Moderne Menschen leben allein

On Saturday I attended, for the first time, a reunion of my old Army Reserves unit.  It was a rather small turn-out, and the food was pretty ghastly, and there were only a few people there I actually knew. And yet, I had a great time. Old friends whom I hadn’t seen for 20 years embraced me, and the years melted away. New friendships were forged over a cold Shiner Bock and an album of faded photographs. We celebrated the bonds of friendship in a quiet fog of regret, knowing that the experiences we shared are not only past, but are a lost and unreplicatable piece of America.

As my daughter and I drove home again, I tried to find the words to explain. I’m still not sure I can.

Most of us were college students. Many of us joined for selfish reasons. To pay for college, to earn enough money to gain our adult independence. We were peace-time soldiers at a time when America was engaged in a cold war that no one really believed in anymore. We had been stationed in Europe, in Korea, in Hawaii. We spun the dials and wrote the reports and spent long hours lovingly maintaining the rusty old Vietnam-era trucks in the motor pool and went to the range once a year to qualify on our M-16s. We watched the Berlin wall come down and celebrated and believed. We got degrees in foreign language and linguistics and history and literature. Some of us ended up in the Balkans for a spell. Some stayed in until retirement. Many ended up in government service. None of us appears to be rich and famous.

From a distance, it would be hard to see the commonalities. How can you explain this bond that stretches across continents and decades without breaking? Is it an accumulation of shared experiences like basic training and sweating out long weeks of the summer at Fort Hood? Is that all there is to the mysterious thing the military calls esprit de corps?

I think it’s more basic than that, and more real. It’s not something you can create with a uniform and a song, no matter what your drill sergeant said. It’s not something that happens at work, no matter how many company picnics and happy hours are in the budget. It’s not something that happens at college, no matter how many late night study groups at Dominican Joe’s you attend with your classmates. It’s something that happens when people actually place their lives and well-being in the service of others. Even at the motor pool on Camp Mabry, or in the training facility at Camp Bullis, or in a big green tent in Fort Hood, in the middle of a peace-time exercise pretending to be at war, we each knew, without speaking it, what our responsibilities were. Standing in front of my platoon during formation, looking at their faces more familiar to me than family, I knew that my life belonged to each of them. Now, when someone posts an old picture on Facebook, those same faces compel my emotions across time.

I think most people never experience that. But I think, perhaps, that once this missing piece of human experience was as common as head colds and hangnails are today. In traditional human societies, the interdependence of each individual with the group, the demands placed on each to work for the survival of the group must have created a different brand of personal relationships than, say, my spending 20 minutes doing a peer-review of a colleague’s cross-functional process flow. Our society emphasizes personal  achievement and independence, a sort of post-modern daydream of  rugged mountain-man individualism that induces our tired brains to imagine that our end-of-the-day commute home in our little metal boxes down a baked ribbon of hot asphalt is somehow the triumphant ride home from our day’s labors and achievements in the world.  But we are alone. In our cars we are alone with our thoughts or the inane babble of the radio. At work we are alone in a crowded office, staring at a computer screen. At school we sit alone at a desk, working for a grade obtained by being compared to our peers. At home we sit alone or with our small family group, often alone while we are together, each absorbed in different activities. All of our need for connection, for love, for understanding and acceptance and joy, is put on one person, our intimate partner, if we have one.  One fragile human relationship to house all of our hopes and dreams, provide all of our nurturing and support, inspire all of our passion, and thrill our complicated human libidos? No wonder marriages don’t last.

I miss my comrades-in-arms from my army days. I miss the feeling of kinship and shared purpose. But there is no path back to that place. The military today isn’t what it was, and although I will come together with them once a year to share a few cold beers and reminisce, I can’t pretend that those old bonds have the power they once did. But there is something else, something new in my life. After many years of struggling with hard times, underemployment, and a severely depressed spouse, I have achieved some stability. And with a little bit of my time and energy free to give, I have started volunteering, marching, making posters, attending organizing meetings, making phone calls. In other words, I have become an activist. Me and a whole bunch of other people it seems. In the back rooms of coffee houses, at a battered table at Scholtz Garten, on campus, in a cramped apartment with cats in our laps, we meet and talk, and while we plan a rally or a vigil, while we make our lists and argue and discuss and recite poetry and drink ridiculous amounts of coffee, the stories begin to work their way out. As we share the markers to make our signs, we begin to speak, haltingly, as though learning a new language, we talk about love and marriage and children and abortion and jobs and lovers and dreams. While we work together, we’re moving towards something, and that makes all the difference. It’s a start.  

Herkneth, felawes, we thre been al ones. Lat ech of us holde up his hand til oother, and ech of us bicomen otheres brother.