The War Came Home with Him: A Daughter's Memoir, by Catherine Madison
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The War Came Home with Him: A Daughter's Memoir, by Catherine Madison
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During his years as a POW in North Korea, “Doc” Boysen endured hardships he never intended to pass along, especially to his family. Men who refused to eat starved; his children would clean their plates. Men who were weak died; his children would develop character. They would also learn to fear their father, the hero. In a memoir at once harrowing and painfully poignant, Catherine Madison tells the stories of two survivors of one man’s war: a father who withstood a prison camp’s unspeakable inhumanity and a daughter who withstood the residual cruelty that came home with him.
Doc Boysen died fifty years after his ordeal, his POW experience concealed to the end in a hidden cache of documents. In The War Came Home with Him, Madison pieces together the horrible tale these papers told—of a young captain in the U.S. Army Medical Corps captured in July 1950, beaten and forced to march without shoes or coat on icy trails through mountains to camps where North Korean and Chinese captors held him for more than three years. As the truth about her father’s past unfolds, Madison returns to a childhood troubled by his secret torment to consider, in a new light, the telling moments in their complex relationship.
Beginning at her father’s deathbed, with all her questions still unspoken, and ending with their final conversation, Madison’s dual memoir offers a powerful, intimate perspective on the suppressed grief and thwarted love that forever alter a family when a wounded soldier brings his war home.
The War Came Home with Him: A Daughter's Memoir, by Catherine Madison- Amazon Sales Rank: #737392 in eBooks
- Published on: 2015-09-01
- Released on: 2015-08-25
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review "A mesmerizing page-turner. Catherine Madison has written a captivating, beautifully crafted tale of the horrors her father endured as a prisoner of war and her lifelong quest to unravel the mystery of his tortured soul." —Hugh Delehanty, coauthor of Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success "I loved this book, not only for the knowledge gained concerning a war I knew so little about but for Catherine Madison’s skill in relating both sides of this complex and difficult story. She is truly a reliable narrator, and her interweaving of her father’s ordeal as a prisoner of war with her own growing up in a household with a broken and damaged man is honest and generous and truly moving." —Judith Guest, author of Ordinary People
About the Author
Journalist Catherine Madison was editor-in-chief of Utne Reader, senior editor at Adweek and Creativity Magazine, founding editor of American Advertising, and editor-in-chief of Format Magazine. She has written articles for many publications, including the Chicago Tribune, Star Tribune, and Minnesota Monthly.
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Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. Moving, Positive and Totally Gripping Memoir By Emmabbooks (I received the Kindle version of this book, free of charge, from Netgalley in return for an honest independent review.)This is the story of Doc, a Korean War survivor; how he survived the War (and being a POW) and family life during his absence and on his return. It is also the story of his daughter Cathy, the author. Useful background information for readers unfamiliar with the Korean War is given as part of the narrative.The book starts in the 1950s and continues up to 2002. Chapters alternate between the father's story in Korea and the daughter's story growing up, mainly in the US, with her returned father's authoritarian parenting style. The changes between timelines are smooth and work well - there are no sudden break offs, or cliff hangers at the end of chapters. There are only 3 main characters, Cathy and her parents. Other family members, friends and POW survivors and non-survivors play a peripheral, albeit essential, role in the book.Themes that stood out for me included the chaos of war (from the soldier's perspective), the importance of friends, how a positive outlook at times of unimaginable suffering really does make a difference, and of course an insight into the Korean War. Also, of course, how to survive growing up with an overly strict, and often frightening, father.What really drew me to this book, was the author's writing style. She uses brevity to give the information pertinent to the action, but does not embellish it. There are moments of total awfulness in some of the Korean scenes, and moments of wit - such as when Cathy has to clear her plate of unwanted asparagus "Chewed until I couldn't chew anymore, then swallowed. ... When it wouldn't go down, its friends came back up." Few emotions are described as the writing is so clear that the reader knows how the person is feeling.I found this book totally gripping. I empathised with Cathy trying to cope with her parents, enjoyed the scenes of her growing up, felt sad at the struggles her father was obviously going through, and was shocked at many of the Korean scenes. However, despite all, this is a positive book - and quite possibly the best book I have read so far this year!
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. Compelling, Thought Provoking, Insightful. A reminder of war's collateral damage. By Alex Wilson The War Came Home With Him: A Daughter’s Memoir is a throat-clenching biography of a POW during the Korean War and an autobiography of his daughter, who poignantly tells her own story growing up with a man tragically changed forever after being a POW. Catherine Madison deftly gives a voice to her father, Doc—something he was never able to do for himself—in a way that honors him profoundly. The War Came Home With Him is painfully honest, not just in the details of life as a POW, but in the undeniable ramifications such immense trauma has on those few who manage to survive. Madison’s honesty enshrines Doc’s integrity, despite the obvious mistakes he make once home from war.“My story of Korea—let it rest there…I imagine I have changed but do not know how nor have any inclinations of such,” Doc wrote to his wife after being release from the POW camps, but before returning to the States. It didn’t take long for the changes to become obvious. Fits of hyper vigilance, anger, paranoia, dissociations and sadness became the routine for Doc, with his family on the receiving end. For example, Madison’s mother urged her to invite her friends over to celebrate their high school graduation, but Madison declined. In her words: “I could not risk my father blowing up in front of everybody.”It would have be exceedingly easy for Madison to portray her father as a villain, a man taking out his pain on his children, but the author digs deeper in search of a greater understand of the man she and her brothers called “Colonel Surgeon Father God.” What she uncovers, largely after his death, is a story so painful it is easier to understand the result: war comes home with its soldiers, sailors, and airmen.Madison never makes excuses for her father, she doesn’t justify the time he punched her, or the countless times he let her down. Instead, she juxtaposes her story of growing up with his story in Korea, then later stationed in Japan as a surgeon treating Vietnam casualties. At times, Madison’s story feels whiny compared with her father’s horrific time as a POW, but this only adds to the meta-perspective of a narrative so intertwined, it’s hard to distinguish between victim and abuser. As a memoir, Madison avoids making categorical statements about all service members, focusing on her personal experiences and those of her father.We often try to drill war down to numbers, military operations, and politics. Quantifiable things like causalities, time, and area determine the traditional scale of a war, but tallying only provides a narrow estimate of the ramifications of war. Policy changes are also popularly discussed, such as the New Deal, McCarthy era policies, and The Patriot Act. Biographies of generals and poignant stories of soldiers. line libraries, but there is a gap in our accounts of war, the effects on the family.As portrayed in The War Came Home With Him, the true casualties of war are immensely larger than reported when we consider the families forever changed. The War Came Home With Him is a reminder to the reader that “collateral damage” in war is costly, hurting families the most.I highly recommend The War Came Home with Him to anyone interested in reading about the experiences of POWs, the Korean War, war-grief, trauma, and the impact on war and families. Actually, I recommend this book to anyone interested in non-fiction. Madison’s writing is so compelling; I read the entire book in a couple of sittings, not wanting to put it down for even a minute.Thank you, Net Galley and University of Minnesota Press for providing me with an Advanced Reader Copy!
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. I found the book to be an urgent call for a better understanding of how trauma affects the human psyche By SRDixon This book does something rarely seen in accounts either of war or of PTSD: it shows the connection between the two not through clinical documentation but through story. Catherine Madison's account of growing up with a father who had endured three brutal years as a POW in Korea demonstrates how PTSD works. Madison's father felt he had survived because of deeply-held values and that may be true. His difficulty separating that experience from the very different requirements of parenting, however, created a home atmosphere in which his family had to live with the ripple effect of his unresolved anger and suffering.Madison alternates her father's story with her own, a technique that demonstrates that his experience was not something in the past, something that he had put behind him. His occasional use of the Korean words he had heard in the prison camps, for instance, are a particularly poignant reminder that his POW experience was constantly alive for him. The many times he explodes at his daughter for no reason she can imagine show the reader what she did not know at the time - she was shadow-boxing with the same enemies who were haunting him.While Madison does not herself draw any larger lessons from the stories she tells, I found the book to be an urgent call for a better understanding of how trauma affects the human psyche. Madison's father was able to build a successful post-war career but at great cost to those closest to him, those who never stopped trying to love him. It is yet another tragedy of war that he survived because of his character but was not able to adapt to a new life in which his survival techniques were no longer required.
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