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THE WORLD’S PROUDEST DAD |
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Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler
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Thursday, 21 December 2006 |
It was last Friday, December 15, 2006. They were all around me, sitting in makeshift bleachers, scores of fathers looking down upon an assembly of young men sitting on foldable chairs on an asphalt parade ground in Quantico, Virginia.
Every single one of us was the World's Proudest Dad. For we were watching our sons graduating from a grueling 10-week boot camp nightmare to be commissioned as officers in the United States Marines.
Yes, there were scores of World's Proudest Moms as well, but this is about being a father.
For I've had a lot of exceptional experiences in my life, but the most wonderful of all is being a father. Nothing else comes close to the times I've had with my two boys, Brandon and Jackson. For me, it is What Life Is All About.
I didn't think I could be prouder of Brandon when he graduated from VMI - the Virginia Military Institute - in May of 2005. I was wrong.
Having been, of his choice, in military school for both high school and college, he decided not to join any service as had most all of his best friends at VMI. He got a dream job with an import-export firm traveling all over the world, from India to the Middle East to Africa. After a year, he asked if we could talk.
"Dad, I am really frustrated," Brandon said. "My country is at war and I am copping out of it. I am working at a great job but nonetheless working as if the war did not exist. If I do not serve my country now, I know I will regret it for the rest of my life."
I hugged him and told him that of course he had my blessing. I had only one question: what service, what branch of the military?
He smiled. "That's a rhetorical question, right, Dad? If I'm going to do this, it will be with the best: I want to join the Marines."
Semper fi.
He entered OCS - Officer Candidate School - in early October. For ten weeks, the legendary DI's - Marine Corps Drill Instructors - try their level best to prove such "officer candidates" are not fit and capable and smart enough to be a Marine Officer.
It is quickly made clear to them that the DI's main concern is not them, it is the lives of the Marines under their command which may be in mortal jeopardy should they be incompetent. It was the job of the DI to discover any capacity for incompetence, mental or physical, they might possess.
Yet Brandon started off with a bad attitude. For he had seen much of this before, as a freshman "Rat" at VMI, and in training such Rats when he was second in command of the entire corps of cadets.
He knew all the tricks. When the DI asked for their locker padlocks, then threw them into a pile, while all the others were desperately trying to figure out which one was theirs (while being very loudly yelled at and told they had brief seconds to do so), Brandon had glanced at the serial number on the back of his for he knew what was coming. So he calmly and quickly found his.
It was interesting to see this attitude evolve as we had lunch together every Sunday during his brief on-base liberty. His smart aleck resentment lasted about two weeks. That Sunday I knew something had changed. He had been "boarded" - an official reprimand in front of commanding officers for a rules infraction. In his case, he had fired a blank round from his rifle when he knew he shouldn't have.
When the commandant saw a tear coming from Brandon's eye during the reprimand, his tone softened. "Candidate Wheeler," he said, "this is not a serious infraction that by itself warrants your being washed out, if that is what's worrying you."
Brandon replied, "No, sir, that is not what is upsetting this candidate. A number of this candidate's classmates at VMI have become Marine officers serving in Iraq. This candidate has attended the funerals of two of them and is seeing those funerals in his mind right now. This candidate has just realized that he has been dishonoring them with his attitude here, with his not taking his experience here seriously enough, and is ashamed."
Things were very different after the third week. He had had a revelation. "You know, Dad, the DI's are not commissioned officers. When we graduate, we will be. That means that the DI's who are trying so hard to make our lives so miserable have to salute us as their military superior."
"And that's OK with them," he explained, "they have no resentment or jealousy about it. It's that what they have to make sure of, what the purpose of our training is all about, is that we are worth saluting."
"I am going to prove myself worthy of my DI's salute, Dad," he said, and then he faltered. "Only I am a little concerned now. I've hurt my shoulder pretty bad."
He had pulled a tendon in his left shoulder on the Marine Obstacle Course, enormously frustrating to him as there was the exact same course at VMI and he had done it at least 100 times. Now he had to learn how to get through it, including the rope climb, with one arm.
His DI cut him no slack at all. He had to pass every PT (physical training) test as if normal. Somehow he did. Somehow he finished in the top 10% in PT in his graduating class of 214 total (over 400 at the start), and in the top 5% overall (which includes written exams and leadership evaluation).
The day before graduation was Family Day, where the young officers-to-be could show their families around the training facilities and have dinner at the Officers' Club. After Brandon regaled us with stories during dinner, we went to have a drink at the club bar. A man in uniform approached us and introduced himself. It was Brandon's DI.
He addressed himself to me but spoke to all of us standing in front of him - Brandon, his mother, his brother, and his girlfriend. "Dr. Wheeler, I have trained many young men in my 14 years with the Marines, and your son is one of the finest I have ever met. In all those years, I can count on two or three fingers any others I could say this to..."
He looked directly at Brandon. "I want you to know that should we be deployed together in the same command some day, it will be an honor for me to serve under you."
His mother cried at those words. Hearing them spoken by a Marine Corps Drill Instructor to my son, I thought, it doesn't get better for a father than that.
And now for the other shoe to drop. America's shoe. America has the finest - the most professional, the most lethally powerful, the most moral and humane - military force in the history of mankind, every member of which has joined voluntarily.
They have chosen of their own free will to risk their lives for their country. They are willing to salute America with their lives. Here is the question that must be asked: Is America worthy of this salute?
For me now, it's a personal question. Is my son's life worth being risked to obey the commands of a commander-in-chief like Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama? What am I to think of a country willing to be so immoral as to choose the first or so utterly frivolous as to choose the second?
Neither choice has been made, of course. But that they are even being contemplated as serious possibilities shows how unserious America has become.
You cannot mistake vicious ruthlessness and a personal obsession for power as seriousness and remain serious. You cannot swoon over the smile and charm of a political juvenile spouting hyper-left platitudes and remain serious.
For all his faults and mysteries, George W. Bush is a serious adult - which is one main reason the Left hates him so much. America behaved as an adult when it elected him over Algore and John Kerry, two profoundly unserious men.
Bush's unpopularity in the polls has much to do with his demand that Americans be responsible adults rather than adolescents who want the world to go away. Maybe America will lose its unseriousness - but you'd think that 9/11 would have made America a more serious nation, rather than less. It hasn't turned out that way.
So now I'm both proud and worried. Brandon and his fellow newly-minted Marine Officers have proved they are worthy of America. It's my hope that America will prove worthy of them. It's my worry that America won't.
Lieutenant Wheeler and his proud family
http://www.rebelholiday.biz/, Rebel Holiday
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