Sweet Jesus on a Submarine

I grew up in the Navy, and while I was in high school we were stationed at Pearl Harbor. There was a big fancy church over near the piers, but for reasons I've never learned, my family went to Mass at the small submarine base chapel. There are many things to love about this chapel; it was built by submariners in honor of their fellow dolphins who had died during the war, it was built secretly since the application for it was denied, and every window has a small submarine somewhere on it. But my favorite part is the stained-glass window in the choir loft, which depicts Jesus standing, arms open wide, on top of a submarine.

Early on in our friendship I happened to mention this, innocently, to Ms. P, who exploded. "How can someone have done that?" she asked. "Putting Jesus on a WEAPON like that is ... just wrong!" She continued to talk about how Jesus didn't approve of force and certainly wouldn't have liked nuclear submarines and how associating him with them was tantamount to the awful claim--popular in some crowds--that Jesus loves us best and will help us prevail in a military fight. I replied, somewhat taken aback, that while Jesus may not approve of the military, the military families left behind, whose husband/wife/father/mother/son/daughter was off under the ocean in a tin can, deserved the comfort of religion as much as anyone else. We went around and around about this, then and several times thereafter. Each time, I had the feeling that I was speaking some other language, that what I was saying wasn't somehow coming out as English. Years later, one of us brought this up again, our perpetual fight, and Ms. P said, somewhat shamefacedly, that the thing she had missed during all of those conversations was that a submarine, while a weapon, wasn't only a weapon--that there were people inside of it.

I had the same experience a few days ago when a coworker of mine told me, with both a voice of wonder and the sure confidence that we were in accord on this matter, that he had been to a military funeral recently and that he had expected it to be really awful, really pompous, and it ended up being really moving. He was quick to point out that he is a pacifist, lest I think that being moved by a funeral suggests that he supports the war in Iraq.

In both cases, I was confronted by my own experience--what I know and what I find familiar. I once didn't notice a military museum outside of town for several years because, let's face it, I grew up in environs that decorated with tanks, missles, planes, and such, and they fade into the background for me. I was also confronted with the complexity of thinking about the military and one's stance, and how otherwise thoughtful, well-meaning people can dismiss everything military out of hand.

Let me be clear: I am also a pacifist. I deplore the choices our government has made in the last several decades with regards to using our military. I believe our government has, in fact, treated our military with appalling condescension and thoughtlessness, especially as they continue to cut funds to support military families, keep National Guards overseas for years at a time when they aren't getting paid, and bring dead soldiers home as freight. I hate that we attract primarily poor kids to the military because it seems like a way out, and I hate that low-ranking people are being courtmartialed for torture while the ringleaders like the Commander in Chief escape wrath.

But I also hate that some liberals assume all military personnel must be hard-core conservatives, that some people dismiss those who serve as brainwashed or stupid, or that people underestimate the real psychological effects on service personnel of being trained to do that which we're told we must never do: kill other human beings. I still see a place in this world for the military, even if I think we jump to use the military far more often than is warranted even without lying politicians making up reasons to march on their enemies. I am not yet evolved enough to turn the other cheek, and I don't know whether I ever will be.

We were at Pearl during the first Gulf War, and I knew wives who came home one day to phone messages from their husbands saying they'd been shipped out last minute and they'd call when they could. I knew people who got married quickly because who knew if they'd have the chance again and a wife has legal opportunities a girlfriend never does. I know people whose marriages finally couldn't withstand the months-long absences and the power struggles between wives who had been keeping families going singlehandedly and husbands who expected to be able to take their "rightful" place as head of the family when they returned. While my own family's experience with the military was fairly uneventful, we lived on bases full of other military families whose experiences weren't always so benign.

And so I bristle when people take their global opposition to war, or to this war, or to global politics, or to the general militarization of our time, and then assume that the particular individuals involved must, to a person, be stupid or awful or what have you. While the personal is the political, the global is not always--or even often--the same as the particular. People cannot be reduced to an administration's policies. I hope everyone who wants one has a picture of Jesus on a submarine, and I will always be moved by the rituals of people who choose to take on a role most of us wouldn't dream of.

Comments

[Sfrajett]

Wow--I love the image of the submarine-themed chapel. It makes me think of the Jesus as a kind of spiritual periscope. You should write more about the military families. I still don't think enough people in this country know what military families are going through, and with the decreasing class diversity of service members, that stress and knowledge is going to be more and more confined to the poor, and nobody else. I liked reading about this!