Tell My Sons: A Father's Last Letters (10 page)

My head was down. I walked with a slump. Despite his taunts to turn and face him, I refused. I was so afraid. My heart felt as if it were in my throat, and I wanted to cry.
Why me?

About halfway down the path, I lifted my head and saw someone standing in our driveway. It was Grandma Weber. She was holding my baby brother, Charlie, in her arms. She was yelling something to me, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying. “Come home”? “Hurry home”? She must have seen what was going on. Perhaps she had come out to provide some comfort. She was gesturing with one arm as if to gather someone into a hug. Suddenly I caught on. Her gesture was intended as the swing of a fist, and she was saying,
“Hit him! Fight back!”

A hot surge of adrenaline made me clench my right hand into a fist. I wheeled and threw the first punch I had ever thrown, straight into Billy’s face. The stunned look in his unsuspecting eyes only encouraged me more, and I let loose. His inability to match my effort surprised and emboldened me even more. I had him!

Even amidst all that unbridled fury, I wanted only one thing. “Are you going to leave me alone?” I demanded as I held him in
a headlock. “I want you to leave me alone!
Never again
, you hear me? Never again!” Pleadingly, he promised.

Billy Bean never came near me again, and I learned a vitally important lesson about how to deal with bullies.

I never did feel good or proud about that fight, and I never once relaxed around him, either. As far as I was concerned, I’d caught Billy Bean on a bad day and had gotten lucky. It wouldn’t be the last time I felt humility in victory.

*   *   *

With due respect to General MacArthur, pride in an “honest failure” is not always a virtue.

I learned that during a visit to our rustic summer cabins on Cross Lake, in central Minnesota. There was a dustup with my younger brother Chris, over who would get to sit in the front seat of our family van. I lost the fight as well as my mother’s vote when she returned to the van after her shopping. I didn’t think I deserved the treatment I got—from a younger brother or from my mom.

She told me if I didn’t like the decision, I could walk home. That was fine by me. As that van drove off, I didn’t give the decision a second thought. Instead, I explored my options under a very hot sun.

I had three options: I could walk the five-mile trek around the cigar-shaped lake, hitchhike a ride, or make the one-mile swim across the lake, none of which I had ever done before. I walked toward the lake, just a hundred yards or so away, to make a visual assessment of the distance, thinking as I walked,
I’m as good a swimmer as Dad, and he said he swam this distance when he was my age
.

After no more than two minutes of reflection, I convinced myself this was something I always wanted to do anyway.
The
trick
, I remembered my dad saying,
is to roll over on your back and float if you ever get tired. Don’t panic. Don’t think about it. Just swim—nice and easy
.

As I walked into the lake with my clothes and shoes on, I was conscious of how peculiar the scene might look if anyone saw me. This was Cross Lake’s main public beach, which was buoyed off with multiple warning signs regarding the dam that lay fifty yards ahead. But no one took notice.

About a quarter mile out, I stopped to check my progress. This was the longest distance I had ever swum, and our cabins were barely visible in the distance. Had I made a mistake? Should I turn back now?

Don’t panic. Don’t think about it. Just swim
.

Halfway across the lake, I found myself heaving pretty hard and again doubting the wisdom of my decision. There was too much time for worrying and too little scenery to otherwise occupy my mind. I comforted myself by thinking about the added satisfaction I was going to feel walking up on that shore on the other side. Hopefully, my mom and brothers would be there to see it.

I flipped over on my back and rested a few minutes, letting myself bask in the vision. What I heard next as I lay there with my ears underwater shocked me out of my premature pride: the unmistakable sound of a nearby boat motor.

In a flash, I thought about our twenty-year-old neighbor, John, who had been run over by a boat just a few years earlier. He had suffered brain damage, permanently slurred speech, and a hobbled walk.

The approaching boat looked as if it were coming straight at me. I began furiously kicking water with my legs and hands in the hope that he would see me. I decided that if my warning signal didn’t work, I would need to be prepared to dive and swim as deep and as hard as I could.

That boat ended up passing a solid hundred yards away, and the driver didn’t even seem to notice me, but I had a sudden sense of urgency about getting off that lake.

At about that same time, someone at the Weber cabins took notice. “Do you see that person way out there? Some moron is swimming in the middle of the lake!” When no one could find me along the road where they last saw me, my family concluded the moron in the lake must be me. A boat was sent out for me, but I refused it. My original decision may have been born out of laziness regarding the five-mile walk, but I hadn’t come this far to be rescued by a boat.

When I reached the shore and tried to stand, my legs felt like rubber, and I could barely walk. I felt proud, but the family video will show I was humble in my victory. I looked like I expected to be scolded by my dad. Instead he greeted me with a smile, a firm handshake, and a congratulatory remark. “That took real guts!”

My mom later told me she was proud, too, but more upset about the risk I had taken. “You were going to show me, huh?”

Of course, I had wanted to make a statement about the “unfair” treatment I had received in town, but that message was sent the moment I stepped out of the van. Although I’ll never convince anyone otherwise, my swim across the lake was nothing more than a practical decision with an unexpected, but welcome, marker of success.

*   *   *

Yesterday’s silly argument over who gets the front seat becomes tomorrow’s silly argument over leadership styles. I was thirty years old and in command of a 182-soldier military police company at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri.

It was no secret among most of the senior leaders in our battalion (my higher headquarters) that our most senior noncommissioned
officer (NCO), Sergeant Major Crosby, didn’t care for me. He publicly complained I was too involved in soldier care and training, and he took my leadership style as a personal affront to all NCOs. And it didn’t help Crosby’s ego when my first sergeant rejected his complaints as misplaced.

When summer came, the battalion held a “unit fun day” that consisted of all sorts of physical challenge events. The culminating event was the “Pugil Pit”—jousting matches with padded sticks used in place of bayonets and rifles.

The ground rules for the Pugil Pit competition were clearly posted on an easel board all day. They were simple: soldiers competed against soldiers, NCOs competed against NCOs, and officers competed against officers. The battalion established such rules to ensure decorum in the ranks.

It came as some surprise, then, when Crosby defied those rules and challenged a senior officer to a fight in front of all our soldiers. That senior officer was me!

My five-foot-eleven, 162-pound frame was hardly a match for Crosby, who carried broad, muscular shoulders, stood six foot four, and weighed at least 220 pounds. I hoped someone would cry foul at the fact he was violating the rules. But which soldier was going to snuff out an opportunity to watch two superiors pound the crap out of each other? In the pin-drop silence that followed his challenge, I saw no other choice but to accept.

As we donned our protective gear, I tried to remember my hand-to-hand training, and I reassured myself the Pugil Pit was about tactics and techniques, not brute strength. My operations sergeant, Lenny Pabin, was a short, stout, bald firebrand with a strong New England accent. He nervously chatted me up as if he were my boxing cornerman. His words reflected confidence, but his eyes said,
Don’t get killed
.

Our physical differences were only made more comical as we entered the makeshift ring, and the voices of encouragement for me sounded halfhearted. More soldiers gathered to watch.

Sergeant Major Crosby was a professional, but when I looked into his eyes as we squared off, I saw only one message:
I’m going to beat you into a pulp, punk
.

What happened over the next several minutes was too wild and confusing to describe in any worthy detail, but I do remember the end result: victory and a cheering throng of soldiers for the underdog. I had landed three back-to-back precision kill shots. The match was over in less than ten minutes, and he hadn’t made a single point.

I’ll admit I felt a strong urge to boast, but I chose a more humble route. Crosby offered a gracious “Good match, sir, well done,” and I replied in kind. It was like fighting Billy Bean all over again. And all over again, it felt good enough just to hope Crosby would leave me alone.

*   *   *

Most of the time, good and bad fortunes have a lot to do with hard work, but sometimes dumb luck gets involved. How does a healthy thirty-eight-year-old man who exercises, eats right, doesn’t smoke, and hardly ever drinks end up with cancer? It’s not fair.

Then again, I should have died at eighteen.

It was the summer after graduation from high school. My dad pulled into the driveway in a pickup truck loaded to the brim with discarded two-by-fours from his construction site. His bringing home that truckload of wood was a summer ritual that resulted in a basement full of cut, split, and stacked firewood for the winter. He left the cutting to me as he departed to finish a roof repair at my grandpa’s house.

I laid out the extension cord and went to work with our circular Skilsaw, a heavy-duty, two-handed model with wide carbide tips for a sharper cut.

My dad didn’t use a sawhorse, because he said it slowed him
down. Instead, he had a technique that allowed him to cut in midair. He would hold a piece of wood in his left hand off to his right side and then just lower his saw onto the wood as if he were cutting into a wall. As difficult as this may sound, it was actually much easier, faster, and more efficient than using a sawhorse, so I adopted the practice.

Reach, grab, cut, throw—reach, grab, cut, throw—reach, grab, cut, throw—reach, WHOMP! My momentum was suddenly halted by what felt like a full-throttled punch against the front of my right thigh. At that very instant, I was simultaneously aware of two other senses. First, the sound of the Skilsaw was instantly muted. Second, when I turned to see who had punched me, the Skilsaw and my right leg moved as one—as if they were connected.

It took a few seconds to register what had just happened as I looked down at my leg and saw the Skilsaw completely submerged into the flesh. There was no pain, but the blade had cut through my thigh as if it were hot butter and buried itself right down to the femur bone. The muscle tension widened the slit into a red canyon.

I grabbed my leg and pulled the pieces together with my dirty work gloves, hobbled toward the deck to our home’s back door, and yelled for my mom. I pulled one glove back and revealed all of that mangled flesh. She didn’t even bother with 911. She yelled for my brother Chris and grabbed the car keys. Within seconds, we were on the road,
Starsky and Hutch
–style: passing cars, jumping curbs, running red lights, my heroically calm mom making her own siren with the horn.

By now the pain was about what you’d imagine after cutting your leg open with a Skilsaw. I bit down on a comb so I wouldn’t bite off my tongue.

The only other time in my life I’ve seen an ER staff move like that was in the movies. The doctor quickly assured us that, despite all appearances, I would not lose my leg. He also said I was one of
the luckiest guys he had ever seen. “Another inch to the right or left of that line, and you probably never would have made it here, son.” When my dad showed up, he nearly fainted when he saw the damage. That was quite a moment for me—the first time I’d ever seen him demonstrate weakness and fear.

The cut was so deep that it required two layers of stitches, seventy-six in all. And since I had eaten just an hour before, they couldn’t knock me out while they cut away on my leg. The plastic surgeon seemed struck silly by how I had managed to avoid cutting any major arteries or veins.

I was later told a wood splinter had prevented the blade guard from doing its job. When I had leaned over to pick up a new piece of wood, the free-spinning blade just touched my jeans and pulled itself into my leg in an instant and with little more than one rotation. Had my finger been on the trigger, that blade would have pulled itself into the bone and down through my knee.

So the same dumb luck that gave me cancer had already given me twenty more years and a beautiful family.

*   *   *

Victories and losses in life are often a muddled mass of earned and unearned ups and deserved and undeserved downs, with both obvious and mysterious causes.

In the final weeks leading up to my graduation, all talk turned to something called “honor graduates.” The best soldiers would compete to earn the title of platoon honor graduates, and the best soldier from all of those would be the distinguished honor graduate for the entire company. Based on my performance, I thought I would at least be a competitor, but my academic work had come up short.

A few days after my non-selection, I was called down to the company orderly room. Drill Sergeant Paradeis sat on a small table outside and stopped me short of the door. “Weber,” he said,
“you’re gonna represent our platoon in the honor grad competition. You up to it?”

“Yes, Drill Sergeant!”

When I returned to our troop bay, I found out the reason for the unexpected honor. Specialist Miller, one of our platoon’s competitors, had been on cleaning detail the night before and got caught with his hand in the cookie jar,
literally:
eating cookies out of the commander’s desk.