Between two wars: How I learned to fight like a man from my father and my son

My father would never talk about the war when I was growing up. We live in an age now where it is generally expected to show respect for our military veterans, but when I was growing up things were different. Veterans of my father’s war came home to jeers and name calling.  

There must be so many reasons not to say a thing when you have been through an experience like that. The war veteran like my father has sacrificed his individual will for the sake of a good that stands apart from questions. The private will is surrendered to the will of a general. 

With or without gratitude, the nation cannot maintain a memory of what was surrendered or what was gained for very long. That may be more brutal than any of the atrocities of war in the end, the loss of consciousness.

When I was a boy growing up we would get in fights on the schoolyard. As I recall, girls would make the arrangements as often as boys themselves, but the boys were the ones who had to fight in almost every instance. “Fight! Fight! Fight!” The cry would ring out, and the children would rush to where the boys were, forming a ring around them that made it difficult for the adults to push through and break things up before anybody got really hurt. These days, the same thing goes on at a different level. Instead of an adult, cameras on cell phones are used to monitor the violence.   

My father taught me to avoid these altercations whenever possible, with positive affirmations which are deeply embedded in the code of my personality. What do you tell someone when they call you out to fight? “I’m a lover, not a fighter.” What about when someone starts a fight with you? “I don’t start fights, I end them.”  It was all about justice, and mercy. 

There was also the general rule. “Never hit a girl.” There was a girl, the one who set up the match between me and Johnny Soltero, who walked the same way home from school as I did. After the fight between me and Johnny, when it was apparent that I was having no further part in her schemes, she would spit on me. It was gross. I felt like throwing up. It happened two days in a row and I told my dad. The next day, I hit her. It was awful. Today we are friends. 

So what kind of boy was I? What kind of boy hits a girl, and then stays in touch with her for 40 years? I have found that if you focus on encouraging the best in another person instead of assassinating their character you get the best results. 

Let's say that one of my boys came up as a street fighter. I don't know how he got himself into the situation, but from what I know he never lost a fight, and he fought a lot. Most people would try to avoid a fight if they could. I imagine that if you fight a lot, it is because you keep getting set up, like Johnny Soltero did before I came around.

If you can go undefeated for a score of fights, you've earned some legitimate street credibility. You don't have to mess with every challenger. You are a known quantity. If someone wants to fight, you can send one of your boys as a proxy. In the best of all possible worlds you've established order, and nobody wants to fight you. This is what I've heard. But how would my boy go undefeated for 20 fights? He could take a punch. In the face. And laugh about it.

He said he didn’t even feel it, which for me is downright unnerving. Maybe it was the broken nose I got in a sucker punch from the kid who I told to leave my friend alone in the 6th grade. If I get punched in the face, it hurts. If I could avoid a fight, I would walk away. But the Learning Story for me is unnervingly more complicated. Sometimes to end a fight, you have to walk toward it.

Notice what you feel and what you don’t feel in your body. The less you talk about it the better. Your invulnerability and insensitivity is evidence of an even deeper vulnerability, the courage to live for others which is at the core of your being. Protect the core by wasting no words on boasts, slights, or sharing information about what you feel or don’t feel about it. Keep that private, so you can contribute to the general good. 

Recognize that whatever may be in your face, nothing on this earth can provoke you to settle for less than the highest good in yourself or anyone else. Do not consent to give away the continuity of your consciousness. Remember who you are and if you must fight another day, walk in the direction of where the fight will be so that you will already be there when you are called to duty. You have to position yourself, so that you can be of service when reinforcements are called for. 

Respond by questioning what you are living for, exactly. Why live to fight another day, or a hundred or a thousand other days if your ultimate objective is achievable if you put your life on the line now? Do you know yourself and what you stand for enough to calmly face your maker, or do you fear that what you stand for can be proved or disproved by someone else? 

Cheers and jeers aside, most have no idea what it might mean to win or lose anyway. No idea of how when the armistice has been signed, the real war has just begun. The people who come after us will be the inheritors of all the soul qualities we developed in fighting our wars. 

This is not about what the right thing to do is. This is about how to do the right thing if we are acting for the sake of our family, and not only ourselves. Good things can come from not getting what we want as easily as bad things can come from getting it. If we want to play the shame and blame game, nobody is innocent. Better to lose in a just cause with a memory of the best in each other than fight at all for something that doesn’t matter.

Ideas do not matter. Concepts do not matter. Political parties do not matter. Capitalism and communism do not matter. Wherever there is war only for the purpose of ideas or concepts or political parties it is a waste. The only thing that matters is that we learn to recognize the truth of who we are, our capacity to love each other with mercy and justice. That is why we fight. We don’t know any better.      

 

* GODSPEED stands for “Gather Only Data in Sync with the Purpose of Every Excellent Deed.”