injured in an explosion -- but after seeing seamen with limbs severed, he felt his injuries were minor, so never mentioned them and thus didn't get a Purple Heart.
It was the ship's sixth and last battle, Okinawa Gunto, that did Burke in, as well as the Sangamon.
Early in the evening of May 4, 1945, Burke was showering when he heard the ship's alarm sound. Pulling on his pants, he lunged for his place at his gunsight just moments before a kamikaze pilot crashed his plane into the ship about 50 feet from Burke.
When the plane's 500-pound bomb exploded on the flight deck, "two 26-ton elevators went cattywumpus, and I went up in the air," he recalls.
Burke became a human torpedo, shooting up and out, landing about 30 feet from the ship in the middle of the Pacific. He blacked out, then woke up underwater.
He remembers looking back at his stricken ship and watching huge flames and water from ruptured pipes shooting into the sky. The crackle of exploding ammunition filled the night.
Burke wasn't the only seaman propelled from the ship. In all, about 125 men landed in the sea, many mortally wounded.
One was his close friend, Jube, whom Burke heard calling out for help. He swam over and wrapped his arm under Jube's injured body. "He was burned so bad that his whole bicep, all the meat came off the bone," Burke wrote. "I had him by the bone in his arm."
After Jube passed out, Burke had trouble staying above the waves himself. He couldn't even tell if Jube was still alive. Fighting for his life, Burke felt he had only one choice. In his letter, he said, simply, "I had to let go. I had to stay afloat."
He never saw Jube again.
"That really haunts me," he wrote.
It would be four hours before Burke and the other survivors were rescued and pulled out of the ocean.
They were transferred to a destroyer, where Burke realized he was probably going to finish out the war with his one possession -- the pants he was wearing. No shoes, no shirt, just lots of service left.
He lamented his fate, particularly with no protection for his feet on the scorching deck of the destroyer in 100-plus degree heat.
But then Bob Baker, a cook on the destroyer, ambled along. A few years older, Baker had grown up in West Valley, just down the road from Burke's family. Baker immediately noticed Burke's discomfort and gave his old friend his extra pair of shoes.
Burke was grateful, of course, even though he wore size 8 and Baker, a big man, wore 12s.
For the next month, the stranded seamen were listed as missing in action as they transferred from one ship to another to make it back to the States.
"That must have been terrible for my mom," Burke acknowledges.
But he was safe, and that's all that mattered -- even though he felt a little like a clown in his immense shoes and wished he had a shirt, at least, to go with his one pair of pants.
By then it was clear that he would be heading home to Yakima. The war with Japan was winding down, and the Navy reasoned that the sailors deserved leave time.
Burke had one overriding purpose -- get home and get his girl. He and Gwen Nance, who attended Wide Hollow grammar school with him, had dated briefly before the war, and he realized that whatever life he had left, he wanted it to be with her.
They've been married 62 years, with three children, five grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren.
Burke went on to become a heating and air-conditioning contractor in Ellensburg, retiring back to Yakima in 1977.
Even in retirement though, he sometimes still wakes up terrified, jolted by some ugly war memory in the middle of the night.
One of those evenings, he climbed out of bed and began penning the letter about his experiences.
"This is tough stuff," he wrote. "I've never told most of this to anybody. Sometimes you've just got to let it out."
In the letter, he reflects upon how changed his psyche still is after 60 years, how his reactions sometimes make him feel ashamed.
For instance, he described being outdoors whenever a plane flies overhead. "I look up startled, then I think, boy, if that were an enemy plane I could shoot it down with ease. That makes me sick to even think I still think that way."
But, characteristically, he smiles and banters, remarking that all he brought back from the war was "bum ears."
And some oversized shoes.
