At any given moment, all of us are the products of our genes, the things we have learned, the experiences we have had, and the thousands of choices we have made over the course of our lifetimes.
One individual whose present condition resulted from such choices is Jim Dickinson, a 76-year-old retired Navy enlisted man who lives in a quiet, comfortable neighborhood in Bethesda, Maryland. When he unbuttons his shirt, he sees in the center of his chest the vertical red scar from recent surgery to remove a golf ball-sized tumor from his left lung. Under his right armpit is a scar from surgery in the summer of 1996 to remove the middle lobe from his right lung. As he contemplates the cancers, Dickinson says, “That’s 58 years of cigarettes. ... I wish I had never smoked.”
After growing up in the 1930s, Dickinson went to the University of Georgia so he could distance himself from his demanding father in New York. In 1942, shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the son made more choices. He enlisted in the Navy and volunteered for submarine duty. He was a plank owner in the USS Puffer (SS-268). He enjoyed the camaraderie with the crew and the liberty opportunities in Australia.
Eight war patrols—“runs,” as the submarine veterans (Sub Vets) call them—were the price he paid for his choice of duty. During the first run, in October 1943, the Puffer was in the Makassar Strait near Borneo. She attacked a tanker and then underwent a merciless depth-charging by a Japanese torpedo boat that held her down for nearly 40 hours.
As he sits at his kitchen table, Dickinson peruses the small diary he kept surreptitiously during the war. It reminds him of the fear that engulfed the young fireman second class and his shipmates during their ordeal. They could hear the splashes as depth charges hit the water, the click of detonators, and the explosions that rocked the boat. The air grew foul. Shutting off the air-conditioning let the temperature rise to 125°. Bodies were drenched with sweat, and some men urinated in their uniforms because the terror was so intense. Some resorted to prayer, others to anger and swearing. Some essentially went berserk as discipline broke down. At last the Puffer surfaced, and Dickinson breathed clean air again. Everything else in his wartime experience was easier by comparison.
In time, Jim Dickinson became an engineman first class, but in 1957 he opted out of active duty following 15 years of service. He then completed eight years in the reserves to qualify for retirement. The choice of civilian life came, he says, because the Navy had become “a strange world. I felt like I didn’t belong anymore. I felt outdated.”
He had, in the meantime, made another critical choice. In 1956 he married Mardalee Bishop—the daughter of an Army colonel—whose heritage traced back to the earliest days of the nation. Navy life had its aftereffects. In the early years of their marriage, Jim’s legs kicked out in bed as his subconscious mind relived the experience of being pounded by depth charges. The kicking woke Mardalee, who, in turn, woke Jim and brought him back to the present.
As a civilian once again, Dickinson drew on his Navy experience to begin a second career as a maintenance man, and later a supervisor, at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda. That job lasted for 20 years until his retirement in 1977. Afterward he and his wife traveled, frequently going to reunions of Sub Vets to recall the wartime years.
His 1942 choice of the Navy shaped Dickinson’s choice of health care provider in his retirement years. The National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda was the site of his two cancer operations and subsequent recuperation periods. The time he spent alone in a private room gave him the opportunity to reflect on his life. He found sources of satisfaction and also wondered about the things he might have done differently. His foremost conclusion: “I married a good woman. She was the best thing that could have happened to me.”
Dickinson’s recovery from his latest surgery may take months as he regains strength in his 118- pound body, as he builds stamina, and as he finds it easier to walk on feet that were for a time so swollen he couldn’t put them into his shoes.
He has chosen a quiet life for the present. He relaxes with the newspaper, radio, or television. He no longer goes to the Sub Vets’ gatherings because he’s heard all the stories already. His wife and grandchildren recently made a cruise to Bermuda without him because he didn’t want to put up with the ship-board folderol.
In Jim Dickinson’s scrapbook is a photo of a tombstone already erected in the graveyard of the small church in Ironsides, Maryland, where he and Mardalee were married. Etched into the stone are the names of the couple and their dates of birth. Above her name is the insignia of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Above his is the logo of the Sub Vets. Thus the results of some choices continue—even after the lives of those who made them.