The Weight of Silence
In 2007, I wrote a solo show called Blue Collar Diaries for the Minnesota Fringe Festival. It was a show about growing up in a colorful working class neighborhood where the sense of value was not so much in a bank account or in a beautiful home but in the crucible of their cheek-to-jowl community. I hoped to capture the music of their disparate lives in a series of first person monologues. I felt I was somehow a midwife to this collection of characters, giving shape to their complex needs and wants. So it seemed only reasonable that I should also include a monologue about my working class father. But it wasn’t written from his perspective. It was written from mine.
The monologue about my Dad started like this:
My father used to rust. Especially in the summer. In the heat of the machine shop, his pores would open wide and drink in the microfine shavings of metal that were in the air. Later on they would re-emerge in an orange stain that he would sweat out while sitting in his car or lying on his pillow.
My Dad wasn’t given to unspooling fascinating soliloquies about himself and his life. He didn’t wax poetic about our purpose and direction here on earth. He didn’t have that typical parental enthusiasm and vanity about his children. He suffered no grand illusions about his life. He didn’t seem to be fueled by desperate ambition or haunted by the “if only’s” that characterized the standard mid-life crisis. Any naked ambition he may have ever had seemed to be burned out of him at a very early age and in a very particularized manner. He was like the shell of a car that had been bombed out on the end of a damp street. So he was mostly silent. When he wasn’t giving orders to the eight of us, you could almost hear him ticking from across the room.
I didn’t understand it then, but my father was suffering from something we now know as Moral Injury.
I was recently reminded of Moral Injury after finishing Patrick Radden Keefe’s remarkable book Say Nothing. At a certain point he beautifully articulates Moral Injury as a notion distinct from trauma, relating to the way that ex-soldiers make sense of the socially transgressive things they’ve done during wartime. He goes on to note that they often believe they have been robbed of any ethical justification for their conduct.
I was first introduced to the idea of Moral Injury in 2015 while sitting in the Admissions Office at DePaul University when my daughter was doing an on-campus visit. I sat like an old piece of furniture in their nicely appointed office trying to keep a low profile. Eventually I noticed a campus magazine on the end table with a cover story titled, “Moral Injury and the Military Veteran”.
Little did I know that this seemingly innocuous magazine that I picked up to distract myself from feeling out of place, would be an answer to long held prayers and would ultimately give clarity to things that haunted me for most of my adult life. Moreover, it was the punctuation mark on a creative project that seemed to be almost supernaturally penned.
After presenting Blue Collar Diaries at Minnesota Fringe, I was commissioned to expand the show into a longer format to present at the History Theatre. They specifically requested that I focus on my father’s combat experience in the Korean War. I immediately felt nauseous. I knew so little about it. I had to follow a trail of bread crumbs to uncover things that made me incredibly uncomfortable and which led to a revelation about a long past memory that I never would have understood apart from this commission. Some of this is revealed in a monologue I wrote titled “Trophies”.
My brother Joe reminded me of an incident that took place in our late teens when I was visiting him as he was painting an attic bedroom in my parents’ home. Somewhere in there he opened up a crawl space door:
“Hey Dad. What’s the deal with all of these trophies ?”
“What? Where?”
“In the crawl space. Behind the chimney”.
“Oh.” (Big Pause) “Those are my shooting trophies. For marksmanship.”
“Really? How come I never knew about them?”
“Leave ‘em alone, wouldja?”
Now, to me those trophies might as well have been a letter sweater or an old pair of track cleats. I was nineteen. I had more important things to think about. So I barely noticed as my dad quietly slipped up the stairs and gathered up a bouquet of trophies before heading back down again, and I didn’t hear him minutes later when he reappeared in the room and began a quiet conversation with my brother Joe:
“I was an Expert Marksman. They asked me to be on the Army Rifle Team and even to be part of the Olympics. I was tired. I had had enough. One day when I was out with my spotter, he saw two CCF Commanders walking down a road. He gave me the coordinates. I fired off two shots, and saw the first mans’ head explode, and the second man had time to look at the first man before the bullet went into his heart and took him, too”.
Now, no one had ever really referred to my father as a Sniper. Least of all my father. They didn’t have snipers back then. Officially. If they pulled you out of your unit and gave you a scoped M-1 ,and a Colt 45 side arm, and a Spotter who moved with you to new and better hiding places, you were not a Sniper. You were a Forward Observer. A Forward Observer.
It’s interesting to note that a Sniper’s survival depends on their ability to create and maintain a good hiding place. Apparently, this is a truth that continues on long after you lay down your arms and go home and live your difficult life.
When I left that day, I had no idea about the true nature of their conversation together. But all these years later, I remember that as I passed through the backyard to get my bike to go home, there were trophies sticking up out of the flip top garbage can. I hadn’t realized then what my father had done .
Like any good Sniper, he had hidden himself; right out in the open.
In the end, he didn’t need cups on the mantle to remind him of what he was capable of. There were trophies enough for him to look upon in the middle of the night, tattooed to the back of his eyelids.
My Dad was in a war that “wasn’t a war.” He was in a position that “wasn’t a position”. He had flat feet and a heart murmur and had selected the Navy as his first choice of Military Service. But my Dad was an Expert Marksman before he ever went into the Army. And that made all the difference.
Shortly after World War II, the position of a Sniper was made illegal in Washington. The military, however, found this mandate completely untenable. The enemy had Snipers and they didn’t hesitate to put any commanding officers in their crosshairs at every opportunity. So almost immediately the military did a big “don’t ask-don’t tell” until seven years into the Viet Nam War, when they finally acknowledged that they had had Snipers all along.
The “don’t tell” part of this transaction seemed to be the bigger part of my father’s Moral Injury. Say Nothing. The weight of that silence was crushing.
Over time it’s become plain that so much of what I was unable to understand about my father was entombed in the harrowing conditions he experienced on the frozen hills of Korea. Experiences so overwhelming that the very memories of them should have been marked as sacred. They should have been treated with the same thoughtful reverence that one exhibits in a graveyard. But they were not. In fact, the level of casual dismissiveness surrounding the Korean War is perhaps the most heart wrenching casualty of all.
Unearthing these memories is as delicate and dangerous a process as unearthing the remains of a loved one. It is a work that demands tenderness and the utmost respect. One would have to have the hands of a priest and the constitution of a field surgeon to unwrap all that remains of that body: the body that once was their innocence, their mounting hopes, their inner ease.
Civilians should always address Moral Injury with the measure of respect it so clearly deserves. I believe my father, like so many Korean War vets, preferred to keep his battle experience like Biblical pearls secreted away in a safe place, lest they be trampled under the feet of those who were willfully ignorant or arrogantly dismissive. So, if we don’t know anything about the Korean War. . . and we never, ever do. . . maybe it’s because we didn’t merit the privilege of that rare and precious history.
I will include a final note before I end this endless blog post. It’s from the Program Notes of Blue Collar Diaries.
Eleanor Roosevelt wrote the following entry in her column titled “My Day” on June 25th, 1944, exactly six years before the war in Korea began.
“There is one great fear in the heart of any serviceman, and it is not that he will be killed or maimed but that when he is finally allowed to go home and piece together what he can of life, he will be made to feel he has been a sucker for the sacrifice he has made.”
You can’t ask a man like my father to make the kind of horrible sacrifices that he made and then pretend that they were anything less than what they really were. You can’t ask the people he loved to live in the wake of those sacrifices and try to navigate those dark waters and tell them that it was anything less than what it really was. Because I won’t let you.