Skip to comments.

Posted on 12/30/2001, 9:08:29 PM by Clinging Bitterly

'Read it and be proud' - Oregon woman tells her father's story of wartime service, captivity

By LARRY BACON The Register-Guard

THE STORY CAME OUT in bits and pieces over the dining room table. Over countless cups of coffee during a 10-year odyssey, Kristi Pickett Burke came to know her dad, Ernest Pickett, in a way no one ever had.

As a child growing up in Florence, where Pickett owned an auto parts store, Burke knew her father had been in the war. Knew he had flown B-29s, been shot down over Japan and held in a prisoner of war camp. Knew the burn scars on his arms and legs came from that time.

Kristi Pickett Burke has written a book about the wartime experiences of her father, Ernest Pickett, who was a B-29 bomber pilot and prisoner of war. Here she holds the flight jacket that her father wore during his supply missions and bombing runs during World War II.

But it wasn't until the Salem woman was grown and had kids of her own that she began to sense the importance of her father's untold story.

And she resolved to put it on paper - a process that took longer than she ever imagined. It became an emotional roller-coaster ride, sometimes bringing them both to tears and deepening their relationship immeasurably.

Her father's story, "Proof Through the Night," was released this month by Burke's small, 1 1/2 -year-old publishing company, Opal Creek Press. Opal Creek's best-known book to date has been the autobiography of Izzy Covalt, an Oregon pizza restaurant chain owner who battled alcoholism.

Pickett is gone now. The former pilot died of cancer in Eugene in 1999 at age 80. His widow, Faye Pickett, also lives in Salem and said she couldn't be prouder of her daughter.

The book's storyteller is Ernest Pickett, but the words were written by his daughter in the understated style she said he would have chosen. The work was nearly done when he died, so Pickett got to read most of it.

"And he was real pleased," Burke said.

She has high hopes for "Proof Through the Night," available nationally through Borders Books and other outlets. The book has endorsements from U.S. Sen. John McCain and PBS news anchor Jim Lehrer. About 650 copies of the initial printing of 5,000 have sold so far this month.

McCain called the work "a graceful tribute to a quiet hero who sought only to serve his country well and in doing so brought her glory." Lehrer referred to it as "a stunningly important book about courage and suffering, heroism and humanity."

"The story of Ernest Pickett is one that none of us should ever forget," Lehrer wrote. "Read it and weep. Read it and be proud."

The endorsements, Burke said, came after she sent manuscripts to the two men and called their staffs explaining why they should be interested. She thought McCain might consider an endorsement because he had written a book about his prisoner of war experience in Vietnam, and his father knew Pickett's squadron commander.

Lehrer had written a novel called "The Special Prisoner" with a plot centered on the nightmarish after-effects of a B-29 crewman's experience in a Japanese POW camp.

Burke was amazed when the McCain endorsement came through, and even more so when she read Lehrer's words.

"It was like the world just changed that day," she said.

Her book relates to her father's firsthand recollections of the beginnings of the B-29 bomber program and his harrowing flights over the Himalayas from India to China to supply the bases where the planes could launch the first sustained bombing attacks on Japan.

Painful memories

During the first daylight attack on mainland Japan, Pickett's plane, the Reddy Teddy, was shot down on Aug. 20, 1944, as it bombed a steel mill. Four of the 11-member crew died - two apparently in the crash, one after capture and one of unknown causes.

Pickett and the other six bailed out and spent more than a year in captivity under the cruelest conditions.

Across the dining room table, Burke heard gut-wrenching stories about how her father's burns went untreated, of his hands so crippled from seared flesh that he couldn't hold chopsticks, of sadistic guards who repeatedly beat him senseless and held lighted cigarettes to his body.

MORE INFORMATION

• Ordering: You can get "Proof Through the Night," from Opal Creek Press. Call toll-free (866) 375-9015. Cost: $23.95. Copies also are available at Borders Books in the Oakway Mall in Eugene and Old Town Books in Florence. • Signing: Author Kristi Burke will sign books from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. Jan. 6 at Borders. (Presumably in Eugene Or.)

The dysentery that racked his guts. The meager portions of rice and fishhead soup he tried to live on. The filth-caked uniform that he wore for a year. The constant battles with lice and fleas. The stink of the open toilet that he and the other prisoners had to ask permission to use.

All of those Pickett related to his daughter in minute details - most still etched in his memory as if he kept a journal. He talked matter-of-factly - never in a way to sensationalize what happened to him or evoke pity, Burke said.

The tears for both came not as he talked about the suffering he endured. That was behind him, she said. Rather they wept when he talked about the agony he still carried for the loss of his four crewmen, the life at home they never enjoyed and a sense of guilt and shame that he had somehow failed his men and his country by being shot down.

A high point in their collaboration, she said, came when he finally began to realize that what happened wasn't his fault.

Pickett told her about the terrible nightmares that constantly returned - even to the end of his life. In one, he relived the crash. And in another, they somehow survived and flew the Reddy Teddy back to base.

And why, she asked him, was the latter so bad?

Because, he said, even as the dream played out he knew he had to wake up. And his plane and the four crewmen would be gone.

An agonizing process

The book, completed in May, took a decade because most of the time Burke was writing it she was a single mother working a day job and trying to make ends meet, she said.

She would write a chapter, show it to her dad and they would talk about whether that was really the way it was. Burke made corrections, added details that came back to her father as he read initial drafts and did research to know what questions to ask as their conversations continued.

The long process, she said, made it a better and more accurate account.

Sometimes she had to venture into territory that made her nervous - ask questions she knew might lead to unsettling answers. Did he ever give away secrets to the enemy? Did he ever see anyone murdered?

Picket dodged no questions. He told his daughter that he had revealed no secrets and saw no one killed, although he saw vicious beatings by guards that may have led to deaths.

"Some days Kristi would warn him that this is going to be a hard day," recalled Faye Pickett, who watched the book evolve.

The couple met in Sweet Home, where she worked in a bank and he drove log trucks. She traveled to a training base in Kansas to marry him before he went overseas.

During the year Pickett spent in captivity, the only hint she had that he might still be alive was a news report of a photograph of a haggard B-29 pilot identified as "Bickett" that appeared in a Japanese newspaper the day after her husband was shot down. That chilling picture is on the cover of the book.

For Burke, perhaps the most emotional time in writing the book came at a moment when she felt she had crawled inside her father's skin and experienced what he was feeling. It happened during a weekend writing binge and startled her when something terrible surfaced inside her, she said.

"I realized I hated the Japanese at that moment," she said. "I was shocked at myself."

The feeling quickly passed, but it helped her understand her father better - understand the prejudice he carried home with him after Japan surrendered in 1945 and American troops rescued him and the other prisoners from a camp on an island in Tokyo Bay. Pickett, who went into the war at 170 pounds, weighed less than 100 when he was liberated.

"A hero for me"

After extensive medical treatment, he left the military and settled in Florence, where he and his wife raised three children and ran the auto parts store for 25 years before retiring and eventually moving to Springfield and later to Eugene.

Like many veterans, Burke said, her father buried the war in his past and sought to live a simple life. He didn't pursue his dream of becoming an airline pilot and gave up flying entirely.

Instead, he immersed himself in his family's lives and community affairs in Florence. Despite everything he had faced in the war, Burke said, she admired him most for his ability to put aside feelings of anger and bitterness and show so much concern for those around him.

Her dad evolved from someone who would walk across the street to avoid passing by an Asian person, she said, to a man who treated the Japanese-born wife of a former American serviceman with the utmost respect and courtesy.

"Because he knew what she and her (Japanese) family had been through in Japan," Burke said.

Florence had few people of color then, and her father told Burke and her brothers to stand up for the couple's children if they ever saw anyone picking on them, she said.

"He had an amazing capacity to love people, my dad did," Burke said. "I don't know how you can go through something like that and come back and put it together. That's what made him a hero for me."

Many old friends showed up to visit with Burke and her mother at a recent book signing at a Florence bookstore. Faye Pickett said the man locals knew as "Ernie" would have enjoyed seeing them, but would have hated all the hoopla.

Some of his Florence friends said they knew a little about his war experiences, but he seldom mentioned them. They're glad his story is being told.

"He talked to me some (about the war), but not very much. He said he was real thankful to be alive," said Judd Huntington of Florence, who went on RV trips with Pickett and said no one could have a better friend.

Huntington hadn't yet read Pickett's book, but Stuart Johnston, who served on the Florence City Council with Pickett, said he couldn't put it down.

"It was a good book even if you didn't know him," Johnston said.

EXCERPTS FROM 'PROOF THROUGH THE NIGHT'

B-29 pilot Ernest Pickett describing parachuting from his shot-down plane:

"Below my feet was an alarmingly foreign-looking land. I was falling into a congested residential area. More than a hundred angry-looking shouting people were out in the street watching as I fell toward them. Except for a few soldiers in uniform, they all appeared to be civilians and were waving wooden sticks and clubs of all shapes and sizes.

"As I drew nearer, they formed a ring in the middle of the street. I could see that I was going to fall right into the middle of it."

About his interrogations by Kempe Tai, the Japanese military police:

"I evaded. I lied. I answered in vague generalities. They answered with rifle butts to the head, kicks to my stomach and groin, and every other variety of beating one can imagine. They repeated the tortures I'd experienced before. I alternately passed out and revived."

Liberation from Omori POW camp on Tokyo Bay: "Silence fell as the commander of the landing craft slowly scanned the group. He saw the condition we were in and after a moment announced in a kind voice, 'It's all over now.'

"The stronger men shouted and whooped. I didn't have the strength for such a huge emotion, yet something inside of me released. I felt an inner sagging upon hearing his words, a realization of how sick I was, how easily I might have died at Omori. I stood on the beach, weak and dirty, and wept quietly."

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.