full fathom five

The power of vengeance

I just finished an article in the New Yorker (Apr. 21) by Pulitzer prize-winning author Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel).  He contrasts tribal societies' behavior around revenge with that of countries with stronger government control.  New Guinea is his example of a society where tribal disputes are settled personally, with each killing demanding a revenge-killing by the victim's relative.  This causes an endless state of war, with people demonizing enemy tribes and constantly fearing for their lives. 

In contrast, more developed countries' meting out of justice by an impersonal government allows us the luxury of peace, and allegiance to that is ingrained in us from an early age by religion and law.  While New Guinea children are taught that to die avenging one's enemy is the most honorable death one can have, American kids are taught to rise above revenge by sayings like "Two wrongs don't make a right;" "Love thy neighbor as thyself," "Do unto others....," and "Sticks and stones will break your bones...".   

However, Diamond shows that we're not so different from tribal societies once we go to war.  Then we do our share of demonizing and dehumanizing the enemy to take our revenge.  And once war is over, we go back to curtailing our desire for revenge and again trying to rise above it.  Diamond says this is deeply confusing, not least because vengeance is a very powerful emotion.  Equally powerful emotions of grief, anger, and love are amply aired in our society, but we don't talk about our desire for revenge.  This is an emotion that has been made shameful by our laws and religion.   

I think Diamond has put his finger on why those who fought WWII were so quiet about it when they came back.  There was such a disparity between the savagery they'd experienced and what was expected of them when they returned: to paste on a smile and build the peace, make up for lost time, that they couldn't talk about their sorrow or anger for lost comrades, the hatred of the enemy that was necessary for them to fight, and other dark thoughts.  Our Christian ethics made these thoughts unseemly.   

And another thing that reduced our returning soldiers to silence was the euphemistic way WWII was purveyed to civilians by the media.  Newspapers thought their readers wanted heroes, so stories of men taking out Japanese singlehandedly led the headlines. The gruesome side of war was left out, so that returning soldiers felt their experience of savagery was untranslatable to folks back home.  And that made them despair of ever telling it. 

Everyone I've ever talked with whose parents went through the war said the same thing: there was almost no talk about it except in very general terms for the rest of their parents' lives.  And because WWII was probably the most cataclysmic experience of their parents' lives, this silence was doubly strange.   

Our opposite stance to vengeance in war vs. peace still causes hesitance between military personnel and civilians.  At least I experience this when I talk with today's soldiers and sailors.  We don't talk freely about provocative subjects of war, vengeance, and what it takes to maintain peace.  But we should.   

One of the best things about researching my dad's service was beginning to have this dialogue.  I realized that people who have served have thought long and hard about these subjects.  They've had to.  They've lived it, and come home to silence.                      

The toll of secrecy and spring-cleaning

Last weekend I was down in Marblehead, Mass. giving a book-talk to a submarine veterans group.  I'd known that WWII was a time of great secrecy for the submarine service, christened "The Silent Service" for its tightlipped policies.  Submariners weren't even allowed to mention the names of their boats or their destinations, much less what they were doing on their patrols.  So when a submarine was overdue or lost, families had no idea what area of the world to even imagine their men in, much less research what might have happened. 

     I found out last weekend that the service is still this way, swearing its members to silence about specifics of their active duty even years after retirement.  The toll this secrecy has taken is that the submarine service has gotten short shrift in naval histories and other military literature.  Their sacrifices and achievements have gone unheralded. 

     There are some writers actively trying to redress this balance, but much information is forever lost.  Silence doesn't just take a toll on documented fact, but it seems to corrode memory and quash inspiration.

     There's another toll I've become aware of this morning.  My husband and I carried trash-bags on our 5:30am walk this morning, to do our part in our town's spring pickup of roadside trash.  I now have to clean the house before our upcoming long-weekend's trip to North Carolina.  I don't mind spring cleaning of our own private space, but this morning's roadside pickup made me despair of human nature by the time we got home with two full bags of roadside trash.  As in the past fifteen years we've lived here, our bags are dominated by cigarette packs, beer cans, fast-food wrappers and coffee cups, tic-tac boxes, and the weird signature mixed-drink droppings of rural motorists: individual-serving-sized bottles of coffee brandy and coffee-flavored milk cartons.    

               

Cyber-hygiene

I got an unsolicited e-mail from an organization wanting to advertise on my blog the other day.  I imagine that my blog was picked by robot, because I don't post often enough for advertisers to be interested.   

    I told my husband about it on our morning walk, and he asked if I'd clicked any links in the e-mail.  I said yes, that I'd wanted to check out the advertiser's website, but when I got there you had to register to browse it, and registration required "signing" a fine-print agreement a mile long.  So I got out of there and deleted the e-mail.   

    By this point, my husband had stopped walking, turning to stare at me in the road.  "Never click a link in an unsolicited e-mail!"  he said.  "It's just simple hygiene, like washing your hands after you go to the bathroom." 

    I felt my eyes widen.  "No," he said, "don't worry," and started to walk again.  "But from now on, go to your browser and type in whatever link you want to check out.  Don't ever click unsolicited links directly.  That's just like not giving financial info. over the phone when someone calls you."   

    So now I've got a list taped to the side of my computer.  Is there anything I should add to it besides the above? Or any site you know of where these rules that everyone should know are gathered?     

Blogs vs books

I'm noticing that blogs are not held to the same standards of logic and coherence that books and other printed matter - articles, essays, columns, etc. - are.  Commenters on blogs don't complain about inconsistencies in writers' arguments or attitudes, the way letters to the editor do in newspapers and magazines, or the way reviewers do for books.  In wondering why, the only thing I could come up with is the difference in organizing principles.  Blogs are chronological; they are divided up by days or - in the case of this blog -weeks.  Print material, on the other hand, is more often divided up by ideas, values, attitudes, events, etc.  Even a biography, or fiction that's a chronological life, has a coherence given by the author arranging the material into some kind of meaningful or consistent whole.  Even a diary is edited to achieve shape, meaning, and a sense of progression before going into print.   

    But blogs can be unedited, unshaped, and as rife with inconsistencies and contradictions as human life is. We live it and then move on.  Bloggers post, and then move on to new things, seemingly beyond the pull or influence or weight of former ideas.  I know that this is part of the appeal of blogs, that they are informal and raw, like life.  But I think the intangibility or virtual nature of the medium encourages this as well.  Blog posts seem to be gone after we click them off, simply because they're out of sight.  Whereas with books or other print forms that we can hold in our hands, there's more of a sense of wholeness.  Everything is there.  If we come upon a contradiction or something that doesn't correspond to what we read earlier, we can flip back to previous pages and check.   

    It's harder to do this with blogs.  We have to go back a few posts or into archives and hunt through entire posts to find whatever idea or attitude doesn't sit right with today's post.   

    What does this add up to?  I'm thinking that perhaps blogging is more given to the pure recording of daily events, like what I've heard of Reagan's diary: what I had for breakfast, who came to see me, etc. Just the straight facts.  Or, perhaps anecdotes: what I did today, what happened to so-and-so, as opposed to stories, which require shape and consistency.   

    Or if describing how to do something, like how to plant seedlings or make fudge, or if they are musings, such as this post - that they have to stand on their own, be wholes, so that readers don't have to wonder about loose threads, or go searching through archives to tie them up.   

     I don't read many blogs, so I don't have experience with those, for instance political commentary, that perhaps have the same expectations of consistency by readers that print forms do.  So these are just my observations from a limited sampling of the medium.  What's your reaction?  Do you think being able to hold a whole work - like a book or article - in our hands so that we can easily flip back and check something that doesn't add up, makes a difference in our standards of consistency, what we expect from a piece of writing?   

            

   

   

Walking Meditation II

The comments on the first post have been helpful and have lead me to a modus operandi for my morning walks, if not an answer.  Today's ice, atop the crusted snow after yesterday's rain, made it even more dangerous to stray off the snowmobile tracks.  I had to concentrate on each step in front of me as I felt my way across the field.  At one point, skirting a stream, I broke through snow up to my knee.

    But it all served to keep me in the present.  That's good, and the essence of the kind of Buddhist meditation I've been taught.  I used to meditate sitting crosslegged in a "zendo" or meditation-room, at the home of a Buddhist monk who led group meditations three mornings a week.  We're lucky in where we live, because this guy is right down the road from us.  The group of us would simply sit and listen to our breaths, focusing on them to quiet the mind and keep it from roaming to endless reruns of the past or plans for the future that seem to dominate my mind, at least.  There was no conflict with visual imagination then, when images would float into my mind.  As long as I zeroed in on them, they would take the place of my breath, forming a new present that changed color and shape behind my eyelids as I watched.  It seemed that I was sustaining the meditative focus, keeping my mind free of the coming day's to-do list or yesterday's regrets.

    When we got our new dog, though, about a year and a half ago, I had to stop going to the group meditation, to help my husband train our dog on early morning walks.  Now Cody's trained well enough for us to simply walk as "a pack," but I'm too attached to our walks to go back to the zendo for meditation.  So I'm trying to make the walks serve as my meditation time.  I pick out a tree or telephone pole about a hundred yards up the road, and try to focus on the rise and fall of my breath, or the sound or feel of my steps, until I reach the marker.  Then I pick out a new one, and do the same thing.  The ideal, of course, is to extend the focus on the breath or other sensations to cover the whole course of the hour's walk. 

    Needless to say, I can't sustain my focus that long.  Too often, the marker up ahead snaps me out of some reverie, which usually involves the immediate future: what I need to xerox for class, what I need to buy for dinner, etc.  If it involved more imaginative flights, such as Terri describes, above, or Notdotdot's "useful ideas" that I could use in some creative way - say in a scene in my writing - it would be wonderful.  But mostly I'm lost in the mundane worries about what I have to do, what I didn't get done yesterday, and looking forward to the weekend.

     However, the rare moments I can stay in the present are worth the long waits.  Feeling one's attention rise and fall on the breath causes a vacuum in the mind that sucks in whatever is there: wind, the smell of snow or rain in the air, crunch of ice under your feet, muscles contracting in your lower back as you walk, or white flag of tail sashaying back and forth over Cody's hindquarters as he trots ahead. This awareness often triggers a slight feeling of alarm over the loss of the familiar: those old tapes anchoring me to the past and a sense of who I am over a continuum. When the here and now comes rushing in, I could be anyone or thing: a hot-air balloon loosed from its ropes and sandbags, rising into thinning air.

   So what I've learned from this walking meditation is that it seems to work when you concentrate on your breath, the sound of your footsteps, the marker you've picked out down the road - the here and now of your surroundings.  When you stray from the concrete sense impressions of the present, and start seeing yourself in the grocery aisle as you pick up tonight's dinner, nothing happens.  You might as well be doing errands.  So being taken from the present surroundings by flights of fancy, imagination, doesn't work in walking meditation (unlike sitting meditation).

    However, since looking over the comments above, it seems like imagination and meditation might be more compatible than they first seem.  Done intentionally at different times, one might help the other.  Focusing on the breath on the morning walk can quiet the mind if it's sustained over a hundred yards or so (to the next marker); this slowing of the mind can extend into one's day, and might make room for visions of how to do things better.  I've often noticed that the hours after the morning walk feel better, run more smoothly, and that one's body feels lighter, more buoyant, as it moves through the day.  I feel simultaneously relaxed and energized as I teach or write.  And so I'm going to choose to believe, over the next year, that walking meditation nurtures imagination.

    Yesterday, my husband and I went to our favorite beach to run our daughter's and our dogs.  It happened to be low tide, uncovering a sandbar out to a distant island of long, low black rocks.  As we started out towards the island, the sand's hard ridged strands sided by low, waterlogged soft spots, exacted close attention to our footing.  My mind had the wonderful emptiness that sucked in the play of a crisp breeze in my hair, the crash of waves in my ears.

     And then I heard my husband's call over the waves.  He was up ahead, turned toward me and pointing to the island.  There, cantering against the black rocks, was a white horse, with a black-clothed rider.  The horse's neck was arched, streaming white feathers of mane and tail back in the wind.

     It was like the reward of a vision for my effort of concentration on the sand moments before.  But it wasn't my imagination; it was real.             

Walking Meditation

On today's walk, it wasn't hard to be "there," in the present moment, because I kept breaking through the hard crust of snow, jarring me out of the old tapes of past or future that run through my head most of the time.  I didn't even have to try to keep my mind on my breath or the sound of my steps; the uneven surface made me have to focus on the ground in front of me to make sure I stayed on the more hardened snowmobile tracks.  It reminded me of what I'd heard about various Buddhist monasteries over the years, that the monks love to do physical tasks like sweeping the floor or doing the dishes, because the physical cues keep them in the present.   

    Which brings me to a question to readers: if the physical world - where we are at any given time - determines what is meant by "the present" or "be here now" of meditation, what is the place of imagination?  Imagination, which often takes us away from the here and now, has never been addressed in any of the readings or teachings on meditation that I've been exposed to.  I've always wondered about it.  Any ideas?   

Edgy sailing

Although we got home six days ago, the cable-modem on our computer has been intermittent.  The cable company finally came yesterday and "swapped out" our old box for a new one, and everything seems up and running - and blessedly fast once again.  So we'll post pictures of our trip and our Fall garden soon.

    Meanwhile, it's good to be back home.  The sailing trip was problematic because precious systems on the boat - like refrigeration, automatic pilot, water, etc. - broke down.  My husband was so busy this summer, that he only got to boat repairs a week before we left.  It was the first time all summer the boat's been in the water as well, so everything was a bit rusty. 

    And our dog Cody, who came with us, has grown a year older since his last sail, when he was content to lie below when we were under sail.  Not so this time.  He's bonded so fully with us in the past year, that he had to be up on deck with us whenever we were there, and glued himself to the nearest leg when things got rough.  There were a few hairy moments, like when we lost a cushion overboard and had to circle it several times to try and pull it up with the boat-hook.  I was at the helm, and got us into a surprise jibe that almost took poor Cody's head off when the boom halyards shot from one side of the transom to the other.   

    That and other close calls made me decide never to bring Cody aboard again.  The fact that he has no traction on fiberglass, and thus gets scared easily when we heel over, plastering himself against our legs, puts him in danger and, in turn, makes him a dangerous distraction.  Once we made that decision, though, it seemed to resolve things for us, promising that future sails will be simpler, and Cody will be happier at home with friends on solid ground.   

Writing and Weddings

Tabor, on her wonderful blog One Day at a Time (http://tabordays.blogspot.com/), writes about her nostalgia for childhood summers in a way that weaves the universal with the particular.  Nearly all readers can remember the way days suddenly lengthen at the beginning of summer, when you no longer have to go to school.  You can laze around in your pajamas till late morning, when Mom or some other grownup gets tired of you and gives you chores.  Nearly every American can relate to that. 

    But then there are concrete sense-perceptibles - of the sticky coating of melted ice cream on hands, the lift of the feet onto handlebars for streaking downhill on her bike, the squint of eyes against blinding mid-afternoon sun coming out of the matinee - that make the individual, unique child Tabor.  We all well remember the long outdoor days of summer, but I, for one, wasn't brave enough to put my feet up on any handlebars.  In these concrete details, we differentiate ourselves, and in this act, readers participate, living those long-ago days.  This ability to lure us in by universals, and to get us - by fine sensory detail - differentiating, picturing our own unique long-ago summers, is the mark of a good writer.   

    These days, I'm noticing this blend of the universal and the particular at work in another context: the wedding industry.  I'm seeing the wedding biz up close for the first time because of our daughter's upcoming marriage in the Fall.  While this coupling of opposites works to widen and engage audience in the arts, it's used for an entirely different purpose in the marriage biz: to increase anxiety.  And what do most people facing a big event do when they're anxious?  Throw money at the source, whether it's buying a knockout dress, hiring an A-list caterer, paying extra to rent a circus-style tent, etc.  

    To start the stress-ball rolling, the bridal books and magazines saturate the bride-to-be with the message that her wedding day is "the most important day of your life."  For women who buy this, and many do, this sets an impossibly high bar.  They are then under pressure to make the day perfect, and doubly so because everyone who matters will be watching.   

    The wedding industry capitalizes on the natural tension between the universal and particular.  What event is more universal, more laden with societal expectations, cultural convention, and family and regional tradition than a wedding?  And yet, while the industry touts this, it also encourages the bride and groom to make it an event expressing their individuality, even showcasing the particular style or substance of their union.  So the poor couple, within a highly conventional structure laden with tradition, tries to express who they are within the narrow confines of that structure.  And so, in the narrow five by seven inch space of the wedding invitation, the bride and groom are made to think they are expressing themselves by choices of font, the color and ply of the stationery, whether the print is raised, and - for really daring couples - the text of the message.   

     But for those poor souls who actually believe this, that they can show who they are by choosing Times Roman over Arial, cream over ecru, raised print over flat, they are being set up for a growing sense of frustration, futility, and even failure as the wedding nears.  And the wedding industry feeds on this stress, as people throw money at goods and services to alleviate their anxiety.   

    A wise friend of our daughter's gave the best advice I've heard since I got involved in wedding plans: don't expect a wedding to express your individuality.  And certainly don't buy the myth that it's "the most important day in your life."   In choosing to have a wedding, be clear that you've chosen one of most conventional vehicles in our society.  So just get on that train and ride.                 

The Power of Place

    In his Lonesome Dove series of novels, Larry McMurtry writes about the pull of familiar places that comes over characters when reminded of their mortality.  In Commanche Moon, the novel that precedes Lonesome Dove, Texas Ranger Augustus McCrea, grieving the recent death of his wife, yields to a powerful and mysterious urge to get on his horse and leave by moonlight without telling anybody, to revisit significant places of his youth.  And so he rides to a glade in the woods outside of Austin where he picnicked with his first love, a woman he still pines for; and then he rides on to a mesa in the desert where he had his first skirmish with Commanches as a Texas Ranger.  He can't fathom why he must go to these places; he only knows that they are where the main trajectories in his life began, and seeing them again might help him imagine how he could start all over again and avoid making the mistakes he has, so that he can visualize things coming out right. 

    In the same novel, the aging Commanche chief Buffalo Hump travels deep into the desert looking for a mound of black rock that he saw once as a boy.  The elders of the tribe told him that this was the place the Commanche people originated, and Buffalo Hump remembers it as a place of great significance: a sacred place.  He decides he wants to die there. 

    I remember once hearing a radio psychologist give advice to never let one's spouse go to his/her grade-school or high-school reunion alone, because the power of nostalgia is so great that people easily mistake it for love, and - if attending alone - are tempted to run off with childhood sweethearts or old playmates.   

    I'm thinking of all this as I feel a similar pull and anticipatory nostalgia for the place I love above all others: the house and ten acre meadow here in the country where my husband and I have lived for the past thirteen years.  Although we designed our house for our retirement, we've noted that we're not holding to the good environmentalist tenets (like ride-sharing, keeping our grocery-shopping to once-a-week, etc.) we intended when we first moved so far from goods and services.  Instead, we're always in our cars, driving thirty miles round trip to the nearest grocery-, hardware-store, or library, plus our jobs.  It's neither practical nor commensurate with our beliefs that we should reduce our carbon footprint as we age. 

     So this past winter, we made a five-year plan to research, find, and move to a town or small city where we can walk from our home to stores, restaurants, library, post office, gym, and a hilltop view of saltwater.  And this is what makes the pull of our present home particularly strong now that Spring is surrounding our house and wafting in the windows.  Because it's the first Spring that's numbered, the smells of garden and meadows, and songs of bobolinks and warblers, all seem keener, sharper.  Greens of new leaves have a velvety depth that I can't remember noticing before, pulling me in to peer at their veins, assure myself of familiar boundaries. The Miss Kim lilac by our back door - a late-blooming, Asian variety - gives out her scent before she's even bloomed; her tight, furled buds smell like a concentrated version of talcum powder.  And then her blooms, increasing with each new morning, give off a more floral, diffuse, and irresistible smell that makes you follow each centimeter of inhale.  These two different scents are a revelation; I always thought the scent of lilacs was just one long delicious lift of the chest.  Everything about this place is more distinct and evocative this year, triggering the silent rejoinder, "Oh, but how can I ever leave?"   

    The other day a friend came over to dig some of our lilies for an upcoming plant-sale fundraiser.  When she commented that the bigger patch of lilies I'd created by dividing them last Fall, would take months to divide next time, I reluctantly told her that in the seven years till we need to divide them again, we'll probably be gone.  I felt sheepish saying it because she's one of the small group of us who run this all-volunteer town.  None of us wants to hear that anyone invested in keeping the town rural, beautiful, and affordable (trying to level property taxes), plans to leave.  It's like a betrayal.   

    But she surprised me by saying that she and her husband, who've contributed more to the town than anyone I know, are both thinking of the same thing.  They're over seventy, and have tried to discipline themselves to cut down their driving, but feel the growing need to live nearer to services.   

    This makes me think there are many of us here in town having the same internal debate.  If I were younger, I'd consider getting us all together to turn our town's elementary school, which our State's Education Commission will probably close in the next few years due to consolidation, into congregate housing and bringing in a food-coop or grocery store and other services to the town center within walking distance.  Then we could hold on to the community and rural beauty we have here, both precious things.   

    However, this is such an all-encompassing task, and there are so many other things I want to do in my retirement.  Like gardening!   

Below: the cause of this anticipatory nostalgia.  First view is foliage garden with pond, backed by lilac.  Then Miss Kim lilac fronted by poppies.  And below that, Clematis: Nellie Osher and President.         

 

Memorial Day 2007 thoughts

As we head into the Memorial Day weekend, I'm wondering about a cultural shift in Americans' attitude about war that's occurred over the course of my adulthood.  In the early Sixties, the majority of us against the Vietnam War blamed anyone in uniform.  We spurned soldiers coming home, never showing them the respect of even asking about their service, much less thanking them. 

    Now things are different.  Those of us against the War in Iraq are careful to separate those in uniform from the architects of the invasion.  We have no argument with the young men and women who serve in Baghdad or Afghanistan.  National Public Radio, while amply covering critics of the war, respectfully extolls our servicemen and women by interviewing families and friends of those who die, poignantly humanising them for us. 

    I'm wondering how this shift has come about, and I'd love to hear readers' views.  In my own case, it has nothing to do with the fact that Vietnam's war was draft-driven, and Iraq's is all-volunteer.  My sharp shift from disdain to respect for those who serve has come solely from my own recent learning about the father I lost in WWII.  It's been a conscious and methodical education for me, and when I emerged from it, I was surprised to find that the new respect for military service that I'd accumulated over eight years of research and writing, most everyone else was feeling too.  Was it the Tom Brokaw "Greatest Generation" books that caused this cultural shift?  Something in the water?  Or just the simple fact of the Sixties' generation aging and maturing? 

    Here's what changed me, and I tell it in hopes that others will tell what shifted their views.  In short, learning about my father changed me from a knee-jerk pacifist who once advocated unilateral disarmament, into someone who actively wishes and works for peace, but believes in mutual deterrence.  Learning my father's story convinced me that peace, unfortunately and at least for my lifetime, needs military teeth to make and sustain it.  I feel lucky that we've got young men and women willing to be those teeth, risking their lives to insure that here in the U.S., at least, we can live peacefully by the rule of law.       

    Because I lost a father to war, and watched my stepfather suffer nightmares and waking anxiety because of having his ship bombed in WWII, I grew up hating war, reinforced by the Quaker faith I was raised in.  Even before the Vietnam war, I was suspicious of military solutions, questioning talk of us and them, winning and losing.  I was a knee-jerk pacifist, so repelled by war that I turned away from the study of it, settling for easy cliches like "Live by the sword, die by the sword;" and "Better Red than dead."  Like many young people in the Vietnam years, I blamed everyone in uniform for the war, thinking that if they'd only refused to serve, run away to Canada or conscientiously objected, we wouldn't have war.    

    The biggest slippage in logic this simplistic stance fostered was the idea that anyone who chose military service was a war-monger.  This was a prevalent attitude in the Vietnam years, when people in uniform were scapegoats for our frustration.  We couldn't get access to Nixon, Kissenger, and MacNamara, so men in uniform - readily at hand in airports and streets - became the targets of our disdain.

    All of this glib, black-and-white thinking turned me away from my father. I didn't want to claim him, tried to harden myself against him by saying that he chose his fate when he went to the Naval Academy and became a career military officer.

    It wasn't till late middle-age when I started looking into who he really was, that I realized that this lifelong attitude had protected me from feeling his loss.  As long as I could put him in some war-monger box in my mind, I didn't have to grieve him. 

    All of this changed when I read his letters, speeches, and patrol-reports.  All he wanted to do was come home.  He hated the war, told his men every day that the better they did their jobs, the sooner they could go home.  Career Navy men in my father's Asiatic Fleet in the late thirties were deadset against war because they were taught what it meant.  They patrolled the Pacific as a preventive to war, knowing that the Japanese wanted complete hegemony in that region.  And once war broke out, they considered their lives forfeit.  Their wives and children and a future beyond the war could no longer enter their calculus; they could only fight, with no regard to all that they held dear.  In this way, they truly sacrificed memories, thoughts of loved ones, hopes and plans for the future, and - in some cases - their lives.   

    So, this is what changed me into a person with newfound respect for those who serve.  What about you?