Author Archives: Stan Deaton

Mr. Smith Goes to War: The Curious Case of the Fighting 50 Year Old

Movie Review: Fury (2014) Starring Brad Pitt, Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Michael Pena, and Jon Bernthal. Written and directed by David Ayer.

“War is cruelty and you cannot refine it.”—William Tecumseh Sherman

The World War II movie has been around as long as the war itself. Hollywood began churning out anti-Nazi flicks even before combat began in Europe in 1939, and from the moment Japanese bombs fell on Pearl Harbor Tinseltown was all in. Some of its best efforts, like Casablanca, weren’t even about war, but about how the conflict disrupted lives and displaced lovers.

We could review some of the films that came out during the war (and some of them were quite good), but one movie released 53 years after the war’s end changed everything. Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan in 1998 took combat on film to a level and an intensity never seen before, and no movie made after it can hope to pretend to anything other than farce if it doesn’t measure up.

To be sure, other films before that—particularly Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986), Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) and Michael Mann’s 1992 version of Last of the Mohicans—brought a sense of realism to the violence and trauma of war that hadn’t been present before. But the opening twenty minutes of Private Ryan, which recreated the D-Day landings of June 6, 1944, were harrowing and graphic in a way that left audiences riveted and many veterans traumatized. I saw it six times in the theater and many times since on DVD and its impact remains unchanged.

Now comes David Ayer’s Fury, released October 17. The story of a American tank crew in the last days of the War, the movie stars Brad Pitt and a nice ensemble cast, and it follows the genre in all its clichés perfectly.

The World War II buddy movie has a time-worn formula that movie makers are loathe to give up. You’ve seen it many times. The squad is made up of a motley and diverse cast of characters who all make jokes at each other’s expense but who of course love each other and are bonded by combat. There is always a wisecracking New Yorker with a Brooklyn accent; a Midwesterner, usually nicknamed “Iowa” or “Nebraska”; a Southerner, often a sharpshooter (think Sergeant York), who dryly quotes scripture almost every time he’s on screen and putting a bullet in somebody’s head. He is invariably nicknamed something like “Hillbilly” or “Tex”; a hard-boiled, brooding leader with a mysterious background who ends up usually hailing from either Pennsylvania or the Midwest and turns out to be either a mailman or a baseball coach before the war; and finally, one member who passes for a minority, either a Jew or a Hispanic.

Very early in the film one standing member of the group will get killed and will inevitably be replaced by a green-as-a-Granny-Smith-apple rookie who a) has never seen combat), b) is usually anti-violence and loathe to kill, no matter the circumstances and c) becomes the squad egghead and/or resident sissy who quotes poetry or will be seen reading a book of some kind during a lull in combat. This fellow’s manhood will be questioned, will be found wanting, will be put to the ultimate test, and he will, in the end, be the only one standing.

Also part of the formula: the squad will fight for most of the picture as part of a larger unit but near the end of the flick they’ll find themselves cut off from everyone else and forced to make a hard choice: run and try to re-join the larger group or stand and fight and face near-total annihilation while serving the larger cause. Guess which one they choose?

Saving Private Ryan, for all its combat realism, followed this formula right down to the last moment, and Fury does too. Unlike Spielberg’s film, however, Ayer’s offering is no love letter to the generation that fought the Big One. This is all about Sherman’s quote that began this blog—war is hell, and you cannot refine it. The movie opens with violence and follows it through right to the end, and you’re not always sure what the larger story arc is, other than survival. And that’s precisely the point. By April 1945, when this movie takes place, most combat veterans just wanted to make it to the end; whatever larger, overarching theme there is in this movie is juxtaposed with the soldier’s will and desperation to survive—another minute, another hour, another day, to make it to war’s end, and then back home again.

There are of course things wrong with this movie, starting with the fact that there were no 50-year-old tank commanders in World War II. None. Nada. Zilch. If you were 50 years old and in the U.S. Army, you were a general. You were nothing else. Even Tom Hanks was beyond the age, at 42, of a captain in Private Ryan. Grizzled and weary WWII combat soldiers were 28.

To Brad Pitt’s credit—and this soon-to-be-50-year-old is eternally grateful—he makes you forget he’s 50. He’s as plausible in this role as he’s ever been in anything he’s done in his long career, and in this instance his pretty-boy looks and youthfulness serve him well. Those same attributes often make you overlook the fact that he’s a fine actor, but this time he makes the most of them without making that the reason you cheer for him.

To my mind, this role is a turning point in Pitt’s career. He is as close now to what passes in Hollywood for a Gary Cooper or a Clark Gable—the man who, when he is on the screen, commands your attention without even opening his mouth. Pitt does that numerous times in this movie, sometimes quite literally taking command of a situation that threatens to explode right in front of you, and he never even moves. If George Clooney is our modern-day Cary Grant, and Tom Hanks is Jimmy Stewart, Pitt is Coop, The King, Errol Flynn, and in some ways Henry Fonda all rolled into one—a character with an earnest but quiet dignity that evokes the best moments of those stars from Hollywood’s golden era.

One thing this movie does well is muddy the waters of the narrative of the American G.I. Whatever else Stephen Ambrose would have us believe about the American soldier as liberator, there are moments in this film when one wonders how excited the German civilians were to see the Americans roll into town. War obliterates all rules, and even the most civilized people can be brutalized and desensitized by unrelenting violence. Fury demonstrates this well. Ayer’s G.I.s are not the sort of people you’d meet at an ice-cream social, and Americans or no, there’s no mistaking the reality that Western Civilization itself was a casualty of this war.

Another point that is well made in this film: American military personnel did not take any German S.S. as prisoners. Members of the S.S. were trained killers, and they were treated as such, a point made repeatedly in all the recent movies and mini-series. Watch for it here too.

Is this the best WWII tank movie ever made? Nope. Since this is a blog about history, my money is still on Humphrey Bogart’s 1943 classic, Sahara, which employed all the buddy war-movie clichés but with a United Nations cast, and with Bogart’s ultra-cool, towering performance that still stands over 70 years later. Every generation needs to interpret World War II for itself and let its stars stand in for those of yester-year, whether it was Bogart, George C. Scott as Patton, Clint Eastwood in the Vietnam-era Kelly’s Heroes, Tom Hanks, and now Brad Pitt.

In the end, what we’re left with is the sense that the war was big, messy, and traumatizing for all those who fought in it. Those who survived were damaged too, in different ways. It’s hard to come away from this film—or any other good one about war—and not be convinced that however necessary it might sometimes be, it always destroys more than it preserves.

This movie too, like its predecessors, reminds us—and we always need reminding—that, as Bruce Catton so eloquently put it, when the Great Challenge comes, the most ordinary among us will rise up and do great things. But the cost will always be high. As the World War II generation literally disappears from our sight, we’re haunted by the question of what all those young men left lying on WWII battlefields—and indeed from all wars—might have achieved if they had been allowed to return to a world without war.

The Way the Game is Played

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Former baseball commissioner and Yale president Bart Giamatti captured it best: Baseball, he wrote, breaks your heart: “It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.”

As a lifelong baseball fan, I’ve always hated to see the season end. Unless the Braves makes the playoffs, that is, which they didn’t this year, after another awful September. I love playoff season too, but this year is different. The end of the season marked the end of Derek Jeter’s career.

Before you Braves and Red Sox fans fill up my inbox with flaming burritos in protest, let me explain. I’ve never been much of a Yankee fan. Indeed, it’s still hard for me to accept the outcome of the 1996 World Series. The Braves, defending World Series champions that year, again won the National League pennant in ’96 and went to New York to open the series with the Yankees.

They promptly shocked the baseball world by winning the first two games in Yankee Stadium by a combined score of 16-1 behind the offensive firepower of Andruw Jones and Fred “Crimedog” McGriff and the dazzling pitching duo of John Smoltz and Greg Maddux. The next three games would be in Atlanta, followed by two more in New York if necessary. The Braves needed to win only two of those potential five games to clinch their second consecutive series. It was going to be Atlanta Braves baseball nirvana.

Except it never happened, of course. They lost the next four games and that was that, with the Yankees winning their first championship since 1978. Derek Jeter was on that ’96 team, playing in his first full season as a Yankee. The Braves lost to Jeter’s Yankees again in 1999.

So though I’ve never been a dyed-in-the-wool Yankee hater, I’ve not been partial to them either, as we say. But I can certainly respect the history of the great franchise and the great players who’ve worn the pinstripes—Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Mantle, Jackson, Mattingly, Rivera.

None, however, were ever better than number 2, who retired Sunday after 20 years in the big leagues. It was all in the way he played the game.

Baseball is a game of numbers, but it wasn’t just Jeter’s statistics that made him great, though they’re impressive enough too. One of the reasons I love baseball is that it’s so tied to its own history, as no other sport really is—every player who puts on the uniform is compared to all of those who have gone before. When Jeter legged out a single on Sunday for his last hit, it was number 3,465 in his career. Only five players in major-league history, across more than 145 years, have ever hit more. Only five. He finished with a .310 batting average, won five World Series titles, five Gold Gloves, five Silver Slugger awards, and was an All-Star fourteen times. He will be voted unanimously into the Hall of Fame.

In this, his last season, he played in 145 games. Only one other Hall of Famer in the last century, Al Kaline, played in more games in his final season. His walk-off game-winning single in his last game at Yankee Stadium on September 25 was the stuff of legend. And he played all twenty seasons with the same team, again a rare thing.

But the most impressive statistic about Derek Jeter to me? Zero. Across twenty major-league seasons, he was never ejected from a game. Not once. With my temper I would have rivaled Bobby Cox’s record for getting tossed out of games (158) if I’d ever been so blessed to play that long, so I can appreciate Jeter’s self-control perhaps more than anything. To play at that high level and never lose your cool enough to get thrown out of a game is remarkable indeed. It speaks to his character, his temperament under pressure, and yes, his upbringing too.

True to the best about the sport, baseball history was in play on his final day in uniform, last Sunday, September 28, in Boston. With two hits on Sunday, Jeter could have tied Ty Cobb’s record for the most seasons with at least 150 hits, with 18.The Georgia Peach played his last season in 1928, 86 years ago, so this is a cumulative record that speaks to skill and longevity, one not likely to fall very easily. Yankee manager Joe Girardi told Jeter about the record on Sunday morning, and asked if he wanted to play longer than his planned two at bats. Jeter said no. He would stick with just two trips to the plate and take the results, whatever they were.

“I never played the game for numbers,” he said. “So why start now?” He fell one hit short.

Others have more eloquently described Jeter’s career than I can, but as a lifelong fan of the national pastime, I know something rare when I see it. I’ve been lucky enough in my life to see some great baseball players in person. Long-suffering readers of this blog will recall that I saw Hank Aaron hit homerun number 713 in 1973. I saw the Big Red Machine in a championship year, and many other legendary players too numerous to mention across 40 years of attending big-league games.

Jeter played the game the way it’s supposed to be played, the way we all dreamed of back when we were playing ball with our friends out in the street or in the backyard, when we played just for the sheer love of the game. Jeter played that way every day.

He played with an intensity that Pete Rose had, but without Rose’s arrogance. He played with unbelievable skill—no one will ever forget his famous flip in the 2001 playoffs against the A’s—with finesse, style, and above all, with class, both on and off the field. He didn’t run his mouth or think he was entitled, or create more headlines for what he did off the field than on. He respected the game and played it with honor.

How remarkable was he? As I mentioned above, he played his last game in Boston, home of the Red Sox, the Yankees’ most hated rival, and the fans stood and cheered for him as if he were their own, long and loudly and with tears in their eyes. Red Sox greats from years past lined up to shake his hand. Boston’s a great baseball town, and they know a legend when they see one, but even this was something to see. It would be like UGA fans giving a retiring Steve Spurrier a standing and rousing ovation, if Spurrier had ever had one ounce of class.

Will we see his like again? Yes. One thing we know about baseball is that it renews itself, and as one era ends, another begins, even if it takes a few years to realize it. When Jeter came on the scene in the 1995 season, another Yankee legend—Don Mattingly—was ending his storied career. Donnie Baseball, now the Dodgers’ manager, played all 14 of his big-league seasons with the Yankees and retired with a career .307 average, one year before the Yankees began their championship run. It was the end of an era, but without our even knowing it at the time, a new one began that same season. It’s the way the game is played.

To watch a great athlete across his entire career is one of the great joys in life. To then see him walk away in the fading twilight is a reminder of our own fleeting youth, when we played the game with passion and love, and of our own mortality. It is a painful reminder, if we needed one, that all good things must end someday.

So there is no joy in Mudville at the end of this season and the end of Derek Jeter’s splendid career. To paraphrase John Fogerty, this particular brown-eyed handsome man has rounded third for the last time. Like all great players who have gone before, Jeter will now gracefully stand aside and make way for others whose names we may not know very well—yet—but who will, in time, achieve greatness. They’ll be here as sure as one season follows another, keeping the memory of high skies, sunshine, and childhood alive. In another September we’ll lament they’re passing from the stage as well. It’ll break our hearts because baseball always does. It’s the way the game is played.

Summer Reading

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August is here, and that means all sorts of things. For Braves fans, it means you brace yourself for the Annual August Flop, and sure enough, right on schedule, the swoon has begun. For college football fans, it means the long wait is almost over. And for we happy yet sweating denizens of Charm City, it means breaking out the kayaks for the evening commute after the drenching, frog-strangling storms that drop 3 inches of rain in 20 minutes every afternoon, hard on the heels of three-digit heat indices.

August also means that, despite the unrelenting heat and humidity, summer is winding down. The unofficial end is a mere two weeks away on Labor Day but if you define summer by summer “vacation,” it’s already over at my house, where school started on August 7. It was 96 degrees that day, by the way. There’s lots of things wrong with that, but then nobody asked me if we should start school that early. If you define summer by temperature, summer in Savannah will last at least 3 more months. But let’s not turn this essay into another rant about the weather, shall we?

I’ve always found the notion of “summer reading,” once you’re out of K-12 or college, to be a relatively useless term. What adult has more time to read in summer than in any other season? Unless you are blessed—and I won’t name any names or occupations—to not have to work in the summer, I’ll wager you actually have less time to read in that season than in any other. The kids are out of school and they keep you busy. Longer days mean more time to do things outside and probably less time reading. Weekends are filled with yard work and other more pleasurable outdoor activities. Personally, I find the cooler afternoons and longer nights of autumn and winter to be more conducive to reading, but that’s just me. I suspect the notion of having more time to read in summer comes from “beach reading” that publishers like to promote, and the lofty idea that people take along stacks of books and actually read when they’re on vacation. If you read the rest of the year, you probably read on vacation. If you’re not a reader, you won’t read on the beach or anywhere else you vacate to. Readers read, no matter the season.

But the term “summer” reading also refers to seasonal reading, of course, and this idea has more traction–we read different things at different times of the year. Is that true for you? I wrote an essay for this blog last October about some great books to read around Halloween, and there are any number of books that make great reading during the Christmas season and on cold winter nights. Here’s what I’ve been reading this summer, broadly defined as Memorial Day to Labor Day:

World War I: With the 100^th anniversary of the start of the war upon us this month, there is lots of good new scholarship being published on all aspects of the conflict. Here’s a few that I’ve picked up recently: Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914; Geoffrey Wawro, A Mad Catastrophe: The Outbreak of World War I and the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire; David Crane, Empires of the Dead: How One Man’s Vision Led to the Creation of World War I’s War Graves; Britt Buttar, Collision of Empires: The War on the Eastern Front, 1914; Max Hastings, Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War; Margaret Macmillan, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914; and Sean McMeekin’s July 1914: Countdown to War.

This is a just a short list of some of the new stuff that’s out, and if it’s any indication, there’ll be a slew of new books over the next four years to mark the centennial of the Marne, the Somme, Flanders, Verdun, the Argonne, and Versailles, not to mention reassessments of all other aspects of battles, the carnage and personalities involved, and the war on the home front and its aftermath.

I’m giving a couple of upcoming talks on the centennial of the First World War, so I used that as an excuse not to dig into the new books but to re-read three compelling books that I enjoyed the first time around and that I now consider classics: Unknown Soldiers: The Story of the Missing of the First World War (Knopf, 2005) by Neil Hanson; Back to the Front: An Accidental Historian Walks the Trenches of World War I (Avon, 1996) by Stephen O’Shea; and John Keegan’s The Face of Battle (Penguin, 1976). Keegan’s account of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme is the best known, but all three offer riveting accounts of the slaughter of an entire generation and the scar the Great War left on the 20^th century. Hanson’s book in particular highlights how the unprecedented carnage of 37 million casualties changed the way societies memorialize the men who fought and died, and how those memorials institutionalize the trauma of coming to terms with the hundreds of thousands who have no known grave. All are highly recommended as we contemplate the continuing meaning of the Great War in our lives.

The Great Books: In 2008 I subscribed to Easton Press’s list of the “100 Greatest Books Ever Written,” and I read three offerings this summer: Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley; Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev; and The Red and the Black by Stendhal. Shelley’s gothic novel, first published in 1818, is not at all like the camp versions served up by Hollywood, which is a real shame. It seems to me that there have been many missed opportunities to get this story about the creation of life and what, in the end, makes us human, on film. I remember the 1973 made-for-TV movie, Frankenstein, the True Story, though critically lampooned, as coming closer to the novel than Boris Karloff ever did. Stendhal’s work is rightly hailed as a groundbreaking novel, one of the first to explore the psychological dimensions of its multi-layered characters. The three books each feature some of the most memorable characters in literature: Victor Frankenstein and his unnamed Creature (not at all like the Golem featured in films); the young Nihilist physician Bazarov in Turgenev’s 1862 novel of generational conflict; and the ambitious climber Julien Sorel in Stendhal’s 1830 realistic classic. Are they three of the greatest books ever written? Read and decide for yourself.

Autobiography: Washington Post book reviewer and Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Dirda is one of my favorite writers and I’ve devoured everything he’s published. He is, in my humble opinion, the best American literary critic writing today; you can find him every Wednesday in the Post, the New York Review of Books, and online on The American Scholar and Barnes and Noble reviews. His books of essays have brought dozens of great reads into my life—new ones and overlooked classics. This summer I came across a copy of his memoir, An Open Book: Growing up in the Heartland (2003), a heartfelt tribute to a lifelong love of reading and the printed word that began in Lorain, Ohio. If you haven’t already, get to know Michael Dirda.

History: Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic by Matthew Stewart (W.W. Norton, 2014) A full review of this book is forthcoming on this blog, but suffice it to say that this is a very controversial book (or will be to many people who read it) and is a full-throated rebuttal to those who insist that the United States was founded by Christians as a Christian nation. Read this one and discuss with your book club if you want to liven things up.

Bedtime Reading: Finally, what to read before turning out the lights? I save the heavy stuff for the early mornings. Clifton Fadiman, he of The Lifetime Reading Plan fame, wrote in his 1955 essay, “Pillow Books,” that bedtime reading should be chosen carefully. “I hold with neither the Benzedrine nor the Seconal school,” he declared. “As for the first, to read the whole night through is to trespass upon nature. The dark hours belong to the unconscious, which has its own rights and privileges. To use the literary lockout against the unconscious is unfair to the dreamers’ union. Hence the wise bed reader, rendering unto Morpheus the things that are Morpheus’, will shun any book that appears too interesting.”

The ideal bedtime book, he says, should neither bore nore excite. Wise advice. So at night this summer I turned to Erle Stanley Gardner’s The Case of the Half-Wakened Wife, # 27 in the Perry Mason series, first published in 1945, and containing the usual cast of characters—the erstwhile counselor Perry, his girl Friday (and sometime love interest) Della Street, detective and Mason sidekick Paul Drake, and the pompous and overbearing DA, Hamilton Burger. The literary Perry Mason cracks jokes, smokes, curses, enjoys a drink, and is occasionally profane. Why Raymond Burr was ever cast as television’s Perry Mason, I’ll never know. I find Gardner’s Mason to be much more human than the unbending Burr ever was on screen. All the stories in the Perry Mason series are interesting but easy to put down and pick up the next night without losing your place. Ideal for pillow reading.

Just for fun I tossed in P.G. Wodehouse’s The Inimitable Jeeves, a collection of short stories first published in in 1921 in the Strand Magazine. For those of you not blessed to have made their acquaintance, all the stories involve English gentleman/socialite/fop Bertie Wooster, his humble but all-knowing valet Jeeves, and Bertie’s friend and fellow Drones Club member Bingo Little. This was the second collection of Jeeves stories published, following My Man Jeeves, with the celebrated first chapter, “Jeeves Exerts the Old Cerebellum.” Wodehouse was the unparalled master at British Upper Crust Old Boy humor, and his stories have a charm, lightness, and hilarity all their own. There is a whole other universe in Wodehouse’s writing, and it’s all perfect for perusing just before turning out the lights.

Which it’s time to do for this column. Turn the page and enjoy the rest of your summer.

The Light Shines in the Darkness

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Under the look of fatigue, the attack of migraine and the sigh
There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.
W.H. Auden, “At Last the Secret is Out”

On a grey Friday, the seventh day of December, 1984, one of my best friends from high school, Chuck Fuller, ended his own life at age 20. Chuck suffered from depression, but none of us knew it. No one saw it coming—not his parents, not his closest friends. All who knew and loved Chuck experienced the gamut of emotions that one feels at the news of suicide: grief, devastation, anger, guilt. If only we’d done this or that, maybe, just maybe, we could have made a difference. We always think that. It shook all of us to the core, and we carry it with us still.

Twenty-five years after Chuck’s death, I wrote his parents a letter to tell them both how much their son meant to me and how his life had touched mine and so many other lives. Chuck’s father told me of the pain of losing his only child, and said this about Chuck’s death and depression: “This life is filled with mysteries and it is not meant for us to understand everything. We would be as wise as God if we did. From time to time each of us has a terrible burden to bear. Burdens of the mind are surely the heaviest. I learned from Chuck’s death that mental anguish is virtually invisible and no matter how deeply we might love and care for someone we often have no idea the burden exists.” The darkness behind the light.

Here’s to the hearts and the hands of the men
That come with the dust and are gone with the wind.
Bob Dylan, “Song to Woody”

I first met Will Brown at the Memorial Hospital gym. Will was a radiologist resident at Memorial and a gym rat like me. The Memorial gym, on the third floor of the Health Institute, has been my home away from home for nearly 13 years, and I’m there a lot. But no matter how much I went, it seemed that Will was there even more. No matter what time of the day or night I went, he was already there. Will riding a stationary bike, reading his Ipad. Will with his retro headphones on, bench pressing nearly 300 pounds. Will doing pull ups with a weighted vest. Will doing sit ups with a 45-pound plate on his chest. Will laughing. Will smiling. Will in the zone. Will being Will.

Like everyone else, I was naturally drawn to him, and we connected instantly. Our conversation and friendship was natural and easy. I learned so many new things to do in the gym just from watching him, but of course we talked a lot too. No matter what he was doing, it was something to see, and I was in awe of him. Will being Will, he’d have none of it. He would invariably say, “If I can do it, you can do it.” I’ve never known anybody who wore all of his accomplishments and talents so lightly, and they were many—champion athlete, musician, physician. And he was right, at least to a point: I tried all sorts of things I hadn’t done before in the gym, and learned that I could do them. And Will being Will, he always acted as if he was in awe of me. He always encouraged me, acted as if he wished he could look like me, and always complimented me. We would see each other across the parking lot, and he’d yell, “Here comes the gun show!” “Stan,” he’d say, “please cover up those arms, you’re putting all of us to shame!” Never mind that he was twice as big as me; that was his way, Will being Will, as I learned very quickly watching him interact with other people.

When he found out that I was 15 years older than he, it just ratcheted everything up a notch. He seemed incredulous. He didn’t just say “I hope I look that good when I’m almost 50,” he would say, “I wish I looked like you right now!” As if he didn’t. With a smile and a body that could conquer cities, he somehow found a way to make you feel like the special one. Will being Will.

One day you’ll look to see I’ve gone
For tomorrow may rain, so I’ll follow the sun
The Beatles, “I’ll Follow the Sun”

Last fall I decided rather late in the game to run the Rock & Roll Half Marathon but didn’t have anyone to run with. Most people who had run it before that I knew would have nothing to do with it again. They had better sense, which is why I of course approached Will one night in the gym and asked him if he’d run it with me. He said, “I haven’t run at all since I ran the Half last year.” I waited. He grinned. “I’d love to run it with you.” That’s the kind of person he was. As far as I could tell, he didn’t train much at all, if any. He even bought a new pair of running shoes the week before the race and planned to wear them, another no-no. The day before the race I drove over to the Savannah Convention Center to pick up my race packet, and as I was walking in, Will was walking out. He was in scrubs, I was in a suit. I realized later that it was the only time I’d ever seen Will when he wasn’t sweating. Will being Will, he gave me a big hug and wouldn’t stop talking about how sharp I looked in the suit. We finalized our plans for the next morning. I would drive to his house at 5 a.m. His friend and fellow doctor, Lee, would meet us there and we’d drive downtown together.

I got up at 4, anxious to get the day started, and left the house at 5. Will lived just minutes away, and I called him to tell him I was on my way. No answer. I got to his street, unsure exactly which was his house but figured it would be the only one with lights on. They were all pitch dark. I called Will again. And again. And again. And again. No answer. Crap, they’ve left without me, and I was only a few minutes late. I’ll never find them downtown and I’ll have to run by myself after all. I was getting a little panicky, driving up and down the street, the minutes ticking by, when I noticed a car sitting in a driveway with someone in it. Taking a chance, I parked and walked up and knocked on the window. “Are you looking for Will?” He was. It was Lee, whom I’d never met. His calls had gone unanswered too. He tried again. This time Will answered. He had not only slept through at least 10 phone calls but through 8 different alarms, having worked late the night before. Nevertheless, Will being Will, he was out in less than 5 minutes, smiling, looking fresh as ever. Off we went.

Lee was a lot faster than both of us, and he was in a different corral. Will being Will, he pumped both of us up as we shivered in the pre-dawn cold, fist-pumping, hugging, high-fiving, “We’re gonna do this!” At the gun, we took off together and stayed together. He kept our time on his watch, and I pestered him throughout: How we doin? How’s our time? After every mile, he’d fist bump, high five, and never stopped encouraging us both: “We’re doing great! You’re awesome Stan! I’m having a hard time keeping up with you!” I’d tell him, “You gotta keep up with the old man!” And he’d just laugh and smile that smile. Will being Will.

At mile 8 the blisters came and I wasn’t sure I could run 5 more miles. Will never stopped encouraging and pushing us. He was in new shoes, for cryin’ out loud. He even took phone calls. Our pace would slacken and then increase. Finally, at Mile 13, Will slowed down. I could sense the finish line was near and wanted to turn it up, but I didn’t want to leave him behind. Will being Will, he could sense that too. “Go on Stan, get your best time! Go!” “No way man, we’ve been together for 13 miles, I’m not leaving you now!” “Stan, go on! Get your best time brother! I’ll meet you at the finish line!” I’ll never forget those words. With a thumbs up, I took off and left him behind. He finished right behind me, just five seconds off my pace, but I felt terrible when it was over. Will being Will, he’d have none of that either. He gave me a big Will hug and told me how proud he was of me. He told me he’d have never been able to finish but for pushing him and keeping him going. We posed together, had our pictures taken together, basked in our collective glory.

I learned so much a bout Will that day, about true friendship. I learned about his loyalty, that he would get up at 5 in the morning—or at least try to—to run with and encourage a friend in a race he’d already run before, a milestone he’d already accomplished; about the sheer physical and athletic skills he possessed that allowed him to do something so grueling without training or preparing, on little sleep, and in new shoes; about his selflessness in encouraging me to go on without him at the very end to achieve a personal milestone. He made me feel that he could have never run and finished the race without my encouragement, when actually the opposite was true. I learned that day about the character of Will Brown. I had always had a sense that he was something special. That day confirmed it. Looking back, every encounter I ever had with him confirmed it. Will being Will. The memory of that November day, of my strong and gallant friend with the heart of a lion, will remain with me when many autumns have become distant, vanished memories.

They say that all good things must end someday
Autumn leaves must fall
But don’t you know that it hurts me so
To say goodbye to you
Wish you didn’t have to go
Chad & Jeremy, “A Summer Song”

It was only fitting that the last time I ever saw Will was in the gym, sweaty as always. He was in great emotional pain following a personal setback the day before, and I sat with him and told him that I was his friend and that I was there if he needed me, and even if he didn’t. He was devastated, shattered. I had never seen him like that. I told him that I would check on him in the days to come to see how he was doing. Will being Will, he thanked me that day and managed to smile, and we said goodbye.

Forever and forever farewell, Cassius;
if we do meet again, why we shall smile;
if not, why then, this parting was well made.
William Shakespeare, “Julius Caesar”

The next week, I sent him a text to check on his emotional state: Hey buddy, how you doing? He responded immediately: “Hey Stan! I’d be lying if I said I was doing well. Been praying a lot.” I told him that I was free on Friday night and that we should get together. No response. When Friday night came, I thought about calling him and inviting him out again but decided against it. I didn’t want to bother him; I had offered my company and he hadn’t accepted. I didn’t want to push myself on him.

Will suffered from depression, but I didn’t know it. In talking with his friends and hospital colleagues later, we all had a little piece of the puzzle, but none of us had the whole picture or understood how it all fit together. Later that evening, in the early morning hours of Saturday, May 24, Will took his own life. He was gone at 34.

The saviors come not home tonight,
Themselves they could not save.
A.E. Housman, “1887”

Memorial Day in Savannah was dark and rainy, as if the heavens themselves were weeping. It was for me a day of profound sorrow and mourning, of feeling what I felt for Chuck all over again, nearly 30 years later—grief, devastation, anger, guilt. But this time I knew and accepted the fact that I had reached out to Will in his last days and that he chose not to accept the lifeline that I and undoubtedly so many others had extended. Will had many friends who loved and cared about him, and he was gone by his own choice. It was a journey that none of us could have prevented. The darkness behind the light had finally overtaken him, and most of us never even knew it was there.

And in the streets the children screamed;
the lovers cried and the poets dreamed;
but not a word was spoken.
The church bells all were broken.
Don McLean, “American Pie”

The following Friday I drove 500 miles across the Florida panhandle to attend the memorial service in Will’s hometown of Gulf Breeze, Florida. The small Episcopal Church there was packed to overflowing, as was the service at Memorial Hospital here in Savannah the following Monday, at which I was privileged to speak. The Rev. Christie Olsen led a beautiful service in Gulf Breeze. The connecting theme, repeated over and over again by all who spoke at both services, was that this remarkable young man touched so many lives and, as one of his friends said, his soul was as bright as his smile. He was the real thing. We all struggled to reconcile the Will we knew with the Will who felt compelled to take his own life. Afterwards, I met his parents, Tom and Lita Brown, and his three brothers, Tad, Alex, and David, at the home where, as his father put it, Will was conceived, born, and raised, and to which he returned all his life to reconnect and renew his spirit. His father Tom and two older brothers, Tad and Alex, all are doctors. His younger brother David is a paramedic. Extraordinary children come from extraordinary parents and families. To the Browns, I say thank you for the wonderful gift you gave the world in Will. He touched and changed our lives in ways that none of you—nor he—could imagine.

Friendship is hard work. All things in life that are worthwhile are. Friendship has to be cultivated, maintained, refreshed, renewed. We all get busy and we lose touch. It’s hard enough sometimes just getting through our own day and dealing with our own troubles. We’re all too busy trying to shove our own rocks up the hill every day. Paying attention to other people’s moods or problems, no matter how much we may care about them, is often just too much work, too heavy a load. But in the wake of Will’s death, I hope now that I pay more attention to those around me and to the burdens they carry within them. Take the time to ask people how they’re doing, and really mean it when you ask. It’s a cliché, but it’s true: be kind to all those you meet, because we really don’t know the silent struggles within or the dark but quiet battles people are fighting. Even in the midst of all the hurries and bustles of modern life, I hope I can stop long enough to pay attention to those around me, and that somehow, some way, next time I can better see the darkness behind the light.

When he shall die, take and cut him out in little stars;
and he shall make the face of heaven so fine
that all the world shall be in love with night.
William Shakespeare, “Romeo & Juliet”

As Mr. Viviana said to Sherlock Holmes in “The Abbey Grange,” there are those in this life who are what you might call large-souled, who are a privilege to know. Will Brown was one of those. Will didn’t just make those around him better, his friends and colleagues, though he certainly did that. He made the human race better, and the world desperately needs more people like him. Will wasn’t a saint, nor was he perfect. None of us is. But he was a good and compassionate friend who always worried more about other people than himself, who invariably made everyone feel better and more cheerful after having spent just a few moments with him. I will struggle all of my life to keep faith with Will and all that he was, but I am so grateful for the privilege of having known him, for all that he taught me and gave me in so short a time.

One thing I know as I stand on the threshold of 50: real friendship is a rare and fleeting thing. I grieve the loss of this special friend. I am angry and heartbroken that there will be no more of him and all that might have been—no more learning from him, connecting with him, running with him. There should have been years and years and years left for this friendship to grow and for it to nourish us both.

But ultimately, the light that shined through Will—and that now shines through all who knew him—was much more powerful and lasting than the darkness behind the light. All the good that Will did and the joy he brought to so many others will far outlive the darkness that ultimately took him from us. And I realize now that Will needed to finish the race before me. As I left him behind on that November day—however briefly—so has he left us. Go on Will; get your best time. Will being Will, he’ll be waiting for me—for all of us—at the finish line. Godspeed my beautiful friend.

The light shines in the darkness,
And the darkness could not overcome it.
The Gospel of John, 1:5

The Kids Are Alright

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Last week I did presentations on history in three middle schools in three different Georgia counties, Gwinnett and Walton in metro Atlanta and Fannin in North Georgia. Two of the programs were for 8^th graders and one for 6^th graders.

I’ve been doing public speaking since I first started this job nearly 16 years ago, and standing in front of an audience to talk about history is about as natural for me now as breathing. But I think I’d rather stand up in front of a hundred federal court judges than a hundred 8^th graders. It’s a tough age and they can be a tough audience. Acting jaded, cynical, and uninterested is a badge of honor.

And of course it’s become a rite of passage for adults to bemoan teenagers in this or any age for what they don’t know, don’t care about, or even care to know what they don’t know. The world is going to hell in the proverbial handbasket, and the younger generation is always leading the charge. It’s the declension theory of civilization—it was better in the past, people worked harder, valued things (education, manners, work ethic, etc.) more than they do now, and cared passionately about and understood the value of getting a good education. Kids these days are just entitled lazy brats.

Adults have been saying that about the rising generation for millennia. It was said of our Founders and of the folks we now call the Greatest Generation. Today’s teenagers will say it about their own kids.

One might assume that as a professional historian, I would routinely engage in this kind of hand-wringing. But the truth is, after visiting with these students last week, I was very pleasantly surprised.

They knew a lot more about history than I thought they would for people who were born in 2002. Even the 6^th graders were familiar with things like D-Day and the Civil Rights movement that I didn’t think they’d know a lot about. What’s more, many of them were not only familiar with history, they were actually very interested in it and weren’t afraid to show that interest, even in front of their peers. I came away impressed with these students and their teachers.

I was particularly impressed with a 12-year-old boy in Fannin County named Mike. You might not notice Mike otherwise as he was a little small for his age (as I was in 6^th grade). But Mike was well-behaved, interested, smart, and he asked great questions.

And I’m drawn to people who ask questions, who are naturally curious about the world around them, and how the world go to be the way it is. At one point I told the students that in my estimation the greatest gift anyone can have is a natural curiosity; armed with that, you’ll never stop learning as you go through life and it will enrich your journey in ways you can’t imagine.

Mike had that in spades. He raised his hand so many times (in a gym assembly of over 100 kids) to ask a question that I finally had to ask him to give others a turn. He came up to me afterwards to ask more questions and to tell me that like me, and like Thomas Jefferson, whom I also talked about, he loved books and loved to read.

Of all the kids I met last week, the little boy in Fannin County with the tousled hair and wearing the plain white t-shirt impressed me most. I told him before I left that I thought he was going places, that he would do great things with his life. His eyes lit up. “Really?” he said, beaming at me. “You think so?” Really Mike. Yes I do. Keep reading, keep learning, and most of all keep asking questions. One day, you’ll be the one standing up in front of a crowd, talking about something that you love.

There’s an old saying, “the world steps aside to let any man pass who knows where he’s going.” I think there’s a young boy in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Georgia who will make the world step aside one day.

I got a glimpse of the future last week, and it didn’t scare me at all. It smiled back at me and promised great things. The future is in better hands than we think.