I grew up during the US-Vietnam conflict. Every night on the CBS evening news with Walter Cronkite, there were detailed reports from the battlefields halfway across the world. These newscasts would cover troop movements, human interest stories about soldiers and locals, and updates on the volatile political climate. But the most impactful of these reports was the nightly body count. These numbers somehow lodged in my mind not as statistics, but as actual humans who had their lights extinguished.
Fast forward to my 18th year, and I am off to USMC boot camp. Now, I had auditioned for and been accepted to the Armed Forces School of Music, so I never even considered that the main mission of the Marines was centered around mayhem and destruction. Regardless of my future path in the military, I was put through the same training as all basic recruits. I learned military history, how to march in formation and all of my General Orders. I was given instruction in basic strategy, how to make a bed so you could bounce a quarter off it, and the value of vinegar as a cleaning solvent. Ironing uniforms and shining boots came along with eating “duck” at the chow hall – duck in, and duck out. But it was the firearms training that gave me the most pause.
Not right away, mind you – I grew up around firearms. The first weapon I ever pulled the trigger on was a 45 caliber M1911A1, a military side arm that my father had. We were at Mount Rainier, out in the backwoods. My father had set up some tin cans along some rocks, and gave me the basic instructions – line up the posts, close one eye, don’t hold your breath. He put the weapon in my hands, then put his own hands around mine – which is good, ‘cause a 45 has a heck of a kick to it.
I got to fire off 6 rounds, and I remember hitting two of the cans. It didn’t frighten me, it seemed natural – remember, I’d been around guns my whole life, so this was a treat to me. By the time I got to boot camp, cleaning a weapon, disassembling it, knowing proper etiquette, and especially knowing how to aim and hit something was all very helpful in completing this part of my training. But it wasn’t until years later that I began to realize the impact of this training on my sense of self.
It was after years of martial arts training, and well into Quantum’s infancy when I realized the stark connection between Walter Cronkite’s body count and my military training. My time in the Marines was a whirlwind that took forever. I remember thinking that the three years I spent on active duty took far longer than the four years of high school, and yet in a flash it was over. There are no words to describe the aftermath of such an experience, but suffice to say I had no idea that the impact it made on me was to be felt for decades to come.
During the Vietnam conflict, there was another aspect that was on TV all the time – and that was the constant protests. I remember thinking at the time, and indeed for years to come that it seemed to have no effect. After all, the war went on for years. It was only after decades of secrecy that the true cause of it came out – just a lot of small men with big egos afraid to be the one who “lost the war”. So, 58,000 Americans perished and got their names on a wall. And for what?
There was a report about one of those protesters, a man named A.J. Muste. He was a lifelong pacifist who protested the conflict every night by standing outside the White House with a candle. While this happened before I could remember, it came up later in my childhood. He was asked by a reporter if he seriously thought that his one-manned protest would change the Johnson administration’s policies. He answered “I don’t do this to change the country. I do it so the country won’t change me.”
We have no idea how much the events of our lives change us. It’s not just the events themselves, but how we shape our responses to them that makes the biggest impact. We fashion emotional, philosophical and systematic mental tools in response to these events – oftentimes in the moment with little reflection. Sometimes, we’re simply too young to have the wherewithal to recognize the gravity or scope of a situation. Other times we may be responding to trauma, and our minds go to a place of triage. If there are no conscious events that help us to unravel these mental tools, they can bring us to a place where we get stuck in a trap of our own making. Without the time and space to deconstruct, realize and re-source our experiences, we may find ourselves experiencing a kind of PTSD.
That brings me to the martial arts part of the discussion.
(Part 2 coming mid-December…)