Tom Matlack wrestles with the meaning of Memorial Day for a guy raised by Quakers.
Photo—Michael Kamber. A mother searches for her son, missing since he was taken into taken into custody by U.S. troops months earlier. Taken outside Abu Ghraib prison, May 2004.
I was raised by Quaker pacifists. My mom’s parents were actually Presbyterian missionaries in China before returning to the U.S. and finding Quakerism. So my mom’s brother fought in World War II and for a few days was missing in action during the Battle of the Bulge.
But on my dad’s family the Quaker pacifism goes back 10 generations in this country and an unknown number before that in England. The scoundrel of the Matlack clan is Timothy, the scribe of the Declaration of Independence who was thrown out of the Quaker church for drinking, bad debts, bear baiting, cock fighting, and for volunteering to fight in the Revolutionary War.
My dad was an English professor at Cornel during the Vietnam War years. I was only a toddler than but I remember when he sent his draft card back to Selective Service, risking two years of prison. I remember the renegade priest Daniel Berrigan, one of the FBI’s most wanted men at the time, hanging around our house on South Hill in Ithaca. And a few years later, once we have moved to Amherst, Massachusetts, getting arrested with my dad who led protests at the gates of Westover Air Force Base. Unfortunately the judge would not allow me the chance to follow through with my act of civil disobedience since he thought I was too young to enter an official plea.
I went on to become a venture capitalist while dad spent his post-academia career working for the American Friends Service Committee, promoting peace and justice around the world and also in Washington.
I’m not sure I am a pacifist, but I am sure my parents still are. So a natural question is what to think of on Memorial Day if you don’t believe in war?
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As for Memorial Day itself my recollections are hazy at best. This isn’t surprising as holidays have never been my thing. In part it’s probably the Quaker in me. Quakers definitely downplay the importance of holidays over day-in-day-out connection with the “Inner Light” in each of us, meaning the God within. It’s also probably because my birthday is December 16th so I always got screwed as a kid when it came to Christmas. Finally, as a divorced father of two kids who generally spent holidays with their mom I had to come to terms with the fact that every day is pretty much like the next one unless you buy into some Wal-Mart version of reality.
That said there are a few memories of Memorial Day that stick out.
Just after college—when I was working in New York City drinking too much and causing all kinds of trouble—I took the bus with a friend to his parent’s house in Chatham on the Cape. My friend’s dad was there and played jingles for various brands he was working on. He was the original Don Draper, the creative director at J. Walter Thompson responsible for memorable campaigns for McDonald’s, Coke, and the Marines.
Another contemporary of my friend and I at the house was a relative of Thomas Eagleton, who had famously been pulled from the Democratic ticket in 1972 for his history of depression. I didn’t figure out who Eagleton even was, or my own struggles with depression, until much later.
All I remember is going to a barn where they played country music with my buddy and the young Eagleton to drink way too much beer. Going for a long run on the Cape toe path in glorious spring weather. Playing horseshoes with the real Don Draper. And flashing my buddies in what I thought was a fraternity style prank but I later realized was amazingly naïve (unbeknownst to me, since my friend had a serious girlfriend, my other two companions were actually gay lovers).
A decade later I would find myself on the Cape again for Memorial Day. This time it was to care for my two baby children while their mother, my soon-to-be-ex-wife, took off. She had rented a house in Wellfleet between selling the house we had built together and lived in for less than a year in Barrington, Rhode Island and rehabbing her post-divorce brownstone in Boston. I was all of 32. I immediately became local as my life line were meetings in church basements where I was trying desperately to stay sober. My buddies became the fishermen, construction workers, and year-round gays in Provincetown. I got to see the resentment in everyone’s eyes as tourists invaded the beauty the Outer Cape. And their cynicism with which they commented, “Yeah, but they won’t be back till July 4th.”
Last Memorial Day I was playing one-on-one basketball with my son on an outdoor court across from the Little Compton, Rhode Island town common. Honestly, I didn’t remember it was Memorial Day until I saw a bunch of plastic chairs, ancient men in uniform, and American flags. My primary objective was beating Seamus, a lumbering 15 year-old at the time with a devastating jump hook. I ended up bent over, humiliated, while listening to the Star Spangled Banner being played across the street. I honestly thought perhaps Memorial Day was appropriate for the beating I had just taken.
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But none of these memories gets at the pacifist view of the remembrance of war. I actually think pacifists think about war more than the average human being, kind of like Mormons in Utah and Born Again Christians in the deep south have a much higher usage rate when it comes to porn. The thing you abhor fascinates you.
My dad has always been a Civil War buff. As soon I was old enough to vaguely understand it, he read Michael Shaara’s “Killer Angels” aloud to me. I stared at the troop maps of Gettysburg and wondered how in the world a professor from Bowdoin College, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, defended Little Round Top at all odds and changing forever the history of our country, and very likely the world.
I found my dad’s passion for war trivia passed directly down to me. A sort of men at their very worst and best introspection that I couldn’t look away from. The opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan became an obsession with me as did The Band of Brothers.
It’s no accident that I have always tried to keep in touch with my friends who went into the military. A buddy was in the 82nd Airborne at the front of the first Iraq War. We exchanged frequent communications throughout his ordeal.
In the last few years my lens for war has been Michael Kamber, the NYT photojournalist. Michael’s whole goal in life has been to shoot the truth of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. His view is that the world needs to see what is going on, raw and unfiltered.
This fit perfectly with my pacifist’s obsession with war. I didn’t like the wars when they got started nor when they dragged on for a decade. But I couldn’t turn my eyes away from them. I wanted to know the gory details of exactly what was going on behind the news reports and the less controversial of Kamber’s photographs which graced the front page of the Times.
Michael was always willing to email me back from the ground when I happened upon a story I didn’t understand, or a rumor that involved US misbehavior in some way. He generally took the side of the troops and was highly critical of the politicians who had sent them all there. He often told me that sending an 18 year-old from mid America, who enlisted to have a job, to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqis or the Afghans was an impossible mission. It was carried out with bravery and with conviction, but no amount of American heart could take a kid who had very been out of Iowa or Michigan and make him capable of rebuilding a country from the ground up.
Michael reported many horrific stories and shot pictures that captured the intense physical and emotional pain of the combatants. But it was the death of his best friend, Tim Hetherington, which hit him the hardest, and therefore me too.
In a way it seemed to be the end of the addiction for him. He often described his need to cover wars to be a deep-seated affliction that couldn’t shake no matter how hard he tried. The adrenaline of being on the front lines, of nearly dying, and of seeing men killing each other right before his eyes was both awful and intoxicating.
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My son, a 16 year-old sophomore in high school, has his heart set on attending West Point. I don’t know where the idea came from but he has researched it exhaustively, talking to many graduates and reading every book he can get his hands on. He is a young man of amazing faith and focus on service. I admire him greatly well beyond what I owe him as his father. And I have stopped trying to talk him out of his dream.
So on this Memorial Day, this pacifist thinks of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and the men who gave their lives at Omaha Beach. I think of Cape Cod, getting drunk with my friends and then getting sober with the locals. I think of watching men in uniform on a town green while heaving with exhaustion on a basketball court. I think of Michael Kamber and Tim Hetherington. I think of my dad, the pacifist and protestor. And I think of my son, the West Point recruit.
I would not say I am a pacifist by a long shot, but I do believe the use of violence should be reserved to situations of defense (such as deterring violent criminals) and consent (such as in sports). I think James Garner’s character Charlie in “The Americanization of Emily Arthur Hiller” had it right on Memorial Day: “I don’t trust people who make bitter reflections about war, Mrs. Barham. It’s always the generals with the bloodiest records who are the first to shout what a Hell it is. And it’s always the widows who lead the Memorial Day parades …… Read more »
I don’t see why pacifists would be less interested in Memorial Day than any other group. Memorial Day is for honoring those who have died for our country; there is no holiday celebrating those who kill for it.
I honor MLK Jr among the heroes of Memorial Day. “Service” does not equal “soldier.”
While war is choice that humans make and pacifists have chosen not to make war anymore, I think that pacifists should simply be thankful that others permit them their pacifism and that others are willing to die for them on the battlefields where their freedoms are protected (and yes, I recognize that a lot of that “freedom” that they are supposedly dying for is simply B.S., but it isn’t always). One day, all humans will have made the choice to not make war anymore. Whether that’s because of human extinction or because humans finally developed the wisdom and courage to… Read more »
“many of the U.S.’s war have been reasonably justifiable (Afghanistan comes to mind)”
Would you mind elaborating on just how it is reasonably justified for the US to kill tens of thousands of civilians in order to hunt down a handful of criminals?
Well, as I recall, the U.S. suffered an attack on September 11, 2001. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. asked the Taliban to turn over the attacker. The Afghanistani government of the time refused (the Taliban as it were, who are now called terrorists and insurgents even though they are properly partisans and patriots of Afghanistan). As promised, the U.S. invaded to get their hands on Osama, which was a reasonable thing to do. The rest of the story after Tora Bora, where it seemed that Osama was dead or at least no longer in Afghanistan, was kind of a mess, but… Read more »
How is one dead guy who was found-not even in the country we invaded and have yet to leave-worth the lives of thousands upon thousands of innocent civilians. Our government and military have killed many times more innocents in Afghanistan alone than were lost on 9/11. Who exactly are the terrorists?
Sorry for the late reply. This page got move along pretty quickly. As I understand the history, this one guy was located in Afghanistan at the time of the 9/11 attacks. The government of Aghanistan at the time was not going to give him up. I recall seeing tv clips of Obama and Mullah Omar praising the 9/11 attacks on TV at the time. Was the U.S. to simply stand by and let this stand? Most people, including my countries leaders, thought not and joined the U.S. in Afghanistan. Not all the same people joined the U.S. (my country included)… Read more »
So exactly how many innocent civilians killed to get one bad guy would you consider “reasonably defensible”? Hell, I don’t think it’s reasonable to even jail 1 innocent person in order to catch 10 guilty (Blackstone ratio), so you can imagine what I think of killing as many as the US has this past decade.
I’m totally lost on the point of this article.
Thank you for that reflective and honest response to a very emotion packed topic. You have caused me to dig,deeper into my own views.
I’ve stopped trying to talk my son out of his dream, too. The town where he graduated from high school has a casino and a Walmart, his grandma and his fiancee, and not much else. He needed a ticket out and that’s the one he bought for himself. He’s brave and strong and I hope they don’t chew him up and spit him out, same as any parent sending their kid into the world. May all of our sons return home, whole.
Amen Justin.
I must have missed the commercial that said Memorial Day is the “remembrance of war” as you say. This is a day to remember those who sacrificed (lives, livelihoods, family, their own personal freedoms, years of their lives) to defend freedom. In my seventeen years of military service, I’ve only met a few who really “wanted” to go to war. Despite all the pacifist wishes in the world, war is sometimes a necessary evil. It should be avoided at all costs, but without the men and women of this country who have volunteered to put themselves in harm’s way, our… Read more »
There are a certain portion of people who feel remembering the fallen in our wars equates to a celebration of war. Hey, it’s America. What do you expect?
The sentence was, “But none of these memories gets at the pacifist view of the remembrance of war.” Pacifists don’t believe in war. So I was trying to explain the irony of all this thinking about war by people who don’t believe in war. And yes the people lost in those wars. I actually don’t disagree with you at all (not that I am a pacifists but still). I totally agree that we should remember those who sacrificed. And that is what I do with those in this piece and many more, on Memorial Day and otherwise. But I was… Read more »