Memorial Day and the Need for Meaning (By Nate)

I promise that I'm not fishing for additional Patreon subscriptions when I say that I really appreciate this platform. If you're old enough to remember the early, early days of blogs, i.e. web logs, or web journals, you'll recall that many authors' posts were pretty spectacularly personal. It was harder to happen upon someone's writing, harder to share it, and much harder to find yourself embarrassed by an unexpected response. Which is not to suggest some critique of 'call-out culture,' as frankly most people getting called out deserve to get called out for being idiots. It's just that the world we live in is one in which an intimate thought or exploratory argument can wind up traversing the globe and entering your mom's Facebook feed in a nanosecond.

However, only our subscribers can read this -- which means I can at least afford to take a risk with an audience that I wouldn't take in my usual sort of online presence.

As I'm writing this, we're nearing the start of Memorial Day weekend, the unofficial beginning of summer, the first of a series of four-day weekends in the Army, and the weirdly solemn liminal zone of what effectively amounts to a barbecue at a funeral. I always feel something right around this time of year, and I've written about Memorial Day a number of times since I came back from deployment. In May 2010, two months after I redeployed, I wrote a Facebook note on my phone (https://www.facebook.com/notes/nate-bethea/for-memorial-day/390768727955/) while waiting for a flight back to my unit in Anchorage. People reacted well to that note, which gave me the confidence to write more candidly about what I had seen and experienced. That led to me applying for and winning the McSweeney's columnist contest that same year, which launched my writing career as much as it exists.

In 2014, I wrote a Tumblr piece about a friend whose death in Afghanistan had greatly affected me (http://inthesedeserts.tumblr.com/post/86900239732/forever-young). I couldn't help but appreciate the response it got from people on the left, and I suppose that made me feel more confident in expressing my political beliefs. Not long after, I published a piece about Bowe Bergdahl's desertion in the Daily Beast, which became headline news. I was absolutely not prepared for the response; I was even less prepared for the extent to which my raised profile would wind up alienating me from the fellow veterans in my unit.

I later wrote about police militarization for Guernica, about having PTSD and about Trump's veteran coterie for the New York Times op-ed page, and bit by bit I found myself receiving angry texts or Facebook messages from the guys I served with downrange. I don't know what motivated them, but I was told in no uncertain terms to fuck off, or at least to stop writing about our unit. And then, of course, came the shooting at the pulse nightclub in Orlando.

An editor at the New York Times Magazine contacted me and asked me to write a piece about AR-15s. I wrote as honest a piece as I could, and the published version was only lightly edited from my original writing. It went live at about 2 pm on June 16, 2016 and I think I got the first hate-tweet about five minutes later. For about two days, it was the #1 viewed and commented piece on the NYT's website. And a few days after that, I noticed that a bunch of guys from my unit were sharing a piece written about me by what I could best describe as a fascist veteran clickbait author. I'm withholding the link (because honestly fuck that guy), but it called me "a poster boy for gun control" and cribbed just about every embarrassing photo of me that existed on the internet. Veterans of my unit shared this post avidly and it generated a lot of abuse.

This absolutely got to me -- it would be a lie to say that it didn't. And if I'd previously held softer views towards veterans in general, this obviously served to harden them. These were guys I'd been next to during mortar attacks and small arms fire, guys whose soldiers I'd helped in various ways, guys for whom I'd jumped through hoops to perform various bureaucratic acts of mercy because I cared about them and their soldiers. I'm not going to say that I believed in some sort of Army brotherhood, but I had at least hoped that my actions would count in aggregate, that they'd remember.

Apparently not, which is fine -- better to rip the scab off now versus later, but it had two very strong effects: the first was that I completely disengaged from what you might call "establishment veteran" activity. I quit teaching at a veteran-centric creative writing foundation, I quit adjuncting, and I quit freelancing (considering all of my pieces were veteran-related, you can understand why). Secondly, when Francis approached me about this show, I decided to do it -- I was either going to be an open leftist veteran or hide my veteran status entirely.

And now on Memorial Day, I find myself somewhat conflicted. Given that the holiday ties solely to remembrance of war dead, it's prime time for combat-related emotional backwash. It's the time of year to call your buddies and reminisce and grieve for the people you lost, but in my case it's also a reminder of the waste of it all.  People I cared about are dead and people I still care about effectively lost to me. That makes an already solemn holiday even more so.

At the risk of sounding like someone who should log off, I have to state that I don't think I was wrong. As we near the 17th anniversary of the war beginning, I can't imagine there's any sane or uncompromised person left who believes that victory is possible, not that it was ever possible in a meaningful way. To me at least, the fact is that everyone who died in the war died for nothing -- and people are still dying to this day. When I wrote that Facebook post back in 2010, I said "Something needs to be advanced in our world to cost so much." In 2014, I wrote "Our friends died for something that wound up inconclusive at best." In 2018, I don't have much to say about it at all, other than that I'm sad, and that my grief is both for the suffering experienced and for the better world that might have existed.

This isn't grand or inspirational. It's easy to envision your life post-military or post-deployment as idyllic and serene. It's comforting to tell yourself that what you did on deployment was for a greater good. We're left only to remind ourselves that we tried, as if that's good enough for the widows and dead kids and war crimes victims, as if there wasn't already a joke out there about the gold star with Comic Sans font that says "you tried." We did indeed, we tried over and over, but that's little comfort in the situation.

All I can do is be thankful that I'm alive, whether deservedly or not. Memorial Day is an opportunity to remember that amid the obvious grief and frustration. I don't want people to be miserable -- hell, I don't personally care if people commemorate the day at all. I just want to make good with the time on earth that I somehow lucked into. For better or worse, it's why I do this show, and I hope this communicates a little bit more about why it's important to me.