Tell My Sons: A Father's Last Letters (5 page)

He spent three months in a full-body cast, and the injuries he sustained would plague him for the rest of his life. His wrist remained disfigured, and his torso looked as if it had been reattached to his body off-center.

When I was an adolescent, this unbelievable story seemed to be the great catastrophe of Franny’s life. As a man, however, I saw something very different: he spent fourteen years suffering from depression after Grandma died, and it got worse as he got older. Though he was physically able until he died at ninety-one, my family had to goad him to take showers, change his clothes, care for his dog, and avoid eating spoiled food.

All through my early twenties, I tried to speak to him about what plagued his mind. “Guilt,” he would say. He gave hints of regrets from his youth or his or Grandma’s transgressions later in life, but he refused to say more. He just cried.

Now, I don’t want to leave you with the picture of a pathetic, sad old man. Franny remained an incredibly spirited character who had the most unique ways of making us laugh. When he passed gas, he would either say, “Excuse me, I thought I was in Kokomo,” or he would call out to an invisible cat, “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.” If we ever replied “Huh?” to a question, he replied back with, “Kick a pig in the hind end, ya get ‘Huh.’ ”

Whether it was inescapable or self-perpetuated, what I want you to know is that Grandpa Weber’s psychological difficulty and challenge plagued him as much or more than his big fall.

*   *   *

I suffered pain of my own as a child.

Physically, every kid has issues of one sort or another. Looking back, I see a kid who may have been an example in the extreme: tonsillitis at age two, fourteen years of recurrent ear infections with four corrective surgeries, two broken wrists, two sets of dental braces, and eyeglasses at age ten. Each of these troubles is common for children, but I never have seen a kid with all of them.

I was also accident-prone, and probably not the right kid to put in the top bunk of a bed. Three times I rolled out, breaking
my wrist on one occasion and losing a tooth on another. (Oh, there were safety rails back then, but I didn’t think I needed those.)

But the ear problems, those were difficult enough to be formative. Every year, I managed to get lake water trapped behind my eardrum, which caused an infection and immense pressure on the middle ear. Those tiny bones are so sensitive, I could feel a stinging pain with each heartbeat until the fluids drained and the infection was gone.

Although most kids are given antibiotics or ear drops to clear up infections, those solutions were not used or didn’t work for me. My doctor didn’t like using antibiotics (he thought they were overused), and the ear drops were useless. Four times between the age of five and sixteen, a surgeon cut a small hole in my eardrum and inserted a small plastic tube, which allowed the fluids to drain.

At least two weeks of every summer were spent writhing in pain or feverishly pumping my ears with my thumb. Evenings were a sleepless nightmare. No one complained about my crying, but I remember moving to different parts of the house so I wouldn’t disturb anyone.

I never did dwell on how these experiences may have affected me as an adult, and still don’t. As with my grandparents, there was no choice about a path of comfort, but perhaps I learned more than I realized about facing the stress and spur of difficulty and challenge.

*   *   *

During my freshman year in high school, I experienced pain—at school and at home—that I would have traded for all the ear infections in the world.

I attended Cretin High School (yes, that really was its name), an all-boys Catholic school. One of my least favorite events was
gym class. I loved the activities, but I hated what came at the end of class: the showers. This was a particularly stressful event for a Catholic boy prone to the kind of guilt and shame about nudity born when Adam and Eve were tossed out of the garden.

The shower ritual felt like a daily walk on dangerously thin ice. Since we were all cut from the same religious cloth, I presumed we each had an appreciation for the unwritten etiquette: do your business, get out, get dressed, and don’t joke about it.

But three months into my freshman year, that etiquette was grotesquely violated, and I was the unlucky and random victim of a cruelty that followed me for the next three years.

Inexplicably, a classmate I didn’t even really know raised his head into the air and shouted to the ceiling, “Hey, anybody notice Weber pop a woody in the shower?” He was just six lockers away from me and in my line of sight. I’ll never forget the cocky grin on his face after he said it.

I stood there frozen in place, staring at my locker.
Do I respond? Do I just stand here? Maybe no one heard him. Maybe I should just ignore him
.

He repeated his taunt, and it was like being poked with an electric cattle prod. Just then, someone else bit, and then other boys joined in the feeding frenzy. I tried making it a joke and said, “Good one, Shane. That’s a funny one.”

“Whatever, Weber. Don’t play it off, man,” he replied.

Then he raised his voice to the ceiling again, “Better bring your soap-on-a-rope,” he yelled, “and watch out for Webs in the shower … he’ll sneak up and getcha in the rear.” I felt shock rush through my chest as I darted out of the locker room and prayed to God that was the end of it.

It was only the beginning.

The comments and ribbing continued for the remainder of that year and my sophomore year, and then lingered through my junior year after we merged with an all-girls school and became Cretin-Derham Hall.

It’s hard to describe such an experience without overstating or understating it. I wasn’t grilled constantly by most kids on most days. It was just a drumbeat of ridicule, with the gaps between incidents filled with fear.

Nothing I said or did—laugh about it, remain silent, reply with “Whatever,” point out that no one else saw it happen, threaten to fight the offender—made the nightmare go away. When verbal taunts didn’t seem to rile me enough, someone etched
Woody
and
Woodman
on my locker.

My mom wanted to get the administration involved, but that brought visions of new taunts, such as “Look who needed his mommy to come fix things for him.”

Life would never again present me with a social problem quite as painful or unsolvable. Although I never want to repeat the experience, hindsight reveals a welcome consequence: I was practicing skills in conflict management that served me well for the rest of my life.

Freshman year brought an extraordinary amount of stress at home as well. Mom had had enough of Dad’s drinking and the effect it was having on our family. He wasn’t a mean drunk or a hard drinker, but his drinking was more than a distraction. It was affecting his work, another woman was involved, and there was at least one awkward incident in our driveway that almost brought the police. Mom kicked him out of the house and said the only way he was ever coming back was if he stopped drinking.

Four months into an ugly separation, we wondered if he would ever be coming back, and I can honestly say I didn’t much care. Though we knew the separation had to do with more than just Dad or the alcohol, it didn’t matter. Routinely seeing Mom quietly crying in a dark corner made us angry and fiercely protective.

With all of the problems at home and at school, suicide crept into my head as a possible solution. It seemed to be the easy button, and the very thought of pushing it brought me comfort.

I played out the scenarios in my head in the weeks that followed, and I came to a solid conclusion that suicide actually wouldn’t solve a thing. I didn’t suffer from a mental illness. I was fully capable of facing my difficulties. Given my circumstances, suicide would be a selfish and lazy thing to do, and it would only bring more pain to those I loved. I decided to stick it out.

*   *   *

My life as a soldier began when I was a freshman at Cretin High, which had a military institute tradition dating back a hundred years.

My early start with army life makes it seem as if this is what I was born to do. It’s difficult to argue against it, but nothing could be further from the truth. Every decision along this twenty-three-year path was a conscious choice, and each evoked a good amount of self-doubt and anxiety.

Nothing about my adult life will tell you this, but I was very apprehensive about army life during those first eight years, and I was far from a model of discipline and conviction when I first donned the uniform.

At Cretin, I wasn’t some kid embarking on an army career. I was merely doing what most of the kids from Saint Francis de Sales grade school did. The “military program,” also known as the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC), was voluntary, and I was hesitant to join. My only frame of reference was the 1981 movie
Taps
, in which the kids took over the high school and started a small war in their town.

Our program was more like a course in leadership and management. Instructors emphasized citizenship and leadership development. We explored real-world examples of leadership traits such as courage, loyalty, dedication, integrity, initiative, and determination. For many friends and family, there was concern that JROTC would brainwash me into wanting to join the army.
They were partly right. I was soon brainwashed, but with exceptionally positive lessons, such as the following:

Some of these were ideals I had seen or learned at home or at church, but other maxims—“Speak up” and “Disagreement doesn’t equal disrespect”—were altogether new and not exactly welcome with my parents or the church leadership. So this instruction empowered a young upstart like me. It told me I was not only entitled to seek responsibility and speak out, but that it was noble and honorable to learn how to do it respectfully and with competence.

The meritocracy and hierarchy of the military program brought with it a welcome predictability. We wore the army dress uniform every day, and we were given cadet rank and positions of responsibility.

Our “work” had limited value in the real world—we had to march and perform drills and we had to maintain the proper appearance, with clean and pressed uniforms, neatly trimmed hair, shined shoes, and correctly placed awards and decorations—but these were very practical ways to demonstrate and evaluate personal responsibility, discipline, and integrity.

Unfortunately, JROTC aroused certain fears among parents and non-JROTC staff. The sight of a mass of kids marching in
uniform and dutifully saluting and carrying out “orders” can send a chill up the spine of even the most reasonable adult, and I heard references to Nazi Germany and the Hitler Youth.

Our instructors took note. They were all retired army soldiers and veterans of the wars in Vietnam and Korea. Most of them had been wounded in combat. They had seen the horrors of war and were quick to humble any student who expressed romantic thoughts about the life of a soldier.

I gave all my attention and energy to the JROTC program, and it showed in good ways and bad. I could march a unit like one of Napoleon’s best, recite on demand the meaning of leadership traits and principles, and perform drills with a rifle better than any student in recent memory. But I was an unfocused academic student with an undisciplined mouth.

When I was a junior, I told a teacher to shut up when she said something insulting to me. Today I would call that “good initiative, bad judgment.” She was wrong, but telling her to shut up was a too-easy solution with harsh consequences. When the promotion order for lieutenant was published for our class—an important milestone in the program—my name was not listed. I openly wept in front of my friends. It took a few weeks for me to realize the failure was all mine.

As my time at Cretin came to a close, it dawned on me that my four years had produced some spectacular achievements—of little or no practical value. I earned a 2.25 GPA and a 19 on my ACT. I played no sports, performed no volunteer work, and held no major leadership positions in JROTC.

My talents included exceptional debate skills, a solid grasp of leadership and management traits, and the ability to recite the eighty-seven counties of Minnesota from memory in under thirty seconds. (About that last one, don’t ask.)

My high school counselor was fairly blunt: “College is not for you. I don’t even think any college will take you. You should start
thinking about what you want to do for a living.” That high school counselor’s words were a wake-up call:
I need to start thinking more and working harder
.

*   *   *

When the time came to meet with an army recruiter, the choice seemed as natural as picking out something for dinner. And it wasn’t all “duty, honor, and country.”

Joining the Minnesota Army National Guard paid for half of my tuition, provided several hundred dollars of income per month, and would help establish a career if I decided to stick with it after graduation from college. Even my choice of army profession (military police) was based on finances—a two-thousand-dollar bonus.

Moving from Minnesota to Alabama for basic training was as shocking as being thrown into ice-cold water. Our open sleeping bays were a close-quarters stewpot of personalities, cultures, and social backgrounds from all over the country, not to mention a total surrender of comfort and familiarity. I knew how to march, shoot, map-read, and recite leadership principles better than most of my drill sergeants, but this wasn’t high school, and these were not underclassmen.

The pace and style of the drill sergeants made my dad’s roughness seem quaint. All my hair was cut off, all my freedoms stripped, and every decision made for me. We weren’t even allowed to pee without permission.