"What happened to Gary Cooper? The strong silent type? That was an American. He wasn't in touch with his feelings. He just did what he had to do."
--Tony Soprano to Dr. Melfi in an early episode of HBO's The Sopranos
The men I grew up around were not gregarious.
While silence is no guarantee of depth--sometimes, as with the simple gardener at the center of the 1979 Hal Ashby film Being There--the taciturn are only presumed to possess koanic wisdom. Sometimes quiet people simply have nothing to say.
I don't think they were toxic either, though they didn't talk about how they felt. I imagine this was in part because of their models, their fathers and the strong, silent movie stars they grew up watching. There were codes of masculinity, things that might be discussed in some contexts, but mostly we were to nod and to make small jokes.
I imagine it was because they thought talk was not only cheap but futile, and that it was silly to think giving voice to their inchoate aspirations and fears about old hurts, grievances and disappointments could in any sense be helpful.
They transmitted this reluctance to talk to me, for before I wanted to be anything else I wanted to be like them. Men acted; they didn't talk about acting. They went to war and didn't come back, or if they did they sat up alone with the tips of their cigarettes burning with anger in the dark. They went to work and came home. They opened sweating bottles of beer on the back porch. They asked questions but provided only select answers.
That's why I don't know much about what my father did during the Vietnam war. And why, when he was in his late 80s, Karen recorded her father talking about his service during World War II. But even then the stories he told made the experience seem like an adventure, like a summer away at camp, not three years in jungles and on rocky archipelagos where you were as likely to be killed by strange diseases as by Japanese bullets.
Yanko was a medic in the Army--considered a noncombatant. Under the Geneva Convention, soldiers were expected to, as much as practical given the circumstances, avoid shooting at noncombatants.
Japan signed but never ratified the Geneva Convention though, in 1942, it promised to abide by it. Still, the U.S. Army contends it purposefully targeted Army medics during the war. The red crosses they wore on their helmets and as armbands made enemy snipers more likely to target them. So most medics stopped wearing the medical insignia, and some even armed themselves like regular soldiers. But Yanko preferred to talk about the poker games, and the trip back from the war, when he was reunited with his brothers on a hospital ship.
Long ago, I interviewed a man who survived the attack on Pearl Harbor. He was in his 60s then. He didn't seem that old to me, just another stolid east Texas farmer in a denim chore jacket. He'd joined the Navy because he'd heard the food was better, because he'd never seen the ocean.
He didn't know anything about geopolitics, he didn't think anything about the Japanese occupation of Indonesia or about how Roosevelt had reacted to it by freezing Japanese assets and imposing an oil embargo. He didn't have an opinion on whether Yamamoto might have believed the only path left to him was to try to kill the giant in his sleep.
He didn't know a thing about the higher forces pressuring and shaping the world where he was to live out the rest of his life. All that was above his pay grade.
He was just a kid, doing what he was told. And when there was no one left to tell him what to do he fired a sidearm impotently into the sky until he woke up as he was being fished from the water.
I can't find the clipping and don't remember much about that interview other than it was unsatisfying and difficult, though the subject was kind enough and wanted to help me out. But apparently you forget things after the battle's over, or your memories feel wobbly and unreliable. Maybe it's like waking from a dream--you have an evaporating recollection, some residual but inarticulable dread, but the details you recall don't add up to any sort of sense. So you can't really talk about it.
Those who were in it and made it through it might understand, but everyone's experience is unique.
Later on, you might construct a narrative, decide there must have been heroes, but the truth might be that you only did what you thought to do in the moment. Or rather what you didn't think to do, that it was all a reflex--that the training kicked in like they always told you it would. Or else you improvised and some grace shined on you that, for reasons obscure and unknowable, did not shine on some others.
You could never have imagined that 45 years later some kid with a notepad would be asking you to tell him how it was on that infamous day. "It was hard, son. It was hard."
We have all done hard things. We are all capable of selflessness as well as cowardice. No generation is inherently greater than any other; all of us will be tested in some ways. History will gossip about us too.
But a lot of us had people--fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers--who did things we could not imagine ourselves doing; who passed tests we are lucky not to have to take.
When you consider the world at large, maybe you can admit that you've been more fortunate than most. Maybe you are not hungry, maybe you are not cold, maybe you are not persecuted (though surely there is someone out there on a screen trying to convince you that you are). Maybe you enjoy a certain status among your neighbors, maybe you send and receive Christmas cards. Maybe you can admit things are not so bad.
They tell us these days that it is unhealthy to suppress our emotions, that eating our feelings can lead to all sorts of physical and psychic harm. I don't doubt that, though I am sometimes impatient with the sort of therapeutic culture that insists every thought is worth expression.
Having been instructed by the silence of strong men, I am perhaps not the best-equipped person to hear someone else's confession.
I still admire Gary Cooper.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
Read more at
www.blooddirtangels.com
Editorial on 12/08/2019