War Stories for My Grandchildren: A Memoir in Short Stories

By H.F. Jansen Estrup

Storytelling at its best, this compelling memoir graphically portrays the scarred emotional landscape of young men who seek a place in the world by way of a military career. Exhausted shadows of the past are brought alive with uncommon eloquence as the author looks back on his youth brimming with innocence, idealism and patriotism.

A page turner, the book explores the complex nature of a man whose brave, daring and sometimes foolhardy exploits led to the essential task; building a scaffold of choices and attitudes by rendering meaning from the intractable depths of experience.

What in other hands might be a dreary tale of adolescent angst, betrayal and disillusion, takes on truly pyrotechnic energy, lifting his coming of age from the mundane to the profound.


Reviews

Rating="Excellent" (top rating) by Writer's Digest

"...What I like best is the humanity of the speaker. Narrators
often glorify themselves or the people they love and consequently
attack those who might have ever hurt them slightly.
It seems those authors do not approach their lives from a
position of power. But this book is filled with real people
with distinctive voices, made human and vulnerable by their
standards and faults and are loved all the more for them by
the reader. Especially wonderful is the perspective on the
world, the philosophies and stories presented with reasoning
throughout, as well as the various layers of actual war and
the psychology of boy and manhood ... the raw, relatable, vivid
voice that is found inside ... the project is quite necessary
and brilliant, and I hope it will come under the gaze of many a
person interested at all in our worlds history or the
intelligent wisdom of one who has lived."



Rating="5 Stars" By jd2 (ID)

In War Stories For My Grandchildren, the author vividly portrays
how war is not always on the military battlefield. This unique book
tells of war in all walks of life, be it young, old, personal, social or
military. It connects the reader to war through the eyes and mind
of the author who experienced these events as they unfolded.
With a poignant view of the military, gained from a combined total
of twenty plus years in the Air Force and Navy, he writes with the
technical expertise of an insider and the wisdom acquired after
five tours in Southeast Asia. Here's a bargain if I ever read one.
The book contains about twenty different stories for the price of
one book. Each story filled with a refreshingly honest point of view.
Not just the blood and guts side of war but a deeper philosophical
understanding of what it is, what it does, and how humanity can't
seem to detach itself from it. Real life danger and excitement await
the reader in stories like The Drowning of Helen Lee and Sea Dragon,
as well as others. I'm sure his Grandchildren will enjoy them all. I did!
Highly recommended from a satisfied reader. Jd2/SFR

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Mar 15, 2007
• ISBN: 9780595874385

H.F. Jansen Estrup

A retired military communications specialist and technical writer, Jansen Estrup is a lifelong student of legends, myths and storytelling. “The stories we tell ourselves determine the kind of society we create and the roles we each play within ...” He lives in the Southern Sierras with his wife of 36 years, an artist. This is his first book.

Book preview

Copyright © 2007 by Hector F. J. Estrup

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN-13: 978-0-595-43098-7 (pbk)

ISBN-13: 978-0-595-87438-5 (ebk)

ISBN-10: 0-595-43098-8 (pbk)

ISBN-10: 0-595-87438-X (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Author Notes

Acknowledgments

Prologue

1945

Sambo

1941-1952

Bad Dog Stories

1950

Korea

1950

Round and ‘Round Things

1957

Mutiny

1962

The Drowning of Helen Lee

1963

Ciphers and Symbols

1965

Chaser

1966

Sea Dragon

1968

Loose Lips

1969

Don’t Drop the Load

1972

Naval Warfare—-Judgements

1973

Fireworks

1977

Hide and Seek

1978

Gunsmoke

1978-2003

Good Dog Stories

1980

Nests

1990

Fred’s Friends

2002

The Greatest Generation-Redux

2006

Epilogue

About the cover:

All three figures are taken from photographs of the author. They are extricated, manipulated and juxtaposed in order to convey the notion of an elder speaking to the very young, or to himself.

For Paul with love

"War has another sort of charm for those

who are malcontent: it can annihilate the personal

at the same time that it sharpens the will to live."

Judith Thurman

Author Notes

Saying thank you to those who have so generously, and sometimes with much personal pain, supplied me with information is both a pleasure and a happy duty. Before I begin naming names or saluting this or that source, let me explain a bit about the authenticity of this memoir.

The events are true. They are especially true in the sense that something happened which caused or influenced something else. I do not pretend to know what cannot be known. For example in the chapter called The Drowning of Helen Lee I have told of a dream sequence involving fires. The fires really happened in roughly the times and places I describe. Something caused the one which lit up late winter Tampa for several days in 1943, but wartime security kept it out of the papers and its ‘real story’ has been impossible for me to track down. To my knowledge no one has ever spoken or written of it, not even my father, who told of many things unflattering to ‘authority’ in those turbulent days, almost any of them grounds to be jailed for ‘aiding the enemy’. Based upon my memories, the general locations and activities of the time, I have created a plausible if unhappy scenario and characters to explain this fire. Another example is the person of Lieutenant Commander Yoo, who was invented in order to discuss some of the many ‘mysteries’ surrounding our failure in Viet Nam. There are others and I trust the reader’s discernment to distinguish between them and strictly ‘factual’ material.

In other instances I have used composite characters and, in order to keep from making heroes or villains of real people, frequently changed the names of participants. In some cases I have left out some of the most awful events, but I have tried not to excuse the guilty or make too many concessions to the innocent.

There is one notable case where I have consciously attempted to immortalize a real person, someone I served with in USS John R. Craig (DD-885). His name was Ken Sargent and in 1969 he was a Chief Machinist. As routine had it, Radiomen seldom had the need or opportunity to associate with engineering types, and junior petty officers (as I was then) almost never were invited to the Goat Locker to hang around with CPOs. So I knew who he was—destroyer chiefs are not celebrities exactly, but there are not many of them and they are very visible. Almost thirty five years later Ken called me on the phone and we had a long conversation about the ‘day’. He’d been living only sixty or so miles from me all of the years we had been retired and even though we went to the same CPO Club (before it closed for lack of patronage), Navy Exchange and Commissary, we had never run into each other. The talk inspired me to write the chapter called "... Don’t Drop the Load", but before that we had promised to get together. We set up a couple of meetings but neither of them worked out and then one personal crisis followed on the heals of this or that diversion and the urgency got left behind. Months later I got an e-mail notifying me of his funeral (that very day). He had died in a freak motorcycle accident, alone on a desert highway. And so I’ve given him the only part I know for sure he had, the only wartime line I ever heard him say and contrived to have him say it with his own name .Main Control, aye.

But generally, I have tried not to ennoble anyone in these stories, including the animals which are central to more than one chapter. It is tempting to anthropomorphize our pets, and although we loved them, we also consciously thought of ours as the first line of defense against danger. We used them and they used us. We try to call it friendship.

In every instance the truth I’ve tried to involve the reader in is as much about climate, culture and attitude as it is with who did what, when, where, why and how. Finding factual or suspected errors in these stories, I urge you to think again. Having had (or remembered) a similar experience differently, I ask that you reconsider. There is no good reason why any of us should have identical recollection of adventures we shared only superficially. Being there, we know from courtroom ‘eye-witness accounts’, is no guarantee of truth or even useful observation. Nevertheless, your memories are as valid (if not factual) as mine and (I urge you to write an honest account of your experiences before you go) so in some cases I have required my characters to speak in opposition voices. Many times I have left unanswered those questions we still think so vital. Often I feel (and suspect that my fellow veterans do, too) we were severely misused, but because we are so profoundly indoctrinated against questioning authority (by family, school and church) we dare not blame our obviously corrupted leaders. Instead we find a scapegoat, a fux-Judas like Jane Fonda or some other protestor, to blame. Some of our actions, such as the current demonizing of those who served with us (or failed to) is so nasty that I wonder if we ever had such hatred of any enemy. And if we did, perhaps that rage so clouded our judgement and behavior that we had no chance of winning. Self hatred, self-inflicted wounds and shame, for thirty- odd years, have only inflamed, not healed our wounds.

Author Notes xv

The specter ofViet Nam is not behind us, except in the sense that we have put it in the ‘denial’ file. Like Satan smirking over Jesus’ shoulder, it is behind us, ignored but still virile, putrefying and very much in play as a puppet-master.

My wife, embracing her Native American heritage, likes to tell me stories. Sometimes I understand them. Like the Old Indian who laments to his grandson of the terrible creatures which gnaw his heart—vengeance and forgiveness.

But Grandfather, cries the boy, which one will win?

… The one I feed, the Old One says gravely.

H. F. J. Estrup

August 2004

Acknowledgments

Many have assisted me with these stories and I appreciate their time and effort very much. That I have written something in opposition to what they related should not in any way diminish either their story or efforts to help me understand. The contents of this book are entirely my own doing. Some conflicts may have occurred for the sake of story telling, but other times recollections reflect my own memories, attitudes and understanding.

Specifically I thank my sister, Liv, for details and for insights into my parents’ behavior and attitudes, my brother Pete, too, for relating and expanding events I had mis-remembered, forgotten or never knew.

Edwin Mulock and writer Morgan Steinmetz of Bradenton helped me sort out my brother’s involvement in the Sandy Creek matter and his activities afterward.

James Steffes, Roger LeMaster, Dexter Goad, Samuel Crawford and my neighbor Blaine Manson helped me with many Viet Nam era matters, from attitudes and topography in-country to events and consequences off shore. Steffes and Crawford have written books about their experiences in the Brown Water Navy. James Blake helped me understand the rudiments of gunnery and missile tracking and John Marek was extremely helpful with the Australian naval experience.

I thank men I served with, Dutch Clem, Jan Igras and Ken Sargent in John R. Craig and Kent Stott in Long Beach for rekindling memories and encouraging me, sometimes in subtle, unintentional ways.

Those who have been moved to create web sites about their military experiences have been essential in helping me research the ‘un-official’ truth. Librarians, with good reason to be a bit timid these days, put their jobs and even their freedom on the line in order to help me. I thank them all profusely for their courage and citizenship.

Virginia Bullock and Entera The Artist, deserve special thanks for their insights, observations and encouragement. Tim Walke, a neighbor, voracious reader and father of an active duty Chief Petty Officer (recently promoted mustang Ensign), was kind and supportive. Mark McGuire, as always, has been a tireless and versatile friend.

Then there are Dorian DuBois and his wife Randa who devoted so much time to reading, proof-reading, offering very intelligent suggestions and generally rallying ‘round the flag-staff, even when I was flying most of a rag or other cock-eyed notion. I thank Dorian’s older brother, Darion, for the many nights we walked home in utter darkness fabricating stories of daring-do as we went, for he was a brother member of the Flat-tops Gang and our denim jackets bore an emblem stolen from WWII, a cockeyed cartoon duck’s face between crossed crutches. It was a small gang, only three or four of us, and we never seemed to be in trouble. I also deeply thank his parents, Fred and Marge. As often as possible in the early Fifties I sat in front of their TV set watching Victory At Sea, the show’s music and visual effects cementing many of those tumultuous events to my toddler memories, welding that past to my future in the military. I recall with gratitude the friendship Bill Howard offered me as a child and again much later when we were in our mid-sixties. Outside of my own family these generous folk were surely the most influential for me. In my world, which was messy and conflicted, they seemed so kind to each other.

Frank James Morgan, Pearl Harbor Survivor, retired Navy Chief Petty Officer and a superb fine arts sculptor, deserves my deepest gratitude for befriending Carole, for taking my family under his gentle wing while I was off playing war and they were alone, adrift in a strange place at a strange time.

And oddly, I find myself speechless, at least wordless when it comes to describing the depth of Carole’s helpfulness. It is beyond her influence as a wife, far more than that of someone who shared so many adventures with me, played adversary and friend, lover and provocateur, intellectual partner and challenger. When we were younger there was great danger in that, of sublimating our egos and aspirations, of becoming too much alike. And yet I recall that I was often speechless around her, in awe of her brazenness and confidence, her certainty of purpose. So simple profound thanks will have to do … thanks for forty-two years of love and stimulation and devotion.

Prologue

There should be a word of caution in every story which purports to ‘tell the truth’. Truth presupposes that the writer knows much more than he ever does and that all of those who contribute ‘facts’ are in possession of a similar span of knowledge, that they have neither ‘agenda’ nor point of view and that they, unlike every so-called historian in history, had a neutral, unbiased overview and were not beholden to either victor or vanquished. And so I write these stories down in the belief that they are as true as I can remember living or hearing them through frightened eyes and disbelieving ears … and always filtered through the microscopic screen of my limited, sometimes mistaken

understanding.

1630-1930 The Family War Record

My mother, called Helen by her father (and Gretchen by mine) imagined herself many things as she lay neglected in her bed, recovering from a crippling disease which was surely more psychosomatic than physical. Her mother, always a victim of Victorian expectations, was often bedridden and sometimes confined to a sanitarium for extended periods. Young Helen could not walk and was too weak for much of anything besides reading. The reason for this is sometimes explained by a father’s cruelty. For years before her mysterious illness, Helen was so active and ‘unladylike’ that she had to be scolded repeatedly and sometimes punished physically. She ran and played sports, even boy’s sports like baseball. Her father thought of women in a biblical way, that they were (at best) a necessary evil. Girls, he imagined, were a waste of time and energy and money. And so it was with great reluctance that he sent her off to school each morning with her books (why did a woman need to know how to read?), a lunch and two bright, shinny pennies for the trolley ride across town, one for going, the other for returning to their understated brownstone house which featured live-in quarters for as many as five servants.

Young Helen, keenly aware of her own mother’s desperate dependence upon the pittance she was expected to run a household on, began practicing her own brand of frugality. Instead of standing in the snow or rain to catch the trolley, she walked. It was not a ladylike stroll, of course, because she had to hurry. There were many, many blocks to cover. It would have attracted too much attention to actually run, so she developed a stride which was longer than it seemed and a pace which was much quicker. Her limbs grew long and strong. She, at ten, was already taller than her parents and when they noticed her at all, they did so with critical unease. She, her father suspected, was trying to overshadow him somehow. But she never challenged him in any way and had long since learned that he had neither time nor care for her. So each day she hid the pennies in one of her father’s discarded cigar boxes. It was as close as she was allowed to be to him.

In time, as she had planned, she accumulated a considerable treasure trove and dreamed of the toys she would buy herself, for the Van Slykes were fanatically religious and righteously rich. Rather, I should say that Mister Van Slyke was rich, for even in the first two decades of the Twentieth Century, in the year women over the age of twenty five could finally vote, not all of them were thought capable of owning or managing property, let alone money. Perhaps because he was so rich, and believed every penny had been given him by God Almighty he could not allow himself to indulge in pleasures of the flesh or senses, certainly not in dolls or frivolous toys.

But Helen desperately wanted to begin a doll collection as she had seen some of her classmates do, and imagined dolls would serve as proper playmates for her. And so for her eleventh birthday she bought herself a small porcelain faced doll dressed in intricate laces, finely gathered silks and miniature baubles. She chose one dressed in a Gay Nineties style and the perfect little lady even had a tiny bustle under her gown. It was the only gift she had ever received and such an unusual thing could not be kept hidden long. Perhaps Helen was intentionally careless, or it is just possible that she showed it off, boasting that she had a playmate, a friend.

Her father’s reaction was swift and brutal. Helen was a thief, he reasoned, because she took his pennies under false pretenses. Worse, he thundered, she was an idolater who worshiped a base image of something not simply craven but, as the first books of the King James Version of Holy Scripture made abundantly clear, it was the image of womankind, of evil in its most recent popular manifes- tation—a Gibson Girl, America’s lusty infatuation with French debauchery . the Can-Can and other unmentionables. And everybody knew how devilish, how Papist the French were, hardly better than Jews or Arabs or cannibals.

Evil had to be punished, of course. Even late in her life it caused her trembling pain to remember this punishment and all she ever confessed was that the hoard of pennies was confiscated, the doll returned for its cost and her father, who seldom acknowledged his daughter’s existence, now proclaimed her banished. Mysteriously, little Helen was stricken with weakness in her legs, a kind of paralysis which left her unable to walk.

She spent her entire twelfth year in a darkened room reading the classics and magazines such as National Geographic, which featured stories about the great discoveries in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, Palestine and especially the newly rediscovered wonders of Mayan Yucatan. Her mother smuggled these gifts to her and she read them voraciously. But one day the servants collected them up and Helen’s father saw them, these blasphemes, in his house! So Helen was deprived not only of the books, pictures and photographs, but her rebellious, unrepentant mother who was sent off, yet again, to an ‘institution’ where she might ‘make herself fit for civilized society’.

Helen was left alone with her memories and imagination. Here she began an evolution to see herself as Helen of Troy, New York, a face which longed to journey upon a thousand ships (and would one day, during World War II, weld up many of them from behind black lenses), who yearned for a hero to rescue her from a prison which might, or might not be an ivory tower behind the white walls of ancient Troy or a cleansing cell from which virgins might be taken as a sacrifice for the receding underworld river gods of Mayan Yucatan (where her ashes would one day be spread on the wind from atop Chichen Itza).

There was much family lore to spike her imagination, too. She, it had been said, was distantly related to a Dutch queen who claimed under penalty of everlasting (and immediate) hellfire, that her ancestors were directly descended from one of the Three Kings/Wise Men who first recognized the divinity of Baby Jesus and her family led many a siege, a pogrom, an inquisition under the Christian banner.

Such things are difficult to prove.

There is also a shadowy link to the early church, to its first Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II, who acknowledged that three have seduced the world—Moses the Hebrews, Christ the Christians and Mohammed the heathens. But all that seems to have survived that era are epic romances like Tristan and Isolde, King Arthur, El Cid and other nightmare dreams. There was a dark side to everything in my mother’s youth and she taught it to me as things are going too smoothly, so something awful must be just ahead. She was right often enough to give me an unconscious hesitant, reserved outlook and I never did figure out whether or not her ‘awful’ expectations were a natural foreboding or simply self-fulfilling prophecy. Perhaps every family carries such burdens and joys.

The first documented Van Slyke was an American of sorts. Born in 1604, nothing much is known about his early years. As a 30 year old carpenter, Cornelius Antonissen of the village ‘Slijk’, which is said to mean dirty or muddy water, made his way to New Amsterdam and was instrumental in negotiating a prisoner exchange between local natives and Europeans. For this service he was given a considerable land holding in the Catskill Mountains, north on the Mauritius, as the Hudson was called in those days, and the Mohawk Rivers. Within this grant were several Mohawk ‘castles’, or fortified villages. There he married a Mohawk woman who spoke French. It has been related as a frontier love story in recent years and they did raise a large family of mixed children well schooled in languages and European ways. They became famous as interpreters and record keepers, weaving details and narrative into fabulous wampum belts. This Dutchman was infamous, at least to hear my mother tell it, as a religious fanatic bent upon carving out his own ‘Christian Empire’ amongst the ‘naked’ (though already schooled by Jesuits) savages of New York. Perhaps there is some truth in this version. If he believed he was related to one of the Three Kings, and possibly a Holy Roman Emperor as well, a 30 year old carpenter who could prove in writing that he was a peacemaker might well have given freedom to his messianic urges. He and his wife drew together Mohicans, Senecas, Oneidas and others. Myth says they may have been the creative impulse which sparked the Iroquois Confederacy (an idea Benjamin Franklin later credited with suggesting representational government for the European colonies, patterned after the Confederation, specifically the United States House of Representatives). Others site evidence that the Iroquois league existed for many years before the first Whites invaded the region. Peace and democracy, regardless of its origins, reigned between natives and immigrants for an entire decade.

Antonissen’s children, in particular his numerous daughters, married prominent Dutchmen but well before that happened dreams of American paradise were shattered. There was an ‘uprising’ in 1643 and it is not clear whether my Dutch- Indian ancestors fought on the side of the Mohicans or the Mohawks. But when England came into possession of the colony (renaming it New York) and began breaking every agreement, natives all over ‘New’ England resisted and there was bitter war which lasted off and on from 1675 to 1697. Neither the Dutch or Mohawks were friends of the English in that era.

Not surprisingly, there were no Van Slyke commissions granted in the Leisler Rebellion (1689-90), or afterward. But nearly a century after that a dozen or so of that name served as officers and enlisted in the Continental Army, many of them doing battle against their Mohawk cousins who, provoked by George Washington’s genocidal campaign against them, had reluctantly gone over to the British. The American Revolution, more than any other colonial conflict, was disastrous for the native blood in our family.

Witt Van Slyke, a friend of New York City’s mayor, DeWitt Clinton, helped him become governor and profited by following the Erie Canal west, from Troy to Syracuse to Buffalo. From 1816 or so, until about 1940, that branch of the Van Slykes was in shipping, tea, steel, real estate, even ice. The sons of these businesses were not robber barons, but they went to well regarded schools and their classmates had names like Van Buren, Roosevelt and Vanderbilt. They did not bear arms in Mexico, nor, since it cost only $300 to buy one’s way out of the draft, did any of my Yankee forebearers join the Union Army during the War of the Rebellion. Business was too profitable to expend the lives of family members and such idealism as existed was focused on the Hereafter.

In 1899 my maternal grandfather, Peter Willem Van Slyke, was touring the Far East, secretly for pleasure but principally and officially in search of new business opportunities. America had a brand new empire and Willem had a keen eye for profits. Touring on a friend’s steam yacht, he made the Formosan port of Gaoxiong (Kaohsiung) at the same time soon-to-be world famous Heichachiro Togo was showing the flag in his brand new battleship, the Japanese fleet flagship, Mikasa. The Admiral was pleased to show off his ship to a fellow champion of the Industrial Age and Van Slyke was profoundly impressed. It was not the warship, which, after all had been designed and built in British yards, which so startled the Yankee merchant. It was Togo himself. As they toured the secondary gun decks and fancy new radio room with its gigantic cathode ray tubes, Willem had an awful vision. Dinner in the Admiral’s stateroom only increased his alarm. He had never met a more competent, self assured man. Formidable. The word stuck in his mind. Purposeful. Arrogant. Formidable. And very dangerous to America’s brand spanking new Asian Empire.

Back aboard his borrowed yacht Willem composed a very serious letter to a casual friend, a school mate he had not seen for years, but followed closely as he became very important in Washington. This letter, the story is told, was waiting for Teddy Roosevelt when he returned from Cuba and months of convalescence. Its words became the imperative which found the dollars to buy the steel which, within a few short years the new President stunned the admiring world with his … America’s … Great White Fleet.

Willem probably deserved to imagine himself a minor player on the world’s scene. Moving navies about in his mind, he spared neither time nor interest in his family. His was a family first to recognize the godhood of Jesus, instrumental in converting and unifying Holy Europe and a pioneer at the dawn of America’s Blessed Creation, among the first to sound the anti-Asian alarm. The Van Slykes were better than the rest of us and deserving, as kings once had been, of special rules, contravening laws and subtle worship.

His daughter, isolated and ignored, began to dream of moving things, too. Not ships or tea chests or chess pieces, she saw countless playmates all dancing to her fondest, most fecund dreams. She would never be alone again! Around her she would gather enough children to make a baseball or football team, a Greek chorus, a birthday every month and every one would spring from her loins fully formed like dolls or sculptures of gods and goddesses.

Eventually I would be one of those playmates, but as a boy (she ‘knew nothing about boys’) I did not fit the companionship role. I spent a lot of time on the shelf, collecting dust and tarnish on my childish shield. I never knew my maternal grandparents. Both died before my first birthday, as yet another war brewed up in the world. There are photographs of my grandmother sitting unfocused in the Florida sun, and one of me in my grandfather’s arms. Both of us are pudgy, pasty and bald under a Sarasota mulberry tree.

And so I found no real military background on my mother’s side of the family, not a single soldier or sailor or airman in the direct line and damned few on the fringes.

I never knew my father’s relatives either.

What a name like Estrup means is a minor mystery. There is an ancient castle and land-holding in Jutland with that name, but I am assured it has nothing to do with my father’s family. Nor is there any of the usual meaning (such as ‘muddy river’ or ‘twi-light of the Pious and Almighty’) attached to it. Scandinavian sources show strupe, Iftstrupe, strupehode and trupe with meanings such as throat, larnyx (also gorge), windpipe and troop, all of which might be stretched to cover some military aspect, but could just as easily have hunter/gatherer connotations. Baltic language branches list esti rather than strupe as the word for devour or gorge, and if one reverses the two parts of Estrup there is rupestis, meaning anxiety and trouble, as well as rupesingas—thoughtful, careful. Going farther back in Indo-European tongues to Sanskrit, one finds the word rup, which means ‘to break off or ‘rupture’, also akin to rip and rap, to speak or strike a (verbal) blow. As the root of strupe or trupe it takes on a specifically confrontational tone. The first syllable is a bit easier. Ose means pouring rain (or maybe serving soup), but Ost can be translated as east in several modern languages. Estrup, then, might be transliterated into something like Big Mouth Barbarian out of Central Asia, even Insatiable Ravenous Glutton, or (more generously) Silky Voice of the Morning Sun. Just as likely, the name refers to the miserable battles, desperate Targa exile, the howling pain and diplomatic rifts of the Great Northern War, for that is when my father’s family name is first recorded. In that alone is enough to inspire any number of mythic fictions.

Frederick IV of Gottorp, Duke of Schleswig and Holstein, commander of all Swedish armies in the Germanies and husband of an emperor’s daughter, was not happy. Since 1698, he had been obliged to side with Karl XI, his Swedish sovereign, in a family quarrel against the monarch’s brother, Frederick IV, King of Denmark & Norway. For long years they had wrangled over the region called Schleswig, a large scattered part of the ‘neck’ which attaches the headlands of Jutland to the shoulders of Germanic Europe, a Danish holding since 1115CE. Suddenly, in an unforseen twist of love and statesmanship, it had passed into control of Danish Frederick IV’s ambitious brother through his niece, Princess Hedwig Sophia von Simmern, Swedes who had alliances against Denmark, Saxony, Poland and the Russian Tsar. The matter remained very serious and unresolved.

Then Karl XI died and his young son, Charles (Karl) XII, became King. Imagining himself cut in the mold of child conquerors like Alexander and Shi-shak (Ramses II), he immediately raised new armies against his Danish uncle.

Duke Frederick, whose wife was pregnant with his heir, should have been thrilled, strutting about, partying inside his moats and walls. Instead he found himself locked in battle for his family’s heritage, wealth and life itself.

As fighting season of the year 1700 began, the Danish king’s armies laid siege to Duke Frederick’s strongholds around Tonning and the Great Northern War began. The Duke brought in Swedish regiments from the German states and hired Dutch mercenaries, yet the siege could not be broken until Sweden landed troops near Copenhagen and suddenly Denmark was outflanked and out of the war.

But King Charles was just getting started. Before the Peace of Traventhal was ironed out, Russia attacked another disputed duchy, Livland (part of Lithuania), and Charles marched east raising armies ahead of him. Duke Frederick rode with him, a bodyguard of Holstein-Gottorp Dragoons to protect them. They rode with boyish enthusiasm and beneath the verve and regal comradery King Charles seethed with rage at the duplicity of Augustus I, a Saxon and the elected King of Poland. This war was entirely his fault and Charles could not wait to have his head. But first he had to take care of the upstart, Peter I, the Russian.

With the Swedes marched a barefoot bastard and orphaned child who had neither name nor prospects. He was about ten years old and for most of his life he had lived in the Duke’s stables, in soiled straw among the horses. Lower than a multi-generational serf, he was treated much as a worthless animal. Horses, of course, were not worthless—not to a cavalry trooper. And neither, now that battle was eminent, were those who cared for horses. Duke Frederick’s squire had seen an odd relationship between the stable mates, the human and four legged, and drafted the homeless boy to haul water and hay. Sneeringly, the troopers called him Hector, Prince of Horses, after the Trojan War hero (a name which followed Norsemen up and down the great Russian Rivers and probably traveled with Varangian Danes who served as bodyguards to the Eastern Orthodox Prelate at Constantinople for several centuries).

When Charles and Frederick surprised and routed the Tsar’s raw troops at Narva, both were certain the war would be short and glorious. As proof came news that Princess Hegwig Sophia, Duchess of Holstein-Gottorp, had given birth to the Ducal heir, christened Charles Frederick after both of them. Heady news all around. Heedless of counsel and secretly simmering with anger, Charles chose to ignore suggestions that he press on to Moscow and end the war with Tsar Peter. Peter, he reasoned, could be defeated any time. He wanted the traitorous head of King Augustus! Sweden’s finest officers toasted that decision well into the night.

Out in the confiscated stables dragoons celebrated, too. Drinking, ridiculing the defeated Russian soldiers, they eventually turned their attention to Hector who had gained their affection by standing fast with several horses while the Swedes fought on foot. Other boys had run away. With mock grandeur, they presented him a pair of outsized shoes taken from a dead Russian. Hector packed the shoes, his first, with straw and even though he could hardly walk in them, his feet were no longer freezing in Poland’s mud.

King Charles’ army marched on Poland (in those days Poland stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea) and all during the winter they won skirmishes and battles outright, but Augustus remained illusive. For another year they went where ever they pleased, winning villages and towns and cities for the Empire of Sweden. Early in the Summer of 1702, at Warsaw, Charles won a major victory and nearly captured the Polish monarch.

Hector, now about twelve years old, thrived in virtually every encounter. The cavalrymen permitted him to feed and groom their animals and taught him how to mend saddles and other equipment. He learned quickly and seemed tireless. More important, their heretical religion taught that everything was pre-ordained, that their every action was known well in advance by God Almighty and that He not only approved, He guided their actions, pre-determined their butchery, crimes and fortunes, their living and dying. So it was extremely important that Hector was tireless, that he seemed to be everywhere and that he was lucky! Jansenism, like the Mithraic Christianity of Greece, Persia and Rome, was a warrior’s religion. All that mattered was divine favor. It couldn’t be earned, begged or bought. One either had it or didn’t. Fate!

Relentlessly the Holstein-Gottorp squadron dashed after the Poles and two weeks later, before the breastworks at Klissow, Hector stood near the King and Duke as they sat together mounted, discussing troop deployments. A single stray musket ball smashed through Duke Frederick’s temple and struck him dumb in mid-sentence. The King waited a moment to hear the next word before turning to see his friend and closest ally slumped dead in his saddle.

Sweden’s long string of easy triumphs was over. In fact, victory would never again ride with King Charles.

In an instant the rest of Denmark was out of the war, although several regiments of Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorp soldiers were hired out to fight during the next twelve years in the War of Spanish Succession. When that was finished the Great Northern War was still waiting for them, but this time they fought on the side of Denmark, Holland, Poland, Saxony, Britain and Russia.

The Holsteinska-Dragongardet went home to the neck of Jutland with the Duke’s body on an ornate carriage. The Duchess and her two year old son, Charles Frederick, whom the Duke had never seen, greeted them solemnly. She remained solemn, even melancholy the few remaining years of her life. Hector, no longer considered lucky, went back to living in the stalls. But in two years his fortunes turned again. With all of the men gone off to fight in the Low Countries or Spain, he became the only candidate when someone was needed to start teaching the four year old Duke the tools of his trade. At fifteen, Hector was strong, experienced far beyond his years and as knowledgeable about horses as anyone in the country. It fell to him to teach the boy duke about riding and care of animals. Before long he had been named Groom, for anyone attending royalty had to have a title to go along with his nick-name.

Three years later he and the young duke had established a close relationship, perhaps too close for many, for Hector’s notion of knowledge, like his language skills and demeanor, was decidedly unfit for the ball and staterooms of Europe.

Hedwig Sophia von Simmern, sister of the Emperor Charles XII of Sweden, Duchess of Holstein-Gottorp, Princess of Sweden and Finland, grandmother of a future Tsar of All The Russias, died in 1707 just as arrangements were being made to find the boy duke a proper companion, role model and tutor. Young Charles Frederick scarcely missed his mother and was an eager student to the man who came to be his mentor.

That man was Georg Heinrich von Gortz, Baron of Schlitz in Germany and one of the Eighteenth Century’s most ambitious failures. For ten years the Baron schooled his pupil in statecraft, an on the job training program to his devious way of thinking. He taught the boy these things in one embassy after another, but what he was really doing was feathering his own cap, assembling his own allies and collaborators, hatching his own plots. For example, acting for his king (whose army was far away on the Black Sea) in matters of finance, he had copper rather than silver coins stamped with the Emperor’s likeness and pocketed the considerable difference in value. Sweden’s war, he assured everyone, was going well and must be funded.

At the same time he tried to buy the Kingship of Sweden for his boy charge, Charles Frederick, who was barely ten years old. Shortly afterward he took the lad to enemy Russia and spent a winter in the ancient Danish fortress Novgorod, where he sued for a separate, unapproved peace with Peter the Great, one which did not include his own king, Charles XII. At this time he proposed marriage between Peter’s frail, eight-year-old daughter and eleven-year-old Charles Frederick. No one was quite sure whether the Baron was all that serious.

By 1718 Gortz, acting in Charles’ name, had completely bankrupted Sweden’s economy and Charles, now eighteen years into his great southern campaign, had never returned. The citizenry was outraged and since the King was not available to feel their wrath, they looked to his effigy, Baron von Gortz. In a fit of popular rage, he was beheaded and dismembered. As if by voodoo magic cast half a continent away Charles died, too. Perhaps, along with his rag-tag warrior remnants, he wondered how it had happened that Peter, not he, was being called ‘Great’. In the end, he might finally have suspected that Sweden, thanks to him, would never be a world power again.

Now Hector, nearly thirty, and the young Duke Charles Frederick fled to Novgorod. While the boy Duke danced and schemed his way into Russian royal circles, Hector scoured the horse stables and wild herds brought annually from the Kurgan Steppe. The shaggy little ponies fascinated him and one day he met a trader named ‘Dji’ from the far Targa north of the Gobi Desert. The men became fast friends. Within a short time Hector married his daughter, ‘Didji’, and that is how all of us came to be marked with the ‘Mongolian Eye’, the epi- canthic fold sometimes called an extra eyelid.

Duke Charles Frederick spent a great deal of time shuttling north and south between the amazing city being built on the Baltic, St. Petersburg, and Muscovy, the soon to be abandoned capital. Depending upon where court was being held, the Duke followed. In between he dashed off letters to the child he had met years before, letters hinting at romance, alliance and a royal household amidst the ‘civilized’ West. After three years of negotiations and twenty one years of warfare, a treaty ending the Great Northern War was signed. Charles Frederick was free to go home to Holstein-Gottorp and with him as his new bride, he took Peter the Great’s nineteen year old daughter, Anna Petrovna, Grand Duchess of Russia.

Hector (now elevated to the rank of Squire and promised enough land to breed his new strain of horses) and his Asiatic wife went with them.

But royalty, in the growing Age of Reason, seemed to have lost its shine. Duke Charles Frederick had his heir before his twenty-second birthday, but his Russian wife, thereafter known as Sainte Anne, died in childbirth. Charles Frederick himself lived but a few more years, dying at only twenty five. The son, Duke Charles (Petrovna) of Holstein-Gottorp, grew up admiring Frederick the Great of Prussia, his warrior skills and perverse lifestyle. So when Charles was coronated Tsar Peter III, about 1762, he withdrew Russia, which had been winning its war with Prussia, and returned all of the territory the dead Tsar had won from the Prussian Frederick. This so infuriated Russia’s aristocracy that Peter (Charles) was thrown into prison and poisoned. His reign as Tsar lasted only six months.

There is another link or two, such as the fact that one of the Prussian King Frederick’s most favored intimates was a Captain von Stuben, later commissioned a Major General of America’s Colonial Army by Benjamin Franklin. Von Stuben’s service, George Washington wrote after the Revolution, was so valuable that without him the United States of America would never have come into existence. But that is a pretty tenuous thread, more important to my mother’s forefathers, those part-Mohawk Van Slykes in up-state New York than the fledgling Estrup clan of southern Denmark.

For the first fourteen years of the future Tsar Peter III’s life, he lived in Hol- stein-Gottorp as Charles. En route to becoming a fierce old man, Hector raised his own family and a curious new line of horse flesh. He took more than a passing interest in the baby Duke, especially after the lad’s father died so young. As before he taught horsemanship, animal care and the like, but Charles was not a good student and when he was fourteen his aunt, Elizabeth Petrovna, took him back to St. Petersburg where he was named next in line to the Tsarist throne. Hector never saw him, or any of his kin again.

Hector’s own son was a bookish yet ambitious man, both political and religious. He became Bishop of Denmark with avowed contempt for the Jansenist creed, but curiously, one of his own sons was named for the heretic bishop. Old Hector’s horse breeding program came to little, but a son of his son was named after Hector, Frederick (which one has never been clear), Jansen, too, just in case, and over the decades the Estrups became scholars, doctors, nurses, lawyers, teachers, variously ranking religious personages, scientists and politicians, but none ever became professional soldiers.

On the Second of March, 1886, my father was born at Horsens, greatly favored by the esteem with which his father and uncles were held throughout Denmark. He was the first-born son of Hector Frederick Jansen Estrup III, one of the country’s leading architects, and was given his name with some reluctance. Seers and fortune tellers bemoaned the fact that the child’s mother had been unable to bring the baby forth on his father’s birthday, February 29th. What an auspicious moment that would have been for the family, for Denmark, perhaps even for the world! And so my father began his life under a cloud of disappointment. Someone had to be at fault. Perhaps it was the baby, rebellious even in the womb. It was hardly fair. He had no chance of achieving success because 1886 was not a leap year. True, the occult harpies admitted, but either February 28th or March 1st might have been just as good.

Baby Hector’s uncles were a protestant Bishop and Denmark’s Prime Minister, a famous naval architect before his long political career. Of all his relatives, my father as a youth admired this last one most. Young Hector was athletic, mastering the speed skate, rifle, kayak and foil by the time he finished gymnasium. There was even talk that he would captain Denmark’s fencing team in the 1904 Olympics. Mostly, though, he studied hard to become an architect like his father and famous uncle. But the day of his graduation from Engineering School came as a great disappointment, for a single professor had the power to speak awful, long lasting words and to twenty year old Hector he said, You’ll never be an architect. You have no artistic talent.

It never occurred to him that the professor might be wrong, or vindictive, or simply striking out against his own missed opportunities. Obedience was highly prized, and there was another notion gaining much favor among European authorities. Primarily an American discipline, the ‘science’ of eugenics was gaining influential converts throughout the Caucasian world. One of the most prominent ideas was that all of humanity’s ills, its ‘bad blood’ was most virulent and concentrated in the ‘first born’ son or daughter. This seemed particularly true of royal (or otherwise influential) families, and Hector’s father found proof of this truth in his son’s every failure. It was to be expected. He was a ‘first-born’, and after all, hadn’t he failed from the very beginning? Authority had spoken and cast his future in stone.

Numb, he did what all able bodied Danes did when they finished schooling. He reported for his compulsory year of military service. Perhaps shame, or rage propelled his attitude. He promptly fell into conflict with the warrant officer in charge of his training, yet another authority whose word was law. He did not mind the unchanging diet of black bread and thin wine. One meal each day was graced with salt crystals and every Sunday career soldiers and recruits alike were served a wedge of cheese. He didn’t mind the drilling and barracks life so much either. But, especially on the heels of his failure to become an architect, being ridden by scared old Warrant Hansen was too much. The man positively hated anyone who had grown up as privileged as my father, and there was another, seldom mentioned motivation for the underclass. Young men like my father would probably be commissioned or appointed and soon enough they would be ordering Hansen’s people to their deaths. This was the only chance any of them would have to dictate their future. They might not escape death in battle but they sometimes could choose who they would have to follow.

Hector did not aspire to lead men in battle. That was too political. Building projects were a different matter all together and challenging, but he really needed to be in the wide open, trackless spaces, places which rejected a civilizing hand. He endured silently.

Then Hansen found a new way to needle him. You’re tall, boy, well over six feet. Handsome, too. You’ll make a fine figure standing outside the king’s palace in eight hour shifts.

Members of the King’s Guard were carefully chosen and had to enlist for four years! To the youngster who would be my father it might as