Author uses book to heal family's past

Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Jun 5, 2006 by Lee Benson Deseret Morning News

Arizona lawyer-turned-author Peter Baird hasn't lived in Utah since the fifth grade, but that didn't stop him from setting his novel, "Beyond Peleliu," in a fictionalized Utah setting.

That's because the book, released nationally this week, hearkens back to events in Baird's youth so seminal that even if he had to change the names to protect the guilty, he knew he needed to get them into print.

"What I write truly is fiction," he said, "but it's a composite of a whole bunch of things that are true."

The story line involves a soldier-surgeon who returns from serving on the Pacific island of Peleliu in World War II with a shot- up left hand that leaves the returning veteran with no choice but to accept a job as a physician in a rural Utah town.

He moves to Utah with a wary wife and grade-school age son, where he drinks too much, cheats on his wife, mentally abuses his son, and in general leads a wreck of a life.

Only at the end, when Alzheimer's gets a grip on the father, does the son, by now a successful lawyer, comprehend the dark secret that is in large part responsible for his father's tragic life.

It is no coincidence that Baird, a successful lawyer, spent his grade-school years in Salina, Utah, with a physician father who injured his hand as a soldier-surgeon on Peleliu, drank too much, chased the local women and alienated his son to the point that they were estranged until later in life when Capt. Thomas D. Baird began to develop Alzheimer's.

"The book is really about the generational impact of combat and war," said Baird, who published accounts of his complex relationship with his father in the New York Times magazine, Newsweek and the Chicago Tribune magazine before deciding to turn the subject matter into a fictional book.

"Beyond Peleliu" represents 14 years of work that Baird described as "serious psychotherapy for me. By that I mean that the images of my parents were blocked into my memory as seen through the eyes of a little boy. What writing this novel did for me was help me to see my parents through adult eyes."

Baird said his story and others like it "will help boomers and pre-boomers whose fathers fought in that war start to understand what happened and why they came back the way they did and how it impacted us and impacted our kids."

Utahns who read "Beyond Peleliu" should be amused by Baird's sketch of life in small-town, Mormon-themed Utah in the 1940s.

"I drew upon all the sensations and memories that I could extrapolate from the '40s," said Baird. "I went to Salina Elementary School from first grade through fifth grade. We were the only gentiles in town, and I remember there wasn't much of a division between church and state so after school once a week they would trundle us all out of school to the 2nd Ward where we would have Primary. I got as far in Primary as they would let me, which means I got a green bandalo and I got a temple on the bottom but never a foot with a wing on it because I was a gentile. I have somehow been able to trudge through life without a foot with a wing on it."

That part of his Utah experience, he left out of his novel.

Lee Benson's column runs Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com and faxes to 801-237-2527.