is a show about a secret, underground Special Forces Unit that answers
directly to the President, and their wives and families. It is an ok
show, not terrific or ground-breaking, but it's a smart premise,
created by David Mamet, and it speaks to something that I have been
thinking about more and more. If you are not in the military,
personally or by marriage, then you don't really get the military
life.
No that that it totally a bad thing. I am not sure that I'd want to
get it. I was watching the wives on The Unit and their interactions.
And of course they are over-heated and soapy, but they are also not
that far off. For all of the moments that stretch the idea too far,
The Colonel screaming at the wives that they will get their husbands
killed if they are not more paranoid, there are moments that are
really accurate. Moments where groups of women who have as a bond only
that their husbands do something dangerous, and then have to be
together and live together and sort out who they are as a group.
Maybe that's what it is, there is a specific group dynamic that comes
from not being blood-family, but being family that is brought together
due to circumstances beyond control. I have a friend, a really close
friend that I met in Okinawa, Japan. He and I write e-mails 3 or 4
times a week, for hours, if work permits. We go back and forth,
discussing everything from marriage to calling each other gay for the
slightest kind word. It's silly and male and great. We talk to each
other about things that we're trying to figure out how to say to our
wives. When my son died, I was writing to this guy about it. He and I
had been e-mailing for the whole time in the hospital. He's that kind
of friend. Like a brother, really. And that's from the military.
That's not from anything else.
Of the friends I grew up with, only one of them joined the military,
too. He and I had been close in the few years before I joined and now
that we are both in, our talks are as effortless as ever, but now they
have an added bond. We're not just the guys we were when we were in
our early twenties, we're also military guys. We have shared
experiences that other people don't have, and that they can't have. We
talk about deployments and things that happen on them. We tell each
other things that we don't tell our families, because our families
don't have the base-line understanding of what it is to be in the
military.
I have a younger brother. He's a Marine. Since he joined up, when we
talk we both know exactly what the other means. We're on the same page
because we're both experiencing the same things. I know what it is for
him, when he wants to deploy and wants to feel that side of the
military life. I know it because I feel it to. I know what he means
when he says that he isn't sure how to make his wife feel what he
feels. Because I know that you can't.
My wife, Margaret, says that she hears the most, to us, bizarre
questions. "Will your husband get to come home from Afghanistan for
Christmas?" To which she never really knows what to say. There isn't a
shuttle, you know? It's not even like taking the Concorde from London.
It's a lot more involved. And I am on a short tour, missing Christmas
is a bummer, but it is incidental. That's not the important thing. She
says that when people ask where I am and she says, "He is deployed to
Afghanistan." They look at her with faces of horror. She says it's
like she told them that I am on death-row and about to be executed. I
am gone for 6 months to a safe-ish area. To a military family, it's
not that big a deal.
We know what it is to live in a tent with people who don't let you
sleep, but who you would take a bullet for. We know what it is to sit
next to someone who drives you absolutely up the wall, but who you
would lay your life down for. Everyone knows this feeling, it's called
Family. But what you don't know is how that feeling can overlay people
who you have trained with. How you come to adopt, almost instantly,
people you would never otherwise spend 10 minutes with. But we not
only accept and embrace that stranger, we learn how to fight a war
with them and then we go out and do it.
And that brings me to the next point that I keep thinking about: When
I called home from Christmas my Grandma asked me, "Are we winning over
there?" And all I could say was, "Well, we're not losing." And the
reason that's all I could say is that we already won. I know that it's
a big joke now to say that. The whole Mission Accomplished banner and
all is a short, sharp, liberal laugh. But the fact of the matter is,
the Taliban no longer rules in Afghanistan. There are pockets of
resistance and we are here fighting a peace-keeping battle. But this
is Operation Enduring Freedom. We are assisting in the endurance of a
Liberty Under Duress. These are the birth-pangs, the travails of a new
country that will actually have the ability to choose its future.
That's an amazing thing to get to tell people.
So here we are, these men and women in the military life. We're all
forced together, a family we never expected nor chose, fighting to
change the world. And the world sees us as a strange and foreign cult
of anti-social misfits who are struggling in a war, 10 years on. But
that's not how we see ourselves. We see ourselves as guardians of
liberty and freedom. We see ourselves as family, we see ourselves as…
well, I am not going to be able to say it better than Shakespeare, a
band of brothers. And for all the in-jokes and acronyms and the
general state of otherness that we project or seem to feel from the
American culture at large, we do this because we love that culture. We
do this because we love to see the American Flag flying on someone's
lawn, even if we know they don't take it down at sunset, like they are
supposed to. We love to see people gathered together and sharing time,
even if we only hear about it from our tent in Afghanistan. We do this
because, even though we aren't a part of America's normal life, we
love that life and are willing to die for it.
But not the members of CBS's The Unit, they have to be on again next week.
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