The theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) has caused a great of discussion in the past 30 years. There have been books, and award-winning movies, and Nobel-winning personalities, and most significantly millions (if not billions) of dollars dedicated to educating the public about this theory, and to stopping it. I personally have participated in debates about, mostly with my friends (on Facebook), and I have been surprised at how religiously the belief in the verity of the theory is held. It is one of the defining issues of our epoch, equal to the subject of the Vietnam conflict in the 1970s and perhaps eclipsing our on-going Middle Eastern conflict today.
AGW is depressingly obscure, I've found. There are those who debate the meaning of the word theory, explaining that it means only an explanation of something instead of a law. A theory is not immutably true, such as the laws that govern the conservation of energy in physics. Of course, I believe that gravity is a theory--the best explanation of why objects interact with this large land mass we call earth (and why other masses in space interact the way they do)--which seems pretty immutable itself. Clouding the issue further is the fact that the theory of gravity has laws that apply within the theory, such as the law that an object in space within the gravitational field of the earth will fall towards it. So how much trust are we to place in this AGW theory? It appears that the answer lies in one's perception.
Then there are the details of AGW. I generally get the impression from the all rhetoric about "global warming" that pollution causes the world to heat up. That will apparently result in sea levels rising, perhaps several hundred (or thousand) feet. Digging a little deeper, it seems that the warming is supposed to occur because of carbon dioxide, a "greenhouse gas" that traps heat. Where it traps heat is confusing as well: is it in the atmosphere, or on the surface? The most scientific explanations focus on atmospheric warming, proposing that a global warming of the upper air will irrevocably trap heat on the surface, with a host of terrible consequences: mass species extinction, including the oxygen-producing algae in the ocean, and perhaps a catastrophic shut-down of the world's biological equilibrium. I've already noted the possibility of sea levels rising, which (given that most of the world's population lives on the coast) would be a very grave threat indeed. Spreading deserts, making agriculture impossible and engendering a massive famine. Terrible stuff indeed.
I hear a lot about climate models, vastly complicated computer programs which seek to extrapolate a set of data into the future. I could misunderstand, of course, but it seems that many of the terrible consequences we can expect to face are themselves extrapolated from a single set of data, the expected temperatures determined by the climate models. And that is what causes me the most concern.
A very passing and abstract understanding of Chaos Theory and a slightly more nuanced understanding of human experience in conflict has made me very suspicious of linear thinking, which is what those climate models appear to be (in essence). Linear thinking establishes direct relationships between things, such as causes and effects. It works very well, too, in what scientists call a "closed system." We use it with great success in everyday life, when we travel places, cook food, conduct our daily work, and the like. After all, most of us know that if we leave our house at for a familiar destination, it takes a well-known amount of time. For me, it takes 30 minutes, give or take, to get to work. If I set the stove dial to "8" instead of "Hi," my bacon cooks quickly without burning. If my daughter does not have much of a nap, she will have a hard time sleeping at night.
In fact, I would posit that linear thinking is essential to our lives. Almost anything we do which is complicated needs a linear explanation--perhaps in a checklist--that helps us achieve the task. Hunters learn and understand complicated details about their spears, bows, or firearms; parents develop complicated sets of procedures for their children, businesses develop strategic plans (not to mention floor procedures, sales protocols, and marketing campaigns), and individuals come up with life plans that may include college, a specific job, a relationship, and so on.
The success of this mindset, and the almost unconscious way which we collectively apply it, tends to obscure the fact that such linear thinking is partially inadequate. But instinctively we know it. We know that an unexpected traffic jam, or a suddenly malfunctioning burner, or a child's unexpected whim, or a new product (or service), or the weather, or any number of other things can disrupt a linear procedure. We recognize it so easily that we have birthed uncounted idioms describing it: "that's life," "expect the unexpected," "murphy's law," and others.
In fact, in my former profession, there was a great deal of debate about whether a battlefield could be treated linearly. That was, of course, the great dream of the American military starting in the 1960s: as weapons became more and more advanced, and more control was possible via computer systems and advanced radios, military thinkers began to wonder if the terrible uncertainty of war could be avoided. They imagined a great army, with all weapon systems and theaters coordinated and controlled from a central location. Armed (literally) with that dream, and with advanced Command and Control (C2) systems developed at ruinous taxpayer expense, all designed by extrapolating past experience into future conflicts, the American military strode confidently into Vietnam, then into the Persian Gulf, then into Afghanistan, and finally again into the Persian Gulf.
Of course, with the possible exception of Desert Storm (1991), history teaches us that our military confidence was misplaced. Vietnam became a bloody, protracted war confused results and our forays into Iraq and Afghanistan look little different. And yet how, with the most advanced weapons and control technology that humanity has ever developed, did we end up with such debatable success?
One proposed answer is in non-linear thinking. Called in different disciplines Chaos Theory, or "Complex System Dynamics," the short story is that our world is inherently unpredictable. It does not behave according to cause and effect, or set rules. It is subject to "emergent factors," which is a verbally precise way to say that new, unexpected things occur. That accident on the way to work, or the new product that destroys a marketing plan, or the new behavior of a child or an entity. Something that is totally unexpected.
Let me take three examples. The first is falling in love. A great many people fall in love with someone unexpected, for an unexpected reason. Perhaps they knew the person before, and weren't romantically or sexually interested, then something occurred that changed their perception. Perhaps they were surprised by a new person they met. Either way, the encounter and the complex emotions that followed--joy, care, desire, excitement, need, contentment--was unexpected. It was emergent. Though we could try to explain it as cause and effect ("I was always attracted to blondes," or "It happened when I stopped looking"), those causes are not, in fact, causes. They are woefully inadequate causes. If it was blonde hair, or the fact that a person has stopped "looking for love," then what about all the other blondes, or all the other people one meets when they stop looking? Even trying to articulate it aloud is beyond the capacity of our language, and most people in love finally resort to phrases like, "it was just different," or "I just knew." They are recognizing that in their love, there was something new. New about them, new about the other person, new about their life, perceptions, and perspective, literally new about the world.
This example also tells us a lot about our relationship to non-linear thinking. We humans seek love inescapably, if we are to believe the evidence of adolescent behavior, the enduring institution of marriage (whatever it's relevance now), the preponderance of our art and media, and the time-honored tradition of matchmaking (now updated to websites like eHarmony and Match.com). In fact, we don't collectively consider love authentic unless it is non-linear. We are contemptuous of arranged marriages, for example. We expect love to be exciting and unscripted. Spontaneous. There is a deep need for and understanding of dynamic, unpredictable relationships that is at the core of who we are and how we relate.
The second example lies in the twentieth-century conflicts already described. Linear thinking, cause-and-effect perspective taught that a disciplined, advanced military such as our own would protect the Republic of Viet Nam (RVN, or South Vietnam). That proved inadequate because the Soviets armed and trained the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) to a much greater extent. That was an emergent event. So we thought up a linear pretext to accomplish our goal of supporting the allied RVN--we sent our own disciplined, advanced military. Unfortunately, the NVA changed tactics. They allied with the Viet Cong guerrillas and began avoiding open conflict. Even so, they were defeated in every major military engagement, but what Americans did not suspect was that such defeats, which crippled their ability to fight, in fact advanced their cause. They were behaving unexpectedly. They didn't attempt to beat the American military on the battlefield, they attempted to make America as a whole tired and ashamed of the conflict. That was an emergent behavior to which the Americans couldn't adapt, and it dynamically interrelated to other emergent qualities such as the "counterculture" social movement occurring in American universities, the increasing prevalence and social acceptance of drugs, and the increased media access to the world which was provided by Americans themselves, through embedded TV reporters. The true relationship and origin of all these events is (I argue) too complex to comprehend, which is why it is non-linear. But their unexpected, frustrating effect is well-documented in history.
But those first two articles deal with human phenomena. What about "natural" phenomena? The third example of dynamism and emergent behavior is evolution. The theory of evolution has long been lauded as a rigorously scientific perspective. Because it stands at odds with the biblical story of the world's beginning, many rationalists have used it to debunk Christianity (and in a broader context, all religion) despite the fact that many scientists who have contributed to the theory were practicing religious men and women. And there is a nice, apparently linear path from single-celled organisms in vast primordial seas to breathtaking biological complexity in the form of mammals and reptiles (including humans and dinosaurs). Charles Darwin, the scientist who first proposed this theory in The Origin of the Species, explained simply that evolution occurred as a result of "natural selection," positing that organisms best suited for their environment survived, while those more poorly suited were eventually killed off through competition (or by the environment itself.
But "natural selection" is an explanation with many facets. It has been reduced to "survival of the fittest," where evolution occurs to cope with changing environments and the species who are less capable of survival and procreation become extinct. Darwin himself, however, became a household name in the Western world due to his idea of "sexual selection," claiming that sexual desirability was responsible for evolution (a titillating idea, especially in Victorian England). In fact, Darwin's work seems to focus on sexual selection, making me wonder as I read it whether or not he departed a bit from the path of rigorous scientific research and began publishing explanations that continued to draw more attention and publicity. Yet no matter how we choose to define "natural selection," the troubling fact remains that we don't really know how it happened, or why it happened. We can explain that this species became extinct, while that species evolved. But excepting a few instances of evolution or extinction we were collectively fortunate enough to observe (such as antibiotic-resistant bacteria), the natural mechanism of evolution is pure speculation. We cannot explain coherently the cause and effect of it all, we can only guess.
For example, if evolution was driven by the need to survive, why then have traits evolved in species that have no apparent effect on survival whatsoever? Evolution certainly caused humans to have different eye colors, but it's unclear as to how that was "naturally selected." And why is the absence of a tail (when the tailbone is present) more efficacious to survival? Why have some species become extinct, while others survived. It is not satisfactory to say that somehow such traits must have aided survival, because if we can't explain something then we have no right to believe it (else we make science the same as religion). Sharks and crocodiles, organisms that have survived the dinosaurs, the ice age, and untold other environmental changes--not to mention the evolution of creatures that share their environments--make a mockery of evolution as a response to "natural selection." And "sexual selection" makes no more sense, because the mating patterns of bygone creatures are forever a mystery, absent time travel. We observe that sexual behavior tends to "breed out" weakness within a species, but it certainly doesn't explain the extinction or development of various species.
Further reinforcing the non-linear characteristics of evolution are the the philosophical implications it has inspired. Evolution is random and follows no single discernible pattern, therefore we humans are an accident (with all our art and science and other achievement as well). And while that is a wonderful overarching expression of the unknowability of this great process of biology, geology, and atmospherics that has been the story of this planet's life, it points inescapably at dynamic, emergent behavior. Literally every evolutionary step has been emergent, something new, whether it was the asteroid that supposedly began the extinction of the dinosaurs or the increasing brain size that characterized the transition from ancient apes to our modern human. Evolution may in fact be the most confidently non-linear perspective in the modern world, and evolutionary biologists have by and large ceased offering conventional cause-and-effect linear explanations for the developments they discover; instead they focus on explaining the apparent facts, which in detail continue to be frustrating obscure. For example, evidence suggests that Neanderthals may have used speech and tools, and probably interbred with both Cro-Magnons and Anatomically Modern Humans (AMHs). Was their extinction then "bred out," or did they become extinct through some other evolutionary mechanism, such as persecution and genocide at the hands of more advanced evolutionary cousins (which would itself be an emergent event)? It's not even clear whether they were more or less intelligent, since they appear to have had more voluminous brains than AMHs, which is a crude indicator of intelligence in organisms.
For some reason, it appears that science has given humans the illusion that there is a finite amount of information in the world, and once all information is known--once science and research has plumbed the depths of all mysteries and revealed all--then there will be no more surprises. That attitude is most concretely seen in the repeated, futile attempts by militaries in the last half-century to bring all aspects of the battlefield under control. But with people and with the world, experience teaches that emergent behaviors occur, without precedent and unpredictable by any cause-and-effect extrapolation. And any attempt to neatly package emergent behavior with a linear explanation is pure speculation. No one will ever know why the North Vietnamese martyred themselves militarily, or how why such martyrdom, if carried on long enough, would result in American war fatigue. Certainly the Americans, who ought to have known best, did not predict it; while it might be fashionable to say that Ho Chi Minh and Giap were smarter than Americans, the fact is that their emergent tactic itself occurred to them through a result of unexpected effects and opportunities. Likewise, no one will ever know what happened to Neanderthals. And a guess, even one made by a scientist, is still a guess.
Eastern thought deals with this reality much better than our contemporary Western thought. Since the renaissance, Westerners have undergone a half millennium of constant progress and living improvement. We have mastered agriculture, distance travel, flight, and medicine. To a certain extent we have even mastered weather--hurricanes no longer slam against ships and shores with 36 hour warnings; our satellites allow us to evacuate days before landfall. But for all this mastery, we can't predict. Eastern disciplines such as Buddhism or the way of Lao Tzu take what is to Western minds a curiously fatalistic approach to life, but I argue that there is wisdom in recognizing one's inability to control one's surroundings. The Marine Corps General James Mattis recognized how little he could control a battlefield, despite commanding whole divisions, because of the violent and highly dynamic environment. He took the radio handle "Chaos" to illustrate that he did not seek to control the battlefield but rather to thrive in the unpredictable environment. That is a military tenet perhaps first articulated by Sun Tzu, an eastern thinker.
And speaking of weather, our weather "predictions" are merely speculations based on observed data. The path of a hurricane is projected, and large swathes of coastline are put on alert. Why? Because we simply don't know where it's going. Half the time a hurricane deviates by hundreds of miles from it's projected path. Other weather developments are guesses at what might happen over, say Chicago when system A intersects system B--never minding that weather systems, like hurricanes, are projected in the future with poor accuracy. And the results of weather systems which intersect are unpredictable, too. These systems are emergent, dynamic, and probably respond to variables that are as of yet uncomprehended. Such as land use, as in cities (which tend to be warmer than surrounding countryside).
All of this calls the predicted outcomes of global warming into serious question. While empirical data over the last 200 years has clearly shown a warming trend, and glaciers melting, and growing holes in the ozone layer, the effect of such facts is unpredictable. It is essentially dynamic and emergent. The "El Nino" phenomenon was hailed as a manifestation of the consequences of global warming, but evidence suggests that it has been occurring at two to seven year intervals for 300 years, and perhaps even further back. So we can't be sure if the extreme weather caused by El Nino is due to AGW or not. In fact, while NOAA has identified that the number of anomalous weather/ocean systems regarding temperature has increased, nobody is sure whether that's a new development or not. And the fact that within the broad warming trend of the last 200 years there existed a 30-year cooling trend from 1940-1970 clouds the issue even further.
Because "the environment" is such a complex system, with emergent, non-linear, dynamic developments, I think that all the trouble and fuss about predicting climate change is a mistake. The simple fact is that we can't predict anything--we can only guess. Perhaps a guess or two will be correct, but that will itself be an emergent effect from the whole. Besides, the use of terrifying predictions to stimulate more attention on the issue of AGW strikes me as manipulative, a way for AGW apologists and researchers to increase their support, especially financially. I certainly have no illusions that scientists, like everyone else, are susceptible to stretching the truth to get their way. After all, bankers, businessmen, and priests have done it for years. Ultimately, I think our resources are better spent learning to thrive in this emergent environment, which starts by understanding it. Computer models apply linear thought to a non-linear system, which makes them nearly useless. Rigorous research aimed at knowing instead of predicting is much more helpful.
It is perhaps tempting to think that if our world is so dynamic and emergent, then what use is there for linear, scientific thought at all? What can we possibly do to make a difference if we have no way of knowing or predicting what the effects of our action will be? The fact is that we live in relation to this world, and we always have. Native Americans burned forests and fields to flush game and make the land into something more congenial to them. We have farmed for thousands of years. We have learned to thrive by taking our environment and adapting to it in a way that is advantageous to us. This doesn't just apply to the natural world, either--businesses do it in the marketplace, governments do it in political spheres, and we individuals have done it with every single aspect of our lives. It is a survival mechanism. And if our environment is changing now, I think it's a good bet that we have something to do with it--but simply reversing the processes is unlikely to reverse the effects we've seen to date. The world will continue to evolve, dynamically. That is why I think it is so foolish to think that we can control the "environment" to such a degree that...what? What is the desired solution to AGW? Make the world as it was in 1930? 1830? Does anybody really know when the world was healthier? What about in the Jurassic period (200-150 million years ago), when there was more oxygen in the air (and more carbon dioxide as well), not to mention warmer temperatures?
We should "pick up" after ourselves, of course. We should not destroy if we can help it. Demanding greater energy efficiency is virtuous, and certainly will mitigate the effects of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not to mention the deleterious smog that existed in Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s, which we have successfully cleaned up, and which exists today in developing cities like Shanghai. Finding better ways to use land than mass deforestation and urban development might slow the warming effect, since scientists point to land use as a major factor in the present warming trend. Of course, that entails a behavioral change, as by and large the population of the world continues to concentrate in the cities. And contamination of water and land with industrial by-products including hormonal, radioactive, and corrosives is still a major threat, and ought be combatted to the maximum extent possible. But whatever steps we take, we should be mindful that they will birth their own emergent effects, and almost certainly will not have the effects that we expect (or not entirely).
Keeping that in mind, we should be careful not to impose restrictions on developing societies that do not have the luxury of guilt over a theory of projected environmental behavior, and struggle daily with poverty. The science behind AGW does not account for the human cost of change, except where it predicts catastrophic results for humanity. That fact is the most suspicious of all.
To thrive in this world, as we have done so far, we must remember that science does not tell us what to do; rather it tells us what is. And that information may help us discern what to do about things, but there is no blueprint. The climate is certainly changing, and the reasons for that change are probably much more complex than industrialization and land use. After all, the earth has already been through three atmospheres and many geologic periods already, and likely will go through more as the earth's evolution continues. How that evolution will be affected by warming, carbon dioxide, or anything else attributed to us is unknowable.
And our evolutionary business is to remain, as the sharks and the crocodiles have. We must learn to thrive.
Sunday, May 5, 2013
Tuesday, April 2, 2013
My Farewell to Arms
I stood on the steel staircase landing and looked out over the river, which had seemed impossibly big when I first saw it. The brackish, heavy air stirred around me and carried with it the scents of heat, of humidity, of mud and gently decomposing vegetation. It was, for me, the smell of the Corps.
A trivial errand had brought me to DMO, which stands for "Distribution Management Office." It was one of those ever-changing acronyms in the Marine Corps--it had been TMO, or "Traffic Management Office" for as long as I could remember. It had the same function now as it did before, which was taking your military orders and translating them into a government contract for a moving company, so you could be moved as painlessly as possible. Perhaps at one time it was staffed by Marines, and moderately efficient. Now it was staffed mostly by civilians, which I viewed with a healthy distrust. Most, I'm sure, were diligent and hard-working...but the Marine spouse who I'd spoken to earlier, and who set up my move, had received me like a bad cold and lectured me in a voice both whiny and severe about the limitations of my particular move.
Unfortunately, I didn't have my check-out sheet--on which I was required to get her signature--when I had first seen her, which meant today's trip to this dilapidated brick building. The steel staircase felt like a patch, added recently to cover some defect in the original building. An apt metaphor for DMO itself: a sad, uneasy hybrid of the Marine Corps and the vast, suffocating apparatus of support that grows like fungus on the military organization.
The first time I saw the river, I stood on sweltering asphalt outside Bobo Hall. I had just stuffed some 1500 calories in my face while Drill Instructors screamed and strutted all around me. Terrified of their attention, I bolted my food and ran outside to the comparative safety of my place in formation and my "knowledge," the little read handbook I had to read in every spare moment not occupied by instruction. As I meditated intently on Lieutenant Bobo, who to cover the retreat of his Marines had jammed the severed stump of his leg into the dirt of Vietnam to stop the bleeding, and who won the medal of honor for it, I noticed that this "river" flowing past was tremendously wide. Wider than the Columbia River, by far. Nearly as wide as Lake Washington.
The pungency of the air contained many memories. There is a particular smell to Virginia--maybe just to Quantico--that is known to every Marine Corps officer. A smell that reminds of early mornings and aching chests after a run, or the slimy cool of the Quigley, or the itch and suppression of a flak jacket, vest, and pack in the treeline. It reminds of Drill Instructors with massive arms and veins popping out all over their neck and face as they scream, of taciturn Captains exuding contempt and disappointment at another failed attack, of the heavy numbness of pack and rifle and road and the back of the Marine in front of you, which sets in and carries you through the hours of a forced march.
The overwhelming feeling of being yanked back to the very beginning, of returning to where it all started, is gone. I am back in my car, and irritably searching for a parking spot near the IPAC (Installation Personnel Administration Center, a sweatshop of administration Marines struggling to handle all the administration problems of tens of thousands of other Marines assigned to Quantico). In the back of my mind, I'm wondering what other memories I've buried.
I'm trying to control my astonished wonder at the ghostly green nearness of the mountains. They slide by, fast and deadly, invisible unless I swing my goggles at them. Then they are dangerously close. But I'm conscious that it is my friend in the other jet, struggling to earn his qualification, and we need these attacks to go well. So I drop my gaze under my goggles, watching the displays. Weapons page, set. HUD to the left DDI. I glance to my left and see the other aircraft zip through two small mounds, level with us. I frown. I know we, the wingman, are supposed to stay above our lead for safety. But my pilot is also the flight evaluator, an experienced and outstanding pilot. I wonder, as I nervously flick my eyes between the HUD, the approaching desert floor, and the lead aircraft slowly rising above us, if my pilot is maneuvering to look at something, or to test the other aircraft, or simply is holding a more disciplined altitude than the relatively inexperienced lead. Am I imagining, or is the ground getting closer? How close are we? Wait, I can't tell. The altimeter says 2,160 feet. Without thinking I say, "RADALT to the HUD." Suddenly G-forces come on, and we angle upwards. The RADALT alarm sounds our proximity to the ground as the pilot adjusts it. The altimeter, showing 2,230, instantly shows 240. There's an instant of nausea, as I marvel that we were flying less than 300 feet above the deck with absolutely none of the safety precautions in place to a collision with the ground, if for but a few seconds we fail to pay attention. Then I realize we're coming up on the target, and I hurriedly bring up the Litening Pod display on the right. Over the ICS, I hear my pilot say, "RADALT to the HUD. Thanks."
I joined the Marine Corps chiefly to be free of my parents' financial support. But a latent streak of romantic adventurism awakened as I arrived on that hot, humid asphalt in the summer of 2003. There was the icy, nauseating fear of the drill instructors, but also this strange exhilaration in the company of my fellow candidates. We were doing great things, in our own way--hiking distances, and performing tasks, and learning things that only days before had been unimaginable. And the sea stories of the prior-enlisted, or the drill instructors (delivered in the form of harsh instruction) made me hunger to travel and take this wonderful, small world of right and wrong, good and bad, of exertion and mission to exotic places. There was the middle east, where the battle of An Nasiriyah had concluded. There were stories of the DMZ in Korea, the Central Training Area of Okinawa, and rumors of Afghanistan. There was more heat in Camp Lejeune, and mountains in Camp Pendleton, and I wanted to see it all. I was in love--and I have remained so until the very end.
One thing true of Marines everywhere is their consciousness of history and tradition, from leathernecks to cake ceremonies, Belleau Wood to Frozen Chosin, and always the revered names of our antecedents like Bobo and Barnum and Chesty. Marines, when prompted, will talk for hours on the lineage of the "blood stripe" on their trousers or the origin of the phrase "Gee-Dunk." I know all the old histories, too, and will no doubt repeat them more often as an veteran than I ever did as a Marine Officer. But I think the real well-spring and deposit of tradition lies in the time-honored Marine institutions that remain, virtually unchanged, into our modern times.
I shivered. The biting wind mocked both the desert-pattern windbreaker I wore as a "warming layer" and the magnificent desert mountains rearing all around. It was just before dawn, and the sky was beginning to lighten behind the ridges. Twenty-five yards in front of me, a row of man-shaped targets quivered, and between them and me strutted the campaign-covered marksmanship instructors. We waited for the sunrise, which promised warmth and would allow us to begin shooting. I wasn't looking forward, however, because there was something oddly familiar about this situation. It wasn't deja vu, but something more like finally seeing a building you've only before seen in pictures. I recognized this.
Then suddenly I remembered. E. B. Sledge had been here, had described it in his World War II memoir With the Old Breed. He had described this whole institution: the unspoken expectation of marksmanship, the cold, the weapons, the instructors, the targets, the pits. He might have been to this range, actually, for he described the remote Camp Eliot which still existed, a mountainous wilderness of hiking trails now sitting under the approach path to Miramar Marine Corps Air Station. Before the modern Marine Corps, before helicopter flight, before Iwo Jima and his own battles of Peleliu and Okinawa, before and Khe Sanh and "The March Up" in 1991, Private Sledge had qualified on the timeless ranges of the Marine Corps. Just as I was doing.
A study of history, too, shows that this legacy runs further back than 1942. The two regiments of Marines who went to France in 1918 were reluctantly included by the Army because Congress knew they were already basically qualified soldiers--they had essential marksmanship training, essential training that was reduced for the Army's conscripts in order to more quickly field combat units. It's likely that the Marine doughboys of Chateau-Thierry and Belleau Wood knelt on the same hard ground with their Springfield rifles, re-fought their grandfather's civil war battles just as today's Marines re-fight Vietnam and the early battles of the long war in the Middle East.
The general rubbed his hands briefly together in a nervous gesture that could have been his transition to a new topic, a physical equivalent to saying, "um." But I detected some glee in the movement, and so readied myself for a joke. And I was not disappointed. "When I was a young Lieutenant in the late seventies," he began, "my platoon lived up in Camp Margarita on Pendleton. And we lived in these really crappy barracks. There was a single squad bay, with a partition at one end for me and my platoon sergeant's desks. It was crumbling and dirty, no matter how many times we field day'd the place, and the showers were always backed up and the toilets never worked. And being a conscientious and enterprising lieutenant, I filled out the chit every Friday specifying the discrepancies and requesting maintenance to come to fix the plumbing. One day, as I was dropping the chit off in the Facilities section, the gunny who was there said, 'hey wait a minute, Lieutenant.' I turned back and said, 'yes, gunny?' He motioned me close--" the general made a comical beckoning motion--"and said, 'now I like you, Lieutenant. You seem like you're really trying to do the right thing here. But I gotta say, those barracks you're living in are condemned. They're scheduled to be replaced in the next five years, so nobody's going to spend any money to fix them at all.' And he pointed to a drawer, where I could see every chit I'd ever written neatly filed." The general paused as an appreciative chuckle swept through the Lieutenants. "Well, I went back and continued writing my chits, but I was a little satisfied to know that there would be new buildings soon." He paused for a second. "Fast forward to the early two thousands, when I became the CG of 1st Marine Division. Shortly after I arrived back on Camp Pendleton, I drove up to Camp Margarita to see the new barracks. By then I was wise enough not to be surprised when I saw the same old crappy, crumbling barracks standing there." A muted laugh from the audience. "But I parked my car and headed into the same old squad bay to find a Lieutenant sitting at the same desk behind the same partition, doing some paperwork. He jumped up quick when he saw mygeneral's star, but I calmed him down--" another muted laugh--"and asked him how the Barracks were. 'Well, sir,' he replied, "the toilets don't work and the showers are always backed up! I write a chit every Friday after field day, but I'm told...'" Here the general paused for dramatic effect, with the air of an impending punch line, "'that these buildings are scheduled to be torn down in five years and new ones built in their spot!'" The laughter was loud and long.
The amazing thing about the Marine Corps is this vital continuity of experience, the feeling of being part of something meaningful, with roots in the past and a mission for the future. Generations of Marines have field day'd crumbling buildings and ships, and written chits that were ignored, and felt the lash of a salty, scornful, authoritative tongue on their sincere efforts. Generations of officers have struggled to care for their Marines who are coping with substandard living conditions, and have with secret pride rejoiced in the Corps' preference to spend money on training rounds and field rations rather than cushy barracks with serviceable plumbing. The great work of the Marine Corps, to win battles and make good citizens, continues in the small details and virtues that are comical, and ridiculous, and the very lifeblood of the military.
In the gathering darkness I watched them line up in the LZ. The shouts and complaints, audible in the still air, told of their exhaustion. Steam rose from their necks and faces, and I shivered. Forcing myself to be still, despite the lack of warming layers (which I had conspicuously stripped), I waited until the student platoon commander told me they were ready "to step." Hoisting my pack smoothly I took my spot at the front left of the column, and started walking.
By now it was dark, and large flakes of snow were falling. I could feel their despair behind me. Despair is not too strong a word, because after their first wake-up-and-full day-of attacks in the field, they were beat down. Bad. I knew how they felt--the sweat, clammy and gritty with dirt but now freezing, the shaky legs and ankles, sore from walking up and down and alongside hills all day. It didn't help that I was marching them past their quarters in Graves Hall, whose windows shone with warm light. There was despair dragging behind me as the dark closed in, and the sad and terrible finality of falling snow extinguished any hope of warmth and light. I had been through it all before, and I knew why ancient people worshipped the sun.
But the despair was born of fear, and baseless fear at that. Soon, I knew, we would arrive at our next LZ, and the snow would keep our sleeping bags dry in the freezing air. I knew we soon would be happily bivouacked. And so I strode remoselessly on, swinging off the paved road on to gravel. Here the carefully constructed model officer I projected to the world fell apart, for I tripped on a pothole and face-planted, with 80-odd pounds of pack helping to drive the point home. Almost immediately, the students had picked me up and were asking if I was okay. I growled at them a thanks and continued to stride, angry and embarrassed but otherwise unhurt. After several paces I commented to my student platoon commander that at least I gave them something to use against me at Mess Night.
We tramped across the wooden bridge, and climbed raggedly up Cardiac Hill. As I strode away from the top, I heard murmurings behind me that swelled, slowly, until someone finally yelled, "stop!" I stopped, turned around, and asked who had fallen back. The students, in huddled postures, told me the name of the two Marines who hadn't kept up, and again I felt their despair clutching at me. The night was cold, the woods were close, and two of their peers were lost somewhere behind. Angry at their weakness, I told my student platoon commander to keep the platoon there, and I took a squad leader with me back down the hill. Eventually I found my Marines, struggling and slow, morale as bad as I'd ever seen. They were uninjured, however, so I told them to continue after us and I walked back to the main group.
Some packs were off, the quintessential expression of defeat for students. I ignored the questioning (pleading?) glances, took my place at the head of the column, and began walking. There was a sullen scramble behind me to pick up and begin again. But it was easy going from here, as the road was flat, and soon we'd turned in the treeline. The slow Marines had caught up. The trail endd at another LZ, where there were other platoons and some vehicles, engines humming comfortably. I had my students take off their packs and sit on them, and talked briefly about the next day's event. Then I let them go make up their sleeping positions. Before lying down, I checked in with my firewatch Marines and chatted briefly with the Marines who were still awake.
From my sleeping bag, slowly warming up with my body's heat, I finally appreciated the beauty and the stillness of snow, delicately outlining every branch and quieting the world. After that night, I never felt any fear or despair in my Marines, and I hoped they learned the lesson: with a Mission to accomplish, and Marines to lead, they can get through anything--or rather, certainly through harder trials than a snowy night hike.
For nearly nine years (thirteen if you count my time in ROTC, which most don't, but which seemed quite military to me at the time) I have loved and served this institution. I have shivered in wet foxholes, and soaked in coffee to stay awake through the small hours while preparing some report or another. I have honed my skills at air-to-air combat and close air support in readiness for conflict, used some of the same Quonset Huts at Iwakuni as the Marines who occupied Japan in 1945. I have suffered the disappointment of my peers and superiors and (worst of all) my Marines, and have taken joy in our shared successes, and I have grown up. Grown to know that I could truly give to a marriage, truly give to my children, truly face danger and difficulty and uncertainty and yet do something constructive.
I have many sea stories to tell and re-tell in nostalgic moments to come. The Naval Service still holds sway over my heart and the thrill of new, dangerous places is only a memory away. But I have found a greater love in my wife and child, and a hitherto unknown desire for peace and quietude. So it is time to hang up my uniform. I taste, one last time, that particular air of the Marine Corps: brackish water and effort and heat and the joyful burden of scrutiny and responsibility. I look out at that river which started it all, the strange brown river as big as a lake and a visible sign that home was far away and I was, then, somewhere completely different. It was exciting, terribly exciting, and I followed that excitement a lover.
But now, with happy memories, it is time to go home.
Semper Fidelis.
A trivial errand had brought me to DMO, which stands for "Distribution Management Office." It was one of those ever-changing acronyms in the Marine Corps--it had been TMO, or "Traffic Management Office" for as long as I could remember. It had the same function now as it did before, which was taking your military orders and translating them into a government contract for a moving company, so you could be moved as painlessly as possible. Perhaps at one time it was staffed by Marines, and moderately efficient. Now it was staffed mostly by civilians, which I viewed with a healthy distrust. Most, I'm sure, were diligent and hard-working...but the Marine spouse who I'd spoken to earlier, and who set up my move, had received me like a bad cold and lectured me in a voice both whiny and severe about the limitations of my particular move.
Unfortunately, I didn't have my check-out sheet--on which I was required to get her signature--when I had first seen her, which meant today's trip to this dilapidated brick building. The steel staircase felt like a patch, added recently to cover some defect in the original building. An apt metaphor for DMO itself: a sad, uneasy hybrid of the Marine Corps and the vast, suffocating apparatus of support that grows like fungus on the military organization.
The first time I saw the river, I stood on sweltering asphalt outside Bobo Hall. I had just stuffed some 1500 calories in my face while Drill Instructors screamed and strutted all around me. Terrified of their attention, I bolted my food and ran outside to the comparative safety of my place in formation and my "knowledge," the little read handbook I had to read in every spare moment not occupied by instruction. As I meditated intently on Lieutenant Bobo, who to cover the retreat of his Marines had jammed the severed stump of his leg into the dirt of Vietnam to stop the bleeding, and who won the medal of honor for it, I noticed that this "river" flowing past was tremendously wide. Wider than the Columbia River, by far. Nearly as wide as Lake Washington.
The pungency of the air contained many memories. There is a particular smell to Virginia--maybe just to Quantico--that is known to every Marine Corps officer. A smell that reminds of early mornings and aching chests after a run, or the slimy cool of the Quigley, or the itch and suppression of a flak jacket, vest, and pack in the treeline. It reminds of Drill Instructors with massive arms and veins popping out all over their neck and face as they scream, of taciturn Captains exuding contempt and disappointment at another failed attack, of the heavy numbness of pack and rifle and road and the back of the Marine in front of you, which sets in and carries you through the hours of a forced march.
The overwhelming feeling of being yanked back to the very beginning, of returning to where it all started, is gone. I am back in my car, and irritably searching for a parking spot near the IPAC (Installation Personnel Administration Center, a sweatshop of administration Marines struggling to handle all the administration problems of tens of thousands of other Marines assigned to Quantico). In the back of my mind, I'm wondering what other memories I've buried.
I'm trying to control my astonished wonder at the ghostly green nearness of the mountains. They slide by, fast and deadly, invisible unless I swing my goggles at them. Then they are dangerously close. But I'm conscious that it is my friend in the other jet, struggling to earn his qualification, and we need these attacks to go well. So I drop my gaze under my goggles, watching the displays. Weapons page, set. HUD to the left DDI. I glance to my left and see the other aircraft zip through two small mounds, level with us. I frown. I know we, the wingman, are supposed to stay above our lead for safety. But my pilot is also the flight evaluator, an experienced and outstanding pilot. I wonder, as I nervously flick my eyes between the HUD, the approaching desert floor, and the lead aircraft slowly rising above us, if my pilot is maneuvering to look at something, or to test the other aircraft, or simply is holding a more disciplined altitude than the relatively inexperienced lead. Am I imagining, or is the ground getting closer? How close are we? Wait, I can't tell. The altimeter says 2,160 feet. Without thinking I say, "RADALT to the HUD." Suddenly G-forces come on, and we angle upwards. The RADALT alarm sounds our proximity to the ground as the pilot adjusts it. The altimeter, showing 2,230, instantly shows 240. There's an instant of nausea, as I marvel that we were flying less than 300 feet above the deck with absolutely none of the safety precautions in place to a collision with the ground, if for but a few seconds we fail to pay attention. Then I realize we're coming up on the target, and I hurriedly bring up the Litening Pod display on the right. Over the ICS, I hear my pilot say, "RADALT to the HUD. Thanks."
I joined the Marine Corps chiefly to be free of my parents' financial support. But a latent streak of romantic adventurism awakened as I arrived on that hot, humid asphalt in the summer of 2003. There was the icy, nauseating fear of the drill instructors, but also this strange exhilaration in the company of my fellow candidates. We were doing great things, in our own way--hiking distances, and performing tasks, and learning things that only days before had been unimaginable. And the sea stories of the prior-enlisted, or the drill instructors (delivered in the form of harsh instruction) made me hunger to travel and take this wonderful, small world of right and wrong, good and bad, of exertion and mission to exotic places. There was the middle east, where the battle of An Nasiriyah had concluded. There were stories of the DMZ in Korea, the Central Training Area of Okinawa, and rumors of Afghanistan. There was more heat in Camp Lejeune, and mountains in Camp Pendleton, and I wanted to see it all. I was in love--and I have remained so until the very end.
One thing true of Marines everywhere is their consciousness of history and tradition, from leathernecks to cake ceremonies, Belleau Wood to Frozen Chosin, and always the revered names of our antecedents like Bobo and Barnum and Chesty. Marines, when prompted, will talk for hours on the lineage of the "blood stripe" on their trousers or the origin of the phrase "Gee-Dunk." I know all the old histories, too, and will no doubt repeat them more often as an veteran than I ever did as a Marine Officer. But I think the real well-spring and deposit of tradition lies in the time-honored Marine institutions that remain, virtually unchanged, into our modern times.
I shivered. The biting wind mocked both the desert-pattern windbreaker I wore as a "warming layer" and the magnificent desert mountains rearing all around. It was just before dawn, and the sky was beginning to lighten behind the ridges. Twenty-five yards in front of me, a row of man-shaped targets quivered, and between them and me strutted the campaign-covered marksmanship instructors. We waited for the sunrise, which promised warmth and would allow us to begin shooting. I wasn't looking forward, however, because there was something oddly familiar about this situation. It wasn't deja vu, but something more like finally seeing a building you've only before seen in pictures. I recognized this.
Then suddenly I remembered. E. B. Sledge had been here, had described it in his World War II memoir With the Old Breed. He had described this whole institution: the unspoken expectation of marksmanship, the cold, the weapons, the instructors, the targets, the pits. He might have been to this range, actually, for he described the remote Camp Eliot which still existed, a mountainous wilderness of hiking trails now sitting under the approach path to Miramar Marine Corps Air Station. Before the modern Marine Corps, before helicopter flight, before Iwo Jima and his own battles of Peleliu and Okinawa, before and Khe Sanh and "The March Up" in 1991, Private Sledge had qualified on the timeless ranges of the Marine Corps. Just as I was doing.
A study of history, too, shows that this legacy runs further back than 1942. The two regiments of Marines who went to France in 1918 were reluctantly included by the Army because Congress knew they were already basically qualified soldiers--they had essential marksmanship training, essential training that was reduced for the Army's conscripts in order to more quickly field combat units. It's likely that the Marine doughboys of Chateau-Thierry and Belleau Wood knelt on the same hard ground with their Springfield rifles, re-fought their grandfather's civil war battles just as today's Marines re-fight Vietnam and the early battles of the long war in the Middle East.
The general rubbed his hands briefly together in a nervous gesture that could have been his transition to a new topic, a physical equivalent to saying, "um." But I detected some glee in the movement, and so readied myself for a joke. And I was not disappointed. "When I was a young Lieutenant in the late seventies," he began, "my platoon lived up in Camp Margarita on Pendleton. And we lived in these really crappy barracks. There was a single squad bay, with a partition at one end for me and my platoon sergeant's desks. It was crumbling and dirty, no matter how many times we field day'd the place, and the showers were always backed up and the toilets never worked. And being a conscientious and enterprising lieutenant, I filled out the chit every Friday specifying the discrepancies and requesting maintenance to come to fix the plumbing. One day, as I was dropping the chit off in the Facilities section, the gunny who was there said, 'hey wait a minute, Lieutenant.' I turned back and said, 'yes, gunny?' He motioned me close--" the general made a comical beckoning motion--"and said, 'now I like you, Lieutenant. You seem like you're really trying to do the right thing here. But I gotta say, those barracks you're living in are condemned. They're scheduled to be replaced in the next five years, so nobody's going to spend any money to fix them at all.' And he pointed to a drawer, where I could see every chit I'd ever written neatly filed." The general paused as an appreciative chuckle swept through the Lieutenants. "Well, I went back and continued writing my chits, but I was a little satisfied to know that there would be new buildings soon." He paused for a second. "Fast forward to the early two thousands, when I became the CG of 1st Marine Division. Shortly after I arrived back on Camp Pendleton, I drove up to Camp Margarita to see the new barracks. By then I was wise enough not to be surprised when I saw the same old crappy, crumbling barracks standing there." A muted laugh from the audience. "But I parked my car and headed into the same old squad bay to find a Lieutenant sitting at the same desk behind the same partition, doing some paperwork. He jumped up quick when he saw mygeneral's star, but I calmed him down--" another muted laugh--"and asked him how the Barracks were. 'Well, sir,' he replied, "the toilets don't work and the showers are always backed up! I write a chit every Friday after field day, but I'm told...'" Here the general paused for dramatic effect, with the air of an impending punch line, "'that these buildings are scheduled to be torn down in five years and new ones built in their spot!'" The laughter was loud and long.
The amazing thing about the Marine Corps is this vital continuity of experience, the feeling of being part of something meaningful, with roots in the past and a mission for the future. Generations of Marines have field day'd crumbling buildings and ships, and written chits that were ignored, and felt the lash of a salty, scornful, authoritative tongue on their sincere efforts. Generations of officers have struggled to care for their Marines who are coping with substandard living conditions, and have with secret pride rejoiced in the Corps' preference to spend money on training rounds and field rations rather than cushy barracks with serviceable plumbing. The great work of the Marine Corps, to win battles and make good citizens, continues in the small details and virtues that are comical, and ridiculous, and the very lifeblood of the military.
In the gathering darkness I watched them line up in the LZ. The shouts and complaints, audible in the still air, told of their exhaustion. Steam rose from their necks and faces, and I shivered. Forcing myself to be still, despite the lack of warming layers (which I had conspicuously stripped), I waited until the student platoon commander told me they were ready "to step." Hoisting my pack smoothly I took my spot at the front left of the column, and started walking.
By now it was dark, and large flakes of snow were falling. I could feel their despair behind me. Despair is not too strong a word, because after their first wake-up-and-full day-of attacks in the field, they were beat down. Bad. I knew how they felt--the sweat, clammy and gritty with dirt but now freezing, the shaky legs and ankles, sore from walking up and down and alongside hills all day. It didn't help that I was marching them past their quarters in Graves Hall, whose windows shone with warm light. There was despair dragging behind me as the dark closed in, and the sad and terrible finality of falling snow extinguished any hope of warmth and light. I had been through it all before, and I knew why ancient people worshipped the sun.
But the despair was born of fear, and baseless fear at that. Soon, I knew, we would arrive at our next LZ, and the snow would keep our sleeping bags dry in the freezing air. I knew we soon would be happily bivouacked. And so I strode remoselessly on, swinging off the paved road on to gravel. Here the carefully constructed model officer I projected to the world fell apart, for I tripped on a pothole and face-planted, with 80-odd pounds of pack helping to drive the point home. Almost immediately, the students had picked me up and were asking if I was okay. I growled at them a thanks and continued to stride, angry and embarrassed but otherwise unhurt. After several paces I commented to my student platoon commander that at least I gave them something to use against me at Mess Night.
We tramped across the wooden bridge, and climbed raggedly up Cardiac Hill. As I strode away from the top, I heard murmurings behind me that swelled, slowly, until someone finally yelled, "stop!" I stopped, turned around, and asked who had fallen back. The students, in huddled postures, told me the name of the two Marines who hadn't kept up, and again I felt their despair clutching at me. The night was cold, the woods were close, and two of their peers were lost somewhere behind. Angry at their weakness, I told my student platoon commander to keep the platoon there, and I took a squad leader with me back down the hill. Eventually I found my Marines, struggling and slow, morale as bad as I'd ever seen. They were uninjured, however, so I told them to continue after us and I walked back to the main group.
Some packs were off, the quintessential expression of defeat for students. I ignored the questioning (pleading?) glances, took my place at the head of the column, and began walking. There was a sullen scramble behind me to pick up and begin again. But it was easy going from here, as the road was flat, and soon we'd turned in the treeline. The slow Marines had caught up. The trail endd at another LZ, where there were other platoons and some vehicles, engines humming comfortably. I had my students take off their packs and sit on them, and talked briefly about the next day's event. Then I let them go make up their sleeping positions. Before lying down, I checked in with my firewatch Marines and chatted briefly with the Marines who were still awake.
From my sleeping bag, slowly warming up with my body's heat, I finally appreciated the beauty and the stillness of snow, delicately outlining every branch and quieting the world. After that night, I never felt any fear or despair in my Marines, and I hoped they learned the lesson: with a Mission to accomplish, and Marines to lead, they can get through anything--or rather, certainly through harder trials than a snowy night hike.
For nearly nine years (thirteen if you count my time in ROTC, which most don't, but which seemed quite military to me at the time) I have loved and served this institution. I have shivered in wet foxholes, and soaked in coffee to stay awake through the small hours while preparing some report or another. I have honed my skills at air-to-air combat and close air support in readiness for conflict, used some of the same Quonset Huts at Iwakuni as the Marines who occupied Japan in 1945. I have suffered the disappointment of my peers and superiors and (worst of all) my Marines, and have taken joy in our shared successes, and I have grown up. Grown to know that I could truly give to a marriage, truly give to my children, truly face danger and difficulty and uncertainty and yet do something constructive.
I have many sea stories to tell and re-tell in nostalgic moments to come. The Naval Service still holds sway over my heart and the thrill of new, dangerous places is only a memory away. But I have found a greater love in my wife and child, and a hitherto unknown desire for peace and quietude. So it is time to hang up my uniform. I taste, one last time, that particular air of the Marine Corps: brackish water and effort and heat and the joyful burden of scrutiny and responsibility. I look out at that river which started it all, the strange brown river as big as a lake and a visible sign that home was far away and I was, then, somewhere completely different. It was exciting, terribly exciting, and I followed that excitement a lover.
But now, with happy memories, it is time to go home.
Semper Fidelis.
Saturday, March 2, 2013
Reflection on the practical role of the Church
The world has eagerly watched the abdication of Pope Benedict XVI over the past week, and eagerly wonders the identity of the next Pope. Events which make this historic moment in the Church even more titillating are afoot, like the continuing world-wide sex-abuse scandal (which has reached England), the recent censoring of American nuns, and the Church's controversial stance on political issues.
The issues are complicated for Catholics, who understand the Church doctrinally as the Bride of Christ, protected from serious error by the Holy Spirit, a hierarchical institution with the proverbial keys to the Kingdom of Heaven. Part of the Church is the magistrate, which teaches a practical right from wrong for Catholics to gain entry into Paradise upon death; another part is the Pope himself, who is chosen by the Holy Spirit through the College of Cardinals, and is the vicar of Christ. It needn't be said that for Catholics these institutions aren't passing political things to be voted out of office or changed through demonstration or revolution. As God is eternal so is the Church, even if it is suppressed (as it was most brutally in ancient Rome, and equally may be today in totalitarian countries like China).
Another issue at play is the understanding of human history as linear. In the Catholic tradition, after the Fall (described in the first part of the Book of Genesis), God chose a people born of Abraham to be His instrument of salvation of humanity. Through their trials and fealty to Him, He was born as a human to them, uniting his perfection to our imperfection in the real person of Jesus. To fully atone for our sins, he--as a human--had to sacrifice himself to God. Without going into the deep ontological logic that describes how the one God could also be two separate persons (much less three, to include the Holy Spirit), He did sacrifice Himself on the cross and redeemed humanity. Yet to fully conquer our sins He had to defeat the punishment for our sins, which was death, and rise from the dead. This, according to Catholic teaching, he did three days after he died. But before he returned to heaven, he commissioned his apostles to preach His good news with His power. Hence the Church and the priesthood was born. Catholicism teaches that at some point he will come again to reconcile all things, ending the sinful world humanity made through the fall by creating it anew as it was before. And so Catholics believe there was a beginning, and there will be an end.
This linear thinking can lead to some odd conclusions. European (and following their lead, American) Catholics seem to have collectively drawn the conclusion that the power and influence wielded by the Church is a sure sign of its favor in the eyes of God. This thinking was most apparent in the 16th century, when the Church was at the height of it's power. Never mind that could look back on some very corrupt episodes in it's history: most of the Crusades, the Avignon Papacy, and the Inquisition, to name a few. But it was priestly misconduct--namely the wanton selling of indulgences--that sparked Martin Luther to nail his 95 Theses to the doors of Wittenburg Cathedral, leading to schism and the offshoot Protestant religions. Yet despite the bitter feuds that followed, spilling over into catastrophic wars, and an attempt at curbing the corruption (the Council of Trent), the Church continued to see itself as condoned by God. This view was aided by the vast number of new conversions in South and Central America and in the Pacific.
The Church suffered other grievances also. The 1789 French Revolution was horribly anti-Catholic and saw most Parisian religious go to the guillotine. Outside the capital, the Church fared better--it's lands and wealth were largely nationalized by the new French government(s), but religious were persecuted and put to death in cities like Reims, Toulon, and Lyon. The humanistic philosophies of The Enlightenment which provided the intellectual foundation of the French Revolution continued to diminish the Church's influence throughout the 18th Century, and in 1917 the revolution in Russia which installed the Soviets (and the subsequent treaty of Versailles, which gave the Soviets outright some predominately Catholic nations, like Ukraine) was accompanied by fresh attack on religion. This one was easier to ignore, perhaps, because the Church that suffered the most was the Orthodox Church, to which most of the citizens of the new USSR belonged. The Spanish Civil War of 1936 hit closer to home, as the liberal side conducted many persecutions of religious in it's territory during the war. And the Second Vatican Council of 1962, which attempted to 'modernize' the Church by making it more accessible to world which knew it little after 500 years of enlightenment philosophy, indirectly resulted in far fewer priests, religious, and laity in the Western World.
While it is clear that the hegemony of the Church is now but a shadow of it's former self (in the 16th century), it is strange that it continues to have such an aura of authority to others. Catholic and non-Catholics alike tend to view the Church as having very broad authority, that its teachings and actions are inviolable. Whether in that context one sees the Church as a force for good or for evil is a matter of faith and perspective, of course. But as an indicator of God's favor, the secular power and influence of the Church throughout history tells a very uncertain story.
The phrase, "the Church is protected from serious error by the Holy Spirit" obviously also requires examination in light of the well-publicized scandals of the Church, from the Crusades on down to the current, probably yet-untold, incidence of sexual abuse by priests. It is facile to simply regard that phrase as untrue. The language is cloudy here, because of course unprovoked wars (with all the attendant horror of war itself), oppression as seen in the inquisition, and the sexual abuse of minors are very serious crimes. But my understanding of the "serious error" is that which specifically endangers the souls of Christians. In other words, as the Bride of Christ, the Church (whatever the intentions of its ministers) is assisted by the Holy Spirit such that it cannot "cause one of the little ones who believe in [Christ] to sin" (Mt 18:6).
That statement itself is fraught with connotations. It is certainly not true that Church ministers have been protected from persuading Christians to sin, both at the macro level (see: Crusades and Inquisition) and at the micro level (i.e. a priest giving unwise or malicious advice to a parishioner, causing him or her to sin). For that statement to be true, the "serious error" must have to do more with the broad teaching of the Church and very little to do with the actions of Christians. And, so far one accepts that explanation, it may be true. The Church has never taught as doctrine or dogma persecution--which nevertheless does nothing to excuse the sins committed in Catholicism's name down the ages.
Yet these arguments render the Church practically ineffective. In the rarefied world of doctrine and dogma the Church may indeed be "holy and without blemish" (Catechism #1426), yet in the world of material influence the Church has to account for at least a great deal of evil. This brings forth the question of it's practical purpose. If the ministers and body of the Church do evil, why should it continue? And certainly no amount of offsetting good (through charity, etc.), valuable as it may be, can be expected to repair great evil. The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains that the Church's purpose on earth is to faithfully continue Christ's work: "[T]he Church's mission is not an addition to that of Christ and the Holy Spirit, but is its sacrament: in her whole being and in all her members, the Church is sent to announce, bear witness, make present, and spread the mystery of the communion of the Holy Trinity" (Catechism #738). The language of this excerpt puts the Church into a role of providing sacrament (the tangible rendition of God's Grace) to the world. There is nothing in either the stated mission or the idea of a sacrament, notably, that implies a mandate of material authority over people, either to tell them how to think or punish their actions.
In fact, sacrament lies at the very center of the Church. In discussing the first sacrament, Baptism, the Catechism provides a clear picture of the holiness available to humans contrasted with the natural tendency of humans to sin.
Furthermore, as the Church may enjoy the special protection of the Holy Spirit in its mission as sacrament, its practical value lies not itself but in its body.
Therefore the secular power, influence, and glory of the Church falls into this category: "Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity" (Ecclesiastes 1:2). The sacramental nature and mission of the Church, however, is the legacy of the apostles and the rock that underlies the institution (cf Matthew 16:18). The Church deserves a special reverence because of it's power to administer the sacraments and assist humanity in receiving the Grace of God, but "special reverence" is demanded only by the Church's role as the Bride of Christ and the conduit of Grace, and not for any material manifestation. Neither should "special reverence" be construed as to imply that the Church is above reproach. A cursory examination of the tragedies perpetrated and suffered by the Church, in fact, indicates that it most deserves reproach most when it seems to forget about the individual ministry of sacrament and turns it's attention toward propagating or protecting its secular power and influence. But that is a discussion for historians and theologians. What is beyond discussion entirely is that the chief practical value of the Church is in the sacraments, and by extension the Grace and divine assistance which proceed from those sacraments.
(It's important to note here that the objective value of the Church lies in it's very identity as the Bride of Christ. For that reason alone it is good, and for that reason it obligates Christians to reverence. Its participation in the material world, however, animated as it is by humans, is prone to the same sins as the humans itself.)
The abdication of Pope Benedict XVI amid the increasing evidence of great scandal in the Church is a great issue for the administration of the entire Church and for the administration of the diocese affected. As the Church is called to participate in the world, those Church members (laity and religious) who commit crimes ought to be punished accordingly, by the laws that apply to them as participating citizens under the jurisdiction of their government. For the rest of the Church, the sins of its members serve as a sad reminder that nothing in this world is immune from the inclination to concupiscence, and therefore Grace that flows from the sacraments is all the more urgently needed.
Let the world eagerly watch proceedings in the Vatican. Let Christians more eagerly turn to the sacraments and answer the call to holiness; let us more eagerly seek to follow Christ's two great commandments.
The issues are complicated for Catholics, who understand the Church doctrinally as the Bride of Christ, protected from serious error by the Holy Spirit, a hierarchical institution with the proverbial keys to the Kingdom of Heaven. Part of the Church is the magistrate, which teaches a practical right from wrong for Catholics to gain entry into Paradise upon death; another part is the Pope himself, who is chosen by the Holy Spirit through the College of Cardinals, and is the vicar of Christ. It needn't be said that for Catholics these institutions aren't passing political things to be voted out of office or changed through demonstration or revolution. As God is eternal so is the Church, even if it is suppressed (as it was most brutally in ancient Rome, and equally may be today in totalitarian countries like China).
Another issue at play is the understanding of human history as linear. In the Catholic tradition, after the Fall (described in the first part of the Book of Genesis), God chose a people born of Abraham to be His instrument of salvation of humanity. Through their trials and fealty to Him, He was born as a human to them, uniting his perfection to our imperfection in the real person of Jesus. To fully atone for our sins, he--as a human--had to sacrifice himself to God. Without going into the deep ontological logic that describes how the one God could also be two separate persons (much less three, to include the Holy Spirit), He did sacrifice Himself on the cross and redeemed humanity. Yet to fully conquer our sins He had to defeat the punishment for our sins, which was death, and rise from the dead. This, according to Catholic teaching, he did three days after he died. But before he returned to heaven, he commissioned his apostles to preach His good news with His power. Hence the Church and the priesthood was born. Catholicism teaches that at some point he will come again to reconcile all things, ending the sinful world humanity made through the fall by creating it anew as it was before. And so Catholics believe there was a beginning, and there will be an end.
This linear thinking can lead to some odd conclusions. European (and following their lead, American) Catholics seem to have collectively drawn the conclusion that the power and influence wielded by the Church is a sure sign of its favor in the eyes of God. This thinking was most apparent in the 16th century, when the Church was at the height of it's power. Never mind that could look back on some very corrupt episodes in it's history: most of the Crusades, the Avignon Papacy, and the Inquisition, to name a few. But it was priestly misconduct--namely the wanton selling of indulgences--that sparked Martin Luther to nail his 95 Theses to the doors of Wittenburg Cathedral, leading to schism and the offshoot Protestant religions. Yet despite the bitter feuds that followed, spilling over into catastrophic wars, and an attempt at curbing the corruption (the Council of Trent), the Church continued to see itself as condoned by God. This view was aided by the vast number of new conversions in South and Central America and in the Pacific.
The Church suffered other grievances also. The 1789 French Revolution was horribly anti-Catholic and saw most Parisian religious go to the guillotine. Outside the capital, the Church fared better--it's lands and wealth were largely nationalized by the new French government(s), but religious were persecuted and put to death in cities like Reims, Toulon, and Lyon. The humanistic philosophies of The Enlightenment which provided the intellectual foundation of the French Revolution continued to diminish the Church's influence throughout the 18th Century, and in 1917 the revolution in Russia which installed the Soviets (and the subsequent treaty of Versailles, which gave the Soviets outright some predominately Catholic nations, like Ukraine) was accompanied by fresh attack on religion. This one was easier to ignore, perhaps, because the Church that suffered the most was the Orthodox Church, to which most of the citizens of the new USSR belonged. The Spanish Civil War of 1936 hit closer to home, as the liberal side conducted many persecutions of religious in it's territory during the war. And the Second Vatican Council of 1962, which attempted to 'modernize' the Church by making it more accessible to world which knew it little after 500 years of enlightenment philosophy, indirectly resulted in far fewer priests, religious, and laity in the Western World.
While it is clear that the hegemony of the Church is now but a shadow of it's former self (in the 16th century), it is strange that it continues to have such an aura of authority to others. Catholic and non-Catholics alike tend to view the Church as having very broad authority, that its teachings and actions are inviolable. Whether in that context one sees the Church as a force for good or for evil is a matter of faith and perspective, of course. But as an indicator of God's favor, the secular power and influence of the Church throughout history tells a very uncertain story.
The phrase, "the Church is protected from serious error by the Holy Spirit" obviously also requires examination in light of the well-publicized scandals of the Church, from the Crusades on down to the current, probably yet-untold, incidence of sexual abuse by priests. It is facile to simply regard that phrase as untrue. The language is cloudy here, because of course unprovoked wars (with all the attendant horror of war itself), oppression as seen in the inquisition, and the sexual abuse of minors are very serious crimes. But my understanding of the "serious error" is that which specifically endangers the souls of Christians. In other words, as the Bride of Christ, the Church (whatever the intentions of its ministers) is assisted by the Holy Spirit such that it cannot "cause one of the little ones who believe in [Christ] to sin" (Mt 18:6).
That statement itself is fraught with connotations. It is certainly not true that Church ministers have been protected from persuading Christians to sin, both at the macro level (see: Crusades and Inquisition) and at the micro level (i.e. a priest giving unwise or malicious advice to a parishioner, causing him or her to sin). For that statement to be true, the "serious error" must have to do more with the broad teaching of the Church and very little to do with the actions of Christians. And, so far one accepts that explanation, it may be true. The Church has never taught as doctrine or dogma persecution--which nevertheless does nothing to excuse the sins committed in Catholicism's name down the ages.
Yet these arguments render the Church practically ineffective. In the rarefied world of doctrine and dogma the Church may indeed be "holy and without blemish" (Catechism #1426), yet in the world of material influence the Church has to account for at least a great deal of evil. This brings forth the question of it's practical purpose. If the ministers and body of the Church do evil, why should it continue? And certainly no amount of offsetting good (through charity, etc.), valuable as it may be, can be expected to repair great evil. The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains that the Church's purpose on earth is to faithfully continue Christ's work: "[T]he Church's mission is not an addition to that of Christ and the Holy Spirit, but is its sacrament: in her whole being and in all her members, the Church is sent to announce, bear witness, make present, and spread the mystery of the communion of the Holy Trinity" (Catechism #738). The language of this excerpt puts the Church into a role of providing sacrament (the tangible rendition of God's Grace) to the world. There is nothing in either the stated mission or the idea of a sacrament, notably, that implies a mandate of material authority over people, either to tell them how to think or punish their actions.
In fact, sacrament lies at the very center of the Church. In discussing the first sacrament, Baptism, the Catechism provides a clear picture of the holiness available to humans contrasted with the natural tendency of humans to sin.
Conversion to Christ, the new birth of Baptism, the gift of the Holy Spirit and the Body and Blood of Christ received as food have made us "holy and without blemish," just as the Church herself, the Bride of Christ, is 'holy and without blemish.' Nevertheless the new life received in Christian initiation has not abolished the frailty and weakness of human nature, nor the inclination to sin that tradition calls concupiscence, which remains in the baptized such that with the help of the grace of Christ they may prove themselves in the struggle of Christian life. This is the struggle of conversion directed toward holiness and eternal life to which the Lord never ceases to call us. (Catechism #1426)Therefore the call to holiness, and the necessity of the sacraments for receipt of Grace, is universal (one might even say, Catholic). It is the primary imperative for humanity as described by Christ when he said, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment" (Matthew 22:37). It applies to all people, whether Christians or not. And more significantly, it applies to all Christians, to include the priests, bishops, cardinals, popes, nuns, and laity. In the same way concupiscence applies to all Christians. And the Church makes no claim of infallibility as regards its ministers--the claim applies only to the collective action as regards dogma, an example of which being that the mission of the Church is to be sacrament for the Holy Spirit, succinctly stated thus:
The seven sacraments [of the Church] are the signs and instruments by which the Holy Spirit spreads the grace of Christ the head throughout the Church which is his Body. The Church, then, both contains and communicates the invisible grace she signifies. It is in this analogical sense, that the Church is called a 'sacrament.' (Catechism #774)The language of the Catechism, which interprets the teaching of Christ, puts the focus of Christianity squarely on the holiness of the individual Christian, which itself proceeds solely through the Grace of God as administered by the Church through the Sacraments. Holiness is manifestly not something bestowed by the Church upon people, but by God upon people, because God is the only source of Grace. The Church functions as a conduit of Grace in the Sacraments, but it cannot limit God (for He is by definition illimitable) by stopping Grace. For this reason, the Church teaches the primacy of conscience: "A human being must always obey the certain judgment of his conscience" (Catechism #1790), which protects the freedom implied in Jesus' second great commandment, "Love your neighbor as yourself" (Matthew 22:37).
Furthermore, as the Church may enjoy the special protection of the Holy Spirit in its mission as sacrament, its practical value lies not itself but in its body.
Because they are members of the Body whose Head is Christ, Christians contribute to building up the Church by the constancy of their convictions and their moral lives. The Church increases, grows, and develops through the holiness of her faithful, until "we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God." (Catechism #2045)It is appropriate that the Church is called a 'mystical body,' because insofar as it exists in the realm of the angels, beyond our tangible and material world, it is 'holy and unblemished.' No doubt this Church, called the Church Triumphant, has all more power and glory than humanity can imagine. But the practical Church of this world, in its divinely-ordained role of assisting people in the struggle for holiness, is called the Church Militant and, as it is ordered and ministered by humans, it is no more protected from concupiscence than the rest of humanity. There is a great mystery in the fact that both Churches are, in fact, the same entity (much like, perhaps, the Trinity constitutes one God), and it is therefore indeed mystical. The fact remains, however, that Christians--even priests or other religious--are no holier than the rest of the mass of humanity.
Therefore the secular power, influence, and glory of the Church falls into this category: "Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity" (Ecclesiastes 1:2). The sacramental nature and mission of the Church, however, is the legacy of the apostles and the rock that underlies the institution (cf Matthew 16:18). The Church deserves a special reverence because of it's power to administer the sacraments and assist humanity in receiving the Grace of God, but "special reverence" is demanded only by the Church's role as the Bride of Christ and the conduit of Grace, and not for any material manifestation. Neither should "special reverence" be construed as to imply that the Church is above reproach. A cursory examination of the tragedies perpetrated and suffered by the Church, in fact, indicates that it most deserves reproach most when it seems to forget about the individual ministry of sacrament and turns it's attention toward propagating or protecting its secular power and influence. But that is a discussion for historians and theologians. What is beyond discussion entirely is that the chief practical value of the Church is in the sacraments, and by extension the Grace and divine assistance which proceed from those sacraments.
(It's important to note here that the objective value of the Church lies in it's very identity as the Bride of Christ. For that reason alone it is good, and for that reason it obligates Christians to reverence. Its participation in the material world, however, animated as it is by humans, is prone to the same sins as the humans itself.)
The abdication of Pope Benedict XVI amid the increasing evidence of great scandal in the Church is a great issue for the administration of the entire Church and for the administration of the diocese affected. As the Church is called to participate in the world, those Church members (laity and religious) who commit crimes ought to be punished accordingly, by the laws that apply to them as participating citizens under the jurisdiction of their government. For the rest of the Church, the sins of its members serve as a sad reminder that nothing in this world is immune from the inclination to concupiscence, and therefore Grace that flows from the sacraments is all the more urgently needed.
Let the world eagerly watch proceedings in the Vatican. Let Christians more eagerly turn to the sacraments and answer the call to holiness; let us more eagerly seek to follow Christ's two great commandments.
Wednesday, February 20, 2013
Springtime and Her
It was a magnificent afternoon.
I was freed early from work for a meeting on Mainside with the eternally frustrating IPAC, which is the Installation Personnel Administration Center and commonly experienced as a particular circle of hell in which one's dearest personal information is subjected to the worst bureaucratic treatment by apathetic Marines with no connection to you or your unit, and therefore no motivation or mutually shared esprit to look after you, and where consequently your pay, or orders, or personnel file are treated as nasty intrusive garbage and whose maintenance is a barely tolerable chore.
Fortunately there is a civilian who works there, soft-spoken and incongruously muscular, whose professional sneer conceals a real desire to help out the poor patients who dare enter that sanctuary.
A short stop later to receive a 'counseling' on my pending move, where I was warned in no uncertain terms that I might expect out-of-pocket expenses during my move to Wisconsin, since my home of record is in Bellevue, Washington, and told severely that this was the last move at government expense that I would ever have, which is sort of the point of leaving this Marine Corps anyway, isn't it?
But nevertheless I walked out of there with the promise of movers calling shortly to arrange a date for picking up my stuff at the unusual hour of 2:35 in the afternoon (1435 to those military types). And behold! the sun was shining with the richness of spring down on the wintry world, where the temperature grudgingly lifted itself up above 40 degrees and an inexplicable, delightfully warm breeze cooed among the shriveled boughs.
I drove home on roads crowded, but with little slowing. I listened to some re-discovered and favorite music, happily singing along (a little off-key, as is my wont) and letting the sentiments of the songs wash over me. I and greeted my ecstatic dogs in a sunlit house, for the first time I can remember (though I know objectively it's happened before). A happy mood was upon me, a mood which promised something great. A moment of pure happiness--especially because I had something to accomplish, and so I cheerfully bent to work on a self-imposed 'honey-do' list.
I should note here that my wife is wonderfully competent, and asks very little of me around the house. She will happily paint walls over and over again until she finds the perfect palette of complimenting colors; she tidies up repeatedly after our daughter (and, shamefully, me on occasion) with a ready hand; she steams and scrubs the floors and changes light bulbs and does laundry and generally applies all the ingenuity and dedication she brought so successfully to Television Production to our home. She also lovingly rears our daughter and freelance writes on the side, I might add. Only a very few tasks are left to me--take out the garbage (which she does as well), perhaps, and remove the dead mice from our basement. You might say I am not strictly necessary in a domestic sense.
But as she is currently doing all of that stuff in our wonderful NEW house in Wisconsin, preparing it with her customary industry for our arrival after the move I have just arranged, there are a few things I can do for her. And while such tasks may not be the 'something great' that our collective consciousness has in mind on a sunny day, well, I can say that they are something much greater than I ever did before her. My wife, see, loves a clean house. And I can really give her that today. It is wonderful to clean crusted dog excrement off the odd rug, clean dead mice and their excrement out of the basement, run a few loads of laundry, scrub the floors of the sticky remains of toddler snacks, and air out the house. It's a honey-do list I made, for her. A way to give back to her what she gives to me every day. It's small, but joyful, and it is the metaphorical cherry on top of this day. I can't wait for her to see everything--not so she will comment (though she inevitably will, and with loving gratitude), but so she'll enjoy it. So she'll be able to relax when she arrives and not feel the need to clean, or tidy, or avert her attention from a pressing mess that's just too hard to clean with a curious toddler running around.
Later that evening I pay an all-too-rare visit to the Sacrament in my church. Incense sits heavily upon the pews with the other worshippers, all conspicuously ordinary yet distinct, comfortably anonymous in the dimness and their private prayers. Their normality emphasizes their focus on the monstrance on the altar, and I slide almost effortlessly into a spiritual communion that I can never seem to achieve anywhere else.
Then in the quiet warmth of our house, I make myself dinner. I'm a bachelor with very specific tastes on a night like this, so I indulge not in ramen or a frozen pizza but in eggs, bacon, and cereal. There are tidbits for the dogs, who happily interrupt naps to come and politely beg (mostly by staring longingly with ever the slightest look of accusation at my feast), but when I finally pull away from my book and clean my dishes, I'm struck by how odd it feels without her.
It feels odd because I should be content. Food, comfort, a good book, a feeling spiritual wellness, a sense of accomplishment--I have all I should ever need for happiness. But my heart is restless. My inner St. Augustine rears his head. I know for whom I cry. It is her. My companion. Her sudden smile, her startling plunges into meaningful conversation, her thoughts on the day, the news, the kid, the food, the everything. All that I achieved this day is meaningless except for the clean rugs slowly steaming on the living room floor, with the thermostat set to eighty degrees, and the clean basement for laundry.
And I want to be with her.
I want to drop this magnificent day and barrel into the single-digit, blustery winter of Wisconsin, just to order her a glass of chardonnay at the nearest supper club (or dive bar), to laugh about the singular pleasure of seat-heaters in the car which somehow manage to warm you deeply even while most of your body shivers, to pick out the most unlikeable person in the bar and befriend them instantly (well, she does that. I just tag along).
But she is with a friend tonight, a rare opportunity to see a friend when they are both in the Midwest at the same time. She'd never want me absent, never consider me a third wheel, but I'm secretly glad she has this night to enjoy free from the needs of our new home, or our old home, or anything else. So that she can have something like my afternoon, hopefully with nothing to accomplish but the gladness that comes with renewing an old friendship.
And I will happily keep the light on here, literally and metaphorically. And hope she notices the basement when she gets home.
I was freed early from work for a meeting on Mainside with the eternally frustrating IPAC, which is the Installation Personnel Administration Center and commonly experienced as a particular circle of hell in which one's dearest personal information is subjected to the worst bureaucratic treatment by apathetic Marines with no connection to you or your unit, and therefore no motivation or mutually shared esprit to look after you, and where consequently your pay, or orders, or personnel file are treated as nasty intrusive garbage and whose maintenance is a barely tolerable chore.
Fortunately there is a civilian who works there, soft-spoken and incongruously muscular, whose professional sneer conceals a real desire to help out the poor patients who dare enter that sanctuary.
A short stop later to receive a 'counseling' on my pending move, where I was warned in no uncertain terms that I might expect out-of-pocket expenses during my move to Wisconsin, since my home of record is in Bellevue, Washington, and told severely that this was the last move at government expense that I would ever have, which is sort of the point of leaving this Marine Corps anyway, isn't it?
But nevertheless I walked out of there with the promise of movers calling shortly to arrange a date for picking up my stuff at the unusual hour of 2:35 in the afternoon (1435 to those military types). And behold! the sun was shining with the richness of spring down on the wintry world, where the temperature grudgingly lifted itself up above 40 degrees and an inexplicable, delightfully warm breeze cooed among the shriveled boughs.
I drove home on roads crowded, but with little slowing. I listened to some re-discovered and favorite music, happily singing along (a little off-key, as is my wont) and letting the sentiments of the songs wash over me. I and greeted my ecstatic dogs in a sunlit house, for the first time I can remember (though I know objectively it's happened before). A happy mood was upon me, a mood which promised something great. A moment of pure happiness--especially because I had something to accomplish, and so I cheerfully bent to work on a self-imposed 'honey-do' list.
I should note here that my wife is wonderfully competent, and asks very little of me around the house. She will happily paint walls over and over again until she finds the perfect palette of complimenting colors; she tidies up repeatedly after our daughter (and, shamefully, me on occasion) with a ready hand; she steams and scrubs the floors and changes light bulbs and does laundry and generally applies all the ingenuity and dedication she brought so successfully to Television Production to our home. She also lovingly rears our daughter and freelance writes on the side, I might add. Only a very few tasks are left to me--take out the garbage (which she does as well), perhaps, and remove the dead mice from our basement. You might say I am not strictly necessary in a domestic sense.
But as she is currently doing all of that stuff in our wonderful NEW house in Wisconsin, preparing it with her customary industry for our arrival after the move I have just arranged, there are a few things I can do for her. And while such tasks may not be the 'something great' that our collective consciousness has in mind on a sunny day, well, I can say that they are something much greater than I ever did before her. My wife, see, loves a clean house. And I can really give her that today. It is wonderful to clean crusted dog excrement off the odd rug, clean dead mice and their excrement out of the basement, run a few loads of laundry, scrub the floors of the sticky remains of toddler snacks, and air out the house. It's a honey-do list I made, for her. A way to give back to her what she gives to me every day. It's small, but joyful, and it is the metaphorical cherry on top of this day. I can't wait for her to see everything--not so she will comment (though she inevitably will, and with loving gratitude), but so she'll enjoy it. So she'll be able to relax when she arrives and not feel the need to clean, or tidy, or avert her attention from a pressing mess that's just too hard to clean with a curious toddler running around.
Later that evening I pay an all-too-rare visit to the Sacrament in my church. Incense sits heavily upon the pews with the other worshippers, all conspicuously ordinary yet distinct, comfortably anonymous in the dimness and their private prayers. Their normality emphasizes their focus on the monstrance on the altar, and I slide almost effortlessly into a spiritual communion that I can never seem to achieve anywhere else.
Then in the quiet warmth of our house, I make myself dinner. I'm a bachelor with very specific tastes on a night like this, so I indulge not in ramen or a frozen pizza but in eggs, bacon, and cereal. There are tidbits for the dogs, who happily interrupt naps to come and politely beg (mostly by staring longingly with ever the slightest look of accusation at my feast), but when I finally pull away from my book and clean my dishes, I'm struck by how odd it feels without her.
It feels odd because I should be content. Food, comfort, a good book, a feeling spiritual wellness, a sense of accomplishment--I have all I should ever need for happiness. But my heart is restless. My inner St. Augustine rears his head. I know for whom I cry. It is her. My companion. Her sudden smile, her startling plunges into meaningful conversation, her thoughts on the day, the news, the kid, the food, the everything. All that I achieved this day is meaningless except for the clean rugs slowly steaming on the living room floor, with the thermostat set to eighty degrees, and the clean basement for laundry.
And I want to be with her.
I want to drop this magnificent day and barrel into the single-digit, blustery winter of Wisconsin, just to order her a glass of chardonnay at the nearest supper club (or dive bar), to laugh about the singular pleasure of seat-heaters in the car which somehow manage to warm you deeply even while most of your body shivers, to pick out the most unlikeable person in the bar and befriend them instantly (well, she does that. I just tag along).
But she is with a friend tonight, a rare opportunity to see a friend when they are both in the Midwest at the same time. She'd never want me absent, never consider me a third wheel, but I'm secretly glad she has this night to enjoy free from the needs of our new home, or our old home, or anything else. So that she can have something like my afternoon, hopefully with nothing to accomplish but the gladness that comes with renewing an old friendship.
And I will happily keep the light on here, literally and metaphorically. And hope she notices the basement when she gets home.
Monday, February 18, 2013
On Self, Soul, and Scripture
The
first Sunday of Lent has passed, and with it the usual gospel reading of Jesus
being tempted in the desert. The parallels to the season are obvious: as Jesus
fasted 40 days, so should we; as Jesus
rejected material comforts, worldly power, and (I think) the need for others to
love him, so should we; as Jesus put his trust in God to feed him, to lead him
to the right place (not dominion), to love him without necessarily showing it,
so should we.
I
wonder how many, hearing that passage, appreciate the 'temptations' part of it.
I certainly don't. I hear about Jesus telling the devil, "no," to all
the powers in the world, and I think it's faintly laughable, as if any
right-minded person with an inkling of heaven would up and say, "why yes,
Satan, I would like to sell you my soul for all the powers of the world."
It's even a little melodramatic for me when the devil says, "for all of
these [powers and principalities] have been handed over to me, and I may give them
to whomever I wish." If that's true, part of me thinks, then where's God?
I
think more appropriately the thought of giving up one's essential self is
appalling to anyone, even the most die-hard atheist. Whether we believe in God
or not, most of us recognize something important and separate about ourselves.
I think it's unique, but even if one is not willing to go that far ("out
of seven billion people, there's got to be somebody like me!"), then there
still exists that thing about us that
makes us different than others. And that, called 'the soul' or any other name,
is something that nobody willingly surrenders.
Or
maybe people surrender it all the time. Those who do, I think, are called
'company men' or 'brown-nosers' or more appropriately 'sell-outs;' we identify
the same phenomena in 'gold-diggers' and prostitutes. Those people who inspire
contempt because on some level they are obviously a little less than fully
human in character--those people have surrendered their souls. Of course,
probably not as efficiently as they would have to Satan, whether he exists or
not. Jesus was offered all the powers in the world, and they only hope to gain
a little more money at the cost of their self-respect. But the sad joke about
those who sell their souls, for whatever, is that 'they' usually sell it
cheaply.
It's
good that Christianity has this season of renewal. Nearly every religion in the
world practices some form of fasting and meditation, and while a common
complaint of critics is that Christianity puts these things into manageable
little boxes ("oh, you only have to do it once a year? well, that's not
exactly a life change!"), it's meant more provide focus an education.
Psychologists have noted that things like a certain amount of self-denial, and
a form of meditation, and a feeling of being part of something bigger than
oneself, all conduce to being happier, more fulfilled people. Turning to Christ
requires all of those things, because frankly they are the building blocks of
any good relationship: sacrificing for the other, paying attention to them in
some way, and putting the relationship itself ('something bigger than either of
members of the relationship') ahead of oneself.
Returning
to the foundation of the relationship, once a year during this Lenten season,
is a way of learning to re-appreciate the other member of the relationship.
Like a husband and wife in a routine need a 'date night' (or a full-blown
second honeymoon), like two friends growing apart need a good chat, like a
person needs to occasionally return to his or her favorite pass-time, we all
probably need a chance to rekindle our understanding of Christ's role in our
life: how He modeled right behavior; how He loved us; how He suffered for us on
the cross; and how we are called to honor Him in our behavior. After all, the
Mass exists as a reminder of these things, but week after week is
routine...until Lent shakes it up and points directly back to the foundation.
The
Catholic Church has many connotations as an institution. Catholics tend to
focus on the efficient and effective charity, on the almost miraculous
maintenance of tradition, the excellent education and firm moral teaching, and
its universality. Others (it seems) tend to focus on the sexual abuse scandal
and the criminal way in which it was covered up, the undue influence it seems
to have in contemporary American politics, the moralizing and proselytizing
that seems cruel and judgmental, and the effective marginalization of women and
condemnation of homosexuals. Both views are probably all too true, and I am
often both proud and ashamed to be a Catholic. But both miss the mark.
The
Apostolic Church existed began as a way to provide a tangible thing so that Christians could have a
meaningful relationship with God--first through the apostles who knew Jesus,
then through their successors. The sacraments are a tangible way to experience
the love and sacrifice of Jesus. The ministry of the church should renew us the
way Lent renews us: by bringing us closer to God (and providing a means to
those scientifically proven benefits cited before). Ultimately, the Church
isn't important for what it teaches
so much--and truth be told, many so-called Church perspectives are merely
opinions from Catholic humans who happen to be priests--but rather for what it does: minister. And Catholics have a
responsibility for a personal relationship with God, as provided by the Church,
and with all the obligations a real relationship imposes. Showing up,
conversing, caring about the other, being the kind of person with whom the other
wants a relationship in the first place.
Too
often, I think, Christians end up surrendering their souls to their various
Churches. Having opinions and doing what one is told is sadly always easier
than a meaningful, give-and-take relationship that requires maintenance.
Separating oneself into a special little church clique, with the mutual support
of other people, is sadly always easier than pursuing a connection with
something largely intangible (which is the definition of something 'larger than
oneself'). Such easy surrenders are so because they provide self-importance.
But real relationships have no room for self-importance, and neither does
sainthood.
What
I heard in the gospel about the temptation in the desert was Jesus rejecting
all those things which would separate him from God. Material possessions,
worldly influence, self-importance: these things pull us away from the other at
the heart of a real relationship. Jesus' citing of scripture in his answer to
the devil indicates that he does not reject the offers because of their source,
but instead because he'd rather live
on 'every word that proceeds from the mouth of God,' and that everyone worship
God instead of him, and that God's love not be tested--because he is in a
meaningful relationship with God and that's the most important thing. What
brings us back to that model are the sacraments, the sacrifice, and the prayer
that the Catholic Church directs at Lent - not as a means to control but as a
way to to provide a tangible 'object' of the relationship.
It's
a marvelous institution for this reason. All the posturing, the positions, the
pride (however justified), and the sins (however appalling) are merely
secondary.
Sunday, February 10, 2013
Cross Country Memories
I woke up today thinking of Phoenix. Perhaps it was the weak, pale February sun streaming in my windows, filtered through gossamer white cirrus clouds. Only in the winter, with the cold sucking humidity out of the air and the thick trees bare, does Virginia ever approach the sheer visibility of the Southwest. And on a morning such as this, my mind went back to the crisp clarity of a Friday evening, the sun all coppery on the darkling sand, when my pilot and I passed a Southwest 737 on the approach path into Phoenix Sky Harbor airport.
I've had some occasion of late to reflect on the past, and one of the things that stands out the most is my need to keep busy. Well, busy is not the right word--distracted, more like. It's stood me in good stead, actually. In college, when I was finally shamed enough about mediocre grades to put in some effort, it drove me to a respectable finish. And when I entered the fleet as a mighty, world-famous Green Knight, it put me up for a lot of working weekends.
Now, the reality of a fighter squadron is, literally, training. Training to kill, in the air and on the ground. In the Marine Corps, the latter is much more important and it is additionally required that fighters be able to kill on the ground only one side of the battle--the enemy--while leaving the friendlies unscathed. Considering the proudly stated mission of the Marine Rifle Squad is "to locate, close with, and destroy the enemy by fire and maneuver, or to repel the enemy assault by fire and by close combat," well, some degree of precision in this endeavor is required from us carefree airedales.
So there is a secondary reality, and that is flight hours. As Malcolm Gladwell put it, the path to proficiency lies in hours spent (10,000 hours being the minimum requirement for mastery, and while we all strive for that, who has that much time, I wonder?), and so our individual and collective ability to kill our enemies without fragging that closing and destroying Marine Rifle Squad relied on flight hours.
Flight hours, of course, are expensive. Not just in fuel (2,000 or so gallons of which we used each flight), but more tellingly in maintenance. For it is axiomatic in the realm of physics, whose laws are inexorable for us as those of death and taxes, that maneuvering such as is required to arrive quckly and safely in the right spot of the sky, oriented the correct way, in a slightly negative-G dive (which helps the bomb fall more closely aligned to the aircraft computer-extrapolated ballistic path) to deliver some hundreds of pounds of hate and discontent upon the enemy, accurately, puts some necessary and occasionally violent force on the jet. All the computers, and hydraulic pumps, and hinges and joins and bolts and generators, all the structural fuselage elements--all of them subject to sudden loading and unloading of gravitational forces as we airedales, with joy in our hearts and laughter in our voices (it's true) yank and bank our way up from the safety of terrain masking and roll in aggressively to "the chute," that wonderful and terrifying flight path from which said hate and discontent would shortly be dealt, but also a dangerous prison of principle, for in "the chute" one is "on government time," a nice way of saying we are required by divers oaths, spoken and unspoken, to deliver the fire support so desperately needed by our comrades regardless of personal safety, and a jet scribing a predictable straight path through the sky toward an intended target for some five to ten seconds makes a juicy target for the foes and their air defenses, doesn't it precious?
Which is all to say that the airplanes, designed as they are for the Newtonian toll by wonderful engineers at Boeing, undergo quite a beating in everyday flight. And they are not, therefore, always working.
Now, fear not. Being nothing less than a professional organization, American Naval Aviation has instituted many safeguards to ensure that broken aircraft are diagnosed and healed quickly (for machines so complicated, which carry life in their austere and purposeful cockpits, act more like living things than cold machinery). The fine Marines who crawl all over the jet and learn it's most secret places, in rain and cold and heat and long, deadly sunny days, they diligently diagnose all manner of little issues, and even more diligently repair them. They are Marines, of course, and are deeply invested in doing their job correctly - something to which I've alluded before. And they certainly won't certify a broken aircraft for us airedales to fly.
That means we only have so many aircraft at any one time, and as each aircraft can only fly so many times per day (three), we only have so many flights. And with a squadron of 34 aggressive, type A, red-blooded aviators all clamoring for flight hours (for to reach eventually that 10,000, though I've only ever heard of one gentlemen do it, and he wasn't flying the Hornet's ful 13 tons of twisted steel, sex appeal, fully articulating leading and trailing control surfaces, and hydraulic and electric circuits, so I'll spare him my envy for his piston-engined, single-control-surface monoplanes), and more importantly all 34 needing training for to kill accurately, space on that flight schedule gets pretty precious. When you start factoring in that maybe only 10 of the aviators are qualified tactical instructors, and one of them is needed for every flight with an unqualified aviator trying to get qualified for to become officially more accurate at killing, well, Flight Hours are very precious indeed, and you can probably forget Mr. Gladwell's 10,000.
But. A brilliant solution. The United States having a vast and reliable network of airfields left over from the days they also enjoyed a comfortable technological and economic advantage over the rest of the world, due largely to the vision and enterprise of men and women like that 10,000 flight hour earner (and where did all of that go, we wonder), and airedales being professionals, well, why don't you go seek your 10,000 hours on the weekend, young WSO? However, you must not under any circumstances come back to the home field until you are scheduled to do so. Therefore you must seek your fortune elsewhere--in Las Vegas, or Phoenix, or Long Beach, or Palo Alto. If you can show good reason, you may go farther afield: Seattle, Portland, Boise, Lake Tahoe, Albuquerque.
Well. Unspoken was the fact that I, like many of my fellow "road warriors," was single. And though some were vocal about the "double standard," I had no desire to pull my peers from their families on the weekend. Also, I was conscious of the fact that in the competitive world of fighter aviation, it was rather well looked-upon if one showed uncommon dedication to flying. And there were real benefits, too. Places to see, bars to visit, new airfields to experience, all while earning per diem getting a free hotel stay. Plus the advantage of progressing in qualifications faster than my peers, if I could entice an instructor along. And I didn't have to go home to my sparsely furnished one-bedroom apartment (seriously, my wife still teases me about my life with only a bed, dresser, and desk) and wonder what to do with my weekends.
So I became a consummate road warrior--during one two-month stretch, I did nine weekend cross-countries. Yup, if you're counting--that's every weekend. Plenty of distraction.
They were days of work and wonder--sitting, hot, in the pits of El Centro with the engines screaming at idle, poring over a chart and scratching fuel and time calculations on my kneeboard to see what sort of Bingo we'd set to safely arrive at our next destination (Bingo being the term for the minimum amount of fuel required to get to base, with a specified safety reserve) while the sweat beaded under my visor and made the mask slippery on my face; knocking off 20 minutes of dogfighting, breathless and panting from the G forces and the strain of keeping one's head turned around and locked on the other aircraft, and keeping my voice aviator cool on the radio with center as I asked for IFR to Phoenix; nervously asking for a lower altitude VFR over the Grand Canyon, and receiving permission, and descending lower into the layered red rock walls while a sparkling blue river winked out of the depths; calling hotels and 1-800-Wx-Brief to file the next flight from the deliciously cool FBO in Palm Springs, giddy with freedom after deciding with the other aircrew that we were NOT going to Long Beach tonight, that we wanted to go to Las Vegas instead, and spending a half an hour 'making it happen;' scrubbing clean an ancient whiteboard with paper towels and the damp sleeve in a crumbling base operations building, wallpapered with squadron stickers, in preparation for a full debrief; and best of all, the sudden quiet at sunset, when the radios magically stop squawking and the light fails and cockpit cools off and the horizons become brilliant streamers of red and pink and orange--when it was time to find a new place, a new hotel and restaurant and bar, and the work is over.
And I remember one winter afternoon, awash in coppery sunset light, when at 18 miles from the field we were directed to turn left and intercept the approach path for runway 07C ('zero-seven-center'), and asked to slow to 130 knots. These instructions are to be followed to the letter, now, because there are many airplanes at any given time trying to get into that small little cone of airspace around Phoenix Sky Harbor, and land--many of them filled with innocent passengers, at that. Having them all moving at more than 100 miles an hour, and climbing and descending on there way out and in, complicates the problem immensely. The hardworking controllers at airports like that deserve a beer next time you meet once in your local watering hole, maybe, and they certainly deserved the utmost professional courtesy from the likes of me, whose ego was often close to writing checks his body couldn't cash, and nor could his airplane, at least not without upsetting the smooth flight of 150 odd southwest passengers, but that fortunately didn't happen but once, and it's a story for another time.
In any case, it was with some trepidation that I tapped the foot pedal, and transmitted back to the controller, "Combat 41 unable. Minimum airspeed 150." Which was putting my pilot and the controller in a pickle, and no mistake. For the former, well, our 13 ton aircraft with two tons of fuel aboard did not like flying at 150 knots, oh no precious, what with finite lift available even with the wings totally reconfigured for maximum lift provision. It requires an exceedingly gentle touch, I'm told, and a high power setting, which the aircraft greatly desires to turn into speed for to gain more lift and stability. A hundred seventy-five knots being preferred. For the latter it became immediately evident why our speed was a problem. Several miles ahead of us, nearly blending in with the desert floor (at 18 miles one is barely seeing the southwestern suburbs of Phoenix below), was a trundling Southwest Airlines 737, placidly and gently gliding in at about 130 knots. Not being designed, see, for the speed of heat, or for eight Gs, or for accurate delivery of death to all comers in the air, on land, and at sea, the Boeing 737 has nice large rigid wings that are uncongenial to the lift or drag requirements of, as one pilot once undelicately put it, "flying through your own a**hole." It is therefore also much more stable at slow speeds.
My pilot answered my radio call over the Intra-Cockpit Communication System (ICS) with a four-letter word unprintable on this family website. The controller, after a pregnant silence, said uncertainly "Combat 41, roger, traffic twelve o'clock, three miles, seven-thirty-seven." Which meant, of course, that he heard me about the 150 knots, and oh by the way there was another aircraft off my nose at three miles. To which my pilot replied via ICS, "Tally," and I was able to say "Combat 41, Tally that traffic," and then quietly wonder whether we'd have to do a turn of holding before we landed.
But this controller was smart and helpful, which made a nice change from all the rude ones who question your omniscience and try to kill you by flying you into either an airplane or a hill, true story, and both also for another day. He hopefully asked over the radio, "Combat 41, can you land on the right?" which of course that Phoenix has two large runways, the right-most one being shorter when landing on runway 07, and perhaps we could land on a different runway than that tortoise of a 737 quite safely. So I hurriedly thumbed to my airfield diagram, saw that the right runway was 7,800 feet long, which was about 200 feet shorter than we'd like but technically quite long enough for the Hornet, and doing a quick calculation on how much I trusted my young pilot's ability to stop from running us off the end of the runway, and exiting the airplane ungraciously through the door that Martin Baker provides, and quickly tapped my foot pedal to transmit cooly, "Combat 41, affirm," and save the day. Which, of course, I did, because the controller happily replied "Roger Combat 41, maintain visual separation that traffic and continue your approach visually to zero-seven-right." It wasn't exactly kosher because under IFR traffic rules he has to give me a heading, but it was quite an expedient solution. My pilot accelerated to a much smoother 175 knots and swung right to offset from the Boeing and line up on the right runway, which looked rather short compared to the two other 10,300-foot-generous runways provided by Sky Harbor. And, having a pilot's generous dose of ego, he batted no eyes at my quick brief about the 7,800 foot runway earmarked for us.
So I found myself with the setting sun at my back, beauty before my eyes and relief in my heart, passing a Southwest Airlines airplane in my hornet. We touched down about 15 seconds before he did, and ended up having to wait a while on the taxiway, worse luck. But it sure made the beers taste good that evening.
Flight hours, of course, are expensive. Not just in fuel (2,000 or so gallons of which we used each flight), but more tellingly in maintenance. For it is axiomatic in the realm of physics, whose laws are inexorable for us as those of death and taxes, that maneuvering such as is required to arrive quckly and safely in the right spot of the sky, oriented the correct way, in a slightly negative-G dive (which helps the bomb fall more closely aligned to the aircraft computer-extrapolated ballistic path) to deliver some hundreds of pounds of hate and discontent upon the enemy, accurately, puts some necessary and occasionally violent force on the jet. All the computers, and hydraulic pumps, and hinges and joins and bolts and generators, all the structural fuselage elements--all of them subject to sudden loading and unloading of gravitational forces as we airedales, with joy in our hearts and laughter in our voices (it's true) yank and bank our way up from the safety of terrain masking and roll in aggressively to "the chute," that wonderful and terrifying flight path from which said hate and discontent would shortly be dealt, but also a dangerous prison of principle, for in "the chute" one is "on government time," a nice way of saying we are required by divers oaths, spoken and unspoken, to deliver the fire support so desperately needed by our comrades regardless of personal safety, and a jet scribing a predictable straight path through the sky toward an intended target for some five to ten seconds makes a juicy target for the foes and their air defenses, doesn't it precious?
Which is all to say that the airplanes, designed as they are for the Newtonian toll by wonderful engineers at Boeing, undergo quite a beating in everyday flight. And they are not, therefore, always working.
Now, fear not. Being nothing less than a professional organization, American Naval Aviation has instituted many safeguards to ensure that broken aircraft are diagnosed and healed quickly (for machines so complicated, which carry life in their austere and purposeful cockpits, act more like living things than cold machinery). The fine Marines who crawl all over the jet and learn it's most secret places, in rain and cold and heat and long, deadly sunny days, they diligently diagnose all manner of little issues, and even more diligently repair them. They are Marines, of course, and are deeply invested in doing their job correctly - something to which I've alluded before. And they certainly won't certify a broken aircraft for us airedales to fly.
That means we only have so many aircraft at any one time, and as each aircraft can only fly so many times per day (three), we only have so many flights. And with a squadron of 34 aggressive, type A, red-blooded aviators all clamoring for flight hours (for to reach eventually that 10,000, though I've only ever heard of one gentlemen do it, and he wasn't flying the Hornet's ful 13 tons of twisted steel, sex appeal, fully articulating leading and trailing control surfaces, and hydraulic and electric circuits, so I'll spare him my envy for his piston-engined, single-control-surface monoplanes), and more importantly all 34 needing training for to kill accurately, space on that flight schedule gets pretty precious. When you start factoring in that maybe only 10 of the aviators are qualified tactical instructors, and one of them is needed for every flight with an unqualified aviator trying to get qualified for to become officially more accurate at killing, well, Flight Hours are very precious indeed, and you can probably forget Mr. Gladwell's 10,000.
But. A brilliant solution. The United States having a vast and reliable network of airfields left over from the days they also enjoyed a comfortable technological and economic advantage over the rest of the world, due largely to the vision and enterprise of men and women like that 10,000 flight hour earner (and where did all of that go, we wonder), and airedales being professionals, well, why don't you go seek your 10,000 hours on the weekend, young WSO? However, you must not under any circumstances come back to the home field until you are scheduled to do so. Therefore you must seek your fortune elsewhere--in Las Vegas, or Phoenix, or Long Beach, or Palo Alto. If you can show good reason, you may go farther afield: Seattle, Portland, Boise, Lake Tahoe, Albuquerque.
Well. Unspoken was the fact that I, like many of my fellow "road warriors," was single. And though some were vocal about the "double standard," I had no desire to pull my peers from their families on the weekend. Also, I was conscious of the fact that in the competitive world of fighter aviation, it was rather well looked-upon if one showed uncommon dedication to flying. And there were real benefits, too. Places to see, bars to visit, new airfields to experience, all while earning per diem getting a free hotel stay. Plus the advantage of progressing in qualifications faster than my peers, if I could entice an instructor along. And I didn't have to go home to my sparsely furnished one-bedroom apartment (seriously, my wife still teases me about my life with only a bed, dresser, and desk) and wonder what to do with my weekends.
So I became a consummate road warrior--during one two-month stretch, I did nine weekend cross-countries. Yup, if you're counting--that's every weekend. Plenty of distraction.
They were days of work and wonder--sitting, hot, in the pits of El Centro with the engines screaming at idle, poring over a chart and scratching fuel and time calculations on my kneeboard to see what sort of Bingo we'd set to safely arrive at our next destination (Bingo being the term for the minimum amount of fuel required to get to base, with a specified safety reserve) while the sweat beaded under my visor and made the mask slippery on my face; knocking off 20 minutes of dogfighting, breathless and panting from the G forces and the strain of keeping one's head turned around and locked on the other aircraft, and keeping my voice aviator cool on the radio with center as I asked for IFR to Phoenix; nervously asking for a lower altitude VFR over the Grand Canyon, and receiving permission, and descending lower into the layered red rock walls while a sparkling blue river winked out of the depths; calling hotels and 1-800-Wx-Brief to file the next flight from the deliciously cool FBO in Palm Springs, giddy with freedom after deciding with the other aircrew that we were NOT going to Long Beach tonight, that we wanted to go to Las Vegas instead, and spending a half an hour 'making it happen;' scrubbing clean an ancient whiteboard with paper towels and the damp sleeve in a crumbling base operations building, wallpapered with squadron stickers, in preparation for a full debrief; and best of all, the sudden quiet at sunset, when the radios magically stop squawking and the light fails and cockpit cools off and the horizons become brilliant streamers of red and pink and orange--when it was time to find a new place, a new hotel and restaurant and bar, and the work is over.
And I remember one winter afternoon, awash in coppery sunset light, when at 18 miles from the field we were directed to turn left and intercept the approach path for runway 07C ('zero-seven-center'), and asked to slow to 130 knots. These instructions are to be followed to the letter, now, because there are many airplanes at any given time trying to get into that small little cone of airspace around Phoenix Sky Harbor, and land--many of them filled with innocent passengers, at that. Having them all moving at more than 100 miles an hour, and climbing and descending on there way out and in, complicates the problem immensely. The hardworking controllers at airports like that deserve a beer next time you meet once in your local watering hole, maybe, and they certainly deserved the utmost professional courtesy from the likes of me, whose ego was often close to writing checks his body couldn't cash, and nor could his airplane, at least not without upsetting the smooth flight of 150 odd southwest passengers, but that fortunately didn't happen but once, and it's a story for another time.
In any case, it was with some trepidation that I tapped the foot pedal, and transmitted back to the controller, "Combat 41 unable. Minimum airspeed 150." Which was putting my pilot and the controller in a pickle, and no mistake. For the former, well, our 13 ton aircraft with two tons of fuel aboard did not like flying at 150 knots, oh no precious, what with finite lift available even with the wings totally reconfigured for maximum lift provision. It requires an exceedingly gentle touch, I'm told, and a high power setting, which the aircraft greatly desires to turn into speed for to gain more lift and stability. A hundred seventy-five knots being preferred. For the latter it became immediately evident why our speed was a problem. Several miles ahead of us, nearly blending in with the desert floor (at 18 miles one is barely seeing the southwestern suburbs of Phoenix below), was a trundling Southwest Airlines 737, placidly and gently gliding in at about 130 knots. Not being designed, see, for the speed of heat, or for eight Gs, or for accurate delivery of death to all comers in the air, on land, and at sea, the Boeing 737 has nice large rigid wings that are uncongenial to the lift or drag requirements of, as one pilot once undelicately put it, "flying through your own a**hole." It is therefore also much more stable at slow speeds.
My pilot answered my radio call over the Intra-Cockpit Communication System (ICS) with a four-letter word unprintable on this family website. The controller, after a pregnant silence, said uncertainly "Combat 41, roger, traffic twelve o'clock, three miles, seven-thirty-seven." Which meant, of course, that he heard me about the 150 knots, and oh by the way there was another aircraft off my nose at three miles. To which my pilot replied via ICS, "Tally," and I was able to say "Combat 41, Tally that traffic," and then quietly wonder whether we'd have to do a turn of holding before we landed.
But this controller was smart and helpful, which made a nice change from all the rude ones who question your omniscience and try to kill you by flying you into either an airplane or a hill, true story, and both also for another day. He hopefully asked over the radio, "Combat 41, can you land on the right?" which of course that Phoenix has two large runways, the right-most one being shorter when landing on runway 07, and perhaps we could land on a different runway than that tortoise of a 737 quite safely. So I hurriedly thumbed to my airfield diagram, saw that the right runway was 7,800 feet long, which was about 200 feet shorter than we'd like but technically quite long enough for the Hornet, and doing a quick calculation on how much I trusted my young pilot's ability to stop from running us off the end of the runway, and exiting the airplane ungraciously through the door that Martin Baker provides, and quickly tapped my foot pedal to transmit cooly, "Combat 41, affirm," and save the day. Which, of course, I did, because the controller happily replied "Roger Combat 41, maintain visual separation that traffic and continue your approach visually to zero-seven-right." It wasn't exactly kosher because under IFR traffic rules he has to give me a heading, but it was quite an expedient solution. My pilot accelerated to a much smoother 175 knots and swung right to offset from the Boeing and line up on the right runway, which looked rather short compared to the two other 10,300-foot-generous runways provided by Sky Harbor. And, having a pilot's generous dose of ego, he batted no eyes at my quick brief about the 7,800 foot runway earmarked for us.
So I found myself with the setting sun at my back, beauty before my eyes and relief in my heart, passing a Southwest Airlines airplane in my hornet. We touched down about 15 seconds before he did, and ended up having to wait a while on the taxiway, worse luck. But it sure made the beers taste good that evening.
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