Love and Fury (19 page)

At the Army/Navy store my father explained to me what each shoulder patch, arranged in cubbyholes like a postman's sorting rack, stood for. They were all beautiful to me, tough as carpet and woven into brilliant colored designs: the ones I could already recognize, such as the 101st Airborne's screaming eagle, or the 82nd Army Airborne AA on a blue circled red field. And the many others my father knew: the maroon and black of the Blackhawk Division; the 66th Infantry's black panther on a gold field; the 63rd, the Blood & Fire Division, a bloody sword against a background of flames.

It was there in a dark and narrow aisle in the back of the store that my father explained to me the beautiful practicality of the paratroopers' jump boots. He held up a pair, black and smooth as polished onyx, the long tongue a deep royal blue on the inside, toes shined “so you could see your face in them” and reinforced eyelets all the way up, no buckles or even the slightest protrusion on them anywhere, nothing on which the strings of your chute could catch. He caressed the boots, smelled them, held one to my cheek, “feel how smooth.”

They had none in my size, barely a man's size, only a pair of infantry boots, part leather, part canvas, with the double buckle around the ankle, and he bought me those although he seemed to disapprove of them somehow, the boots of the foot soldiers, not the sleek and smooth leather that made paratroopers stand out.

I knew from the division's yearbooks, which I pored over constantly, that trainees wore high-top Converse sneakers until they were given, with much ceremony, and after successful completion of their training, their very own jump boots, which each man kept polished and well oiled to keep the leather supple.

“You get a blister, it could slow you down. You could get killed because you didn't take care of your boots.”

I took this all in. The world was a dangerous place but one could take precautions. Lucky for me—and I felt it, felt grateful—I had my father, who shared what he had learned with me. He would keep me safe if I followed his directions.

When we could not play war with our canteens and utility belts and helmet liners and Frannie's dead grenade that had been turned into a cigarette lighter; when we were not shooting at each other or crawling across the ground on our stomachs, sliding our wooden bayonets into the ground at acute angles, inching our way forward through imagined mine fields, covered in branches and leaves for camouflage; when it was raining, our mothers yelling, You're not going out there you'll catch your death of cold!—we played war indoors.

First of all there was the card game, the simplest card game we knew: flip over one card at a time and the higher-valued card wins. If two cards of the same value were turned over, you had a war: one card down and the other would decide the battle. When the battle was decided, you turned over the first card to see what you'd won—you never knew, it might be a high-value card that would help in the next war, maybe not. In any case, the game was over when total victory had been achieved: one person had all the cards.

Another indoor war involved our “army guys.” Everybody had a bag of hard green rubber soldiers for these wars, and the bag included not only soldiers standing, sitting, or lying on their bellies shooting, but also tanks, trucks, artillery, and tiny machine guns. Indoors we perfected the sounds of the weapons: rifle fire, machine guns, explosions, as we knocked over the enemy's soldiers who, once deployed, could not retreat.

Everything about that postwar boyhood was colored by the war that had just ended. What our fathers would not tell us we imagined, and Hollywood was there to help. As soon as the sun came out we headed for the battlefield with its foxholes to dig, its trees to climb and snipe from, its boulders to take cover behind.

What we could not tell one another but what I believe we all felt was that we were playing with death, playing at dying. After all, we were told, daily, that another war was imminent, and that this time there was little chance of survival. The communists had their missiles trained on us and those mushroom clouds in the photos of Japan would soon be pillaring upward on our own horizon as they had already done again and again in our nightmares. Besides, killing was merely hitting a target, like an icy snowball clanging a street sign or the satisfying
thwack
of a spongeball in the strike zone. Killing wasn't the mystery; dying was the greater challenge to the imagination. You'd cry out, stagger, fall as dramatically as you could muster. Then you could lie in the grass and be more silent than you would ever otherwise have any excuse to be, high grasses arching over you, leafhoppers of neon green crisscrossing your vision, a sky of ozone blue above you as you lay there trying to ignore the itch of a bug on your neck, feeling the boredom setting in, hearing the shouts and calls and play-acting of your friends nearby.

We didn't care that everything was way too big. “Neat!” we said. We didn't care a bit if we flapped when we ran, our canteens and shovels and cartridge belts falling down from our hipless waists, the chin-strapped helmet liners wobbling on our heads, because these were not toys; these things were real!

We would grow into them. Our war was still in the future, the war that would turn some of us into cynics, that would rip apart families, that would send some abroad in search of safety, and that would chisel more than fifty thousand boyhood dreamers out of their lives and onto black basalt wedged like a blade in the heart of our native land.

I remember a Memorial Day weekend many years later. We were riding in the car, Kathi and me and the kids, possibly going on a visit to my father in Pennsylvania. Perhaps we had been listening to news on the radio because suddenly our son Robert, five years old, riding in the backseat with his baby sister, made a declaration: “War is bad!” His mother and I agreed, both of the generation that came of age in 1968. “But Poppop fought in a war,” Robert offered, “he fought in a parachuter war.”

It was a kind of query so we answered him by explaining, carefully, that sometimes a person has to decide between two things that both seem wrong and that some people fought in the war because they wanted to stop the killing that was already going on. He was quiet for a long time. He fell asleep. When he woke he rubbed his eyes, stretched, yawned, and said, “Tell me again.”

“Tell you what again?”

“Tell me about the time when Poppop came down out of the sky and stopped the war.”

Just a few years later, when Robert was in second grade, Operation Desert Wind became Operation Desert Storm and the brothers, fathers, and uncles of several kids in his school were called to active duty and sent to the Persian Gulf. The principal decided that the kids deserved some reassurance, and someone to answer their questions about what was going on, so she assembled a schoolwide program that featured the local recruitment officer from the Army Reserve.

But I was more concerned with a nine-year-old boy watching a man in a crisp uniform with colorful medals above his heart, standing straighter than he'd ever seen anyone stand before, with his hat under his arm, his brass buttons shining, wearing white gloves. Were I that boy I would be trying to narrow my eyes, jut out my jaw, stand up straight, and quickly become somebody else: the man up there on stage saying we live in the greatest nation on earth and that liberty must always have heroes to defend it from its enemies. And all those bloody et ceteras.

The visiting room is a large, stark room of beige ceramic brick, with blue seats in rows fixed to the floor. One of the guards points me to a seat, and after about ten minutes, Damion comes through the door and checks in at the desk where a guard sits on a raised platform. I see him scanning the crowded room so I raise my hand; he beams for a moment before returning to his blank prison visage, a mask to wear as he makes his way past other prisoners and their visitors, other prisoners he may need to be wary of, whom he must communicate with here—by looking or not looking at them, by nodding or not, by his carriage, his walk on his way to where I sit. Social tripwires I can't see are everywhere around him. Asked about this, he will shrug. “It is what it is.”

Prison is a box in which we put our nightmares, our worst fears; prisoners are the actors we've chosen to cast in the roles of malefactors. (And how do we audition them?) The whole place is the architectural expression of self-righteousness. Each of the guards is free, within wide parameters, to exercise his personal biases, doubtless believing he is operating as a force for order, safety, virtue, law. One of the guards seems to have appointed himself Damion's nemesis, undermining him at every opportunity. According to Veronica, it is because she and Damion are an interracial couple. “We will be sitting across from each other, holding hands, and that jerk will come walking down the row past couples making out and—almost fucking!—and warn us that any more intimate contact will end the visit.” This same guard has repeatedly written up Damion for offenses so minor (and in at least one case fictional) they are preposterous. But when it comes to jobs inside the prison—in the kitchen, laundry, etc.—jobs for which one gets “good time,” i.e., time off one's sentence, it is the number of infractions, not their severity or even veracity, that will disqualify you.

I get it that it's a shitty job. I get that their authority is being tested every day. I get that in some important ways they are as dehumanized by the situation as the inmates. Still, one can feel their contempt for anyone who is there who doesn't need to be. Visitors, yes. But especially volunteers, the army of naïve do-gooders who seem always to be convinced of a contagious virtue they are carrying. They only make things worse with their bullshit.

I was one of them years ago. In this very prison, among others. I volunteered with the Alternatives to Violence Program, or AVP, but only on two weekends. Both times I was the only male on the team of five. Mostly I stood off to the side and watched the women present the material. The program is designed so that after several weekends you become certified to teach the curriculum; after a few more, you're certified to lead a team.

I recall returning from the first weekend disturbed and uncomfortable, but it was hard for me to grasp what was bothering me, especially since it was my first time inside a prison, but I sensed it had something to do with the approach my AVP colleagues were taking. Still, who was I to criticize?

So I returned a couple of weekends later for the second session of the course. At one point, when the lead teacher turned to write on a newsprint pad mounted on an easel— “de-escalate”—one of the inmates caught my eye and nodded in her direction, making a lewd gesture with his hand and mouth. None of the women saw it. He looked at me, all but winked at me: we know the score, don't we? I did nothing. Which put me on his side, I suppose.

And yet, that moment, and that inmate's vulgar schoolboy gesture, snapped me out of any illusion that we were getting through to any of the men in the room. The immaturity and misogyny of that moment, not to mention the look I received from the inmate and the complicity of my inaction, combined in a way I recognized. For all of our differences, we men in that room by and large had shared the standard-issue American boyhood. In that curriculum, violence, not so much hidden as disguised—as athleticism, as patriotism, as ambition—is of the essence. And so I came to believe that the women were starting from the wrong set of assumptions. These prisoners were not men who had strayed from the path, not at all; they had learned their culture's lessons, our culture's lessons, all too well; they were the guys who got an A in the course, and had they had other opportunities, other arenas in which to deploy their gladiatorial training, they might have been CEOs or senators. They would get an A in this course, too, because after all, telling women what you have figured out they want to hear is also part of the hidden curriculum of boyhood.

I seldom hear anything that sounds like the truth about boyhood. I myself have been lying about boyhood ever since it ended. Not that I can point to a moment when it ended. I used to do that, too, tell about the moment I became a man, but that was another lie. As I work to strip away the lies, I see why it was I needed each of them. Or maybe as I outgrow the need for each lie, it becomes clear to me for what it is, becomes defined and articulate, and slips away, but not before I get a glimpse of all the other lies—and a few truths, too—it was connected to. Sometimes it feels as if I am unraveling, but I no longer think that's a bad thing. Maybe when I'm done unraveling there will be time enough remaining to make something new of myself, something more of my own design. If not, then at least I will have spent my time on a project of my own, quixotic though it may have been.

Remaking oneself. Isn't that what prison affords the opportunity to do? Wasn't that its original purpose? Is this not called a “correctional institution”? In reality, I doubt that society wants more Gramscis, Dostoyevskys, Malcolms.