Finding Life in the Land of Death
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If I were trying to develop and deliver a talk about the history of Unitarian Universalist opposition to war and war-making institutions, I could have hammered this out and gone right back to dipping peppermint Jo Jo’s in milk and watching Dr. Who on Netflix. I mean, we are UUs: we don’t blindly obey, we question. We don’t use our hands to hurt, we use our hands to create and heal. We don’t seek and destroy, we search and explore. We only march if we’re carrying tubas or protest signs, and our hair and habits of dress are very far out of regulation. Unitarian is to Military as Peace is to Conflict, as Compassion is to Aggression, as Eros is to Thanatos. But that wasn’t the task my minister gave me.
My task was to reflect on my experiences in the military through the lens of my UU principles—in effect, nothing less than the reconciliation of the two aspects of myself I have yet to reconcile! I mean we’re talking hermetically sealed, compartmentalized, and stored in different wings of my psyche. Needless to say, this task sent me on an oscillating cycle of research and reflection, trying to unravel a psychological box of tangled Christmas tree lights and then array them and try to figure out why and when they blink like they do. But to do this, you’re going to need some background information.
(Uh-oh, you’re thinking, this is going to take a while. Please don’t start with your birth, please don’t start with your birth…)
I was born at home in a little bungalow with Joni Mitchell playing in the background. I was raised by very warm, very progressive parents. I wanted for naught. We recycled in the eighties before it was cool, explored the Sierra mountains, drove around in VW vans, and ate just truly awful peanut butter and jelly sandwiches made from uncountable grain bread, adhesive peanut butter, and no-sugar-added fruit spread. I was surrounded by community and extended family; I was wrapped in love and the life-giving spirit. But from an early age, Thanatos—the impulse toward death—was clearly extant.
When I was a toddler, all I wanted to wear was a diaper and my grandfather’s World War II Army helmet. I was rough and tumble. I made weapons out of everything. I fashioned bows and arrows from bamboo, lashed pocket knives to broom sticks, honed butter knives into throwing knives. I deconstructed fishing poles into foils. I stuck needles through the red feathered bottle brush seed buds to make blow darts. You name it, I weaponized it. And once my grandfather bought me a BB gun, the dye was cast. I could hit a kumquat at 20 meters by the age of eight, and pronounced in my third grade class—much to the utter horror of my parents—my intent to become a sniper. So that’s the first piece of my why: Even while warmly enveloped in progressive values, love and life, Thanatos was present and a part of me. On to the second bit, a little less clear.
At UC Berkeley in 2000 I took a class called Controlling Processes, taught by Laura Nader (Ralph Nader’s sister), and by some humorous and wonderful twist of master schedule fate, the location of the class was at the Haas School of Business. Before class one day I heard three young business students discussing an assignment that gave them a model career progression within a fictitious company and asked them to make decisions about when it would be most efficient to get married and have two children. I understood the assignment was about intent and planning within a context of incentives, but the idea that given a condition of freedom, one would even consider exercising that calculus and cold constraint over some of the most beautiful, transcendent, and poetic of human experiences deeply repulsed me.
This was not the cause of my delinking from the normal progression of things, but a window into why my thinking prevented me from ever accepting the way things should be done. I had a really good plan for law school. My grades were great. But by the time I graduated from Berkeley, I wanted to go somewhere far away, and I had no use for sensible decision-making.
And so I went from Berkeley to Cairo, and Cairo to Dubai, wandering and exploring under the banner of work and education but really just rejoicing and anguishing in the tides of Eros and Thanatos, in the wash of composed inquiry and nihilistic frenzy. Studying with professors who ended up later having a hand in a revolution, but also wandering through the City of the Dead at night in Cairo, through the crumbled mosques and mausoleums, and then watching the sunrise at Al-Ahzar Park as the ripple of the Call to Prayer spread across the Islamic sector. Or in Dubai, moving through the unregulated spaces and souks of an amoral brand of globalization feeling disgusted, but also buying really nice smuggled whiskey from the great backwater pirate Emirate of Ajman for about forty dollars cheaper than retail.
And then suddenly, several years later, I was back in Oakland, but somehow a stranger in an angry household and an unhappy marriage, going to work at an investment bank every day at 5:00 am. Really, truly, miserable. If I leaned my head out of my office I could see a small sliver of sunlight reflected in the window of a corner office. The specter of Thanatos was not present in an exciting way, but was rather sort of advancing incrementally across my ceiling and truly threatening my life from within. That same cold logic of “shoulds” that had repulsed me that day outside of class had somehow asserted itself, and I got married because I felt I should and I went to work at the investment bank because I felt I should. But then the weight of “shoulds” reached a breaking point and I left. Or as we say in the Army, I popped smoke. I filed for divorce, applied to graduate school, was accepted and drove east to Washington University in Saint Louis—founded by William Greenleaf Eliot, the first Unitarian minister west of the Mississippi and also T.S. Eliot’s grandfather. And in my ramshackle studio on my blow-up mattress, after seeing lightning bugs for the first time and listening to my iPod, I experienced what Nietzsche called:
The intoxication of convalescence, full of reawakened faith in tomorrow…of a sudden sense of anticipation of a future, of impending adventures, of seas that were open again, of goals that were permitted again, believed again.
I was free…and so I joined the Army. Why? Because of Thanatos. Because I had a lot of school debt (which was a byproduct of having no use for sensible decision-making). Because I wanted to be a more able version of myself. Because it didn’t make sense in the traditional progress of things. Because it appealed to me as an ascetic conquering of a self that I recognized had become too wild. Because I needed to atone. Because I saw a huge body of experiences, rituals, symbols, rites, struggles, skills, and credentials that I wanted. Even though I passionately disagree with the use of military intervention as a tool of empire, with the dehumanization and othering of whole nations and cultures, with the immoral calculus of drones, with the prioritization of war over education. Even in light of all of it, I wanted the experience. I needed the experience.
And so I signed-up, swore-in and was packed on a bus to Fort Leonard Wood Missouri for fifteen weeks of combined basic and advanced training as a Combat Engineer. My head was shaved and my world was turned inside out. We were “smoked” constantly—which means being the beneficiary of what the Army calls corrective physical training. I’ll give you an example:
Our drill sergeant’s favorite was to call a formation in the middle of the night, lock us in a room, turn up the heater and make us do what is known as front-back-go’s (cycling between pushups, sit-ups, and running in place) in shorts, t-shirts and flip flops. Pretty soon it’s a hot, painful, slippery mess—and all the while they flip the lights on and off and yell through a bullhorn, “Pain is weakness leaving your body, privates!” This would go on for hours. I lost thirty pounds that summer. We woke up at four and went to sleep at midnight—because, as they liked to remind us, “The Army only requires we give you four hours of sleep per day and it does not require it be consecutive.” We had two minutes to eat and could not lift our eyes from the tray. There were no forks, because “spoons are fast.” When in formation, it was best advised to pick a spot 100 meters away and just fix yourself and eyes in carbonite lest the drill sergeant mark you as “fidgety.” We learned marksmanship, how to properly throw grenades, breeching and clearing techniques, land navigation and field craft, and because of the specialty, a lot of demolition techniques. We blew up countless cement pylons, we disabled mines, set and dismantled trip wires, and conducted everyone’s favorite, “field expedient explosive techniques.”
It was everything I had expected and I loved it. I loved the stress and pressure. I loved the aesthetics. I loved the cadences and the physical training. I loved the drill and ceremony. I loved navigating at night by map and compass. I liked sleeping outside in mud fox holes. I loved the rituals that marked our completion of the different phases. I loved the long runs to the water tower with my buddies as the sun came up. I loved the extended marches—fifteen miles of physical burden and introspection. More than anything, I loved the Zen of swinging the giant, vibrating mechanical buffer back and forth in rhythmic arcs down the red hall, creating shiny wax scallops after lights out. I was totally and utterly at peace.
But as transformative as it was for me, the process had a far more profound effect on those around me. Most of the recruits—called “warriors” until they finish basic training—were young African American and Caucasian boys from every urban and rural pocket of poverty all across America. Many of them came from utterly hopeless situations. There were ex-addicts, gang members, good ol’ boys, and sundry low-level criminals. There were also many that carried postures of abuse, anxiety, depression, and hopelessness. And throughout the course of the initial training, friendships formed across racial and class lines, behaviors were corrected, group identification set in, a new values-based vocabulary was methodically stitched into moral fabrics.
People were given a purpose. People were given a reason to feel good about themselves and the means to realistically hope for something better than what they had known. People were given their dignity back. And it was amazing to see the parents and spouses and other family members appraising the new version of the person they said goodbye to fifteen weeks prior.
The military is a huge and very complex beast. It’s really an entirely separate society and economy within the larger United States. And in a lot of ways I find it preferable to the broader social and economic order. It invests in people and gives them opportunities to earn and strive. It is organized around values, not profit margins.
It is the only chance for many at-risk students being pumped through the American school-to-prison pipeline to live a better life. It restores dignity, and instills value and values. It strengthens the middle class through the G.I. Bill and the VA home loans. By the time of Brown v. Board of Education almost all of the units in the Army were already integrated. And while 58% of all Americans supported the repeal of DADT, more than 70% of military personnel did. Gender limits on certain roles have been removed, creating more paths to prestigious General Officer positions.
I am not wearing olive-drab colored glasses; I have seen the damaging effects of the constant cycle of wars on human lives. And I was in downtown San Francisco on February 15, 2003 marching against the war in Iraq. It was wrong, it was immoral, there was no cause and there were no consequences for the criminals that beat the drums of war at the cost of American and Iraqi lives. I get it. But the soldiers aren’t the policies of a lunatic politician. The soldiers are us; the soldiers are our community and neighbors.
It has been five years since my enlistment. I have since been commissioned as an officer and am now a detachment commander for a logistics unit. It has been a rough year, and the main challenge we are facing is caring for soldiers who are struggling with depression and PTSD and facing really difficult home situations after multiple deployments. Drug use is showing up more and more. Homelessness. Suicide. I’ve had to go to the funerals of people that should still be here. The lack of employment opportunities just makes everything worse. But the unit is the one node of consistency in a lot of people’s lives. It’s where physical and mental health care and a host of other services are accessed; where educational counseling takes place, where food pantries are accessed, it’s where men and women reconnect with their social support network. It’s often the steadiest stream of income for young reserve soldiers, the best thing they have going, and the one thing that keeps them from sliding back into the maw.
It takes up all of my free time and I am nowhere near compensated for the hours I put in, but I feel proud and honored to be able to serve my people. The military sucks sometimes, but then it’s great; it takes from you but then it gives back. If I had to essentialize in one sentence what the military has done for me it is this: It turned down the static and noise. I was disburdened of so much. I have such a clear signal now. It has made me a better husband to my amazing wife. I am a better father. I am a better teacher. I am so much more content and appreciative of everything I have. The Thanatos is satisfied and channeled in a healthy way. And just as the Unitarian Universalist church has played a role in this outcome, so too has the military.
Somehow, in the Land of Death I have found my way back to new life.
- Finding Life in the Land of Death - June 1, 2013
