Tag: family

From First Gear Straight to Fifth

September 9th, 2026

My son, Hans, called me. Hans is an Iraqi War vet (2011 deployment). He likes to talk to me about his work (he pumps concrete for a living down in Texas). When we chat on the phone, the conversation always drifts toward military topics. Both Hans and I are veterans, and we have a mutual understanding of how the Army works. We share some common experiences.

Hans was lamenting how he sometimes loses his temper at home. Hans attributed his fits of anger to his time in the Army. He described it to me this way:

“Dad, I watched this video with a psychiatrist talking about how we get trained in the Army. This stuff isn’t just about guys with PTSD. Anybody who has spent a minute in the military is taught to deal with a problem right away. Now, some civilian, he might gradually react to different levels of stress. He might go from first gear to second to third to fourth and then to fifth gear. We go right from first to fifth! You and I are trained to deal with bad shit. We don’t know how to handle small stuff anymore.”

There is some truth to that. If you have been a soldier, then you are taught to have a “sense of urgency”. You deal with problems as if they were matters of life and death, because sometimes they really are. I remember when I was in flight school learning how to operate a helicopter. I got drilled over and over again about how to deal with emergencies in flight. What do you do if the engine quits? How to you handle a tail rotor failure? What if a hydraulic line breaks? When these things happen, there isn’t time to ponder your options. You do something and you do it right fucking now.

Hans noted that in a crisis situation we tend to act quickly, and somehow, we usually do it calmly. I can remember, back in 2009, when I got run over by a forklift at work. The 8000 lbs. lift crushed my right foot and ankle. I screamed “fuck” when I got rolled, but after that I felt no emotions at all. I was aware that my leg was trashed, but I just stayed put and waited for the EMPs to come and throw me into the back of an ambulance. I can think of other traumatic situations where I just did whatever needed to be done, without really thinking or feeling. Afterward, I was a mess, but not during the crisis. It was almost like I was more of an observer than an active participant when things went sideways.

It’s the smaller issues that trigger us. I used to freak out when our kids would spill a glass of milk at dinner time. For years, I was a rage-aholic. I would go off the deep end over petty incidents. I could deal with the stuff that needed me in fifth gear, but I continually overreacted to the little things.

I told Hans that it gets better as you get older. It’s not that I am any more patient than I was years ago. It’s just that I no longer have the stamina to be constantly outraged by life. I still lose my temper, but I don’t have the energy to maintain that emotional state for more than a couple minutes. Often, after I blow up about some piddly thing, I feel sick and exhausted, sometimes for up to an hour.

I have found that mediation helps with the anger. It allows me to slow down while I deal with stress. I still can’t always shift through the gears in the correct order. But I can do better than I used to do.

A Bottle of Baja Blast and a Take 5

September 6th, 2026

Karin and I took the little boy to see his mama. She currently resides in a minimum-security prison on the northside of Milwaukee. The facility is a relatively small structure that only houses 98 inmates. It sits on a tiny piece of land on the corner of a busy intersection. There is a sturdy metal fence around the prison, but no razor wire crowning it. The Milwaukee Women’s Correctional Center (MWCC) is probably the best-looking building in the neighborhood. That part of town is a little rough.

We are trying to go to the prison every weekend. The visits help his mother to deal with her incarceration. There is no actual visitor’s area. The meeting place is in the cafeteria. We use the same tables that the inmates use for their meals. The room has two vending machines. Neither of those contains food that is even remotely healthy, and the inmates can’t use them anyway. Only visitors can use the machines to buy snacks for themselves or for the prisoners. There are a number of board games available to help pass the time.

The prison has limited visiting hours. There are three-hour blocks on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, and three-hour blocks of time on Saturdays and Sundays in the early afternoon. When we were there on Saturday, I saw nine inmates with visitors. Usually, an adult was there with the child (or children) of the incarcerated woman. So, on that afternoon only 10% of the inmates had visitors, and based on my limited observations, it seems like it’s always the same people who have people come to see them. That means the vast majority of the inmates are essentially isolated from the outside world. That’s a sobering thought.

This prison has a very different vibe from the last residence of the boy’s mama. Taycheedah was a maximum-security facility, and it felt like it. The guards at Taycheedah were polite and professional, but the atmosphere was always tense. At MWCC the folks working there are friendlier and it’s more relaxed. It is still obvious to everyone who comes to visit that they are entering a prison, but it isn’t quite as scary as other places.

The boy’s mother is unhappy. She does not like it at MWCC. They make her do janitorial work five days a week. She thinks that they are stricter at MWCC than they are at another minimum-security prison where she did time. She has a roommate who talks constantly. Yeah, it sucks, but what can she do about it? Nothing. This is her home for the next 17 months. It is finally sinking in that she is not getting out of that facility until February 4th, 2028. That is a painful realization.

As I said, it is helpful to her when her five-year-old son comes to see her. They hug and laugh. I buy her a Baja Blast (a variety of Mountain Dew) and they share a couple Take 5 candy bars. A rule states that any vending machine food has to be removed from its wrapper and place on a large coffee filter before being consumed at the inmate’s table. I guess that is some security issue. I bought her son got a bottle of lemonade which he managed to partially spill in his excitement. I expected that to happen.

I am not entirely sure what benefit her son derives from the visits. Going there every weekend gives him some stability and routine. He needs that. I know that he misses his mama and this is the only way for them to physically connect. The mother does call the boy at least once every day., but that isn’t enough. For most of the visit the boy and his mom got along well. Then he needed to go to the bathroom. I took him there.

When we returned from the bathroom, he suddenly became upset. He had been playing a game with his mama when we left, and my wife and his mama had completed it in his absence. The boy had a tantrum. His mother became very anxious because she thought that she would get into trouble if he made a scene. Eventually, he calmed down. It took a while. Why did he flip out on us?

His new kindergarten teacher has experience working with children who have trauma. She lent us a book to read. It is called Building a Trauma-Informed Compassionate Classroom. One of the causes of childhood trauma listed in the book is having an incarcerated parent. Well, here we are. The boy’s mama is doing time and that’s the reality of it. The boy is trying to deal with a situation that I, as an adult, struggle to process. He is going to have difficulty regulating his moods. We are going to have to help him to feel loved and safe.

We have to work through all this.

Feral

August 24th, 2026

While we were in Texas visiting our son’s family, Karin, Asher, and I spent nearly all of our waking hours in their double wide home. The double wide stands on an acre of wooded land, mostly live oaks and cedars. However, since it was the early part of August, the kids were indoors most of the time. The outdoor temps hovered near 100 degrees, and even for children who are Texas natives, that is a little extreme. They might play in the yard for a while early in the morning, but then they get out of the intense heat and retreat to an air-conditioned environment.

During our visit, the air conditioning on the double wide went out. That was a bad thing. Gaby, the mother of our three grandkids, promptly called a HVAC guy to come to the house. Karin and I paid for the repair. I talked with the repairman before he started his troubleshooting. He was a busy man. He had many calls to make that day. Fortunately, the problem was just a bad switch, and it was a quick and easy fix. He hit me up for $300. I told him,

“That’s a bargain.”

The sweating repair guy smiled at me and drawled, “Well, I can charge y’all more if you like.”

“No. I’m good.”

The fact is that getting the air conditioning fixed was a non-negotiable item. It had to be done. It is like what happens in winter in Wisconsin, where we live. If the furnace at our house goes out in subzero temperatures, it gets fixed. It doesn’t matter how much it costs.

Asher’s three Texan cousins are all about his age. Weston, Maddy, and Wyatt are members of a restless crew. They have energy that would be best expended outside, but that would probably risk heat exhaustion. So, they played with Asher inside the house. There was a lot of yelling and laughing and crying and general mayhem. Gaby wisely chooses her battles. She could demand that her kids play quietly and keep the house in order. But at what cost? She lets them make a mess, and at certain points in the day allows them to watch Blippi, which gives her moments of relative calm. Asher engaged well with his three cousins. It didn’t take him long to become one of the Lost Boys (and Girl).

One day, I was sitting in their living room near the youngest boy, Wyatt. Wyatt is three years old, and he is generally a quiet lad. I did not interact much with him. He was shy, and as my wife said, “When he smiles, he does it with his whole body”. At home, both in the house and outside of it, Wyatt was usually only clad in a pull-up diaper and maybe oversized cowboy boots. On that particular day, Wyatt had multicolor streaks of washable marker all over his body, like a mischievous kind of warpaint. He made me think of the boys in the book, Lord of the Flies, although he’s much younger and more peaceful.

I mentioned to Gaby, “Wyatt looks kind of feral.”

She agreed with that. Being feral is not necessarily a bad thing. Innocence and wildness coexist in children. The two attributes complement each other. I’ve come to accept that both are essential qualities and should be seen as blessings. That’s just who they are.

He’s Grown so Much

August 22nd, 2026

“He’s grown so much.”

The young woman made that comment after she looked at her little boy. Her five-year-old son smiled back at her. It was his second visit to see his mom at the prison. The prior visit to the prison was over three weeks ago. The visit to see her in jail before that was four months ago. The young woman calls her son every day, but she seldom gets to physically interact with him. She is incarcerated at a facility that is a 90-minute drive from our home. That drive is not something we can do every day, or even every week.

The young woman may get transferred to a minimum-security prison soon. There is a facility like that much closer to our home. She might end up there. That would make visits easier. Even so, she still won’t have daily contact with her boy. That just isn’t possible. She won’t get to eat dinner with him. She won’t get to take him to school. She won’t get to tuck him into bed. She won’t get to do the innumerable little things that mothers do with their children every single day. She is going to miss so much of his childhood.

A caregiver who is with a child day in and day out doesn’t often notice the subtle changes in the boy or girl. The child develops almost imperceptibly. Suddenly, one day the caregiver looks closely at the child and realizes that they are staring at a stranger, somebody new. They are surprised by how the kid has grown. This older version of the child snuck up on them.

A person like the young woman notices the changes immediately because for her they are stark, because she has not been there for all of the little things. There are huge gaps in her experience with her son. Every visit is jarring in away because she hasn’t been able to witness his entire growth process.

The real punishment involved with doing time is not what a person endures inside prison. The punishment is what that person misses on the outside.

Her First Day of School

August 12th, 2026

Our granddaughter, Maddy, started kindergarten today. Karin, Asher, and I came over to her house at 6:30 to see her to the bus stop. We were early and the sun wasn’t quite up yet. It was hot already, the temps in the upper 80’s.

Maddy was not doing well. Her mama, Gaby, was holding her and trying to comfort the girl. Maddy was crying and didn’t want to get dressed for school. Gaby gently nudged her along. Finally, Maddy was wearing in her fancy pink dress with the strawberry pattern. She had calmed down enough to walk to the bus top with her older brother. At least she wasn’t going on the school bus alone.

Starting something new is often scary. Our grandson, Asher, began his school career last fall when he went to kindergarten. He was good on the first day when my wife, his mama, and I were there with him. Things went downhill after that. Asher is a smart kid and quickly figured out that going to class was not a one-off. He suddenly realized that he had to go to that school every day. One day, I drove to school and almost had to use a crowbar to extract him from his child seat in the car. He cried constantly as I carried him to the schoolhouse. Fortunately, Miss Martha, a seasoned faculty member, came over and pulled Asher out of my arms. He quieted down as she soothed him. Then Martha smiled at me and made it clear that I should go away, like right now. After a week or two, Asher grew accustomed to going to school. I think that might have been after he noticed a cute, blonde girl in his class who stole his heart away.

I think back to when I went to West Point fifty years ago. I arrived at a place where I didn’t know anybody, didn’t understand the rules or the culture, and didn’t even understand some of the language used. The environment was utterly alien to me, and it took probably a year for me to adjust. I sympathize with a five-year-old doing something similar to that.

We walked to the bus stop as a group: Maddy’s mama, my wife, her older brother, her younger brother, Asher and me. The bus travels down a dirt road. The road was being fixed when we got there in the early morning twilight. I am not sure what the maintenance crew was doing besides shoving the dirt around. The bus showed up like a stagecoach in those old western movies. It stopped in a cloud of dust.

Maddys’ older brother got in the bus. Then Gaby held onto Maddy’s hand while she got in. The younger brother, who only clad in a pullup diaper and sandals, started to walk up the steps too. He was almost inside the school bus before his mama snagged him and pulled him out again. That is one impatient little boy.

His turn will come.

A Balloon

August 10th, 2026

How do you connect with some kids who you haven’t seen for almost two years?

When the three children are quite young (ages seven, five, and three), you really don’t connect with them. You certainly can’t establish a relationship in twelve days, especially if you are more than sixty years older than they are. You may be their grandfather, but you are really a guest, a visitor, somebody who is just passing through.

My wife and I are visiting our grandkids in Texas. We live in Wisconsin. We are usually separated from these children by over a thousand miles of geographical distance. We are also separated by experience. Even if we lived next door to these kids, we still might not have a solid bond. We live on the periphery of each other’s reality. They don’t know us and we hardly know them.

We brought our other grandson, Asher, with us to visit our Texan grandkids. Our relationship with Asher is profoundly different from the one we have with the three children from the South. We are with Asher each and every day, often all day. We know Asher, as well as any grandparent can know their grandchild. We have an extremely deep connection with Asher, and we have a very tenuous one with the other children.

Asher has been playing each day with his cousins, and they are getting along quite well. It took Asher less than a day to fit in with these other kids. That’s excellent. My wife has found it relatively easy to slip into her role as “Oma”, which is German for grandma. She plays card games with Texan kids and interacts with them in a relaxed and natural way.

I struggle with establishing a connection with kids. I don’t know what to say to them and I don’t want to push myself upon them. I mostly observe them and try to know them in that way. I would require months to really became their “grandpa”. I don’t have much time. We only have twelve days here, and half of those days are already gone.

Several days ago, their mother bought all of them balloons. All the children played with them inside of the house, seeing as it was 100 degrees outside. Then the kids’ mom and my wife had to make a trip to buy school supplies and new clothes. They took the older two Texan kids with them. I was home babysitting Asher and the three-year-old boy, Wyatt. Wyatt has never spoken to me. He keeps me at a distance. While his mama was away, he grew sad. He didn’t want to watch the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse with Asher. He missed his mom. I found a balloon and started to bounce it back and forth with him. Wyatt smiled and we played together until his mama came home with the school stuff from Walmart.

A balloon helped me to connect with Wyatt, at least a little bit.

That’s a win.

Over and Over Again

August 8th, 2026

Yesterday morning, we drove to a jobsite in Texas where are oldest son, Hans, was pumping concrete. He operates a huge pump truck. It has eighteen wheels, weighs about 185K lbs., and has a 57-meter boom on it. He had been working at the site since 2:00 AM to pump a 600-yard concrete slab for a new hay barn. Karin, Asher, and I got there at 8:30, and his crew wasn’t even close to be finished with the job. Hans had asked us to come to the site to see what he does for a living. He seldom does jobs so close to home. It’s nothing for him to pump concrete as far away as Dallas, or Houston, or Port Arthur. Since yesterday’s job was only about ten miles from our hotel in Madisonville, he figured it was a rare chance to see him in action.

We did not actually go into the jobsite. If you aren’t wearing a hard hat, you shouldn’t be there. We could see Hans in the distance. He is instantly recognizable even at 100 yards away. He was walking around slowly and with a slight sag in his shoulders. He waved once at us and then went back to work. He looked tired, extremely tired. I can identify with that.

I worked as a supervisor on the dock at a trucking company. For about twenty years, I worked third (graveyard) shift. During many of those years, my wife and I had small children at home, which meant that I was always sleep deprived. Like Hans, I tried to sleep before my shift started, but that seldom worked. I was dead tired and wound tight simultaneously. I often self-medicated to function, but that was unhealthy for me and my family. Even when I was physically at home, I wasn’t really there. However, I was the sole breadwinner in the family, and we needed the money that I earned.

Hans is in a remarkably similar situation. He doesn’t even have the luxury of having a set start time for work. He gets called by dispatch a few hours before his job is set to begin. He sleeps at random times, and he sleeps poorly. He is taking care of his family financially, but there are significant downsides to his line of work. He honestly loves pumping concrete, and he is good at his job. It is the erratic schedule that is slowly killing him.

When I was working on the loading dock, I was operating in a brutal environment. The temperatures on the dock were exactly the same as the temps outside. It was hot in summer and intensely cold in winter. My job required me to function under severe time constraints. I had to think on my feet. It was also literally dangerous on the dock. I had my right leg crushed by a forklift in 2009.

Hans’ working conditions are not much different. He works in extreme heat. His work is hazardous and physically demanding. His job is stressful. He has to get his job done while following a rigorous schedule. Everything is time sensitive.

I wonder why Hans and I have followed such similar career paths. It might be just bad karma. However, I think part of the problem is that we are both veterans. We have traits that draw us to work that, quite honestly, kind of sucks.

I will make some gross generalizations here. Veterans tend to be mission oriented. We just want to get the job done. We like unambiguous instructions and goals. Give us a clear set of orders and set us loose. We are used to working in difficult environments under pressure. We expect things to go sideways and we plan accordingly. We can be part of a team, but we prefer to work alone. We have limited social skills.

So, where do we wind up? Hans and I found work with companies that needed people who could work under stress and still get the job done. I really wish that Hans had found a different path, but he didn’t. The cycle just keeps repeating.

Together at Last

August 2nd, 2026

I took the little boy to see his mama in prison this morning. It was a 90-minute drive from our house to the facility in Fond du Lac, WI. I hadn’t been there since the last time the young woman was incarcerated. That was seven or eight years ago. The prison hadn’t moved, but the way to get to it had changed. GPS was not a lot of help. I had to take a road that was torn up and clearly marked “closed to thru traffic”. A couple miles of gravel and potholes brought us to our destination. We made it to our visitation appointment in time, but I was still uneasy. When we got into the guard shack, I found out that I had good reason to be.

To visit an inmate an outsider has to request an appointment online with ICSolutions. This is after going through a multi-week screening process to even get approved for a visit. Once the boy and I got inside the entrance, I was told fill out yet another request form and then wait for somebody to help me. We waited. From long, painful experience I have learned to just roll with whatever happens in the prison system.

A female guard came out to us and smiled. She looked at my form and then checked on her computer printout for my name. I found it for her. She frowned a bit and said, “The boy’s name isn’t on my list with yours.”

Apparently, my face said it all. My expression screamed, “Ohhhh, fuck.”

She didn’t ask me any questions. She cut me off before I could even speak.

She told me, “Don’t panic! We’ll call and see if the captain can make an exception for you. I know that ICSolutions can be very confusing. Just give me a minute after we put you through security.”

The guard screened me and the boy. We put all of our possessions, except for a credit card into a tiny locker. The guard quietly asked me about the young woman and her son, and then she told me,

“It’s wonderful that you brought him here. We learn from the mistakes of our parents.”

I’m not sure about that, but I wasn’t going to argue.

She made a phone call. The boy and I stood at the closed door leading to the visitation building. Were we going to get inside? The young woman didn’t care about seeing me that much, but she was burning to be with her little boy. Clearly, I screwed something up when I made the appointment online. My only question was about how catastrophic it would turn out to be.

The guard told me, “The captain is making an exception for you, but we are putting a warning in your file. If it happens again, we won’t be able let you through.”

I thought to myself, “Fine. I will worry about next time when next time rolls around. Just get us through this door.”

We got past the door and then through a heavy steel gate. The outer fence of the prison grounds (note: there are several fences) is electrified and it has razor wire on top. We walked across the lawn to the visitation center, where we went through another series of locked doors. In the guard shack at the entrance to the prison we had been given hand stamps that only show up under ultraviolet light. At the final hurdle we had our stamps examined and we were assigned to a table in the room. Then we waited for mama to arrive.

The whole process reminded me of when I crossed into East Berlin at Checkpoint Charlie back in 1983. Funny how some memories resurface.

The emotional reunion of mother and child was almost anticlimactic after the ordeal of just getting them together in the same room. We talked for a while and then I bought snacks for mother and son. That is why I had a credit card with me. Only visitors can use the vending machines. Almost every item costs about $3.50. It doesn’t matter if it is a candy bar or a bottle of soda or a little bag of cookies. It’s all expensive, and the vendors literally have a captive audience.

The young woman thanked me for bringing her boy to her. I just said,” You’re welcome.” It was something that needed to be done, and it was done out of love.

We stayed for two hours. That’s all you can get on a weekend. There is a playground outside and the boy made good use of it. The boy and his mama joked and laughed. I spoke to her about what we might do once she gets out in February of 2028. A lot can happen between now and then, but we at least shared ideas.

Leaving the prison was the exact reverse of how we came in. A person goes back through the same wormhole to get home again.

There is a mural covering a wall in the visitation center. It’s really well made and shows images of women’s faces. There are two statements on the wall.

“She overcame all that tried to destroy her” and “Real change, enduring change, comes in small steps.”

Not bad.

Anxiety

July 30th, 2026

It’s been at least four weeks now since my wife and I have put in applications to visit a young woman who is currently incarcerated. We also filed an application for the woman’s five-year-old son, who is in our care. The Department of Corrections (DOC) needs to do a background check on all potential visitors, apparently even kindergarten age children. The young woman has not seen her little boy since April, which makes it four months since they were together. The woman is understandably anxious about the situation. It is particularly upsetting for her since my wife, her son, and I plan on making a road trip to Texas three days from now in order to see our grandchildren down there. The young woman was really hoping to see her son before our departure. We were also hoping that would happen. The odds of us visiting her in prison before we head south are getting worse with each passing day.

Early this morning, the woman called us to tell us that the boy and I have been approved to schedule a visit. My wife has not yet been approved. After the mom called us, I immediately went to the ICSolutions website set up a meeting. We can’t schedule a visit directly with anyone at the prison. They outsourced that work to a third party, ICSolutions. It is impossible to make a visit any other way. I tried several times to schedule a visit sometime during the next couple days. I failed. My request was rejected because ICSolutions said that I was not approved. The website said that my approval from the DOC was still pending.

After that, I made several phone calls. I called the people at the prison for help. They told me to check with ICSolutions because in the DOC’s system I had been approved two days ago. I called ICSolutions twice, and they assured me that in their system I was not approved. They did say that my information would be updated tomorrow, and I should show as being approved after that. I will believe it when I see it.

In the meantime, I had four more phone calls from the incarcerated mother. In each call she became more and more agitated. Her anxiety was through the roof. During the fourth call, she tearfully exclaimed,

“I’ll never get to see him!”

I quietly told her, “You will get to see him. The people at ICSolutions said that I can go online tomorrow and I will be able to set up an appointment for a visit. If there are still open visitation slots available during the next three days, I will take one and we will come up to see you. We will drive two hours to the prison, and we can be with you for two hours.”

Now, we wait.

To be fair, the people at the prison and the folks at ICSolutions were polite and sympathetic. They really did try to help me. However, because the computers at the DOC and those at ICSolutions are not on speaking terms, they could do nothing for me. The people working within the system are all decent. The bureaucracy is nothing short of demonic.

Tomorrow morning, I will login to my account at ICSolutions and maybe, just maybe, I will be able to set up a visit.

I am not confident about that.

July 31st, 2026

Update: I finally got an appointment to visit the young woman. It is at 9:30 AM on August 2nd. She will get to see her little boy, at last.

Don Timmerman

July 26th, 2026

Don Timmerman died of cancer on July 19th. He spent almost all of his adult life advocating for peace and justice. I am tempted to say that he was “fighting” for those causes, but I’m not sure if that word is appropriate to describe a man who was an absolute pacifist. Based on his understanding of the Gospels, especially the Beatitudes, Don rejected all wars, and by extension all aspects of the military. He was an elder and leader at the Casa Maria Catholic Worker House in Milwaukee, WI. He posted a monthly newsletter, Casa Cry, in which he consistently railed against the U.S. military/industrial complex and the violence and suffering it produces. He used his jeremiads to stir the consciences of those people who bothered to peruse his essays, and he encouraged them to protest against the evils of war. Unfortunately, I suspect that most if not all his readers already agreed with most of his views. He was preaching to the choir.

I did not know Don well. I can’t remember how I met him. Nor can I remember the last time I spoke to him. Up until the time that my wife and I became guardians and fulltime caregivers for our little grandson, Asher, I was often involved in protests of one sort or another. I would see him at these demonstrations. It was his calling to bear witness. In that sense, Don was a prophet, like those in the Hebrew scriptures. If he saw injustice, he had to say something, or at least silently show his opposition to it. He had to be there.

It seems odd that I ever met him at all. Our paths in life were radically different. Don trained to be missionary priest in Tanzania. He was at one time a translator for Mother Teresa. He became deeply involved with the Catholic Worker movement. He repeatedly participated in antiwar protests and was often arrested for civil disobedience. He was passionate about living as a disciple of Christ.

I, on the other hand, graduated from West Point and I spent six years as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Army. I served in a helicopter unit in West Germany during the early 1980’s. My oldest son, Hans, enlisted in the Army in 2009. He went to war in Iraq. He came back damaged.

Don frequently demonstrated against ROTC at Marquette University in Milwaukee. I went there with him once. It was a lonely vigil. I think he was often all alone when he protested, but he felt that it was duty to be there. Don believed that it was wrong for a Catholic school to support ROTC. The administration at Marquette disagreed with him. I stood with him holding a sign to protest the training of military officers at Marquette. At one point, a young, fresh-faced ROTC cadet walked past us nervously. He glanced at me and hurried away. When I looked at the cadet, I saw me, an earlier version of myself. That shook me. I understood why this young man was wearing a uniform and doing what he was doing. I firmly believe that Don did not understand. He saw it all in terms of right and wrong, black and white. ROTC was wrong. Period.

The times when I was demonstrating with Don were educational for me. They also made me feel uneasy. It should be noted that my wife and I did absolutely everything we could to keep Hans out the wars. We used advice from the Quakers to show him as a conscientious objector in the system when he had to sign up for the Selective Service. The irony was that Hans enlisted anyway, and for all the same reasons that I had when I joined up fifty years ago. Hans and I were, and in a way still are, part of the system that Don so intensely opposed. We’re vets and he never was.

Back on May 1st of this year, I posted an essay on my blog, “It’s Still about Iran”. Read it if you want. Don did, and he sent a remarkably long response to what I wrote. I attempted in my article to describe what a disaster the current war against Iran is. I did not write the essay solely for pacifist readers. Actually, this article was also posted on a veteran’s website, The Havok Journal. I did not use moral arguments against the war. Don had always used moral persuasion, with limited success. I tried mostly to explain why the war was so stupid. Thomas Merton once said that a man would rather be considered clever than good. I tried to appeal to a person’s intellect more than to their conscience.

Don sent me a variation of his usual diatribe against war. He apparently assumed that I support war in general, and that I only opposed to this current fiasco. In his response, his last words to me were:

“You have chosen the state over Christ.”—Don Timmerman and Casa Maria C.W. community

That stung.

The fact that is that I agree with almost all that he said. One thing I learned from my time with Don was that people seldom listen to moral exhortations. Prophets are usually ignored, or worse. Maybe I have chosen the State over Christ. Or maybe I see more nuances than Don did. I don’t know about that. All I know is that my son and I have suffered from the effects of war. I think I hate war as much as Don did, and I may have more reason to do so.

I wrote back to Don, and I asked him not to judge me.

He replied, “Of course.”

Don was a good man. I admire his courage and his dedication. He lived his faith.

I just wish we had known each other better. I wish we had understood each other better.