Uncle Sandy in World War 2 – Part Three

by Andrew Himes, executive director of Voices in Wartime Education Project

Six weeks after Amber's wedding to Dave, on a sunny August afternoon, I drove into Wheaton, Illinois after an absence of decades. My own nuclear family had moved from Wheaton to Millington, Tennessee in 1961 when I was in sixth grade, and my other relatives – aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents – had all moved back down South within the next few years. My grandparents had moved to Murfreesboro, Tennessee along with the Sword of the Lord, and my uncles had become pastors of churches in South Carolina, Virginia, Texas and Tennessee. In the absence of my family, I never had any compelling reason to go back to Wheaton.

My only previous visit back to Wheaton was in 1976 during my years as a revolutionary communist. During that summer I returned to the house where I had lived as a child, just down the street from Wheaton College on College Avenue across from the football stadium. By 1976 the house was changed entirely. The gray paint on our clapboard siding had been replaced by purple paint, and the sedate white trim on the house's window frames was covered by a bright fruity orange enamel. I stood on the sidewalk outside the house gaping at its transformation until one of the inhabitants, a member of a tribe of cheerful hippies, came outside to invite me into the house for dinner, which we ate at a rough, round table salvaged from its previous life at the center of a coil of electrical wire. We seated ourselves on pillows, our ankles crossed on the floor of my former living room. Our supper's main course consisted of brown rice accompanied by a selection of stir-fried vegetables drenched in soy sauce. Our dessert consisted of very fat, sweet, and carefully rolled joints of marijuana, the scent of which I have never forgotten.

This time, in 2007, the occasion for my visit was a weekend retreat to train caregivers providing care to veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars suffering from post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The retreat was organized by Soldier's Heart, a national network of counselors, therapists, and military chaplains. The phrase "soldier's heart" was used to describe combat stress during the American Civil War, and the theme of Soldiers' Heart is that PTSD can only be understood as an injury to the human soul, as a kind of spiritual and social injury, and not simply as physiological and psychological damage to be treated mainly with heavy doses of drugs and a minimal amount of counseling.

The first morning of my retreat, I got up early and went running in a nearby park. It was a peaceful park, green and beautiful, with trees and wetlands surrounding a large lagoon and a path around the perimeter of the park with a distance of about two miles. As I jogged, my surroundings began to appear amazingly familiar to me, although I still did not know exactly where I was. Only when I arrived at the opposite end of the park and saw a sign announcing the entrance of the park did I realize I was in Northside Park, a place I had not been since 1961. This was the park where I had grown up. There was the broad lagoon at the center of so many days in my youth, and there was the island used for setting off fireworks in Wheaton every 4th of July. This was the island where my mom and dad had gone on scores of dates before they were married, placing a blanket on the grass and taking part in an activity known in the middle part of the 20th century as "necking and petting." There was the small changing house where I had put on my first pair of ice skates: hand-me-down skates from some church rummage sale, old and worn black leather skates passed down from sibling to sibling, each skate with two parallel blades designed to aid small feet like my own as I learned to glide along a wobbly and insecure path with my ankles collapsing hither and yon and my bottom landing with a plop on the hard white ice that covered the frozen lagoon. There was the set of tennis courts where my parents had taken me and my siblings in summers on family picnic outings, along with all of my aunts and uncles and grandparents. Think of it! Seven Baptist preachers and seven Baptist preachers' wives all playing tennis together in the Northside Park sunshine, while I and my sisters and my baby brother, the first four of almost thirty cousins to be born as grandchildren for my grandparents, played happily on the bright green grass next to the courts.

That afternoon, I drove out to the house where my family had lived, and it was gone. Our old house had been torn down earlier in the summer of 2007, along with all the houses around it. The land was being prepared for a construction project for some new housing development or institutional building connected to Wheaton College. The demolition had been quite recent, I could see. The clods of earth were still fresh, decorated with bright green young weeds growing here and there.

I walked one block north from the back yard where I had played to the elementary school I had attended, named after Oliver Wendell Holmes. The brick building was now owned by Wheaton College and had been renamed Jenks Hall. The front part of the building was now the Army Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) classroom building, and the back part of the building was now used for a college theater. The house between my old house and the school building had been torn down in some past year and converted to a military training physical obstacle course. When I wandered into the school building I found that the two rooms used once for kindergarten and first grade were combined for use as a yoga studio. My old kindergarten room was empty, and sunlight streamed through the bank of windows along the southern wall. On the northern wall, where at the age of five I had stored my small towel used to be used for afternoon naps, now were stored two score or more of yoga mats, blue, purple, or yellow rubber rectangles rolled up and piled in a pyramid.

I was struck by the incongruity of what I was seeing. This building, Holmes School, my grade school, had represented both safety and adventure in my life. There were the front steps of the building where my mother had walked me to my first day of kindergarten and then had said goodbye to me. This building was where I had taken my first steps into the world of learning and social engagement in a world beyond my family, and where my innocence had first broken down. This building was where I had first become suspicious of others, fearful of their motives, and desperate for their admiration and approval. This was the building where I had first begun to lose track of my soul, where I had first made compromises in order to get along, where I had first begun to nurture the seeds of selfishness and to fear spontaneity. There was the blacktopped playground where I was punched out by an 11-year-old nemesis named Bradford when I lost my front teeth. This building was the seat of my innocence and also where I had first begun to lose my faith and fear my world.

And now the building contained this triple contradiction; military classrooms for learning the art of war, a yoga studio for healing the mind and body, and a theater for sharing and re-telling stories of what it means to be human.

Go to Part Four