Today is May the 12th, a double anniversary for me. First, it is Mother’s Day and thus a poignant reminder to me that my mother has been gone for almost 11 years now. When she was with us, I was not near the son I could have or should have been to her. The life experiences I have had have ironically brought home to me that she was frequently right about things that, at the time, I ridiculed and dismissed her opinions. (Certainly, she was right about my ex-wife, and she tried to warn me, but I was too stupid to listen to her at the time. So as I have said repeatedly over the last 25+ years, “Mom, you were right. I should have waited till I was 30 to get married and to someone a lot better“).
Or better yet, not get married to anyone at all – and thus take total ownership of what I wanted to do in life. But, that is a discussion for a different day.
It is also 40 years to the day that I walked across the stage in front of Bond Hall, received my diploma, and returned to my seat, now a bonafide member of the “The Long Gray Line.” While there are lots of words I wish to write about my mother, it is the second event – and my reflections on it – that I want to write about today.
May 10th, 11th, and 12th of 1979 were three glorious days weather-wise. The bright Charleston sun showed for all those three days, and it was an event that just seemed to fly by at the time. Exams had been over for three days, our knobs had been long recognized, and thus the barracks was a laid back place. While as the clock ticked down, we gave serious thoughts to the future and the world that awaited us when we walked outside the Lesesne gate for the final time in our college experience.
Thursday was the first of three parades, and it was also marked by spending a significant bit of time in Jenkins Hall filling out paperwork in anticipation of our commissioning as officers in the United States Navy. Since I had had a scholarship, I was to be commissioned as a regular Navy officer and not in the Naval Reserve, something I was grateful for at the time and still am today. ( In those days, they made a distinction between the regulars and the reserves, something that the Navy got away from in the ’90s, much to its detriment, IMHO). My parents were to arrive that day as was not so soon to be ex-wife. ( They came separately, which created a logistical problem for me, as I had to work picking the ex-wife up around the parade schedule and meeting my folks). I recall all three of the parades with some fondness, mostly since I was on the battalion staff and thus marched in front of the battalion with the other 6 of us. Dinner out with my folks and the ex. Followed by some hurried lovemaking with the ex before I had to be back at the barracks. ( One thing they did then, was to require us to spend those last two nights on campus, as I recall, which I think was a good thing in retrospect).
Friday morning saw two parades with the afternoon being the graduation parade where we, as Seniors, marched away from the front of the Corps and allowed the new leadership to take charge and pass in review in front of us. That night came yet another balancing act, eating with my folks then driving off for a huge party on the hangar deck of the USS Yorktown. I don’t remember a lot of the party save for the meeting and greeting with fellow classmates and their dates and/or fiancee’s – not because I had too much to drink – but it just did not register as strongly with me in memory as what came after.
With a couple of close friends from my company, we took a smuggled in bottle of Jack Daniels and climbed to the very top of this tower at about 1:30AM.
As we sipped our forbidden whiskey, we looked at the moon and the lights and pondered what the future was to bring. My one friend was going into the Marine Corps and was off to Basic School in about three weeks. Our other friend was headed to the Army, but as was the state of the Army at the time, he was not to enter until August for Field Artillery school. I had a date to be in Pensacola in mid-July. I was to be assigned to a submarine squadron in Charleston for about eight weeks so as to allow for my wedding to the ex. ( As it turned out, being with the sub squadron was a great learning experience as I got to ride two submarines and as the only person not going to nuke school – I had nothing to prove to anyone). When we stumbled off to bed, to get maybe four hours of sleep before marching to the Chapel for commissioning and then on to graduation, the only thing we knew for sure was that we did not know what the future held in store.
How bright the future seemed then. I knew with certainty I was going to do well in pilot training and would be off to the word of flying “jets” in no time at all. The reality, as it set in over the next few years, reached up and slapped me right in the face. I ended up in the NFO pipeline, got drafted into E-2’s, and within a year and a half of graduation, I was married and had a son at the ripe old age of 23. Six months after that, I was on my first cruise, a seven and a half month ordeal I still refer to as the “Voyage of the Damned.”
As the years moved on their were ups and downs, but on the whole I was fairly contented work wise, or at least I thought I was. On the home front, it was becoming rapidly apparent that I had made a hideous mistake and with each passing year I felt like walls were closing in on me. I should have recognized then that I needed to make a drastic change, but I didn’t. I stayed thinking I could somehow “make it work” and the happiness I craved, sexual and otherwise would somehow just magically come to us. Cruises and detachments became the only respite and I was on a lot of them at the time, allowing me to postpone a decision I should have stepped up and made.
So too was the nation I was serving changing and not in a way that was for the better. When we were commissioned, the cold war was the dominant factor of foreign and military policy, and we dutifully trained to be prepared to give the Soviet Union a beating it would remember for generations. Vietnam was still fresh in the nation’s memory. Hell, most of our department heads had made cruises in the Tonkin Gulf. The last American to walk on the moon had only occurred seven years before. We did our flight training under the shadow of the Iranian Hostage Crisis, and then joyfully participated in the build-up towards the 600- ship Navy – with its Maritime strategy and North Atlantic cruises. Of course, the Middle East was always in the background, and we flew and sweated through the tanker wars and the crossings of the “line of death.” I made ten trips through the Suez Canal in 12 years.
What in hindsight, we did not pay enough attention to was how American values were changing and how the foundations of cruelty and neglect were being laid under the guise of “Morning in America.” Some prescient souls saw trickle-down economics and the new “conservatism” as the destructive forces they were to become, but I was not one of them. Like many others, I cheered on Ronald Reagan and his expansion without paying for it. It was only much, much, later I realized that I never benefitted from those policies economically, only in terms of hours in my logbook and hours logged on liberty around the world.
Indeed, in 1979, it would not have been considered acceptable for a politician of either party to hijack and steal a supreme court nomination. And for all the dickering about Reagan’s tax cuts, no one of either party would have considered it acceptable to shut down the government and not pass a budget bill for the year. Yes, it is true there were crank Congressmen even then, such as B-1 Bob Dornan and others, but they were properly boxed in as the extremists they were. No one of any political stripe would have foreseen them becoming an actual part of American political leadership.
And on a more personal level, the years were changing all of us too. Life in its inexorable form was either tearing us down or built us up. For myself and many others, that first 20 years following graduation did both. People married, divorced, people left the service, and others stayed on for the long haul. My first 20 years out of the Citadel were marked with joys and defeats, and only by the grace of God was I able to break free from the domestic walls that were closing in on me, to experience real adventure and joy in my life in the second 20 years following graduation. Also, in that first 20 years, I had classmates who died, some from disease and others from aircraft or other mishaps. We advanced in rank, while others became successful in chosen civilian fields. Some made life-altering compromises while they did so. The realities of life in the world wore each of us down in its fashion.
Looking back, I think there are two clear cut dividing points in the 40 years since graduation. The first was Dec 31, 1991, when the Soviet Union ceased to exist. We all entered a new world that we had never thought would exist.
The second dividing line was March 19, 2003, when the most significant foreign policy disaster in 40 years was thrust upon us, with many of us by that point playing leadership roles in planning for and/or executing that incredibly misguided bit of American foreign policy. In the interim of both periods, momentous events occurred that changed both us personally and the nation we lived in, and some of us served as a whole. I wish I could say those changes were, in the aggregate, good ones but taken in total – they were not. The tremendous national decline accelerated, and the bright future we had anticipated was forcefully stolen from us. And while the robbery was occurring, most of us did not even realize it.
Not to mention the decline in the level of the nation’s economic progress or its political and civil discourse. What is indeed shocking to me at this juncture in my own story, is to see how many of my classmates now routinely accept as “ok” things that would have been utterly unacceptable in our youth.
And some things happened in the subsequent years that none of us would have anticipated, such as climate change. We also, by and large, never predicted the overall level of corporate thievery that has now become commonplace. Although, to be fair, while I do have classmates who have profited handsomely from it – most of us did not. ( I have one classmate who participated in, according to an SEC filing a few years ago, in an economic event that laid off 8000 people. Eight thousand people who had their lives torn apart, all for “shareholder value.” Even outside of the military, we made moral and ethical compromises).
So what then? Was the experience all a waste? Not at all. On balance, I have had a vibrant and exciting life, one filled with both the travel and adventure I craved. And if the nation I served ended up slipping on the world stage, I count myself fortunate to have the health and strength to continue to recognize the problems at hand and fight on against the failure to improve the nation I served, in my limited fashion.
Would I do it again, if I knew what I know now? To be truthful, the correct answer is, “I don’t know.” If I knew what I know now – there is a reasonable probability not. However, at the time, I only knew what I knew then. And what I knew then was that I wanted to go in the service, I wanted to go through a tough “system,” and I felt that by doing so it would make me a better man and an officer. In hindsight, some of those things turned out to be counterproductive to being a good officer, but I did not realize it at the time. It was indeed a shock it became apparent that some, but not most, of what we had been taught turned out to be outright lies designed to instill a certain level of conformity to a societal system that was already changing. Would I have gone into the Navy? I think so, but I can honestly state now that there might have been better ways to prepare for that service. My service occurred at the end of an era, an era that will never be repeated in American history. And because of the pace of the changes that overtook American society, my Citadel experience did not adequately prepare me to deal with them. It accomplished what it knew how to do – build a person who could fit into a larger unit and conform to it. They were valuable lessons to be sure, but they were not the only experience that developed me or even the most important one. Conformity, not underpinned by knowledgeable and sometimes contrarian thought, is dangerous. That’s a lesson I only learned in the tail end of my military career, and my time in Japan reinforced the lesson.
What follows next will be considered heresy by most of my classmates, but it needs to be said. The Citadel experience may have been a good one in the ’70s and ’80s but in the second decade of the 21st century? Not so much. American society has changed. American values have changed. And the world our nation lives in has changed. And it may be, as much as no one, myself included, wants to admit this, the “system” may be in its last days and – like other customs that no longer have much relevance – be put aside in pursuit of a better future. Our society has features that we scoffed at or reacted to in ways that were blind and wrong during our cadet days. We do ourselves and our nation a grave disservice if we do not at least explore the alternatives.
Looking back at these paragraphs, I realize that this post is much more negative than I started out thinking it was. Nonetheless, I think it’s appropriate for where we are on the nation’s journey as well as on my own personal one. The thing about being on the back side of the 40 years instead of on the front side of it, is that you end up being shaped by more than just one particular four year period. I will always treasure my experience on the banks of the Ashley. But it’s not the only thing that shaped me into who I am today. Nine years in Japan and spending 17 of the last 20 years overseas contributed just as much. I like who I am today, much more than the guy who walked across the stage some 40 years ago. It took the whole journey to get here, and the blocks all fit together. I’m grateful I did not fall into the traps that I could have fallen into. It’s easy to do, and in that regard, I have been incredibly lucky, and I know it. The forty years turned out much different than I thought it would. It was a good future in total, for me – although I could have done without some of the life detours along the way. For the nation, I gave my entire life to the service of? The same cannot be said. It, and the future it gave to all of us who walked across that stage, failed us miserably.
The question still remains, then:
“What was it all for? And who stole that better world and future from us?”
Stay tuned to this space. I will continue to explore that on this blog.