A COLLEGE ROOMMATE, AND ABRAHAM AND ISAAC, AND VIETNAM

                                                               Mark

     Four of us vets rented a house a few blocks east of campus on Cache la Poudre. Mike Taylor, who had been raised partly in Europe, thought the place needed a little something, so he unfurled a three‑foot by twenty‑some‑foot banner he'd been saving for a special occasion, and we hung it across the front of the house. It had a big yellow Shell Oil emblem and the words "C'est SHELL que j'aime." Basically, "I love Shell." The neighbors were afraid it signified some kind of cult, but we didn't care. We liked the notoriety.

     So the place became known around campus as "the Shell house." Mark Streuli wasn't living there at the time because there weren't enough rooms. But he was one of us. Of the five of us, Mark and I had been in the military in Vietnam, and Jim and I had spent the summer of ’68 there as journalists.

     Mark had been in Army Special Forces in Viet Nam. He was a quiet, wiry, intense man who seemed to have a bemused attitude toward the political passions and idealisms of the rest of us. He is the only man I've ever heard refer to combat as a game, and he was serious. I, ever the idealist, had angry words with him at the time; later I came to believe he’d been more right than I had wanted to believe.

     When Jim and I had returned from our trip to Southeast Asia in the fall of 1968 and began telling our stories to our roommates, Mark was astonished to hear that I'd spent a week at Mangbuk. "I built that place!" exclaimed this man who prided himself on not getting visibly excited. He went on to qualify himself, saying that he had supervised the initial construction of the camp at Mangbuk during his time as a demolitions specialist and combat engineer with the Special Forces.    

     Once in a while when Mark was over and the five of us, plus whatever visitors had happened by during the evening, stayed up late partying or just talking half the night around the kitchen table, Mark would crash at the Shell house instead of walking back to his rented room half a mile away.

     One morning I got up when the rest of the house was still in bed to find Mark asleep on the floor in the hall outside the door to my room. Mark was one of those vets you didn't startle awake because you didn't know what he might have been dreaming, and he had the reflexes and training to react and do some real damage before he became fully awake.

     I stepped over him as carefully and quietly as I could. I watched his face so I could speak if he started awake. What I saw instead was a barely perceptible change in his breathing, then an ever‑so‑slight lifting of one eyelid. He was awakening the way we had learned to when we were in the boonies: you let your mind and then your senses come awake without giving any outward sign of it in case someone is trying to slip up and kill you. You let your mind remember where you are. You mentally locate your hands and feet; you remember whether you are wearing boots. You remember where your weapons are in relation to your hands. You listen for movement around you. You crack open an eyelid just enough to see out between the lashes but not enough to seem awake. You check out the area. If everything you see and hear is normal, then you can open your eyes.    

     I knew Mark was now awake, watching me between the lashes of one slightly opened eye.

     "Mornin', Mark," I said.     

     He grunted and went back to sleep.

                                 J. Glenn Gray and Kierkegaard and Abraham and Isaac

     In our last semester before graduation in the Spring of 1969, a small group of philosophy majors met at Professor Gray's house for a seminar in Modern European Philosophy. We met there because Gray had been recovering for some time from a serious heart attack. Some of us were going on to graduate study in philosophy. Jim Martin was in the class too, because although he was a political science major, he'd taken enough philosophy courses, and taken them seriously enough, that Gray welcomed him into the seminar. Jim later married Gray's daughter Sherry.

     J. Glenn Gray was an icon on campus, and indeed in the national community of students, teachers, and writers of philosophy. His best‑known book, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle, about his experiences as an intelligence officer in Europe in WWII, has such a word‑of‑mouth reputation that it keeps slipping back into print, though it was first published in 1959.

     We did readings in Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Karl Jaspers; and maybe one or two others. Gray had spent considerable time with Martin Heidegger, and had translated his Was Heisst Denken? as What Is Called Thinking?, which was on our reading list.

     He assigned me a paper on Kierkegaard's dialectic of faith, partly because Gray knew of my interest in Hegelian dialectics, which I'd studied with Professor Harvey Rabbin (who also attended this seminar along with Gray, and helped teach it, because of Gray’s weakened condition). Gray’s doctoral thesis, Hegel and the Greeks, continued to be reprinted in paperback for many years after its initial publication. Kierkegaard's essay which I was to write about was “Fear and Trembling”. It dealt with the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. I remember Professor Gray using the word "sublime" to describe Abraham's faith, which was so deep that he was willing to sacrifice his son, Isaac, for his God.

     Sublime? I was furious. I read Kierkegaard's essay. It in no way abated my fury. My assignment was to make a copy of my paper for each student in the seminar, and one each for Gray and Rabbin. I did so, with this title at the top of each mimeographed copy: "Kierkegaard's Dialectic of Faith: Or, How to Eat Shit and Like It."

     When we gathered for the class, I had the butterflies, as if I were about to start in my first high‑school football game, or, for that matter, about to enter a firefight. Professor Gray passed around the copies of my paper. It wasn't hard to see that this man, whom we all revered for his wisdom and fairness and his thoroughly warm and gentle nature, was angry. When each person in the circle of fewer than ten people had received a copy of my paper, he spoke, with a sternness that I, at least, had never before seen in him: "The first thing I want everyone to do is to take Dean's paper and cross out the title." His face was in profile to me as he said it (I was to his left); he seemed to be speaking to everyone but me. Then he turned his beloved, stern, disapproving, wounded old man's face to me and, barely meeting my eyes, mumbled words to the effect that, no matter what our opinions were, and no matter how strongly held, there was absolutely no excuse for using that kind of language in this class.

     Everyone except me took out a pen and bent over the paper, pressed on the floor or a book or a clipboard, and crossed out the title of my paper. The room seemed soaked in pain. Professor Gray said I could go ahead and present my paper.

     I was as angry as he was, and as committed to my state of mind as he was to his. Here I have to say that I feel now([1]) as I felt then, and I think now as I thought then. But what I remember after Professor Gray told people to cross out my title is jumbled. I know that I made my case, and that I so strongly felt myself to be right that I was willing to risk censure, even total ostracism, from these few people whose opinions of me, along with those of my roommates, meant more to me than those of anyone else in the world. Well. Except for the Marines I’d served with. But they were scattered about the world, and these people were here, in Dr. Gray’s living room.

     I’m sure I spoke in an overwrought, choke‑throated, stumbling, almost tearfully pleading sort of way. However well or ill I made my case then, these were its elements:

     I have seen, and been a party to, the killing of men, women, children. I have walked through people's homes with a bayonet fixed on the end of my automatic rifle, and have used it to guard those people while my comrades burned their homes. That is obscenity. The use of the word "shit" is not only trifling by comparison; it is at times the only accurate word to describe the reality before us. It is among the few words we have in the American language to signify the obscenity which I witnessed and perpetrated. I came here, to the study of philosophy and to this class, to attempt to understand, and then in some small way to rectify, what I have done, what other men have done before me, what still other men are doing now, as we speak, and will do in the future. I take this work, and my expression of it, most seriously. I cannot do this work without the uncompromising use of the clearest language I can call to mind. That is what I did here. I did it from a sense of mortal and moral urgency, and in good faith. I insist that my sincerity, and my accuracy, be recognized.

     Your sense of propriety is a significant part of a mental construct which is the very reason why we do, have done, and will do the murderous things that we do.

     You asked me to write about faith. I know something about faith. I was willing to die to keep the faith, and nearly did. Whether or not you agree with me, that gives me the right to speak and write as I do, and to demand that you listen. I was among the very most faithful. Our motto, as Marines, was Semper Fidelis, Always Faithful. We did not question this, as Abraham did not question his God. We had a more popular, more vulgar version: Ours is not to reason why; ours is but to do or die.

     You must, you absolutely must, hear me now, on this subject; or, even if I must stand alone against you, Professor Gray, and against the rest of you, my friends whom I love, I will judge your efforts at philosophy as being insincere, irrelevant, and fundamentally and humanly dishonest. What I am saying to you is that, as a faithful soldier, I was Isaac; and as a small unit leader in combat situations, I was also his father, Abraham. Younger men than I, boys really, trusted me when I ordered them into the fight, trusted that the reasons for my orders to them justified their sacrifice. That sacrifice was, or easily could have been, so great that for you to express anger or displeasure at my use of a word most of the world uses anyway, which all kids learn on childhood playgrounds, is for you to break the deeper faith, the one that springs from our common humanity.

     Goddamn you, listen: it's no accident that they call us "infantry." We are the manchildren who, now and forever back in time, provide the sinew of armies, provide the blood and decomposing tissue the death of which, in most wars in most times, serves no purpose more noble than the fertilization of the soil on which we die, which could have been accomplished by the spreading of manure, or of bone meal or some other by‑product of the slaughterhouses from which we get the steaks and chops we barbecue on patriotic three‑day weekends.

     We are too young to judge the rightness or wrongness, or the odds of success or failure, of the demands which send us, first to the recruiter, then to boot camp, then to armies, then to war, then to some bullshit little roadway or village or bridge or snowy hillock on the wrong side of the world, to slaughter, and be slaughtered by, human beings who are more like us than we are like the leaders who sent us into the fight.

     It is only by luck, by a mathematically serendipitous circumstance that had me standing in a certain randomly chosen place instead of a few inches to the right or left when the bullets came past my ear at Tho An, that I am alive, and here, to say this to you.

     What I survived to say to you is that faith is not enough. Faith, by its very nature, does not question. So the faithful soldier does not know whether the government he fights to save is really democratic, or even whether that government truly asked for his help. He doesn't know whether the soldiers he fights against represent a truly evil cause, or are just simple, faithful, unquestioning "INFANTry" like himself. He doesn't know whether inaccuracies in the information which is the basis of his marching orders result from faulty intelligence or from lies. Often it comes from both, as was the case in the Gulf of Tonkin, and more recently in the run-up to the current war in Iraq.

     Goddamn it, listen: Abraham's responsibility is not to his God, but to his son. For if he chooses his God over his son, then he will forever be sacrificing his own blood and that of his children for the sake of schemes hatched by men in long black robes, or odd‑shaped hats, or colored sashes. I bring this to you direct from the well in the village of Tho An, where the difference between what I was doing and what I had been told first appeared to me in such startling clarity.

     However well or clumsily that is expressed, what I said to J. Glenn Gray and Harvey Rabbin and my fellow students that Spring evening in 1969 was much clumsier. It was no less deeply felt.

     It didn't cut much ice. Gray was stern toward me the rest of the evening.

     Now, as I go back through his wonderfully thoughtful book, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle, I see again his reaching, with all sincerity and with carefully reasoned and stated reservations, for religion as the sole possibility for limiting the violence which we humans visit on one another in wars.

     I still can't agree. Religion was more effective in supporting the pointless carnage of Vietnam, and in the preparation of us faithful young warriors to fight there, than in stopping it. I still think that, of the human impulses, religion, far from being a way out of the violence, has the bloodiest hands of all.

     Gray and I stayed friends, but never really returned to the conversation which had been so painful for me, and I think for him as well. He wrote glowing letters for me, which helped get me admitted to the History of Consciousness Ph.D. program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, whence Harvey Rabbin had come. They certainly also contributed to my receiving a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, and a full scholarship my first year of graduate school.

     Each of us had been as sincere, and as certain, as the other. I think that the difference between us regarding faith showed, more starkly than anything else, the difference between what the soldiers of his war experienced and what the soldiers of my war experienced.

     I think that Professor Gray was, in his bones, too kind, too decent a man to truly understand the murderousness to which he sometimes put his mind and pen. I mean this only as concerns the role of faith in human affairs, when it comes to the institutional killing done by the world’s armies. I thought so then; I think so now. Thanks to the aggregate of Vietnam, my studies (including 3 years of philosophy courses from Dr. Gray), my reading, my experiences as a journalist in other wars, and to the limitations of my own character, I no longer have that problem.

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[1] “Now” in this case is March 24, 2009, as I write and edit  the final pages of this book.