Changing of the guard

Why this war can never be black and white for me

by Tanya Whiton

My father was supposed to retire from the Navy on Labor Day Weekend, after 33 years of service. My whole family made plans to travel down to Washington, DC, for the big day. Then another position was offered — maybe he’d stay in. His ceremony was cancelled. The job fell through, and his retirement was rescheduled, for Tuesday, September 18th, when a number of his colleagues would be in town.

My father was drafted during the Vietnam War, at the age of 23, and because he had a degree in Russian and Russian literature, he had options. He chose the Navy, and his background led him to cryptology — the deciphering of codes and information. The Cold War provided the perfect enemy for a man with his talents, and he was to retire as the Director of the Naval Security Group, after a long and successful career. He’d purchased a new wardrobe of civilian clothes, and readied himself for the transition to a world he’d exited back in 1968.

At 9:35 on Tuesday, September 11th, I received a message from my mother: “Tanya, if you have a television, turn it on.” I don’t, so I turned on the radio. Two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center towers. And this just in, a plane had also hit the West wing of the Pentagon — where my father’s offices were. I tried to call my mother back, but the lines were glutted and I couldn’t get through.

My personal politics have never been clearer or more conflicted than they were in the hours that followed. I do not support the US military actions that have been taking place in the Middle East for years. And I am very disturbed by the trend in government — inspired by the Republican victory in the last election — toward increased military spending. The United States increasingly resembles Ancient Rome before the fall; our ambition and appetite as a nation are dangerously disproportionate to the resources we possess. But I grew up inside the Fortress, inside what is essentially an alternate universe, one that has little relationship to civilian life. I grew up surrounded by men and women in uniform, and I was taught to respect them.

Battleships, guns, and barracks formed the backdrop to my daily life, and I still feel at ease in the familiar environment of a military base. There is always a flag flying in front of my parents’ house, and it is always illuminated at night.

At noon on September 11th, my mother called me on a borrowed cell phone to say that my father was safe. He’d been at Fort Mead when the plane hit. We could count ourselves among the lucky, among the soon to be thousands of stories of missed flights, sick days, business errands and other seemingly prosaic moments that spelled the difference between life and death.

Over the next few days, I would see the flag I grew up saluting, saying the Pledge of Allegiance to, standing still for at sundown, suddenly regaining a significance it hasn’t held in years. Again, I felt torn. Seeing the Stars and Stripes whipping from the window of a passing SUV, I couldn’t help but think about the tremendous greed, the conspicuous consumption of world resources, which has so marked our country’s relationship with the rest of the world. We have underestimated both our impact and our enemies.

But then I saw a flag flying at half-mast, for the dead in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon; as visceral and sad a sign of tragedy as I can imagine. I remembered the first time I saw a flag at half-mast. I was eight years old, we were stationed in Italy. I asked my father why the flag wasn’t all the way up — had somebody made a mistake? No. Two hundred or more marines had been killed by a car bomb exploding in a barracks in Beirut, he explained. It hadn’t occurred to me until then that the flag could contain such a range of meanings, covering the spectrum from nationalist zeal to mourning of the dead.

I was surprised and dismayed to find out, following the events of September 11th, that my father’s change of command and retirement ceremony were to go forward as scheduled — for conflicting reasons, of course. I did not want to travel through New York City to Washington, DC. Though I knew travel security was probably tighter than it had been in years, I didn’t feel safe.

And I felt badly for my dad, to be ending his career in the shadow of such a terrible incident. But mostly, I felt like the message sent by the Bush administration, to press on, to conduct business as usual, to resume life as it was before the bombings was a mistake. Not only a mistake, but a crucial turning point in the life of this country, a time to reconsider our use of resources and our foreign policy, being deliberately pushed aside to make way for the rhetoric of war.

I called my father to talk about my mixed emotions, to see what he had to say. He said what any career military officer would say in a time of crisis: “Don’t be a sissy. Get on the goddamn train.”

In the pristine white Navy Chapel in downtown D.C., my family rose for the National Anthem, surveying the three men in the pulpit. Dressed in formal white uniforms, with medals cascading down their chests, my father, his replacement as Director of NSGA, and their commanding officer all stood at attention. We had gotten word the night before that this ceremony was to be a changing of the guard, but not a retirement. Admiral Fallon, Vice Chief of Naval Operations, a former fighter pilot with the frank, boyish face of another era, announced that in light of the terrorist attacks, the Navy still required my father’s service, his ideas and his insight.

Afterwards, at the reception, scores of family friends, current and former service members and some of the greatest champions of my father’s career, stood in line to shake hands and congratulate him. “Aren’t you proud?” many of them said to me as they made their way past. “You must be so proud.” Yes, and no, I thought, though I smiled and nodded. I’m ready for my father to return to this world, the one my mother and I live in. It’s changed a good deal since 1968. And while I have no doubt that a man of his intelligence and integrity could be of great use to the military right now, we need him more. We need him to have an opportunity to simply be a person again, rather than a military man: a person whose heroes were Stanislavsky and Horowitz, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, before the language he loved became a weapon. And I suspect — though he’d never admit it — my dad feels the same.

I couldn’t at first figure out what was different about him when I arrived home. But as he gave his farewell speech that was no longer a farewell, I realized what had changed. His black hair, which only a few months ago and been salted with gray, was now completely white.

Tanya Whiton can be reached at twhiton@prexar.com.