An Ecstasy of Fumbling

I have served in the military, as have two of my brothers, Mike and Stuart. Stuart and I deployed in support of the Global War on Terror. He went to Afghanistan and I went to Iraq. Mike was in the Army Reserve for eight years without deploying to a combat zone, which makes his service exactly as meaningful as mine or Stuart’s. Everyone who serves in any capacity risks going in harm’s way. Service is service. So happy Veterans Day to all who have served, whether for two years or twenty, and to my son, Adam, serving in Washington DC and my son-in-law John, serving on a destroyer based in Washington state.

“I don’t have a favorite child,” says the caption on a TikTok video of a teenage girl glaring contemptuously at the camera, “but I do have one who I try really hard not to piss off.” I have three children, and my greatest point of pride—to the extent that I had anything to do with it—is that they have all grown into decent, compassionate adults. Like that TikTok parent, I don’t have a favorite child, but I do have one who I suggest you do not cross.

My middle child, Allie, is smart, sensitive, and fierce. Under her beautiful, kind exterior lies a fighting spirit that has been evident from a very young age. Allie didn’t just enter a “No!” phase as a toddler; she committed herself fully: Ready for a nap, Allie? No! You had better eat those vegetables. No! Want some ice cream? . . . No! Once, when she was four years old and had just learned to ride a bike, I inadvertently distracted her and caused a wipeout that bloodied her elbow and a knee. She sat up on the pavement, her bike still lying over one leg, and yelled, “Thanks, Dorkus!”

Allie is all grown up now, with a husband and three pets: a dog named Cookie and two cats, Potato and Sushi. Cookie was supposedly acquired, at least in part, as an anti-anxiety comfort pet. I was skeptical, but it turns out that constantly dealing with Cookie’s quivering anxiety leaves one with no time for one’s own. Cookie is also the queen of expensive vet visits. She even tested the bounds of canine chocolate consumption by eating an entire 36-ounce bag of semi-sweet morsels. C’mon, a dog named Cookie—overdosing on chocolate chips—the treatment should have been free. Had the expensive intervention failed, her headstone would have read, “Here lies Chocolate Chip Cookie, a semi-sweet dog.”

Due in part to her sensitivity, Allie is a gifted writer. She is able to put herself in her audience’s shoes and access their emotions without maudlin sentimentality. She brims over with empathy, and that excess of empathy also shows her where all the vital organs are when she wields her pen (or keyboard) as a sword. Go far enough beyond run-of-the-mill jerk, and Allie will eviscerate you and name a pet after whatever food spills from your guts.

I called her the other night, and she was feeling a bit downhearted. She had seen Nick Fuente’s gleeful “Your body, my choice” video celebration and decided that it was emblematic of every young man who had voted for Donald Trump. She also worried that some of the women in her orbit were “pick me” girls like Kristi Noem, who recently spent almost forty minutes on stage fawning over her orange-glazed hero while music played at a question-free town hall event.

We all know how Kristi Noem would have handled the Cookie situation.

Allie was stuck in the trenches, looking ahead at no man’s land and behind at a bunch of deserters. Options look limited from there, and they all lead to the same conclusion: We’re screwed. It’s not a place where a dad leaves his daughter, so I told her about how I had almost immediately turned my election disappointment into action and how others were anxious to join me in the counterattack and to hold privileged politicians accountable.

I also suggested that she get off of social media for a while and do something creative or read some good fiction. (My wife suggested The Women by Kristin Hannah. I suggested A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore and Raised in Captivity by Chuck Klosterman.) It’s more than mere distraction, I told her. It would be good for her mental health and would allow her brain to work things out in the background. She would be sharpening her sword.

On this Veterans Day, it may feel as though we’re all stuck in the trenches waiting for the fatal mortar to drop in our lap or the gas shell to pop and poison the air we breathe with caustic chemicals, but sitting in our dread or consuming social media or commentary that reinforces it does not expand our options or clarify our thinking. Even in the front-line trenches of World War I, where trench mortars and poison gas were very real possibilities, there was art. There were soldiers processing the horrors of the war and digging into the interior self—that place full of messy emotions and surprising ideas—through poetry. It didn’t make them any less competent or prepared for battle. For some, it saved their sanity, or even their lives.

I borrowed the title for this piece from a poem by one of those soldiers, Wilfred Owen, a second lieutenant in the British Army. He was once sent home to be treated for physical injuries and shell shock but returned to the front lines voluntarily because he thought that earning the Military Cross would give his poetry more authority. On 04 November 1918, exactly one week, almost to the hour, before the end of the war, Owen was killed during the battle to cross the Sambre Canal near Ors, France. He was posthumously awarded the Military Cross and promoted to lieutenant. His poetry has plenty of authority.

You may disagree, but I say that we are so not screwed. I’m not minimizing. There will be pain and cruelty and gross incompetence, but we have time to celebrate Veterans Day and to indulge in fiction or poetry or painting or rock climbing—whatever breaks our personal doom loops. It will make us sharper and deepen our emotional well.

I wouldn’t seek the front lines just to give my poetry more authority, but I have found poetry useful from time to time. While lying in ambush in the sauna-like heat near Quantico, Virginia, or trying to find sleep on sweltering nights in Iraq, silently reciting Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” provided some relief. More recently, before the emcee at an event handed me the microphone so I could deliver a toast, he said, “Make the Irish poets proud.” Guess who has some Irish poetry in his head? Thank you for writing my toast, William Butler Yeats.

I’ll end here with the portion of Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” from which I took this post’s title:

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime…
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

You can find the whole poem here. I hope this finds you well, and

Happy Veterans Day!

Semper Fidelis,

Trygve