"You guys are, like, into war or something?" my friend's roommate asks.
"Well... I wouldn't say we're into it," one of us says.
In my friend's living room, we are watching a documentary about Vietnam. My friend and his roommate work together as defense attorneys in the Bronx, trying to keep troubled families together. They have been doing this for almost two years. My friend's roommate doesn't like to watch historical documentaries about countries fighting each other. He prefers "reality" shows where producers manufacture fights among members of wealthy families. Until a couple years ago, I preferred to barely watch anything at all.
About a year and a half ago, my friend invited me to come to his new place he shared with his girlfriend on a random winter Saturday. She was out of town and we hadn't done anything in a while, so he suggested we have a guys' day and start watching a 26 part documentary about the worst conflict in human history, the second world war. Yes, I know, it was a very depressing choice of how to spend one's time. But my friend was already dealing with defending people accused of all the most vile things one could imagine happening between family members, and I was still kind of attempting to understand some horrible things I'd witnessed in my life.
Before my friend became a defense attorney for the underprivileged... who am I kidding? He is for the destitute, the kicked about, the one's who weren't dealt much of a hand at all, even if they are the one's who may or may not be part of the difficult hand dealt their own offspring. Anyway, before that he worked in water filtration and was a vegan in Ithaca, where we had gone to college with many of our other friends. Back then, his girlfriend at the time had a passion for informing herself (and him) about all the injustice in the world, whether the victims were humans or not. He was already on that track in various ways, so they matched for some years, doing their best to either fight against all the injustice in the world, or at least participate in as little as possible. They broke up soon after they moved to NYC for his law school education. He soon got a new girlfriend, at law school, and she was all about racial justice, defending people accused of assault, battery, even murder, and trying to fix the world through the courts.
When I wonder about why I am in interested in learning about violent conflict, education and upbringing have more to do with that than any of my professional experiences. I was interested in war and had fantasies of being a soldier when I was very young. Some time around seven years old I read a bunch of encyclopedic volumes about the various wars in which Americans had fought, and they had lots of paintings or pictures. I was also obsessed with learning about presidents, many of whom, such as George Washington (Revolutionary War), Ulysses S. Grant (Civil War), Theodore Roosevelt (Spanish-American War) and Dwight David Eisenhower (World War II) were military heroes. I remember telling my mom that I was proud America had won every war it had ever been in. She corrected me and said that we didn't necessarily lose Vietnam, but we definitely didn't win either. And Korea was kind of a stalemate. But yes, we won many killing competitions, and got more land and power along the way.
What mattered most though, in my opinion, was that we'd helped stop Hitler from killing all the Jews (albeit a little late) and taking over the world, especially because my best friend the first ten years of my life (until I moved) was Jewish. We played most of our war fantasies together in our backyards, although they tended to be more the type where it was ancient times, he was a wizard and I was a warrior. The war fantasies were mostly fought by myself in our safe suburban backyard in Long Island. There were a few trees and a path to run through, so I had some foundations to pretend on. We also had a halfway functional sailboat to play on, so that helped with the naval scenes. I think it all had something to do with the fact both of my grandfathers had fought in the Pacific ("peaceful") Theater in World War II.
Michael ("Papa") of the North Country was already a man, perhaps in his early 30s, when he served loading bombs in the Philippines. After growing up on a farm, he was the first in his family to go to college, at Cornell University's New York State College of Agriculture & Life Sciences. In-state residents get more affordable tuition at the state parts of Cornell, so he was able to get by on much less food than I ate when I was privileged to go there (I've also been privileged simply to breathe and perceive... the definition of privilege depends on what you believe...). After college he spent some time as a traveling fertilizer salesman, riding around New York State before he served in the war, married my grandmother, and ran his own tree mill. I used his war photograph album from his experiences in the Philippines as my junior year "Show & Tell" project for my English class.
Grandpa Ted grew up on Long Island, just as his ancestors had since English people started settling in Connecticut and eastern Long Island in the late 17th century. His father grew up on a farm, because Long Island was mostly farms back then. Both his parents worked whatever jobs they could to get by, including being a chauffeur for wealthy people. Later his dad moved to North Carolina. But before he did, he drove his seventeen year old son, Ted, to Manhattan to lie about his age and enroll in the Marines. He was sent to battle in the first Replacement Division to Guadalcanal, which was the first vicious battle of the United States against the Axis in the South Pacific. He always downplays what happened, and my dad says he almost never talked about it. However, I do know his mom sent him tonic water so the quinine could treat his malaria, because he casually told me that like it was no big deal a few hours before I went to India/East Asia on my best attempt at emulating his courage and adventurous spirit. I already knew by then the only detail I'd ever learned about his combat experience, which was that one of his jobs was to go into caves after his group had used a flame thrower to torch any potential enemies during their jungle battles, where the enemy could be hiding anywhere. When you consider how dedicated and brave his opponents were (one soldier held out on an island until the 60's because he didn't know it was over), that must have been terrifying. I look back at playing
Goldeneye when I was 15 and realize I never really thought much about how Grandpa had actually had real bombs exploding near him and bullets whizzing by him, killing and maiming people he knew, perhaps cared about or even loved, as opposed to pixelated characters that kinda turned red and then disappeared as you somehow carried seven different guns with you. Every once in a while, maybe a few times a year, I think about Grandpa's war experiences, going into caves, hoping to find either nothing or the charred corpses of his unknown enemies, people he'd never met who would have killed him given the chance, anything but a living fighter... or maybe he wanted a living fighter to go against. He volunteered after all, and he never told me how he felt about it, other than that many of his fellow marines were psychopaths. I guess that's who you'd want with you as you faced some of the best soldiers in the history of the world, ready to sacrifice for their divine emperor who supposedly had a mandate from heaven.
The only time my grandmother saw him get teary-eyed was in his 80's, when someone asked him about the war. Once, after a campfire with friends, he surprised me by emerging from the bathroom at 1 am and started chatting me up. We went until 3 in the morning, and he pretty much told me anything he could think about from his life... except the war. He waved that one aside as if it were nothing. At one point, he was considering how his children had turned out. His main judgment was, "Most importantly, they are all still alive." Perhaps he felt this way simply because he was a parent, and more so because of his youthful exposure to fatalities in combat, but I think he mostly felt that way because he had served most of his life as a highway patrolman in the 50's, 60's and 70's.
As you can see, I was set on understanding not only where my country came from, but where my first male role models had come from. Thus, I figured we could at least watch the first few episodes of BBC's
The World at War. I'd read a military history of the conflict in 2014, so getting the video version with interviews from all sides (except China, because it was produced in the 70's) provided valuable perspective. We developed a pattern of spending every second or third Saturday afternoon watching 4 episodes or so (and once on a Thursday). Usually his girlfriend was away, but sometimes she joined us, because, after all, she was even more into diving into the darkness of the world than we were, seeing photos of victims her clients had stabbed. Even so, she didn't really have the stomach for the footage, and would find something else to do the few times she was around for the marathon. Anyway, by May we had completed the series. I think that's when I started drinking more. I drink much less now. I'm content with and without things I can take that temporarily alter my mind.
Whenever we brought it up to the other friends in our group at happy hour, they would mention they'd watched a few episodes of Ken Burns' Vietnam, but that it was very depressing. Understandably.
When my friend moved to Harlem last September after becoming single for the first time in a decade, we figured we could step into winter by watching Vietnam, which was about ten hours shorter than World War II despite being about a decade longer in real life. We watched it a lot less regularly, but we made it through a couple weeks ago. Prior to viewing, I'd already taken a whole course on Vietnam in college, seen dozens of movies (fiction, yes, but still soul stirring), read excerpts of Tim O'Brien's
The Things They Carried for one of my writing classes in college, and actually traveled around Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos for several months (including parts of the Ho Chi Minh Trail) as part of my journey. As with most places, there were plenty of sweet people. I've also had a very pleasant Vietnamese student the past four months, among others from the past, so the people are very real to me. Obviously none of that educational experience was actual war, so I can't really say anything on the subject other than it's hard to fathom, and whenever I've met anyone of my generation who has served in Iraq or Afghanistan, I give them respect and ask them to say anything they care to, if they want to, so I can listen, regardless of how I felt politically about any of those government decisions. Courage is courage.
Years after my Asian adventures, I was hitchhiking and camping through the southern US, because I wanted to get to know my country. Also, my grandfathers had had similar experiences, albeit in very different fashions. When I was hitchhiking to Zion in the snow in late November, I got a ride from some guy whose brother had been in the army and just assumed I had as well. When I asked why, he said it was because I was wearing a blue army issue winter cap. My dad had given one to me for my snow camping because he's a hunter, and he liked the quality. Ironically, I did have my standard army combat jacket I'd warn on most of my adventures (unconsciously imitating Grandpa?), but I wasn't wearing it when the guy mistook me for a veteran.
A couple years later, I traveled through the northern United States in summer and stayed with a group of young musicians in Montana. One of them was from Idaho and worked security at the airport. He was a really funny Iraq veteran. His roommate, my host, was quite a hippie traveler, but hadn't been to many developing countries. When it came up that I'd done a seven month journey, mostly in Asia, beginning with two months of solo traveling in India, the veteran was blown away and thought I was very brave. Since he had been in firefights in Iraq, I was taken aback by his respect. I asked him why, and he said he thought he'd panic in a situation like that. I said that after I got past the start it was fine, and that at least there weren't, ya know, any bullets or bombs flying toward me, with not just people, but warriors actively trying to kill me, although there had been the low potential for landmines near the Ho Chi Minh trail in Cambodia.
Despite all my childhood fantasies, I had never once considered signing up for any Central Asian or Middle Eastern wars, even though September 11th was the first day of my senior year of high school and the Iraq War began during spring break of my freshman year of college. I'd already read enough history, watched enough movies and seen enough news to know that I didn't want to kill anyone or risk my life for what the government was telling us at the time. But this guy came from a different experience, and joined the military a few years into the war. He said the fighting was sometimes scary, but mostly he had courage because the fellow soldiers in his unit were with him. Even so, he couldn't fathom traveling alone in such a strange country. We both agreed that the other was braver/crazier and left it at that. But just like most humans in conflicts, I think I'm right to be on the side I am. Why else would the world put me there? And of course he was braver. It was a freaking
war! I met a 19 year old woman who was traveling alone in India, where a billion humans live their whole lives anyway. And I'd rather people fear war more than traveling...
Most young boys have energy, imagination, and genetic material giving them not just human nature, but life's natural urge to survive, defend one's self from being destroyed and destroy life in service of continuing life. Yet evolution takes us new places in our experience of spirit, and physical combat subsides the more we find our common humanity, whether it's brotherhood or sisterhood synchronizing.
That's likely the reason why my friend's roommate got the impression we were "into war." As with most people, I would be much happier if there were never any war again, but I respect those who have done what, at times, has been necessary to do so that we may have more love, as strange as that seems.
Viewed another way, like many other things in my life, my interest in being a warrior may have spawned from my parents' musical tastes. They often played Dire Straits' record
Brothers in Arms around the house during my early childhood and early adolescence. I was surrounded by lyrics sympathizing with the plights of brave combatants while simultaneously bemoaning our inability to avoid such bloodshed. As with most of the music I listened to before the age of 11, I rediscovered those songs when I was studying government in college. Why study that? Because I wanted to learn how to prevent conflicts where humans unleash the most negative possibilities of existence upon each other.
As for the music, "Walk of Life" raised my spirits up when I entered college and was often depressed, so, of course, it was good for walks. "So Far Away" worked after talking to my ex on the telephone almost on a nightly basis for the first few weeks, because we were basically homesick. We had come from where we had, and like many from other places, we felt our home was special, and now we had to adjust to a new home with new people and a much larger way of living, and we reassured each other. The most powerful song on the record is the title track, "Brothers in Arms," which I would listen to when reflecting on much of the history and political science I was studying back then. We would invade Iraq the next semester.
When it comes to literature, although I've always loved reading, the first adult book I can remember truly loving reading was at age seventeen: Joseph Heller's classic irreverent, witty and dark depiction of World War II,
Catch-22. I remember reading it during halftime of a Christmas basketball tournament where I would eventually win the first award of my career, and that a freshman who was already a starter and would become the most celebrated athlete in my town's history asked me, "What are you reading for?" Notice the preposition inquiring about purpose. He said he would rather do anything than read. Luckily, his opinion wasn't very important to me, and I kept reading. Two years later, right after my first creative writing class at the university Kurt Vonnegut dropped out of to fight in World War II, I read
Slaughterhouse-Five. I've been devoted to writing ever since. My first year in the city, my father gave me Norman Mailer's
The Naked and the Dead, his first masterpiece, inspired by his experience fighting in the South Pacific.
Now, after all those adventures, I've been in New York for six years, working with people from around the world, including Germans, Japanese, Vietnamese, Koreans, Spanish, Mexicans, and teachers from England and the South. Every once in a while, I try to enjoy some of the best America has to offer.
I first wrote this piece for Memorial Day, and have shelved it until now. Anyway, when I wrote this, my lawyer friend and I hadn't seen each other in a couple weeks (and also because his roommate's family was visiting), we spent some time focusing on the nice things in life instead of watching other people fight. After waiting five years, we saw the "Dark Universe" exhibit at the planetarium at the Natural History Museum, in whose lobby were gigantic quotes from Teddy Roosevelt, who has been my favorite president ever since I got my first teddy bear at the gift shop in his old mansion in Oyster Bay, Long Island, not far from where I was raised. Then we walked in the park, saw the "Play it Loud!" rock exhibit and wandered around the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Next we paid tribute to John Lennon's Imagine memorial before going to Harlem for some food before ultimately taking the Staten Island Ferry past the Statue of Liberty and back to the glowing Financial District. Basically, things I'd done when I first came back to Manhattan five years ago and hadn't done since. Then we watched some comedy to enjoy existence a little more. There's a lot of darkness in the world, but you gotta keep exploring beauty and laughing.
I had a very peaceful Sunday with mixtures of solitude and walking among fellow New Yorker's. I took my third walk of the day an hour or so after it officially became Memorial Day, so I could look at the river and the gigantic flag that flies on the other side. My sister loves flags and knows every flag in the world. I'm not really that into flags, but America is more responsible for producing the story of my life than any other country. That, and it looks good flapping in the wind. Then I walked up to the Grant Memorial on Riverside, thanked him for leading the way against the Confederacy, and bowed to the inscription above his tomb. I read his biography about winning the most just war in American history, which was my companion project to watching Vietnam last winter. I don't go to pay respect to the violence, as noble as it can be to protect those who need protecting from lethal aggression. I go because he did what he had to do so millions of people could be free in our sweet land of evolving liberty.
I also pay tribute to my grandfathers, one of whom left this world the night I celebrated my 21st birthday. I had the honor of helping turn him on his side in bed the final night of his life. I'll never forget that look in his yes, even though he'd been through war and 94 years of what the planet can throw at someone. Maybe it was fear, maybe he just didn't like the idea of being helped so much.
My other grandfather left the world at age 85 as I was dancing on a train in Tokyo, Japan, having just had one of my first really successful lessons with elementary students. I happened to be wearing my army combat jacket.
On this Veterans Day, I say thank you not only to all the veterans, but I also say thank you to all ancestors for your bravery, your will power and your sacrifices in service of enhancing the quality of life for all who reside on the experiential pyramid built by our forebears. My joy is possible because you fought the battles of life with courage, and remembered to smile, learn and laugh along the way. The world will be even better when we understand that everyone is fighting a battle every day.
