Something Yet Undefined
I recently spent a long couple of weeks in San Diego training with one of our dive teams. For many reasons, it was an incredible experience. On our last day, the Navy guys we trained with invited us to a barbecue on the beach. It was a perfect day — a Cali day. Ribs, hard seltzers, a spike ball net, and a table big enough for beer pong turned a great afternoon into a blurry night.
By the time we stumbled back onto the pier and made our way home, we only had hours before we were on the road. But I had three-quarters of a bottle of wine to finish before we left, and Larry was ordering pizza, so the adventure continued.
After we walked to the gate and got the ‘za (which Larry did completely barefoot after misplacing his sandals), Larry, Brian and I began to have an interesting conversation. I, drunkenly earnest and stubborn, was trying to convince them of this one thing; something which came to me at a time I really needed it to.
It was April. My grandmother had just died of cancer. Close friendships crumbled, and my heart was hurting. I was still working through a lot of sh*t from deployment on unseen mental and emotional levels. The world entered into a state of panic in the face of disease, the economy constricted, and nobody knew how anything would pan out. Then, when we didn’t think things could get worse, a certain incident in Minneapolis sparked some of the deepest contention in our country that my generation has ever seen.
In short, everything was exhausting.
One night, in the middle of the chaos, I went to a buddy’s place to hang out and play some cards. They were my gang on deployment; the guys who had my back in a time and place of high stress and loneliness. We were a group rarely found outside of the military. From Colorado to New Orleans to Puerto Rico to Oklahoma, and yet, somehow, we were all on the same grungy camp in the ‘Stan, keeping ourselves occupied with spades and the gym. Our friendships continued, and grew in the months after coming home. Completely different backgrounds; from completely different walks of life; all in the same family with love for each other akin to siblings.
That night, the rest of the world kind of fell away. I didn’t think about the breakdown I’d had the previous day; I didn’t think about how sad I was with everything seemingly crashing down around me. I was surrounded by people whom I love and who love me. That was enough.
And I realized: love is the only thing that matters.
This was the point I desperately tried to make to Larry and Brian, while stumbling back to the hotel and shoving pepperoni pizza into my face.
Love is what drives us to do the things we do, I explained. It bonds us to the people in our lives, and to the greater society. It gives us reason, purpose, and direction. It is the only thing that we leave behind when we die. When we take our last breath and leave this world forever, it only matters who, what, and how we loved. Everything else dissolves at the hand of death. It’s the central theme in almost all of the stories we tell each other, the songs we sing, and the heart of everything that becomes anything worthwhile.
I don’t know if Brian actually had something to say or if he just liked to argue. He didn’t necessarily disagree; he just didn’t think ‘love’ was a good enough word. Semantically, it didn’t hold all the right meanings in the context for which I was using it. I mulled on it, but didn’t abandon my position entirely.
Larry, however, was firmly convinced that my position simply couldn’t be true. Hate, he said, is what drives him. Now, we’re talking about a guy who, for the majority of the past two decades, has made a life out of killing people. Bad people. And his hatred for them fuels his motivation to see them off. I’ve made lots of friends just like him. Hell, I’ve got an older brother who has war stories most infantry cats today can only dream of. I never want to know the number; I just know to stay on their good side.
In a somewhat emotional turn of the conversation, I saw a side to Larry that you seldom see from these big, bad SF guys. (Although, if we’re being honest, Larry is really a big teddy bear. He did punch me in the face twice during a friendly scramble on the beach earlier, but — to be fair — I shouldn’t have gotten involved.)
All his life, he’d been set out to fight evil. Genuine, real evil. People who behead other people in the streets for being a certain gender or sexual orientation; people who stone a woman to death for being ‘promiscuous’ even though she was raped; people who don’t know (nevertheless understand) the value of human life. He’d had countless friends die, seen sh*t most people wouldn’t believe, and he is one of thousands feeling the same existential crisis in this mess of a political climate. I saw and felt his pain. With everyone turning on each other, blaming the system for this and for that, and using it to find and incite hatred for America, it feels like what we do, and what some of us have done, doesn’t matter at all. The good people who have stood up against the world in the name of our values, and lost their lives doing so, are just another pile of corpses. Meanwhile, the ones living and walking on this land don’t even realize what they have, nonetheless the sacrifices that have been made to get it.
You see, while there are absolutely issues within our country’s system — many of which are being presently addressed via arguments on social media, mass demonstrations around the country and the world, and an inundated government that can’t make a single decision because they’re too busy arguing — our country and its system has created a lot of undeniable good. And this good has been fueled and fostered by good people, who have fought and continue to fight the good fight.
I’ve been to places around the world that make me grateful and proud to be American. Because while we have issues, I promise things could be worse. Like Larry, I find it incredibly disturbing that so many people have come to be fueled by this deep-seated hatred for America. We continually look at the horrors of our past to define our present. We look at a small percentage of our population to label the whole. We construct ideas about people and things that we don’t really understand.
My dad has a great anecdote about being in a restaurant with his interpreter in Thailand. There are a group of people, all white, sitting at a table. The interpreter tells him those are ‘westerners’. European, maybe Canadian, doesn’t matter; somewhere west. He looks at another table, where two white people, two African Americans, a Latino and an Asian are all having a conversation and laughing. “Ah,” says the interpreter. “That’s easy. Americans.”
Diversity defines our nation. It lives at the heart of our military. Any American who disagrees with this is living in a bubble; any American who refuses to acknowledge the good, overlooks who we really are, and points fingers at anyone who disagrees with their view is missing out on the joy of being an American.
I gave Larry a really big hug before we finally called it a night. I’ve grown up with an older brother in the military, and I saw his pain in Larry’s that night. I felt some of it, too. Pain for our nation, pain for her people, and pain for the sacrifices that have made us who we are.
We shouldn’t disregard the ills that plague our system. We shouldn’t dismiss the horrors of our past. We shouldn’t make any excuse not to change so that tomorrow is better than today.
But we should never reject the good that has come out of this country. Our freedoms, and the quality of life those freedoms provide, are unparalleled in this world. We are lucky to be women who can do anything men can do; we are lucky to be straight, gay, everything in-between and love freely; we are lucky to be whatever color from whatever background and make something of ourselves; we are lucky that we can make our voices heard, that we can write letters and make phone calls to our state governments; we are lucky to be American.
This goes back to my initial point: love is everything.
We have forgotten how to love our country, and we have forgotten how to love each other.
However, I admit that love — maybe — isn’t a strong enough word. Brian’s whole counterargument was that ‘love’ didn’t fully encompass what we use it to mean, because it means so many different things.
Love means having compassion and empathy for other people, regardless of who they are. It’s doing good things for the sake of doing good things.
Love means finding forgiveness and disbanding hatred from within one’s heart.
Love is aspiring to something because you have a passion for it, a drive. It’s choosing to work hard for a greater purpose, because you care about the byproducts of whatever that purpose is.
Love is having something you’re willing to die for. It is what drives us to protect our values; to fight against things that defy our freedoms and our right to a meaningful life.
True love is all-encompassing and unconditional. Spoken through action, needless of words. Found in character, not in dialogue. It is blind but not ignorant, and the only thing that stands up to the hand of our equal, final Fate.
If love isn’t a strong enough word to use for all these contexts, then we shall call it ‘something yet undefined’.
But whatever it is, it connects us all. Everything that has existed, presently exists, or will exist is connected through this insentient channel. Some may call it Love. Some people call it God.
It is all of us, and our infinite bond of consciousness.
The next morning, we packed the cars, hungover as hell and dreading the drive ahead. After some fun reminiscence on the previous day’s events, we all stood to leave. The National Anthem sounded across the post and we stopped, dropping our arms to attention. We straightened our legs, and tried not to sway from the alcohol still in our systems.
As the music played, I thought about the day we did some beach landing training. The Navy guys would drop us off in our little boats, we’d ride them in to shore, then simulate making contact with an enemy force. (It was super fun.) I thought about the soldiers on D-Day in Normandy. And there we were, decades later, doing something similar (on a far lesser scale) all in the name of our country.
Now Her anthem rang in our ears, and all of us — who’d been across the world multiple times, been to combat, regularly went on all kinds of crazy training missions — were standing in the same way, to the same anthem, for the same reason.
I will always stand up for what’s right. I will always defend against evil that threatens me and my people’s values. I will love my fellow citizens, and speak for the rights of any person who stands under our flag.
And I will always be proud to be American.
Why?
Because of something yet undefined.
**Note: names have been changed to protect personal identities.
