Guilt-Gems - Part 2

At the reception station we received our haircuts, immunizations, uniforms, etc. But after three days or so, trucks arrived to take us to our assigned training units. Basic training began in earnest.

Boy, did it ever begin in earnest.

“That’s your ride, dickhead” said a helpful NCO, pointing toward an olive drab pickup truck. I clambered into its bed. The trip to my destination took about fifteen minutes: the last fifteen minutes of relative peace I would experience for the next several weeks, until the conclusion of Phase Fucking One of basic training, strictly speaking one station unit training (OSUT), because my fellow recruits and I would be together for a total of fifteen weeks, combining together both our basic and advanced individual training.

As soon as the pickup truck arrived, its passengers were greeted by several screaming drill sergeants who gave every indication that they would love nothing better than to beat the living shit out of us.

At some point I learned that I was now in C Battery of the7th Training Battalion, specifically in its 4th Platoon. The platoon’s ultimate task would be to learn the skills of a field artillery forward observer. The immediate task involved mastery of such skills as making the blanket of your cot so taut that you could bounce a quarter off it.

A second critical task involved sorting out who would steal your stuff from who wouldn’t. Imagine a pigeon hole desk whose pigeon holes grew steadily more numerous. I started off with two pigeon holes. I wound up with 50, because the platoon contained 50 men and by the end of OSUT I knew the strengths, weaknesses, and personality of each one.

At age 23 I was the second oldest member of the 4th Platoon—henceforth the “Fawth Platoon” because of the way a guy from Harlem pronounced it and his pronunciation has stayed with me. Most of the guys were 18, and they behaved like 18-year olds, with numerous squabbles and occasionally knock down drag out fights, the prohibition against physical violence notwithstanding. It was not the weaker members who got drubbings; it was the more obnoxious members. The single most obnoxious guy got beat up so thoroughly and his face was so bruised and swollen, that he was dubbed “the Elephant Man,” to whom in the wake of his drubbing he did indeed bear an uncanny resemblance.

Just about everybody got nicknames. There was, for example, “Volkswagen,” who had ears so big they made his head look like a Volkswagen with both doors open. There was also a guy from New York named Neidecker, whose surname won him not one but two nicknames: “Needle Dick” and “My Pecker.”

The guys could not quite figure out what to make of me, but taken on the whole they accorded me an unusual degree of respect, at least by the coarse standards of the Fawth Platoon, and I went by three nicknames: “Grims,” “Lieutenant,” and “Senator.” I was proud of the fact that I had such dignified nicknames, and crestfallen when one drill sergeant, who evidently thought I should be taken down a peg, eventually christened me “Poindexter.”

I have dealt with the nicknames at such length for two reasons: first to convey a sense of the coarseness that was a staple of Fawth Platoon; and second to indicate the limited insight of my comrades: for by all rights I should have been called “Gandhi.”

That was because I consciously modeled my behavior on Gandhi, for two reasons. The first was that I frequently used my knowledge of Gandhi’s principled convictions and techniques to de-escalate conflict, which won me respect for my skill in that area. The second was that a Gandhi-like persona reduced the chance that someone would elect to beat the shit out of me.

Then one day an event occurred in which I behaved in a way totally unlike my usual persona. The platoon included a young recruit who especially looked up to me. That particular day the recruit said something—I forget what—and for some reason I replied with the same casual brutality as anyone else. A look of hurt flashed across the recruit’s face that I will never forget.

John Updike once wrote a story entitled “Guilt-Gems.” It describes a middle-aged man named Ferris who discovers in his memory “certain bright moments that never failed to make him feel terrible.” In one of several vignettes, Ferris leaves home despite his youngest son’s desperate attempts to prevent this. He recalls the moment of his departure and of the expression on his son’s face. “Had Ferris imagined his son’s tears of despairing fury? He thought not; there has to be some shine of the extreme, to make a guilt-gem.”

Updike describes several other such episodes, each of which yields its own guilt-gem. None involve major wrongs. They consist instead of swipes at people that might seem minor but cut deeply. Updike ultimately says that “a guilt-gem is a piece of the world that has volunteered for compression.” That is how Ferris recalls these various episodes in which he has wounded others. And by reducing them “to a few baubles that he could, as it were, put in his pocket and jingle, he was, doubly, guilty.”

Unlike Ferris, I have a number of major regrets. So perhaps I have collected fewer guilt-gems. But I do have the guilt-gem of that casual cruelty at Fort Sill.

Because if you’re going to play Gandhi you have to go all out. You have to live your life in such a way that, although you will undoubtedly make mistakes that hurt others, you will not reduce those mistakes to mere baubles. It is not the mistakes but the trivialization of those mistakes, the people you have hurt, and the harm you have done, to mere baubles, that betrays your real nature.

The theme of this project, which I have decided to entitle “The Struggle for Peace,” is that the best and probably only chance to save this country lies in our willingness to change our behavior. The power of the supposed villains of our contemporary crisis rests upon the fact that we have willingly given them that power. And having relinquished power for so long and so lustily, we have created a situation that can only be defused by a massive effort to change ourselves.

In its way, this struggle will be as difficult and will involve as much sacrifice as in the Civil War, but unlike that struggle, this one can be won on no battlefield save the one in our own hearts. And what of the guilt-gems? By the way that we chronically conduct, day after day, seemingly minor partisan political squabbles with one another that nonetheless trivialize the humanity of our "opponents," we are amassing guilt-gems of sufficient weight that, taken in aggregate, will crush our republic as surely as condemned convicts were once crushed with stones.