“I was raised by the military-industrial complex,” my mother would say. It was an apology, in later years, for how long it had taken her politics to catch up to her morals. I knew her as a righteous hippie: an artist, anti-colonizer, in favor of home rule and revolution; someone who threw rocks at tanks in occupied Northern Ireland and put her 5’3” body in the middle of fights and in between children and danger. She taught art in the middle of South-Central Los Angeles in the end, loved by the neighborhood and the school and every dog for blocks. She died shortly after organizing her fellow charter school faculty through hostile union-busting, and before she could see the fruits of a contract or retirement.
When I was a kid, she had been anti-union, inherited from her father who didn’t want to pay $15 an hour to machiners; she and my father worked for a defense contractor through the Cold War, fans of Reagan. She blamed Clinton and his peace processes for taking her job.
“I was raised by the military-industrial complex.”
It was true. Every man in my blood has gone to war for the United States for generations, until my own brother. We’ve had bodies in every conflict; I can track it back 175 years. My mother’s father manufactured specialized airplane screws, once he came home from the Navy and the Pacific in the second world war. He brought back a hatred for Patton, and for an entire nation, which he fed to my mother through photographs of war crimes and narratives of inhumanity. (She amassed a strange collection of books related to Japan during her life; ancient art, wartime atrocity, erotica, history, woodcuts.)
Her mother’s father had to do his service over multiple branches, never seeming to satisfy any but never quite reaching the point of dishonorable discharge. The lore on him said he was sent to capture Pancho Villa and, being a sympathizer, declined to do so. He maintained his disinterest in law after discharge, becoming a bootlegger, shacking up with a not-quite-divorcée who had slipped illegally into the country and fraudulently claimed a new birth year and birthplace. Their curb was marked by the homeless during the Great Depression as a place to come for food and kindness; Alice couldn’t cook but kept chili or soup on the stove every day for years. Her brothers trickled down from Canada after her to be drafted by the US for the Great War.
Generation after generation they enlisted or were drafted. The bootlegger’s grandfather came from Germany with no wife and five children; Ohio sent him directly to the Civil War.
I was raised by the military-industrial complex, too. Stories of my parents entangled with the three-letter agencies, of my mother working with satellite imagery fine enough to read the brand on the butt of the cigarette left in the footprint of a Russian boot in the snow, as far back as the early 80s. She told us she had wanted to paint a giant red X on our roof for the Russians to aim at; the nuclear fallout at our distance from the Long Beach naval base would be torturous, she explained, full of sickness and rotting flesh, and she’d rather them take us out directly. She laughed, baffled, when anyone was surprised about the NSA revelations of spying at home. We grew up knowing any phone might be tapped at any time. We knew security was an illusion, only a stacking up of layers of difficulty to make yourself harder to reach, to make other targets more attractive than yourself. Our parents started a tiny self-defense supplies company from home, selling pepper spray and screamers I had to take with me to walk alone. We kept big dogs; they don't stop burglars or murderers, but they do encourage them to try a different door.
My father came back from service with undiagnosed PTSD, a hatred for lamb and mutton, and a fear of rats. And humanity. His military activities were in special forces and by description certainly war crimes. When I was about 8, he abruptly stopped a mysterious work activity that had had him flying back east regularly, which neither of our parents would explain, but he told my brother once he used to “pop people for the government.” That night, he tearfully told us instead about what he had done in the Army, the people he had killed in their homes, in front of their children, in countries we were and were not at war with, while a soldier. I learned a term for suicide I wouldn’t understand in specific for several more years, and was sworn to secrecy—eight years old and expected to carry the secret that could steal the pension from a desperate stranger’s widow and orphans. He feared rats because he’d woken up with them eating his toes in the jungle. He once strangled my mother in his sleep while she was 8 months pregnant with me, when she was coming back to bed from the bathroom; she managed to wake him from his flashback before he could kill us. A closet at the end of the hall was filled with weapons of all descriptions; blades, firearms, ammunition. Less deadly weapons decorated the walls. His sister later told us she used to watch the Friday night news, “waiting to see if Bill would end up in a library tower.” We mistook him for dead more than once, finding him unbreathing or passed out surrounded by blood and broken glass, before he died on the floor at 52.
His brother came back from Vietnam just as gentle as he had gone, with medals for bravery for his willingness to be airdropped over enemy lines to cook for combat soldiers. I knew him as someone who kept chickens and doves. Some time after his return, at a baseball game (he lived for the Dodgers), the band played the “1812 Overture.” When the canon fired he disappeared and wasn’t found until hours later when the stadium had emptied, hidden beneath the stands, sheltering from the shelling.
Their father survived Europe in WWII, but not without three false notices sent to their mother that he had—or that he likely had—died. She hated the wistful Christmas songs from the 40s, “I’ll Be Home For Christmas.” I wonder sometimes how long she lived with his false death each time, and whether after that many notices she could ever really believe he was alive when he came back to her.
All of my ancestors are dead. They survived the wars they went to, after a fashion.
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