The Letter

A letter to Will — February 23, 2020

I wrote this six years ago, when Will was not yet two. He's not yet seen this one, but he will this Sunday, Father's Day. I've been very deliberate about what he reads and when, because although these letters are his, I'm very much finding myself in the writing of them, and hopefully the understanding of them. It's so ironic to me that we teach best what we most need to learn. This letter, like an old saddle, might give my son just a little comfort, in what I hope is a long and beautiful ride. A ride that's both worth taking, and remembering.

23 February 2020

Dear Will,

This is a particularly difficult letter for me to write to you. I’m really not sure how to do this. To share a memory so painful, that the telling, the words, seem insufficient.

I write this for you, but also for myself, in hopes to glean what I might, from lessons I could not and would not repeat.

Thirty five years ago on this day I was training to become a reconnaissance specialist in the U.S. Army. A 19-Delta, a Cavalry Scout.

I was 18 and fairly fresh out of high school and had just spent a few months living with my father. He was recovering from thoracic aortic repair surgery, and it was my task to help him while he recovered. It was a very difficult and invasive operation. This surgery had required splitting him open from sternum to backbone, between the ribs, and it was exceptionally brutal to his body. He had gone into it at the age of fifty, with two aortic aneurysms, one 5 cm, the other 7 cm, and as it turned out, they were much worse than anticipated, so they made a decision mid surgery to repair only the larger one because of the severity: the one just above his heart. The other, near his stomach, would have to wait even though it was a ticking bomb. He almost bled out on the surgical table but he somehow survived and, after some months, he slowly recovered.

He really was a tough old cowboy and I can’t help but think he knew I needed this time with him. It was in fact the first time we lived together for any period more than a few days, since the divorce. It was also the first time I had ever seen him at all vulnerable and it somehow changed the dynamic of our relationship. He was notorious for not asking or accepting help but he truly needed me and that was a new experience for us both.

After a few tough months of recovery, he was back on his feet and I was off to do what I had signed up for. I went ahead with my enlistment and went to Fort Knox, Kentucky, to begin O.S.U.T. (One Station Unit Training), a combined basic and advanced individual training program unique to the Scouts. It was an incredibly challenging endeavor — one of the toughest tests in my life, and the program spit out many strong young men that were unable to adapt. It was hard for me I think, not especially because of the physical training or the psychological manipulation necessary to mold a teenager into an efficient and obedient soldier — it was hardest for me because I couldn’t be sure that I had done the right thing or left at the right time. I was still very young and impatient for life and I wasn’t sure of anything. I wasn’t sure if my father understood why I had refused his offer to pay for my college and stay close by but instead earn college fund money by enlisting in the one of the most dangerous combat jobs available. I wasn’t sure if I understood myself. I was for sure, very headstrong, and had joined without asking permission or telling anyone until it was already done. I had decided to make my own way, and I knew he was very concerned that his son might be lost in the looking for himself. It was in retrospect, not an unwarranted fear.

He had spent his own youth in a military academy and I suspected he would eventually be proud but with so much going on, I wasn’t at all sure at that time that he approved. He seemed for the first time in my life, a little frightened for what I’d chosen. For what I might face.

But I hoped he was proud. He made me think that, in his own quiet way.

It was at the airport gate when we said goodbye. He was a man of very few words that usually kept his feelings to himself, but here, as I boarded he broke a little. Nothing obvious. Just a shift, a long hesitation and then he called to me before I disappeared forever inside that tunnel. He simply said, “I love you.” And then I was gone.

That’s how I left him. I boarded the plane and from there, I soon went into a sort of communication blackout. That’s the way it was in training. We were picked up by a bus, taken to the barracks. Stripped of our civilian identities and sequestered for the duration. You could write and receive letters but phones were almost completely off limits.

And so it was on this date, today’s date, 3 weeks after beginning training, exactly 35 years ago today, that I received my first letter from him while I was there.

It was the longest and most intimate letter my father had ever written me — thick with pages.

He was at his core a hard man and not one to express his feelings openly or out loud, but on that day I read a letter that would forever alter my understanding of him.

He was in fact proud of my decision. Not because I had chosen to be a soldier but because I had chosen to make my own way on my own terms. He went on and wrote about many things, this man of few words. In detail and in a voice I almost didn’t recognize, he regaled me with his own recent exploits and adventures. He told me how he had rekindled a long forgotten passion for flying and astonishingly of having already crashed his newly purchased ultralight airplane. How he walked away by some miracle without a scratch. I was in awe.

My father was living once again, fully, and in turn I was so very lifted and restored by the knowing of it. I needed just that, at that very moment. There are no words to describe how perfectly beautiful that letter was. How it hit. How it landed.

And so when at formation that same day, after chow, when I was told to report to the C.O., my mind didn’t go to disaster at first. But you didn’t get good news this way. And when I entered the captain’s office, his expression gave away too much. It was then that I noticed that behind him, in the corner, we were joined by a chaplain.

It’s funny, at that moment, because of the letter still fresh in my pocket, I couldn’t imagine that my father might not be okay. After all, for me, this letter was just hours old.

I remember next, how I tried to speak, but although I could hear my own voice, I couldn’t recognize it. I heard it asking the Captain to please just tell me that my family was okay, already knowing that would not happen. Those words, that voice, seemed so disconnected from me, my body. It was mine, but strangled.

There is an awful second when men not accustomed to lying look into your eyes searching for, trying to invent a way, to tell you news that simply can’t be said politely. And then it just came out. In a tortured kind of slow motion. His words trailing off and bleeding out quietly over the soft walls of the room. He’d performed his duty, and that was how I learned that my father was dead.

I won’t attempt to describe the breadth and depth of the impact of this or the myriad lessons that began for me there. I can tell you that in his dying, I was surely saved from becoming something else. Someone else.

When I returned to complete my training after the four-day absence I took to bury my father, I was not recycled in training as per standard procedure but rejoined my original unit. I was told on return that I would have to start over — sent back to restart from the beginning, as is usually done when someone misses any portion of this extended training. But somehow it never happened. I had somehow slipped through the cracks. For me it was an incredibly valuable stroke of luck. This training was not designed for interruption, and in this I do believe there was some divine intervention. While I was gone, the sleep deprivation and torturous and constant physical and mental strain had finally fundamentally altered my fellow trainees in a very real way, and in my short but critical absence, I was able to understand and register that change upon return. In short, my unit had become what some would call brainwashed. When I left, they were tired, scared, unfocused boys struggling to be inconspicuous. When I returned, it was as if a switch had been turned. The boys were mostly gone and the men that replaced them had a newfound lust for war. For killing. It was remarkable. I don’t exactly know what happened in my short absence or what changed in them or me, but it was a stark realization and by no means a small change. There is a specific method to creating reliable killers, and I, simply by chance, escaped a crucial window. Having seen the view from both sides, with fresh perspective, I chose to keep what I’d come with. So now for me it was just a matter of faking and mimicking the behavior of my fellow trainees without accidentally and inadvertently adopting it for real. Not losing myself was now my constant thought, my daily goal, and a nearly impossible line to walk. I was to act the part of someone thirsting for battle without becoming him, and it would be the memory of my father, wounded but resilient, that would keep me anchored to a reality I could live with and find strength from. My father, in his dying, had in fact, saved me.

If it were possible, if I could tell him anything today, I’d say, ‘Thank you’ and ‘I miss you.’ I’d tell him his grandson is truly remarkable and sometimes, already, he reminds me of him.

I think that’s enough writing for today. As I write now I can hear you stirring in the other room, up from your nap. I’ll end this with a quote from the book Illusions, something my Dad and I shared a great fondness for and talked about as far back as I can remember.

Richard Bach wrote...

And the Master said unto the silence, “In the path of our happiness shall we find the learning for which we have chosen this lifetime. So it is that I have learned this day, and choose to leave you now to walk your own path, as you please.”

— Dad