For Your Tomorrow (13 page)

They talk late into the night, and many nights thereafter, sipping cups of spicy chai. The candle burns between them, illuminating their shaven heads. As Jeff strolls home through the quiet city streets, the darkness recedes—the first twittering of birds; a saffron sheen in the eastern sky.

I
N
2001,
THE SOLSTICE SUN
shines down on a bus winding up the narrow road that leads to the top of Mount Tohamsan. A thousand years ago, Korean pilgrim monks in flowing robes hiked up this rugged mountain to Sokkuram Grotto, an eighth-century Buddhist cave temple in southeast Korea. They climbed in search of spiritual renewal, believed their arduous physical journey to the temple embodied the spiritual journey to Nirvana. Seated in comfortable plush seats, Jeff and Mica feel an inward ascension of travelling to a holy place as they curl up and around the serpentine road, spiralling thousands of feet into the striated mackerel sky.

Jeff has come to South Korea for a ten-day visit with his sister, his flight another perk from Sylvie’s Air Canada buddy pass. Teaching English in the country since last fall, Mica visited the temple a few months ago, drawn by its renown
as one of Asia’s finest Buddhist shrines, a UNESCO world heritage site. When her brother told her he was coming to visit, she knew she had to bring him here; that he, too, would feel the power of this sacred spot.

The bus stops at a parking lot, a mesa on the mountain’s eastern side. They step into the mid-morning sun, into alpine air steeped in pine and fir. A string of rice paper lanterns—red, blue, yellow and green—leads them up a path to a pagoda temple emerging from the side of the lushly forested mountain. They pass under an arched stone gateway into a rectangular chamber, its brown granite walls carved with images of ancient deities. They step slowly through a narrow stone passageway, run their hands over the smooth bas-relief sculptures, threshold guardians of the hallowed world they’re about to enter.

In the centre of a rotunda, the Buddha sits cross-legged on a lotus pedestal. They stand transfixed, gazing at the five-metre-high granite statue. Under a dome ceiling, the Buddha’s robust circular body, draped in carved folds of fabric, exudes an inner force. A circular relief of lotus flowers on the back wall creates a halo around his head, tightly curled hair, elongated ears, eyebrows shaped like crescent moons. One hand hangs over his knee, palm inward, fingers touching “the earth”; the other rests in his lap, palm up. A golden light illuminates the half-closed eyes, the faint smile on his face.

Back outside, they rest on a stone bench in the sun, surveying the blue mountain ridges and the East Sea glistening on the horizon. “I’ve finally made a decision,” Jeff says. “I’m going to join the army.”

“What?” Mica turns sharply to look into his face. “You mean the reserve?”

“No,” he says, meeting her eyes, “the regular force.”

“Are you serious? What about your Ph.D.?”

“I’ll finish it at some point. I can’t focus on it right now,” he says with long sighing breaths. “I need discipline.”

“You’ll certainly get that at boot camp,” she says dryly. “Have you thought this through?”

“It’s all I’ve been thinking about for the past six months. Ever since Dad and I took that road trip to Virginia last fall. Did Mom tell you about that trip?”

“Not much. Just that Dad had to visit some naval bases down there, and you went along for the ride.”

“I’d been thinking about the reserve as a part-time job,” he says. “Then I read this novel that Dad brought with him about British special forces. That’s all I’ve wanted to read since we got back … war novels, military history, military strategy. I have no interest in the books I’m supposed to be reading. Then Dad and I went on a few wilderness camping trips around Nova Scotia with a winter survival group. I loved it! And realized it’s the kind of physically challenging stuff I’d like to be doing all the time.”

“Working out has always been your therapy, but … boot camp?” she says, grimacing. “Have you talked with Sylvie about this?”

“Yeah, she’s encouraging me to go for it. She said, ‘Whatever makes you happy, I’ll be right there behind you.’ ”

“What about Mom and Dad?”

“I’ll tell them when I get back,” he says, rising and grabbing her hand to pull her up. “I wanted to be sure first. Now I am.”

A
T THE TIME
, J
EFF’S DECISION
to join the military’s regular forces seemed to come out of nowhere. We were blindsided by its suddenness, its radical deviation from his scholarly path. But with hindsight, the markers leading to his ultimate destination are clear. Growing up, Jeff thrived on physical challenges—on the hockey rink, the soccer pitch, the baseball diamond, the lacrosse field. I remember the sweltering summer of 1986 in CFB Winnipeg. We were in the backyard of Marion and Russ’s PMQ where a
three-metre-high wooden ramp was set up. Fifteen-year-old Jeff was practising jumps on his BMX bike. He sped up to the ramp, his sandy brown hair blowing back off his lean freckled face. The tires hit the front of the ramp; he crouched towards the handlebars, eyes steely with determination. He jerked the front wheel up and soared to the top of the ramp, flew up into space, spiralled at the peak of his jump; then landed, beaming with exhilaration. To our relieved applause, he smiled at us and pedalled back to go higher and farther next time. My three-year-old son, hands clasped behind his back, watched in wide-eyed wonder, mesmerized by his daring older cousin.

The summer of his eighteenth year, Jeff had to endure a month at “Base Boring.” His father set up weight-training equipment for him in the garage beside the cottage. That July, Jeff developed his pecs, glutes and abs, as well as a lifelong commitment to health and fitness. His weight training progressed into a regime that went far beyond the physical. It was as much about having a disciplined mind as a strong body. During his decade at Carleton, he furthered this ideal—unifying body, mind and spirit—by practising martial arts: kick boxing, Brazilian jujitsu, grappling, and t’ai chi. In 1998, he enrolled at the Thai Boxing Academy and returned home for Christmas with two shiners. Since both he and his adviser, Alan Hunt, were committed weight trainers, they sometimes worked out together at the Carleton gym and talked about boxing. Forced to box as a schoolboy, Alan detested the sport. But Jeff told him that boxing gave him a venue for confronting fear, as did his job as a bouncer in Ottawa clubs and pubs.

Jeff’s intellectual development corresponded with his physical and spiritual dedication to samurai philosophy. In 1997, he got a tattoo on the trapezoid muscle of his left arm that embodied this commitment: the Japanese character for “the void,” the Buddhist ideal of emptiness of the mind. “Voidness is the eye of Buddhism,” Miyamoto Musashi proclaims in
A Book of Five Rings
, a 1643 text on Japanese samurai culture. This mind—the way of the warrior—is essential in the path of the martial arts. “Warrior” is used in the Tibetan sense of
pawo
, “one who is brave.” As Jeff underlined in his copy of
Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior
, “Warriorship does not refer to making war on others. Aggression is the source of our problems, not the solution.”

A year after he was tattooed with the Void, Jeff shaved his head, another external sign of his internal transformation. In most spiritual traditions, head-shaving rituals mark rites of passage. For Buddhist and Christian monks, the “shedding” of hair is synonymous with the shedding of a previous stage of one’s life, a bodily show of psychologically preparing for an ascetic struggle. Although the two endeavours seem antithetical—combat and spirituality—perhaps soldiering was “the way” for Jeff to further his search for the Void, a state of mind that can’t be found by passively reading books. At age thirty, he was considered “old” by military recruitment standards, but he eschewed a desk job. He wanted the gruelling corporal tests of the infantry.

Shortly after he returned from South Korea, Jeff told his parents about his decision to enlist. Russ breathed a sigh
of relief. He could see his son’s waning enthusiasm for his doctoral studies, and that they were, in fact, depleting him. Russ felt that soldiering, which would challenge him both physically and mentally, would be a much better fit for Jeff than the sedentary life of a professor. Moreover, the military had been a fulfilling career for Russ; and in two years, at fifty-five, he would retire with a decent pension. Marion was bewildered by her son’s turnabout, but she could also see that he was suffering. “He was too much in his head, kept too much within himself,” she once told me. “The solitary reading and writing were too isolating for him. He was slipping into a black hole.”

“The soul has a code,” writes psychologist James Hollis. “The larger life is the soul’s agenda, not that of our parents or our culture, or even of our conscious will. The agenda of the soul will not be denied though it may be repressed. It will show up in depression, listlessness, ennui, and fantasies.” This Jungian view would interpret Jeff’s depression as his psyche’s displeasure with his life choices. Was he not living his own story, the myth that he himself had chosen? In “The Myth of Er,” Plato writes,

Was “Necessity” intervening, disrupting the pattern of Jeff’s life?

When Marion told me about Jeff’s enlistment, I felt dismay and confusion. Abandoning his Ph.D.? He was so intellectually gifted, and had climbed so far up that mountain—the summit was in sight. I also harboured many conflicted feelings about the military since my father’s death in 1968—even though it wouldn’t be until 2005 that we would suspect military complicity in his illness. That year, 1968, also heralded the peace movement. Ideologically, I lay with John and Yoko in their 1969 bed-in for peace in Montreal, wanting to “Give Peace a Chance” and to “Imagine” a world where there was
nothing to kill or die for
. I wondered if “The Universal Soldier” really was to blame. As a pacifist, however, I had never been able to resolve the problem of how to combat the evil that exists in the world. What do you do when the barbarians are at the gate? What would I do if the lives of my own children were threatened? Speak softly and carry a big stick?

On Friday, September 7, 2001—the day of Jeff’s swearing-in ceremony—the Canadian military still felt like a safe place to be, as it had been for Jeff’s father and his grandfathers for the past fifty years. When my dad was a soldier in the 1950s and ′60s, I never thought of him having a dangerous job. His basement workshop, where he shone his boots and Royal
Canadian Dragoons pins, had a comforting smell of shoe polish and Brasso. Every morning when I came down to the small kitchen in our PMQ, my father would be standing at the stove in his uniform, stirring the porridge for breakfast. As the hymn “Holy, Holy, Holy” sounded on CFNB radio at 7:45, he’d put on his burnished black army boots, wrap the puttees and chains around their tops, don his khaki beret at just the right angle, and head out the back door to drive to the base. While he was in Egypt for a year with the UN peacekeeping force, I imagined him in his blue beret “standing on guard,” as we sang in “O Canada” during our school assemblies. The pictures he sent back showed him bare-chested, riding a camel and wearing shorts—which he never wore at home.