One of the themes of the book is the challenge both men and women face to define themselves amidst the cultural expectations of their time. Sound familiar? At one particularly (prematurely) giddy point in the novel April Wheeler, the 29 year-old mother of two married to the once-dashing now slowly suffocating Frank, attempts to shake them both out of their complacency and to inspire a new beginning.

“‘It was like saying, All right, then, if you want this baby its going to be all your responsibility. You’re going to have turn yourself inside out to provide for us. You’ll have to give up any idea of being anything in the world but a father…..You were too good and young and scared; you played right along with it, and that’s how the whole thing started. That’s how we both got committed to this enormous delusion – because that’s what it is, an enormous obscene delusion – this idea that people have to resign from real life and ’settle down’ when they have families.”

…

“‘Oh, Frank Can you really think artists and writers are the only people entitled to lives of their own? Listen: I don’t care if it takes you five years of doing nothing at all; I don’t care if you decide after five years that what you really want is to be a bricklayer or a mechanic or a merchant seaman. Don’t you see what I am saying? It’s got nothing to do with definite, measurable talents – it’s your very essence that is being stifled here. It’s what you are that is being denied and denied and denied in this kind of life.’

‘And what’s that?’ For the first time he allowed himself to look at her ‘

‘Oh,don’t you know? Don’t you know? You’re the most valuable and wonderful thing in the world. You’re a man.’”

Not to spoil the finish but let’s just say that in the end the “delusion” remains a force to be reckoned with and Frank is a long way from feeling valuable and wonderful. It is not a great stretch to wonder if one of the reasons this book remains so relevant (and hard to read) today is that it can seem so familiar, despite our more supposedly modern and evolved sensibilities.

JAMES HOUGHTON

Newspaper columnist and talk show commentator Mike Barnicle has made the observation that the American public largely has regarded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with apathy–notwithstanding the results of last November’s presidential election and the sympathy we may feel when seeing the occasional news coverage of a grieving widow or parent of a soldier killed in action. Our apparent lack of concern, he has noted, is particularly striking when compared to the public outcry that contributed to the end of this country’s involvement in the Vietnam War.

Politics and purposes aside, the major difference between the Vietnam War and the current conflicts was the presence of the draft. Because of the draft, Barnicle has argued, just about everyone had a stake in the daily occurrences in Vietnam. The longer the war continued, the greater the possibility that your own draft number would come up, or your brother’s or son’s or friend’s. There also was a good chance you knew someone who already was in Vietnam or you knew someone who had a father, brother, son, or nephew who was there. I recently spoke with a man who told me that just about every member of his high school football team went to Vietnam after graduation; four of his teammates were killed there.

Fortunately for most of us and unfortunately for the rest–those who are fighting in the conflicts or have loved ones fighting in them–the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan do not have a similar reach, and so we can go about our daily routines without giving them much thought. I confess to doing just that. But my routine was disrupted one morning this week, when, as I scanned the front pages of the newspaper’s various sections, checking the headlines before turning to the sports section, I saw a name and face that I recognized in a story about a fatal helicopter crash in Afghanistan. The Marine pilot, who was among several people killed in the crash, was, ten years ago, a 19-year-old kid who played quarterback for the college football team I helped coach. The newspaper story said he had a three-year-old daughter, that his wife was pregnant with their second child, and that he was finishing up this third tour of duty and was scheduled to come home in a week.

I coached defense, and Kyle was a quiet kid on the field, so I didn’t really know him. I’m not sure that I ever even spoke with him, beyond maybe offering a “How ya doin’?” But learning of his death, the death of someone I saw two or three hours a day, a few days a week for nearly four straight months, made the wars seem a lot more real to me the morning I read the story. And it made all the stories of the soldiers—the sons and daughters, mothers, fathers, quarterbacks—who have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan a lot more tragic.

My wife, Michelle Seaton, also remembers Kyle. Before I began coaching, she did a season-long series for the National Public Radio program “Only a Game” about that same football program, which at the time was being reinstated after a five-decade hiatus. Like me, she never really got to know Kyle, but she spent a lot of time watching him at practice and during games, on the field and on the sidelines. She saw someone who, in addition to possessing remarkable athletic skills and being, as the tributes have said, a great teammate and friend and a leader on and off the field, also seemed to have conflicts and doubts, as anyone does. She saw a college kid, who, like most college kids, was just trying to figure things out. Michelle wrote the following remembrance about Kyle for WBUR, the Boston radio station that produces “Only a Game.”  –Larry Bean

Ten years ago, I reported a series of stories on the creation of a football program at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, N.H. I trailed the football team through practices and exhibition games during its trial season and again the following year, when the team began playing conference games.

Kyle Van De Giesen, a graduate of North Attleboro High School in Massachusetts, was the college’s starting quarterback those two seasons. He looked as much like a quarterback as anyone could. He was tall, broad-shouldered, graceful and good-looking.

I didn’t spend much time interviewing Kyle. Every team has players eager for the microphone, but he was not one of those. Players who have as much talent and charisma as he had either become cocky and outgoing, or they retreat a bit into themselves, as though mistrusting the status the game has given them. Kyle largely kept to himself at practices, although it was clear he had many friends on campus.

In fact, he actually seemed unhappy on the field. My sense about him was that he was feeling a lot of pressure to perform on a newly minted football team destined to struggle. He had been urged to come to St. A’s, where he would be a star player. His alternative would have been to go to a much larger program and be a backup. He might have enjoyed that more.

As it was, he was a far, far better player than the program could realistically handle, a strong-armed passer, agile and smart. He had a real feel for the game, and for the way plays developed, with a dozen details changing every second, and big players rushing at him and the pressure rising all the time. He usually could figure out what to do. But it seemed that emotionally, he was finished with playing. He left the football team after that second season, choosing not to play as a junior and senior, and I doubt he ever regretted his decision.

I was so sad to hear of his death–killed in a helicopter crash over Afghanistan on a day that took 13 other American lives–but not at all surprised to learn he had become a Marine pilot. It, too, is a role that requires intelligence and intuition and an ability to stay calm while conditions change rapidly.

Seeing Capt. Van De Giesen’s face in the paper was a shock. He looked so grown up, in his Marine uniform, next to his wife, and yet so much the same. The last time I saw him, he was still basically a teenager, smiling and joking on the last day of practice. He was unusually animated and relaxed that day. At the time, I imagined that he was relieved to be putting the football season behind him so that he could get on with the business of being a regular college student.

Of course, his loss is felt keenly by his family and friends, by the entire community of North Attleboro, and by his former coaches and teammates at Saint Anselm. I hope his family knows that his loss also is felt by those like me, who knew him only in passing.  –Michelle Seaton

From “Stay at Home Dad,”  (watch short video on the essay HERE)

By Charlie LeDuff

“Sometimes, when the baby’s asleep, I find myself staring into the rearview mirror of my career. As a reporter, my job was to write down the history of the living so our grandchildren will know how we lived. The reporter gives people things to talk about. He rubs elbows with and makes suggest

ions to people in power and exposes the wrongs they do. He holds up a mirror to society, going where few would, asking questions few dare. He is the arbiter of what is interesting. That is power.

Now, the governor won’t call anymore, the old colleagues either. There will be no more Hollywood parties, no expense account, no action. It’s just you and the kid, and the kid has no idea how good you are. Worse yet, in the mania of your empty house, isolated by the Los Angeles car culture, as that old deadline time, that hour of adrenaline arrives, you wonder whether you were ever really any good at all. You find yourself staring into a dirty diaper as though it were tea leaves, trying to augur some story about the failings of the latest immigration bill.”

Mongolia

From “The Indiana Jones of Dorchester” an essay for THE GOOD MEN PROJECT

By Curtis B

“My town had 10,000 people. By Mongolian standards, that’s big. In the countryside there were no paved roads. All the buildings were Soviet-era construction. They used cement because it was quick, and it was cheap. But that after a while cement crumbles. I would spend half an hour each day sweeping pieces of cement up off the floor of my apartment.

I watched the little old TV they gave me. The one channel that came in consistently showed only European fashion programs. I didn’t take a shower for two weeks, I felt like shit, and I watched Italian supermodels. I watched the channel because it was the only place I could hear English and listen to music I recognized.”

From “The Squeeze of the Python”

By Arthur Golden

A strange sort of disconnect exists between looking up in the sky with fascination as a child and suffering the discomforts of flight in a high-performance fighter. How does the one somehow lead a young man, or in some cases a young woman, down the path to the other? Even while being fitted into my gear, I’d begun to have the feeling of dressing up for battle with some horrific beast. To be a professional pilot—in these circumstances at least—isn’t to stroll along the flight line admiring the various wing shapes. It is instead to live every day with the smells of kerosene and stale, military-issue paint; to banter with colleagues who are also competitors; to learn the practical applications of geometric formulas; to become fluent in a complex jargon and in the control of cockpit switches; to learn to tolerate nausea; and to grunt and groan through the intense, hemorrhoid-inducing experience of high-g forces. It is as if, for some people, the love of flight finds its fulfillment in a different sort of pursuit altogether.

But of course, everything in life works this way, as I came to realize over the weeks that followed. It’s one thing to imagine the pleasing glow of accomplishment, after all, but quite another to suffer the labor necessary to bring it about. Every mother of a newborn who pictures her child one day as an adult must first endure the bouts of midnight fever, the tearful adjustments to new schools, and worst of all, the seemingly-endless worries over problems a parent is powerless to fix anyway. To imagine otherwise is like being the stockbroker at a party who muses about the novel he’s going to write one day, when in truth he has no idea of the agonies that lie ahead of him if indeed he ever gets around to the task. He has made the same mistake so many children do when they stare up the miraculous sight of a plane overhead, and while recalling photographs of jet fighters on the ramp, imagine the glorious calling of being a fighter pilot.

From “Beginner’s Heart”, an Essay Written for THE GOOD MEN PROJECT

“The first thing I did when I got to the University of Iowa was to figure out where I was going to practice martial arts. I thought I knew a lot about karate, but really I knew nothing. Iowa was my coming out party. In Newark karate was a matter of self-defense: If you attacked me, if you touched me, you could forget it. I will do what I had to do to protect myself. There was no philosophy behind it, no foundation to what I was doing.

But in Iowa I met all these people who had roots in Okinawa. During the four years when I trained with these guys, I realized there was so much more for me to learn. In Newark, I had to protect myself at all times just to survive, so I developed a mean streak that I never turned off. But I saw how these guys carried themselves, and I realized that I didn’t have to walk around like I was on edge, like I was ready to explode anytime somebody said the wrong thing to me, because I was not in Newark anymore, and I didn’t plan on being in Newark the rest of my life. I’m living in the suburbs now, and I can’t go to the grocery store looking like I might hurt you if you grab that loaf of bread before I get it.”

From “Here’s the Bad News, Son” written for THE GOOD MEN PROJECT

By Steve Almond

“It’s tempting to blame all this on my father. That’s the safe move. Perhaps if he’d encouraged us to share our feelings rather than pummel each other, my brothers and I would have entered the world without fear and loathing. We’d have become secure little citizens, ready to talk things through. But that’s missing the point. Masculinity has always been governed by aggression.

To put it more starkly: Aggression is the means by which boys learn to share their feelings. Not even the most loving father can protect his son from the playgrounds of this world, the bars and parking lots where bullies lurk, where soft emotions are hunted down and targeted, where fear converts itself into rage, and rage into violence.”

Photo: Michael Kamber for The New York Times

From “Shooting the Truth,” an essay written for THE GOOD MEN PROJECT

By Michael Kamber

I had a plan when I was in Iraq. I was going to come back to the States and live on a tree-lined street with this smart, sexy woman I loved. She had an apartment full of sunlight. Our friends and family would be there with us, eating and laughing.

But when I returned to Brooklyn, something had changed, in me and in the city. In my formerly industrial neighborhood black nannies now pushed fat white babies in $400 strollers; my neighbor’s new car had separate air-conditioning zones for each occupant; a friend obsessed over his iPod remote control. No one was the least concerned with the Iraq war. My neighbors’ programs did not include getting their legs or testicles blown off by someone wiring 155mm shells together and pressing a garage door opener. They didn’t worry about having to shit into a colostomy bag, or about being spoon-fed because they had got their arms blown off. And why should they?

So I got back to the world and I felt a certain arrogance washing over me, and a certain anger. I couldn’t think about much except getting out again. My woman wanted me to go into therapy, but I didn’t feel the need to pay an expert to facilitate this intersection-the intersection between the violence I saw every day in Iraq and people going blithely about their lives at home. And I wasn’t going to cop to this war junkie stuff.

I’d found a useful role in this world, a way to give evidence that has value. I had nothing to apologize for, nothing I needed to be diagnosed for. Some things in this world just are, and that’s ok. They don’t need to be satisfactorily resolved.

I put my things in storage and took the first assignment that got me far from New York.

Author of “Stay-at-home Dad” for THE GOOD MEN PROJECT, here’s the video of Charlie’s appearance on THE COLBERT REPORT discussing his book US GUYS:

LeDuff on Colbert

Charlie LeDuff is a Pulitzer prize winning journalist and documentary film producer.   In addition to his essay appearing in the PROJECT’s anthology, Charlie has produced a short film that will be included in our companion documentary about manhood.

It would be reasonable to assume that a declining old fogy such as myself-with my 50-something body creaking and wheezing like a car with fading paint, fins, and a clogged carburetor-would be far more vulnerable to swine flu than my bright-eyed teenage daughters. Not so. Two-thirds of the 5,000 confirmed cases in the U.S. thus far, the Centers for Disease Control revealed last week, have struck people between the ages of 5 and 24. Less than 1 percent of those infected were over 65. What gives? Many older people, blood studies show, have partial immunity to the swine variant because of a lifetime of exposure to similar flu viruses. The epidemiological quirk may be counterintuitive, but from my perspective as a parent, not so surprising: Every day I am reminded how vulnerable the young are to hazards to which, due to the inoculation provided by decades of hard experience, I am now immune.

The mean-spirited judgment of others is deeply wounding when you’re 13; at 54, not so much. At 17, the outrageous unfairness of life is not a simple reality, but the source of recurring anger and angst. Into your 30s, everyday blunders keep you up nights, squirming with humiliation and self-doubt. Over time, repeated exposure to these psychic pathogens renders them less toxic; you learn to maintain your equilibrium. What you can’t do, unfortunately, is distill that process into a vaccine to administer to your children. Only through their own mistakes and heartache do they develop antibodies of their own. It is the hardest thing about being a parent, watching your children struggle and suffer, learning what you already know but cannot, for the life of you, pass on.

WILLIAM FALK

The Week, June 5, 2009