The Freedom of Escaping (Part 2)
Note: “The Freedom of Escaping” was a short story included in my book “Document.” This is an excerpt that picks up at some point in the future from where that story left off.
Although this story contains things from the world in which we live, it should be read as a work of fiction. All characters are fictional and not based on any actual living person. The events that take place in this story are entirely the product of my imagination. The town of Oak Ridge is mythical, but it could be any real small town in America.
After I left the town of Oak Ridge, there were often times I would compare it to places I lived in future years. I can remember one military tour where we lived in a quaint little town on the Atlantic coast of North Carolina. When we got those orders in the last winter days of 2007, we found out we were going to North Carolina for the first time. And we were excited; it was something new and we had never lived there before. This was one of those things that was so cool about the military: you got to go somewhere new every once in a while.
Since we were not one of those military families that liked living on base, we literally got out a map of North Carolina and started looking up and down the coast and researching places and towns. We had visions of finding a town like something out of a Nicholas Sparks novel, a coastal village where we could relax and enjoy ourselves at a slower pace. We decided we would try to find a place in Morehead City, North Carolina, just across the bridge from Beaufort.
Although we would spend only three years there, in later years I would look back on our time on the Crystal Coast with much fondness. The difference between the people on the Crystal Coast and Oak Ridge was the folks on the coast didn’t have a scintilla of pretense in their souls. They were God-fearing, salt of the earth people and they weren’t hypocrites; they often worked on the numerous military bases in the area — Camp Lejuene, Cherry Point, Bogue Sound auxiliary air field — and they had a huge respect for those in uniform.
At the height of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, between my own deployments, I was at my son’s baseball game one day when a huge commercial jetliner passed overhead on path for landing at Cherry Point, and one of the parents looked up and said matter-of-factly, “That’s some of our people coming home.” You wouldn’t get that in Oak Ridge. First of all, none of those planes were flying anywhere near Oak Ridge because the town wasn’t close to any military bases, and even had those planes been flying above, Oak Ridgers wouldn’t even have looked up to see what it was nor truly cared.
Oak Ridgers essentially fell into three groups: (1) university-town, liberal zealots who lived out their existence inside a comfortable little cocoon of their own creation inside which nobody with whom they had the slightest political disagreement was allowed (the smallest of the three groups); (2) self-proclaimed Democrats that were really hugely socially conservative; they were actually Republicans, but they just didn’t realize it. Their Daddys and Granddaddys had been Democrats too, in the tradition of, say, Strom Thurmond before he became a Republican (by far the largest of the three groups); and (3) self-professed Democrats and Republicans who were that ilk of red stater that had NRA stickers on their trucks, or stickers with an American flag, or a “Don’t Tread on Me” flag, but they couldn’t explain to you what was going on over in Iraq or Afghanistan, nor why.
The second two groups “supported the troops,” yet couldn’t tell you how. “I just support what they’re doing over there.” I wanted several times to ask, “Oh yeah? Well, what ARE the troops doing over there?” “You know. Protectin’ our freedoms.” I shook my head at these platitudes. We were not protecting anybody’s freedom. We were destroying the enemy. Every single day. We were destroying people and things. That was our job. If the average Oak Ridger was privy to what we had witnessed and what we had done, I wondered what they would say.
I would come to resent people in the future using my veteran status to make them feel patriotic; for instance, I once overheard a future boss in a job I quickly left tell someone, “Ya know. Neil Dalton fought for us in Afghanistan and we are proud to have him on our staff.” He might have felt “proud,” but he had no idea what he was proud about. He had no clue what it meant to wear the uniform. I never had a problem with people who chose not to serve, but I didn’t like those who hadn’t served taking advantage of another person’s service in order to profit from it or make themselves feel better.
There’s a great quote from a Vietnam veteran about the gulf that divides the Vietnam vet from people in his generation who didn’t serve: “There’s a wall 10 miles high, 10 miles thick and 50 miles wide between those of us who served and those who didn’t and it is never going to come down.” That applies to every person who ever served in a war and those who didn’t. And it also applies to those fortunate to have served in a military organization with true standards of professionalism and those who have not.
Every single time I lived or resided in Oak Ridge, it was the same. Over a span of thirty years, no matter when I came back to visit or live, the three aforementioned groups always remained. And they always seemed to have an extremely insular and stunted view of the world outside, as if they had never ventured beyond the narrow confines of their little town. People in Oak Ridge put every person they knew into a box and gave them a label. And woe to any man who made any attempt to break out of that box they had created for him.
But on the Crystal Coast, for some undefinable reason, things were different. The towns were even smaller than Oak Ridge, yet the people understood. People embraced you. People knew what it meant, for instance, for someone to have just returned home from a deployment. Once word of this leaked, perfect strangers would celebrate it with you. This type of thing was alien in Oak Ridge, where people so rarely saw a real member of the military; it was difficult for them to wrap their minds around it. Sure, they made noble efforts, but the concept was distant and nebulous to them.
It certainly helped that a lot of military veterans and retirees had settled along the Crystal Coast. An already quiet, languid existence was made even more enjoyable by being in the company of people with similar life experiences and priorities. It was during that time I would become friends with the unlikeliest of people, a man fifteen years older than my own father, not quiet old enough to be my grandfather, but with a well of wisdom deep enough to fit that role. His name was Jim Allison. Both of us were the sons of titanic fathers, we had been athletes, and we had served as Marines, and this somehow combined to give the two of us ample common ground to explore when we all got together on Friday evenings in Beaufort.
I would discuss my afflictions with Oak Ridge with Jim at length, and how the more time I spent away from the place, the bigger the wall of separation seemed to grow. “Well, your problem now is people can’t identify with most of your experiences. They can’t relate. They can only relate to you based on that narrow, finite period of time they knew you. If you get outside that, the safest thing they can do is ignore it. Pretty much everything with them is just surface-level. That’s the majority of folks. But the very few who go deep with you; they’re your real, true friends. Bonded for life.”
Jim’s words dripped with wisdom. Once I left Oak Ridge, people “went deep” with me almost everywhere I went. It was a small circle, no doubt, but there were always a few. Quantico, San Diego, Newport, Florida, Texas, and now out on the Crystal Coast, where I was pleasantly surprised to have as our best friends four couples old enough to be our parents, who blessed us with their time, life experiences, stories about the struggles of parenting, and wisdom. And they dispensed it all without any judgment. They all went deep with me, especially Jim.
But nobody ever “went deep” with me in Oak Ridge. Maybe I never gave anybody the chance. Actually, that’s incorrect; I spent the better part of a decade trying to learn their way of life before I left. Maybe those people just didn’t have it in them, unable to exist anywhere but at what Jim called the “surface-level.” Either way, there it is.
To be continued.
Copyright, 2016, all rights reserved.
