IF JOHNNY COMES MARCHING HOME

                               

Last week, one of the young people in my life announced that he’s joined the United States Marine Corps and will be leaving for basic training in San Diego shortly before Christmas. The news hit me harder than anything in recent memory and the pervasiveness of a silent cyclone of emotions has colored my thinking in every other regards as well. Somehow, I sense I’m not alone in these regards. More precisely, I hope I’m not.

This young man has signed up for a full four year enlistment in the toughest branch of the American armed services. They’re generally first on the scene and they’ve traditionally taken the brunt of whatever action in which they’ve been called to engage. They have a justifiably proud and noble tradition. I’ve served alongside Marines; I’ve gotten drunk with them and I’ve gotten into bar brawls with them. I’m friends with several of them and the saying, "Once a Marine, always a Marine," is true. There are no EX-Marines.

There are a lot of them in Arlington, though, and in cemeteries in big cities and small towns from one end of this vast nation to the other. There are also thousands of them in VA Hospitals and private institutions and they span at least three generations. They are also continuing to kill themselves because they cannot live with the things they experienced in combat. I can relate. After 35 years, I still have bad dreams sometimes and Fourth of July is not my favorite holiday.

As things stand now, this young man will likely be rotated between Iraq and Afghanistan. If conditions continue to deteriorate in South America, a tour of duty down there is not out of the question either. His chances of making it home unscathed are slightly better than his chances of being killed. He’s a nice young man from a logging community. He hasn’t seen a lot of life yet but he loves his country and right now feels the call to duty. He figures that he can serve best with the best. There is absolutely no faulting either his motivesor his logic.

This young man isn’t just another number to me. He’s not some profile, some abstract concept, some rank and last name on a military table of organization. He’s a bright kid with a heart of gold and he’s got a lot to offer here at home. He loves horses and he loves logging and he’d like to try making a living using Morgans to haul out dead Douglas fir to sell to local mills or chop up into firewood and market to his neighbors. No, he hasn’t got the plan perfected, but he’s working on it. Hell, when it comes right down to it, he hasn’t lived long enough to have much perfected but his dreams. He’s shared some of those with me and they’re good, decent, wholesome, modest and do-able dreams. And they all go on hold the moment he boards his flight for San Diego in December.

He wanted to talk to me about what he’s facing and, as you can imagine, I dreaded that for the one question I was afraid he’d ask.

I told him that once he got to San Diego, forget everything in his life that came before and focus intensely on the moment. I told him to obey every order without question or without even thinking about it. I told him to ignore the grousing of his buddies or any of the things they might try to get away with as their way of coping with Marine discipline. I said to make friends with those who acted as he did. I told him to learn everything he could and to give 100%, whether he was polishing brass, peeling potatoes or learning how to survive after his last round was expended.

I told him as well to take the time between now and his December departure to spend with his girlfriend, his family, his friends and his community. These are the memories that make a difference. I grew up in a real dysfunctional family and I envied those of my buddies who had more of those kinds of memories than I did. I think in many cases, they came out of the experience better for them.

There were other things I could have told this young man but I’m not much for sharing war stories or even swapping them with other vets. When I was in college, I interviewed nearly a hundred of my generation’s veterans for a project the university had going. I got to be real good friends with one of them and was there when he killed himself because he just couldn’t forget what happened to all of his buddies but him on a hill in Vietnam.

I’m glad this young man didn’t ask me if I thought he was doing the right thing or more specifically, if I thought our country was doing the right thing. I don’t know anymore. The right thing for whom? Seems to me that the World Community doesn’t think it’s right for them or there’d be a lot more of them contributing militarily. Right for the Iraqis or Afghanis? Even a cursory examination of their history would suggest that they’ve been quarreling among themselves since time immemorial and no empire from the Egyptians on down has ever been able to change that. We’re not doing a very good job of it either. We’re spending a lot of money we don’t have and we’re losing a lot of young men and women who are a more vital resource than any we really have.

It also strikes me that the thing about making peace with guns is that you’ve got to maintain it with them too. Only in this case, the "guns" are our sons and daughters, nieces and nephews, husband and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends, mothers and fathers. I live with these folks. I see them by the hundreds daily because my home is three blocks from the University of Washington. I’m starting to see some of them after they’ve come back from places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Now I understand why it was so hard for people to look me in the eye when I got back.

It just seems to me we’ve got to come up with a better way. How many more of these kids do we sacrifice before we accept that there is more than one way to make peace in this world?

Tags: US Marines, Seattle, Washington, Rusty Miller, Merritt Scott (Rusty) Miller, patriotism, McCain, Barack Obama, peace, World Community, Arlington, Semper Fidelis, veterans, Veterans Administration, Iraq, Afghanistan, University of Washington, Vietnam, war, peace

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IN PRAISE OF BOTH PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES

September 12, 2008

I’m watching The View this morning and the guests are John and Cindy McCain. I like the McCains, even though I’m not of their political persuasion, which is why I’m not voting for John. But if he ever moves into the neighborhood, I’d like to meet him. He and I have a couple three things in common, including Vietnam service and a passionate love of this country. Even when we disagree, I know he has the best interests of the nation at heart. He’s also not afraid to compromise for the popular good. These are traits I value in a person and I think they’re necessary to be a good national executive.

But it’s Friday, and I don’t do politics on Friday. I’m just enjoying a man whose war record I certainly admire. To me, he’s a model of courage and character. He also recalls a quality not often mentioned in a political context anymore. John’s got integrity. If I needed help patching my roof before the next day’s rain, John wouldn’t wait to be asked. He’d be there with a pickup truck full of roofing material and friends. And towing the hot tar for the shingles. It would be a natural reaction for him. And when we invited him to have supper with us, we’d let him say the grace, even though we’re Catholics. He believes in the same god as anyone else and he’s said that a lot. I wonder if we were the only ones listening.

But, as I said, I’m committed to a more liberal agenda. However, I feel pretty much the same about Barack Obama as I do John McCain. They both have the qualities and character traits I value in a leader. They also have intelligent, dramatic, independently-thinking significant others who are not afraid to disagree with their husbands publicly. To me, that’s a kind of domestic checks and balances which translates into a fairer hearing for the opposing view. I like it that John and Barack came together yesterday. They lent the occasion the dignity, the austerity and the respect it deserved.

It rankles me that "my party" (whose symbol is a jackass, by the way) makes an issue of McCain’s age and appearance. It reminds me of the comments I heard about Mick Jagger in my native country of Canada after one of their concerts there. It was as though the audience expected them to stay young forever and resented them when they did not. Hey, I can handle someone feeling afraid of growing older, even though I cannot personally relate to it. What I CANNOT handle isafflicting the rest of us with an attitude we don’t own. Translated:

Some of us grow older.

Some of us grow better.

Some of us just grow.

Get over it, folks. Nobody except Peter Pan and the folks in Camelot live forever. The Stones still put on one heckuva concert and John McCain has the inner strength and dedication which is to his generation what imagination and daring are to the young. Like Barack Obama, he’s also got a loving family so for him, it’s never going to be THAT lonely at the top. And as John said on The View, with regards to Hillary Clinton, with whom he is friends and has a good professional relationship, "We’ve worked together before and we certainly will again." I’m absolutely certain he feels that way about the other senator who is also a colleague.

I also like it that both of them occasionally put their feet in their mouths. And that the people around them do too. I get nervous around superior people or those who promote themselves as more saintly than thou. Me. WhomEVER. I’ve seen perfectionists polish the joy right out of life. Those for and with whom I’ve worked tend to be so anally retentive you’d swear they were housebroken at the point of a 12 gauge over and under.

Noooooooope. Give me someone who occasionally trips on his lip. I could use a lighter moment or two and Lord knows how much the lesser gods enjoy mortal slapstick. I think that’s why I loved Dan Quayle so much. He was the best act on the Potomac for awhile.

Neither one of these men is going to achieve all he wants in office and that’s due in a large part to something else both seem to remember. They are there to serve the national constituency. They work for us, not the other way around. And I think we, the voters, have learned what fatal folly it is to surrender so much control. We’re going to be paying a lot more attention from here on out and we are going to be a lot quicker to demand a public accounting.

Under two generations of Bushes and under Dick Cheney, we came very close to establishing a dubiously benevolent monarchy in Washington, DC. While I can appreciate the nobility in both Barack Obama and John McCain, I am also an American and I will bow to no one except the gods of my choosing.

I’ve yet to kneel before another human being. I expect I’m not alone in those regards.

 

Tags: John McCain, Barack Obama, Vietnam War, political humor, America, Canada, Mick Jagger, The Rolling Stones, perfectionists, Dick Cheney, Bush, Merritt Scott (Rusty) Miller, Rusty Miller, Seattle, Hillary Clinton, The View, Washington State Democratic Party, Washington State Republican Party, Christine Gregoire, Patty Murray, Maria Cantwell, Ernest Callenbach, Herb Michelson, Peter Pan, Camelot, Democrat, Republican, Dan Quayle, William Lars Bladine, Jeb Bladine, Peter Wong, KUOW, University of Washington, Seattle Times, Seattle Weekly, Cream, Garrison Keilor, The Prairie Home Companion

THE SKAGIT VALLEY MASSACRE

                                     

The Skagit Valley, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skagit_County,_ some sixty miles north of Seattle, stretches like a northern Plain of Jars from the Cascade Mountains west to Anacortes and the San Juan Islands of the upper reaches of the Puget Sound. Encompassing some 1900 square miles and a population of 117,000, it is a quietly flourishing land but not a densely settled one. In many ways, it is a place time has left largely alone.

When I lived there, in the small fishing village of LaConner, my neighbors included novelist Tom Robbins, Washington State poet laureate Robert Sund and abstract artist Guy Anderson. Stormy in winter, radiant in spring, tulip fields lovely in summer and hauntingly lonely in autumn, it was, as well, a magical and pervasively mystical place, thanks in large part to the strong presence of the Swinomish (Indian) Confederation and their reservation on Fidalgo Island, across the Swinomish Channel from LaConner.

This week, thanks to a Tuesday rampage by a lone white male with a history of mental problems, six people up there, including a woman deputy sheriff, are dead and two are seriously wounded. At this writing, the media are still gathering information but enough has come out to easily visualize the bloody and random trail of carnage he left before turning himself into the Sheriff’s Department in Mount Vernon, the Skagit County seat. http://www.kirotv.com/news/index.html

In Seattle, it is a story which has overshadowed the war in Iraq, the aftermath of Gustaff and the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. For all the diversity of our neighborhoods and what would only pass as a metropolitan lifestyle this far removed from places like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and New York, we remain perhaps embarrassingly rural in orientation and predilection.

As much as we abhor this kind of violence within our own county and city limits, we accept it as a tradeoff. And as enchanting as places like the Skagit are, it’s tough to make a living if you’re not either from there or hired into the area. But we weekend and vacation there. Some of us retire there. A few of us, self-employed, do make lives for ourselves there.

For the rest of us, it’s the hope and belief that people can live among one another without fearing such excesses of human behavior. As naïve as that might seem east of the Mississippi, it’s worked in the Pacific Northwest pretty successfully, even in the boisterous days when timber was in trouble in Oregon and marijuana replaced it for awhile as the state’s top cash crop.

Long after the vigils, the tributes, the funerals and the memorials, we will wonder if this could have been prevented. We will pressure the courts to compel the man who did these things to explain why. Small town city councils will meet to discuss law enforcement issues and there will be an upsurge in the purchase of firearms and home protection systems. And neighbors will be watching other neighbors for indications of silent stress about ready to go ballistic.

In time, like after fire, flood, earthquake, volcanic eruption or sea-borne storm, the wounded will heal and the bereaved at peace. This will the subject of family Bibles and local history. Despite our innocence, we realize that of all the natural disasters which can and have afflicted us, what we are capable of doing to one another in rage, fear or madness is perhaps the most unpredictable and profoundly resonating.

We need not seek to know for whom John Donne’s bell tolls. Certainly it tolls for us.