While learning how to operate a standard-issue Claymore mine, I learned the side that released its explosive charge was branded with the phrase "THIS SIDE TOWARD ENEMY." Things with simple and obvious instructions like these are affectionately referred to as "idiot-proof." Everything Uncle Sam issues to military men has simplistic instructions concerning its operation and maintenance.
Everything except wives.
The recent concern about military men and their wives having problems reminds me of my own observations of the tragic fact that some soldiers, airmen, sailors and Marines never understood the operating procedures of marriage.
As budding Marine re-cruits, sweating on a parade deck under the blazing San Diego sun, drill instructors would spend hours forcing upon us the "idiot-proof" way to teach us to "present arms!" during a rifle drill.
But I don't recall a minute of training invested on how to ignore the flight departing from the airport visible from our barrack's windows. The flight that a fellow recruit weeping in the rack above me wished he was on so he could escape boot-camp hell and return to the comfort of his wife and child.
Perhaps training for dealing with being away from one's family isn't necessary. He chose to be there. And to return home early and without honor would be far worse. When I met him again two months after our graduation, he didn't speak as warmly of his wife as he did when we walked our posts late at night.
"She left me," he said. "She has taken my son and gone away."
I wondered why?
"Wasn't she proud of you?" I asked. "Didn't she think you looked sexy in your uniform?"
"Yeah," he said, forcing a grin, only to make me think what I said was funny. "But when I told her I would be leaving again, she changed."
In the valleys of Southern California, the corps taught us "idiot-proof" ways to disassemble, clean, reassemble and operate lethal weapons we used to fight. But they never explained to a young corporal I befriended years later how to put down the bottle of whiskey, close the cap and fight the urge to pour another glass.
It would have been nice to have that instruction when he heard the news that his newlywed wife no longer wished to sleep in a bed alone while her husband was in Okinawa. Instead, she would share it with another. Since that day, he avoids being sober for any great length of time.
Up the mountains that enveloped those valleys, we would march with heavy packs and the blistering sun on our backs. We learned endurance through the unbearable, but the lesson did not cross over to the marriage of a staff sergeant I would meet during my final years in the Marine Corps.
A brilliant Marine, he had mastered his craft. On his dress-blue uniform, he wore ribbons and medals earned from service around the world. However, in his eyes you could see a sense of bitterness worn inside, where the love for his wife once rested. The many years and the four children, each arriving nine months after his return from an overseas tour, helped tarnish his once-shining vision of her. Besides her physical change, she no longer sat quietly at his side upon his return to listen to his stories of self-sacrifice and heroics.
Now, wrapped in her own thick skin developed to deal with life as a military wife, she would be the one to lecture him on his responsibility to his children and her sacrifices to provide them with a proper upbringing.
When he spoke of her to me once, he expressed how much he had grown to despise her.
"Why don't you leave her then?" I asked, falling back on what I considered the easy, obvious answer.
"I can't," he responded, turning his head to look past me at the plain, white wall. "I wouldn't know what to do without her."
Before my tour ended, she took the initiative (something the Corps tried to instill in us) and divorced him.
These specific relationships I witnessed had unfortunate endings. So, does that mean a military man should not get married because wives do not come with "idiot-proof" instructions? The military does have an issued reply to that question.
During the final phase of our basic training, we spent a day learning how to heal battle wounds. We were confronted with ghastly images of amputations, burns and bullet wounds. Finally, a corpsman demonstrated the "idiot-proof" techniques to treat each injury. When he finished, one of my fellow recruits asked about how to deal with someone when they think they are going to die.
The corpsman's answer seemed simple: "If he feels like he can't hang on, tell him to live for his wife. If he isn't married, tell him he needs to live to have one."
An "idiot-proof" answer.
Mikolajczk writes for the Northern Star, student newspaper of Northern Illinois University.