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letters was a wallet-size membership card in something called the Domain of Neptunus Rex.
    The card reads:
    DOMAIN OF NEPTUNUS REX
    TO ALL SAILORS , whoever ye may be, and to all Mermaids, Sea Serpents, Whales, Sharks and other Living Things of the Sea, GREETINGS;
    KNOW YE that on this day there appeared one
    Norman Steinman
    who, having invaded our Royal Domain by crossing the Equator on the U.S.A.T. SF #1650 has been, and is hereby, gathered to our fold and initiated into the Solemn Mysteries of the Ancient Order of the Deep.
    GIVEN, UNDER OUR HAND AND ROYAL SEAL , this
    12th day of January, 1944.
    Neptune I, Rex Ruler of the Raging Main and
    Davy Jones, His Majesty’s Scribe
    After a week at sea en route to New Zealand, my father noted, “Today we crossed the Equator and we had a Father Neptune party on the deck and it was really good.” I imagined a scene of levity: a GI with a long white beard dressed in fishnet stockings parading around the deck of the transport ship with a trident, while thirty or forty seasick doggies—that’s what they called themselves (doggie for dog-faced, expressionless)—hooted and hollered despite their discomfort.
    After months of training in Tyler, Texas, the GIs were finally on their way to “the real thing,” to the war itself. The satiric Neptune ritual, that shipboard frivolity, was a sanctioned way to release the tension of a long journey. But the vaudeville that celebrated the first crossing into a lower latitude masked a more somber initiation. The “membership card” was supposed to mark the end of life as these soldiers knew it; certainly life as my father had known it. Combat would actually effect the most profound transformation in these men’s lives. Combat would initiate them into a fraternity of men both ancient and silent; the fraternity of men who have faced death—who have killed or been killed in war.
    About male initiation rituals, the scholar Mircea Eliade writes, “When the boy comes back from the forest … he will be another; he will no longer be the child he was. He will have undergone a series of initiatory ordeals which compel him to confront fear, suffering and torture, but which compel him above all to assume a new mode of being.” In my father’s letters, as well as evidence of change, I would find evidence of who he was before the war changed him.
    The soldiers threw scraps of food from their King Neptune celebration over the railing to the dolphins and gulls. The other creatures of the deep—the whales, the sharks, the sponges, the rays, the blowfish—scarcely noticed the big boat carrying soldiers to war, casting a temporary shadow on their realm.
    I N THE FALL of 1992, a little more than a year after my parents’ deaths, I quit the day job I’d had for five years and headed north for a month to a writers’ colony at Fort Worden State Park outside the town of Port Townsend, Washington, on the Olympic Peninsula. With me were my husband, my dog, and my father’s letters.
    I wanted to try to understand the connection between my father’s silence about the war and our family’s home life. I wanted to understand the ordeals that compelled Norman Steinman to assume a new mode of being.
    I figured if I could just lock myself in a cabin with all those letters, I might unravel the narrative of those war years and comprehend some truth about the man, his experience, his pain. I wanted to know
how
the war changed him.
    We arrived at Fort Worden late at night and followed the map to our assigned domicile. I’d imagined our living quarters would be one of the fine Victorian officer’s houses on the main quad, like the ones in
An Officer and a Gentleman
, which had been filmed here. But cottage #255, originally intended for an enlisted man and his family, was a simple wooden bungalow. Three bare little rooms, a woodstove, some dilapidated furniture.
    The next morning