Grave Contemplation

This weekend I was annoyed.

I listened to so many people – very educated people – thanking active duty servicemembers, the deployed, and our Veterans, all without mentioning the dead. And while it’s just peachy to honor everyone who serves, and to thank them for their continuing sacrifice, it always confounds me when it happens on Memorial Day without mention of the dead. Memorial Day is set aside to remember the dead. It’s like a nation afraid to say the word. Dead.

It bothers me that more people don’t observe that fact. It bothers me when people say “Happy Memorial Day.” It bothers me that it’s symptomatic of an American population that doesn’t understand the military. And so, I find myself annoyed on Memorial Day again.

I live in a rural area nowhere near a military base. Here the military is a distant ideal borne mostly by VFW and American Legion volunteers who stand near the coffee shop trying to pass out red tissue paper flowers. There are no active duty servicemembers walking about. The word “ma’am” is uttered mostly by polite older men to older women. There are no military uniforms. There are farmers in coveralls and a hardware store where you can still buy things “on account” and a high school team named after potatoes. It’s Americana and it’s quaint and it’s patriotic. Yet it’s getting harder and harder to find the military memory here, and in other American towns just like it across the country.

As the kids and I walked up the gravelly road into the cemetery for the Memorial Day ceremony, I noted the inscriptions on the moss-infected graves as we passed each one: WWI, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. I was thankful there were no fresh graves, no visible connections to Iraq or Afghanistan. But I also understood that it was the reason for the widening gap between our military and civilian populations. Because for most of our nation the dead are not friends and brothers as much as they are cold headstones or sanitized news stories or touching Facebook photos. Even in a cemetery full of flags on a misty Memorial Day, the military sacrifice was conceptual. Theoretical. Second-hand.

We came to a stop in front of a tipsy podium rigged with extension cords, standing alone amidst the headstones. Men in blue covers gathered behind it, their pristine white gloves matching their hair. The moist flags hung heavily and as people gathered, we all stood motionless and stale. The ceremony began and my children clung to me for warmth, or maybe more. Their father was in the Middle East last Memorial Day. This year he was only on a business trip. But the lump in our throats was still very fresh.

I looked around. At 41 years of age, I was the youngest adult by many years. It was pathetic and embarrassing. I felt angry.

The speaker told the familiar story of a young man who didn’t come home after throwing himself onto a grenade. I was thinking of the young man’s mother when my seven year-old looked up at me and tugged on my shirt. I could see tears welling up in his eyes as he whispered, “what does ‘absorb the blast’ mean?”

My eyes glazed over as I realized that once again I was the only thing standing between him and a truth he already suspected. I replied quietly, “It means that he laid his body down on a grenade.” He looked at me, blinked, and waited for the confirmation. I felt like a surgeon who had just excised a tumor, trying carefully not to use the word “cancer.” I decided to be clear, because it was important. I leaned down so I could look him in the eyes and I whispered the truth. “It killed him. He did it knowing he would die. And it saved other people from dying. Do you understand?” My son nodded and turned away, but was soon squeezing my leg even tighter than before.

After the ceremony he stood staring quietly at the grave of a World War I veteran for a very long time. As I watched him it struck me how a story, some hushed words of truth, and something he could touch and see impacted him. In that moment, that dead man was a real person. And in that moment, that dead man in the ground stood in the gap between my son and the mere concept of sacrifice.

Grave Contemplation

So on Memorial Day I will probably always be annoyed by the sales and the drunken barbeques and the well-wishers. But I will lessen the blow by always honoring the dead, and by teaching my children that it’s not just a theoretical, patriotic practice. It’s real. The dead are real. Like a mother answering an unwanted but inevitable question, the dead stand between us and a truth we already suspect - speaking plain and clear, even in their whispers.

Be Careful What You Wish For

This post was first published as a part of the 2011 Military Blog Swap at Chambanachik. I’m republishing it here for my regular readers who may not have had a chance to wander that direction yet. Also, it’s now December 20th. I can start shopping.

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I loathe the annual requirement that befalls me each December 20: Christmas Gifts. I’m not a complete Christmas Eve procrastinator, not quite, but pretty darn close. What I’ve come to accept is that it’s just not a talent I possess. Oh sure, if you’re six years old, you think trinkets from the dollar store are the shazizzle, or you really like cookies, I’m your girl. But otherwise, I pretty much suck at gift-picking. I vehemently decry the commercialism of the American Christmas ritual mostly because I hate to shop for that perfect gift so very much. It all just stresses me out.

Point of fact, I was driving along peacefully this week singing radio carols when the Santa on the sidewalk twirling the UPS Store sign gave me a procrastination heart-attack. Not because his shiny white nylon beard was still the same shape as the neoprene packaging from whence it came, and not because my eight year-old was in the back seat eyeing him suspiciously after having been perched on the ledge of disbelief last year. And not even because he had blood-shot eyes and music device ear buds that were apparently delivering R&B Holiday tunes that allowed him to sync his twirling sign to the rap-tastic beat.

No, it was merely the content of his sign that induced panic. He paused for a radio station identification notification, and was momentarily still enough for me to read it:

IT’S NOT TOO LATE! YOU CAN STILL SHIP IN TIME FOR CHRISTMAS AT THE UPS STORE!

The fact that I had not, up until that very moment, even contemplated that there might be an impending delivery deadline made me go into yuletide myocardial infarctions. I started thinking about gift lists, malls, grocery bills, navigating Toys ‘R’ Us at 7pm, and the blackmail that is Amazon’s free shipping racket. My head was spinning into oblivion. It was capped off with a stroke destined to put me into a holiday coma when my sweet daughter asked, “Mom, is that the real Santa?” Gah! I hoped Santa wasn’t watching as I pushed the pedal to the floor and replied, “Whoopsie! Didn’t see it. Sorry. Don’t know what yer talkin’ about.”

After dinner I calmed down and I sat down with a blank piece of paper, and I dutifully started scratching out names. I stared at the list with no idea what to write next to each family member. My Santa-doubting daughter sat down next to me and declared she would now be making her list for Santa. She looked at me sideways as she wrote, evaluating whether or not I was overly interested in her list. I stared at my own blank list instead and ignored her out of misery rather than parental strategy. In disgust, I finally tossed my pen down. I had eleven family members on my list and at the moment they were all getting cumin. Yes, the spice. I noticed that my daughter wasn’t faring much better. She had just one thing on her list, and it was numbered: “#1. iPod.”

“Um, are you stuck on what else to ask Santa for this year, honey?”

“Nope.”

“Well … it’s not a very long list. You just have one thing there.”

“Yep. Just an iPod. That’s all I want.”

“Oh baby, Santa’s not getting you an iPod. You’re only eight.”

“Well that’s what I thought at first. But then I decided if I only put one thing on the list, there wouldn’t be anything else to get me. So that’s all I want. Just an iPod.”

Now I was depressed and in awe, all at once. It was horrifying and exhilarating. In a trump move to beat all holiday trump moves, she was actually extorting Santa. She was extorting me! She was successfully diverting her Christmas wish list right around the extravaganza that is the Dollar Store on Christmas Eve. I had to come up with the right answer, and fast. It rolled off my tongue eerily:

“Honey, I know what you mean about wanting that one thing so badly that you can’t think of anything else. But if you do that, you’ll have to be willing to wait until the time is right. If you really want it, it will be worth it, but you might not get it when you want it. I don’t want you to be disappointed.”

And darn it, that’s where Christmas came crashing down on me. You know that moment where something comes out of your mouth and you realize that what you’ve been thinking, what you’ve been obsessed with for the past week, just came flying out of your own mouth in the form of some sage advice to someone else? In my case, it’s usually something I need to hear myself say. In my case, I usually don’t like it. In my case, it’s usually said to my children who are all too ready and available at a moment’s notice to parrot the sage advice right back at me. Well yeah, this was that moment.

You see, last year about this time my husband was half way around the world in desert camouflage, avoiding a discussion with me about what it was like to have recently been under rocket fire for the first time. At this time last year I was sitting on the toilet, the only quiet place in my house, crying when nobody was looking and telling myself it was because I was allergic to guinea pigs. At this time last year I was standing in the Christmas Eve candlelight service listening to my five year-old’s miniature voice singing carols, and wondering what it was like to pretend that sand was snow and cafeteria curry was a Christmas bird.

Well a few weeks ago my husband came home, and I have to say, it has been rough at times. We aren’t synced into each other’s routines, yet. Into each other’s spaces. We aren’t operating as a team. It feels … well it just feels foreign. Strange. Like we’ve been apart for a year or something. And it’s frustrating, people. It’s frustrating that homecoming isn’t the magic pill that you swallow that makes the deployment go away. It’s frustrating that all of your friends think it’s the end of the mobilization when really it’s just the start of the next phase of readjustment. It doesn’t feel as good as you want it to. It just doesn’t feel like anything you expect. I’ve been focused on that. I’ve been focused on trying to cram my husband back into a hole where he doesn’t really fit any more, a hole that we kinda filled-in while he was gone.

I looked down at my list and envisioned my own name there, with just one thing written next to it: normal again.

I heard my own voice ringing in the air: “Honey, I know what you mean about wanting that one thing so badly that you can’t think of anything else. But if you do that, you’ll have to be willing to wait until the time is right. If you really want it, it will be worth it, but you might not get it when you want it. I don’t want you to be disappointed.”

And I smiled.

My daughter hugged me, and she said there were probably other things that would make her happy this year, even though she really still wanted an iPod. And I told her that I probably had lots of things that would make me happy this year, too. I envisioned writing myself a list of all the other things in my life that made me happy, and the girl in my arms was near the very top. I hugged her tight.

She suddenly squirmed out of my arms and reached for her list. Satisfaction and delight twinkled in her blue eyes. She kissed me on the forehead and walked away, as if she was the parent, and I smiled as I looked down to see what she had written. And there it was, right after the iPod:

#2. A Parrot.

Where Soldiers Come From

Two weeks ago I received an email from someone requesting my opinion about a documentary that would be airing on PBS for Veterans Day. I had serious misgivings about my qualifications. I am not a movie critic.

I’m a military spouse, and a temporary one at that. I may have grown up a Navy brat and married an active duty Navy man, but I’ve been a reservist spouse most recently. For years I’ve been totally removed from the daily sacrifice that active duty families experience. I thought about the sacrifices associated with my freedom approximately four times a year: The Fourth of July, Veterans Day, Election Day, and Memorial Day.

Then, in September 2010, my husband was mobilized to the Middle East and was gone for a little over a year. After that, I thought about those sacrifices more. An awful lot more.

Still, I hardly felt qualified to give my opinion about a military documentary. I agreed to watch it, but not to write anything specific. My husband and I sat down after the kids went to bed and watched it together. Parts of it were hard to watch.

“Where Soldiers Come From” is the kind of story where you can’t quite figure out what’s going on. It’s uncomfortable. You want to hear a narrator explain the significance of the equipment, the location or the mission, but you aren’t given that luxury. Slowly I started to realize that the film kept me right where the boys in the film were: lost, muddling through, and making it up as they went along.

“The boys” are a group of young friends in rural Michigan who sign up for the Army National Guard to keep from getting bored, to earn some extra cash, to follow in family footsteps, and to hang out with their childhood friends. The announcement that they will be deployed to Afghanistan right before Christmas isn’t totally unexpected. Yet it’s clearly dumbfounding to both the soldiers and their families.

Unlike some other Middle East war documentaries I’ve seen, this one isn’t about a particular base or battle or machine or even a specific failure or success. It’s just about people. It’s about expectations, change, and choice. But mostly, it’s about what the sacrifice looks like after they all come home.

“Where Soldiers Come From” isn’t a glamorous patriotic tale about our best and brightest young adults intentionally signing up to serve their great country in an effort to defend the freedoms and liberties of their Nation. In fact, it’s more about a group of disillusioned, out of work, undereducated young men who aren’t particularly sacrificial when making the decision to serve. They seem to be in it for all the wrong reasons. But over the course of a deployment they encounter foreign people they’ve never conceived of, they face the very real possibility of death and the potentially worse fate of permanent injury, they feel the effects of prolonged isolation in a foreign land without the bulk of the very freedoms they’re fighting to protect, and they succumb to severe depression and sleeplessness when they internalize all these struggles. As you watch them grow, they become the strangest of heroes. They become young American patriots who strive to justify their sacrifices by leaning on the choices they made long before they understood what would be asked of them, while simultaneously feeling embittered by a sacrifice that they don’t ultimately understand. And neither do their proud friends and families back home.

It’s a profound dichotomy to watch as it develops. Nobody saves a life. Nobody sees the results of an accomplished mission and feels satisfied. Nobody comes home and feels like a hero. Nobody comes home and concludes that the sacrifice is over. The effects of war continue long after they come home.

After the film was over, I asked my husband some questions about his deployment and heard for the first time about a rocket strike that occurred the first night he arrived in Bagram, Afghanistan. I listened intently, almost holding my breath, pretending not to be shocked. I thought about the young inexperienced boys in the film, about my husband’s significant training and maturity advantages, and about how none of it mattered: those rocket strikes were obviously indiscriminate. But in coming to that realization, I was left knowing that the sacrifice of war isn’t found in the events that actually occur. Rather, it’s found in the willingness to step in harm’s way, whether you are informed and mature about the consequences or not. My husband didn’t come home with a purple heart. But he was willing to come home with one. Everyone I know who ever deployed was willing to come home with one. And for that act alone, they are my heroes. They are my heroes over and over again.

If you’d like to catch a glimpse inside the lives of several young men as they make that choice to become heroes for the first time, you can watch “Where Soldiers Come From” on Thursday, November 10, 2011 on PBS at 9pm. It will also be streaming live from November 11 – December 11 at www.pbs.org/pov/wheresoldierscomefrom

Last year on Veterans Day I was focused on the sacrifices borne by those who have lost their lives in foreign lands protecting our freedoms. That’s easy to understand because by definition a Veteran is someone who has served in an overseas conflict. But this year, I’ll be thinking of something completely different. Instead, I’ll be thankful to the survivors who continue to protect our freedoms, and the families and supporters who allow them to keep doing it - even though they already know first-hand what the sacrifice looks like.

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I know you’re all waiting patiently  for the final installment of our homecoming story. Parts One and Two seem to have been written so long ago. It’s been a difficult to find the time to write due to the typical transitions associated with a servicemember’s return home. However, I’m happy to report that Part Three will make its appearance here on Veterans Day, and that my regular writing schedule is set to resume in the following weeks.

Thanks for giving me the time I needed to regroup and welcome my husband home. I miss you, and I miss writing, and there’s nothing that could keep me away from you for very long. ~ Lori

Big Sarge

The Fourth of July in my little town is a homestyle celebration. It comes complete with neighborhood fireworks, a city-wide salmon feed, a cruise-in car show, a street dance near the tavern, and of course the obligatory Independence Day Parade. In years past the Official Parade Marshall has included the retired school crossing guard sporting his traditional red, white and blue mohawk, and a dog that once ran a relatively successful write-in campaign for mayor.  It’s the kind of parade where everyone waves at the volunteer firefighters because they know them mostly by name, cheers for the rodeo princess, and stands in awestruck reverence as the Mustang club rolls by, partly out of envy, and partly because they can recall when half the members were working on those same cars in the high school car shop twenty or thirty years ago. After all of the Farmall tractors roll by, it ends with several of the largest tow trucks you’ve ever seen in your life.

I know it’s not July any more. Stay with me here for a second.

Flash back to the Second of July, 2011. Husband is home for R&R and the country is filled with patriotism and hot dogs and I’m pretending it’s all because my husband is home. It’s the day appointed for us to begin placing our lawn chairs and blankets along the traditional parade route to secure a position close enough to the candy-throwing to ensure a cinnamon bear or two, but far enough away to avoid being pelted by the spray of the super-soakers wielded by the Little League All-Star float-riders. I’m driving along to peruse the possibilities, and I see something unusual.

It’s a man in ACU’s – including boots – running along the road (pretty fast I might add) with a huge United States flag.

Now I’ve run with a flag before, and it ain’t easy. I ran a relay once where the baton we used was a flag and let me tell you, the training I did helped me nada. The weight and resistance and torque and “look at me” factor that a flag adds is just, well, excruciating. But here was Big Sarge, running along happily in the heat of the day on (not kidding) Main Street. I knew there was something to it. Something important. I just didn’t know what.

I diverted from my mission, flipped a u-turn, and rolled my window down. I hesitated for a moment and almost drove away, wondering if he would think I was some love-starved cat-calling gal with a penchant for boys in uniform (which I am).  But I overcame my shyness and yelled out, “smile, sir!” And you know what? He did. He smiled. So I snapped a picture with my phone:

Big Sarge exceeding the speed limit

I posted it to Facebook moments later, with some comments about what a real runner looks like. It caught the attention of a few friends and we were all mesmerized by this man running with our American Flag in hand. A couple of days later as we sat in our lawn chairs along the parade route, we were astonished to see him opening the Ridgefield procession! We yelled out, “that’s the guy in the Facebook photo!” My heart really swelled to see someone honoring our heroes that way. I imagined who he was and why he was running. I thought about fallen soldiers in a desert far away and I looked over at my husband, standing behind me. I assumed that this man’s run was a gesture meant for the Fourth of July. And then I forgot about it.

Until yesterday that is, when I received a comment from a reader which led to a mini conversation. It went something like this:

DAVE: Dig the Blog Lori … my family and I are not separated by a deployment but I am stationed in Salt Lake City for the next three years while my wife and four kids still live at home.  I promised my daughter that the high school she starts at is where she will graduate … Anyway I hope the days go fast until your husband returns.  I have another 3 months until my next visit home.  Take care! SFC Dave Sivewright

ME: That’s rough Dave. My Dad stayed behind when we moved between my sophomore and junior year. I can relate! God speed to you! See you ’round.

DAVE: Thanks Lori!  It’s a kinda small world.  My dad was in the navy as well … you’ll probaly see me running with the US flag when I am home.

+ I gasped +

ME: Hey, I took a picture of you one day, Dave! I yelled, “smile sir!” And you did. You’re on my Facebook page. I love you, Sarge.

DAVE: I remember that lol. I would like to get a copy of that if possible.  Thanks Lori.

I laughed thinking of how many of my friends commented that we’d like to know what the real story is behind the guy who runs with the flag, and here I was with his name, rank, and email address. It was like striking gold. You can’t exactly stop a guy running down the street to ask him what he’s doing and why. And yet here he was, commenting on my blog, and becoming my newest friend on Facebook. I’ve always said this blog has drawn me closer to the military community than the DoD ever did. And now, I’m right again (she likes being right). My ramblings and emotional exposure have officially introduced me to someone right here in my own hometown that was otherwise completely inaccessible to me through the vagaries of PERSEC and the necessary inability of security measures to connect military members in any kind of official capacity. And it’s not the first time, either.

Interwebs, I love you. But sorry. Not as much as I love Big Sarge.

Memorial Day is Different This Year

This week a reporter emailed me to ask my thoughts as the spouse of a deployed servicemember on Memorial Day, and I couldn’t answer the question for a whole day. I felt ridiculous for being at a loss for words.

I sat down to write and I stared at my computer screen. I blinked. I had nothin. Yeah, me – the one who can wax eloquent about nearly anything. The one who can strike up a conversation with a perfect stranger about the intricacies of just about any weather condition, who can extemporaneously compare and contrast The Preschooler’s constant need for peanut butter with Sweet Pea’s inexplicable desire to carry around (but not look at) ten books everywhere she goes.

Perhaps it was hard because one of the first holidays that passed after Husband left for his one year mobilization to the Middle East was Veteran’s Day, and I’ll admit it was a hard one to swallow. When my newspaper arrived that Friday it was emblazoned on page after page with bright red, white, and blue sales flyers.  What in the hell was a Veteran’s day sale? Why had I never noticed how irritating this was before, when it was so clearly offensive to me, now? All I could think about was the blue star banner hanging in my hallway, and how I prayed every night that the star would never turn to gold. All I could do was skulk around my house, and clean insanely, and let my kids watch TV while I silently but violently ripped up the newspaper ads in defiance.

But this Memorial Day I didn’t feel that way. We’ve come so much farther in our pride, patriotism, and faith since we first built our own little white table six months ago. This Memorial Day, we understand that our perspective is not theirs. We understand that observing is the best honor. We understand that celebration isn’t for them – it’s for us.

So, we are celebrating. First we are attending a local ceremony at 9am put on by our American Legion. We’ve been talking about sacrifice at the dinner table, and I think the kids understand that word better this year than they ever have. They don’t understand the sacrifice Husband is making, but they understand their own. And that’s just enough understanding, for now.

But after the ceremony, we aren’t going to sulk. We aren’t going to hang around home with quiet and somber regret over the general public’s lack of understanding on the very holiday set aside to honor those who have given the ultimate sacrifice. Instead, we are going to celebrate and have some fun as a family, and take advantage of the festivities of the weekend.

Because it feels right to honor these men and women by doing what they could not, by doing what they would have most wanted to do if they were here: to spend more time with the people they loved.

Happy Memorial Day, America. Thankyou for your sacrifices.

This post can also be found at SpouseBUZZ.com, Military.com’s online military spouse community, where Volkman contributes as a featured author.

My New Year’s Revolution

resolution

As a lawyer for our local government, I write resolutions from time to time. These are not friendly little lists of hopes meant to invite a symbolic new year of permanent change in girth, perspective of egotistical self, or eradication of mental slack. No, in this context the word resolution is intended to mean “reducing a complicated theory to simple form.”

 Hah.

 Believe me readers, these kinds of resolutions that lawyers write are things you never ever want to be forced to read. Though most legal drafters have finally dispensed with the archaic “party of the first part” repertoire, there are still far too many terms foist upon non-legal readers which resemble disastrous syntactic amalgamations. Case in point, that was a thirty-three word sentence for the concept “lawyers are too wordy.” (But it was a lot prettier, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it?)

The point is, there remains in my toolbox this list of painfully contrived machinations like “wherefore” and “whereinas” and the dreaded “heretoforinafter” which I am forced to use from time to time. Because that last word is actually a shortened way of saying “for the rest of the document as used solely within this document it shall be called something shorter for convenience.” But who gets that? Why don’t we just say “from now on?”

The only logical answer is that these words were created and adopted at a time when some chubby guy in a white wig contemplated a show of force against the commoners, didn’t have the brawn, and used the only weapon at his disposal: a dippy fountain pen with a big fluffy feather. Point of fact, even in modern day lawyering these words have become self-serving vehicles of job security. Think about it: it takes one lawyer to write it, one lawyer to read it, two lawyers to fight over enforcing its terms, and one or more former lawyers turned judge or justice to decide the outcome of the fight.

 But it’s the other meaning – “an expression of determination” – which is conjured up each New Year’s Day as we make our list of annual goals. But why? Why do I want to express my determination?

This year, I really don’t want to follow that fat old white guy around any more. I want to fight back. I’m sick and tired of writing things down that I want to do. Any list I make will just look like a to-do list, and I have plenty of lists in my life already. These aren’t helpful … they serve only as reminders of my self-inflicted failures as each day goes on and they are not accomplished.

So screw expressions of this sort. I don’t want it, I tell you. It’s time to break with the tradition of heretoforinafterwards, fluffy pens, and fluffy words for the sake of job security. I want brawn. I want action. I want movement. I want … REVOLUTION! Because Revolution is rotation. Revolution is completion of a course. But most of all, Revolution is a sudden radical change. And that’s what I want. A sudden, radical change.

So that’s it. This year, I’m looking for change and movement. And this year, I’m ready for it. And you know, there’s just one word, one very powerful word, that adequately expresses this concept – and it fully and succinctly responds to all 550 of the words I’ve already written above:

revolution