Reluctance to Shine
Marines, pewter, and poetics
I had only been an infantryman in the Marine Corps for a couple years when the green machine determined to send me back to college to become an officer. It was a program called the Marine Enlisted Commissioning Education Program, which goes by the acronym MECEP. It is not the most absurd acronym. The Marine Corps Planning Process is a better candidate for that. It goes as MCPP (pronounced McPeePee). In fact, the prefix “MC” attaches to innumerable strings of letters (MCMAP - Marine Corps Martial Arts Program; MCCDC - Marine Corps Combat Development Command…etc). In practice, this means that just as the fast food chain McDonalds affixes “Mc” to a variety of foods, ahem “foods” (McRibs, etc), Marines use and misuse the prefix “MC” to achieve wry, comical ends on a regular basis. For example, it is not uncommon for a higher ranking individual to be a “real McDick” when issuing unpopular orders.
The officer / enlisted distinction is fundamental to military organization. You might think of it as white collar / blue collar— a gross oversimplification that is nevertheless useful. The Department of Defense requires officers to have a bachelor's degree—having discerned over the years that to lead in the still mostly male, rough and tumble environment of the military, one should have at least four years of practice trying to think while severely hungover. Officers need to be McEducated.
The MECEP program is supposed to leaven the officer ranks (known among the enlisted as “the dark side”) with officers already experienced in the trenches. Theoretically selected by merit, my presence in the program was undoubtedly the result of two harried Pentagon staffers colliding in a hallway and mixing up the files they were carrying.
But I McMade my way to the University of Michigan with another grunt and MECEP student named Patrick in order to check in at our new command. The two of us were probably quite a sight as we walked across Michigan’s main campus in Ann Arbor in our service Alpha uniforms (as required when checking-in). We were both tall, white, lean, sunburned, shaved heads, and took in our surroundings like good infantrymen should with what we would call situational awareness but which you would probably call paranoia. It’s essentially the same thing. Some friendly locals spat at us and called us “baby killers,” and though I have not, in fact, killed any babies, I got their point.
At Michigan I met some faculty members who, bewildered as they must have been by me, took me under their wing and have become irreplaceable friends. With their help I built an independent major in the honors program studying ancient Greek, literature, philosophy, and poetics.
I was just home from a deployment and those were a couple of golden years for my family. After a violent induction into the Corps, a year of training and immediate deployment, we had our first opportunity to live together as a family. Our young children had dad around more than ever before. We walked everywhere in Ann Arbor, delighting in the trees and trails and even stretches of dirt road that sometimes appeared making wooded country lanes within the city. We experienced leisure for the first time in our adult life and together my wife and I read everything we could forage from the abundant Ann Arbor bookshops.
But I was still a Marine and had duties at the Naval Reserve Officer Training Command in Ann Arbor. These duties included physical training with Marines and Midshipmen several times a week. As a member of the endurance team, you might find me running through Geddes Park or the University of Michigan Arboretum. On icy pre-dawn mornings we schlepped 50-100lb packs for ten miles or more up and down the sides of the Huron River valley. Sometimes members of the Washtenaw County SWAT team joined us for a run to celebrate in military fashion the Marine Corps Birthday. Other times I would stand in for a Drill Instructor at the orientation for new midshipmen who were hoping to become Marines and I would scream and carry on for days until I was spitting up blood and croaking to speak.
It was a weird life. And it was perfect for me.
Sometimes the officers who ran the program, or even the other MECEP Marines would ask about my unusual course of study: poetry. I found myself trying to explain, mostly unsuccessfully, that studying poetry would make me a better Marine— more lethal; more loyal; a better leader. I don’t know that I convinced them, in fact, I’m sure I never did, but as long as I could still run, shoot, carry, and fight it was all good. It helped that I was prior-enlisted and an infantryman. The Marine Corps will tolerate many eccentricities if you can back it up with demonstrated professional competence, especially that most important Marine competence—grit.
I did not have much in common with other students, or the campus culture in general. It was less accepting of the oddity of a Marine grunt studying poetry than the Marines were. But I had my family, friends on the faculty, and Marines, and that was more than enough.
I think of those years in school at the University of Michigan as something of a caesura in a crazy life. A brief moment of some peace and stillness, an opportunity for McReflection.
Just before I graduated, one of my professors and friends, the inimitable Linda Gregerson, published a poem called “Still Life” in The New Yorker. It is a poem about death—the Qaa bombing, the Krakow ghetto. Linda describes a scene from a still life painting with a cut lemon, a knife, and some dead game laid out on a linen cloth. The halved lemon was just cut, its flesh about to decay, but is as yet still perfect. Looking in the mirror Linda sees a parallel to the still life painting. The mirror frames a life with death waiting just outside the frame.
I see you in the mirror every morning where you wait for me. The linen, Father, lemon, knife, the pewter with its lovely reluctance to shine. As though the given world had given us a second chance.
Not every poem is about you, but as I’ve written in my own work, sometimes they are about you too. Linda’s “Still Life,” juxtaposes two frames. One a mirror showing life, the other a painting showing the dead things in the still life’s scene. Looking back now at the life we had as a family at that time, and the war I was supposed to go and fight when I graduated, we had that life with death waiting just outside the frame. It was a beautiful season of life—subdued by what surrounded it on either side and all the uncertainty for our young family—but it was that which made it like the pewter in the painting: lovely even though, or perhaps because of, its reluctance to shine.