The Good Men Project

"Sincere, ambitious and nearly always engaging, these stories will touch familar chords in men."

The MetroWest Daily News

October 30, 2009

“Sudden Death” by Larry Bean

Filed under: Larry Bean — tmatlack @ 7:19 am

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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

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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

 

June 19, 2009

Good Men Excerpt: Developing Psychic Antibodies

Filed under: Fatherhood, Larry Bean — tmatlack @ 6:00 am

One of my favorite publications is The Week, in part because it demonstrates the value of newspapers and magazines, which are the primary sources for its content and have been the primary sources for my income over the past two decades.  I also love The Week because it allows me to seem far more well-read than I am. The magazine’s tagline is “All you need to know about everything that matters,” and that’s an accurate description. For those unfamiliar with the magazine, it’s essentially a compilation of newspaper and magazine excerpts-news stories as well as op-ed pieces-covering the previous week’s top national and international issues and events. The Week also covers business, arts, entertainment, and even my favorite guilty pleasure, celebrity gossip (“Three-year-old Suri Cruise refuses to eat unless she can use chopsticks”). The editor’s letter is usually a highlight, and such was the case for the June 5 issue, when editor-in-chief William Falk wrote about the limits of a parent’s power. With Father’s Day in mind, I’ve figuratively and literally taken a page from The Week (a third of a page, actually) and reprinted Falk’s letter below.  -LARRY BEAN

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

 

June 17, 2009

Good Men Film Clips: The Evolution of Dad

Filed under: Fatherhood, Larry Bean — tmatlack @ 6:00 am

While researching a project on stay-at-home fathers, my wife came across some clips from the forthcoming documentary The Evolution of Dad.

In the first clip, stay-at-home dad Dallas Hayes explains his version of the circle of life to his infant son, as he changes the boy’s diaper. In the second clip, Dallas explains why you can call him Mr. Hayes, but not Mr. Mom.

In a third, more somber clip , Ralph Benitez describes how fatherhood saved his life.  -LARRY BEAN

 

June 12, 2009

Daily Man: The First of the Few Good Men

Filed under: Daily Man, Larry Bean, Work — tmatlack @ 5:16 am

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At a dinner in 1815 celebrating his squadron’s recent triumph, American naval officer Stephen Decatur raised his glass and offered a toast: “Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but [I drink to] our country, right or wrong!” In the intercourse that precipitated the dinner, America certainly seemed to be in the right.

At that time, the Barbary states of North Africa-Algiers, Tunis, Morocco, and Tripoli (now known as Libya)-so-called because of the people’s Berber origin, had been seizing European ships for at least 300 years, capturing and enslaving by some estimates more than 1 million crew members and passengers. The frequency of these attacks declined in the late 18th century, when the European and American governments began paying tributes to the Barbary sultans in exchange for the safe passage of their vessels.

Then, while the United States was waging the War of 1812 with England, the sultan of Algiers declared his intention to increase his number of American slaves by employing raiders to overtake U.S. merchant vessels as they entered or departed the Mediterranean. Shortly after that declaration, Algerian pirates seized the American brigantine Edwin and held her crew as slaves for nearly three years, until Decatur arrived with a squadron of 10 ships in 1815, 10 weeks after the end of the War of 1812. From the sultan, he demanded and received the crew’s release, as well as $10,000 in retribution for those men. Decatur’s victory led to the end of the Second Barbary War.

Decatur already was revered for his exploits during the First Barbary War (1801-1805), which began when newly seated President Thomas Jefferson refused the pasha of Tripoli’s order for a $225,000 tribute. Tripoli responded by declaring war on the United States, and in turn, Jefferson called for a blockade of Tripoli’s harbor.

A reminder of Decatur’s heroism during that war remains in the city of Tripoli. From the roof of the Libyan capital’s Jamahiriya Museum rises the mast of the Philadelphia, one of the ships that participated in the blockade. (The museum also houses the VW Beetle that Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi drove during his 1969 coup.) In the fall of 1803, the Philadelphia ran aground in Tripoli’s harbor. The ship’s commander surrendered, her 307 crew members were imprisoned, and the pasha added a new warship to his fleet.

In February 1804, Decatur, then a 25-year-old lieutenant, took command of a Tripolitanian ketch that the Americans had seized and used it to sail undetected into the harbor and destroy the Philadelphia. Armed with sabers and cutlasses, Decatur and his charges boarded the frigate and killed two dozen Tripolitanian guards. They captured the ship, set it aflame, and blew it up, and then they escaped without losing a single man. When he learned of the foray, British Admiral Horatio Nelson called it “the most bold and daring act of the age.” As daring as Decatur’s sortie was, it did little for the welfare of the Philadelphia’s crew: They remained prisoners, slaves to the pasha.

This situation didn’t sit well with William Eaton, an impetuous, argumentative, Dartmouth-educated former American army captain who was vehemently opposed to slavery of any kind. When Eaton was serving as the American consul in Tunis, in 1800, he witnessed the trading of slaves firsthand. He was so repulsed that while in Tunis he went into debt by guaranteeing a loan of $5,000-at that time, enough money to buy a Manhattan mansion-to a father seeking to buy back his daughter from the Tunisian pirates who had seized her.

In 1805, not long after the Philadelphia’s destruction, Eaton secured permission from Jefferson, a slave owner, to try to free the ship’s captured sailors. He would lead a brigade comprising eight members of the newly formed Marine Corps and 600 Arab and European mercenaries from Egypt into Tripoli, across 500 miles of desert. In May 1805, Eaton and his vastly outnumbered troops arrived in Tripoli and took the port of Derna. They then prepared to liberate the Philadelphia crew.

Meanwhile, Jefferson was becoming increasingly concerned with the mounting cost of the Barbary War. He therefore severed contact with Eaton and then reached a settlement in which the Philadelphia sailors would be released in exchange for 52 prisoners whom Decatur had captured in battle and a payment of $60,000.

When the treaty was signed, Eaton, having been forsaken by the President, was forced to flee Derna.

Decatur may have drunk to Jefferson’s means of settling the intercourse with Tripoli, whether the president was right or wrong. Meanwhile, Eaton believed he had been on the wrong end of intercourse with Jefferson and with his country. Bitter about not being compensated for his pecuniary losses during his mission and festering over the way Jefferson had abandoned him, he drank to just about anything once he returned to his Massachusetts home from Derna.

The life of Decatur, the war hero, came to a gallant end. In 1820, he was killed in a duel in Maryland by James Barron, a commodore whom Decatur had helped to court-marshal and convict 13 years earlier on charges that Barron surrendered his ship too hastily to a British war vessel.  The duel followed an exchange of insult-laden correspondences, some of which referenced the other man’s significant other.

Eaton, his body ravaged by alcoholism, died at the age of 47 in 1811, 80 years before the Marines would honor his troops’ victory at Derna-the Corps’ first-in the opening lines of their hymn: “From the halls of Montezuma / to the shores of Tripoli.”  -LARRY BEAN

 

June 5, 2009

Daily Man: Spank You Very Much, Mr. Bond

Filed under: Daily Man, Larry Bean — tmatlack @ 5:28 am

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A recent viewing of the Quantum of Solace DVD reminded me of a column I wrote that deconstructed the James Bond myth. The magazine I used to edit had just hosted a car-of-the-year contest, and one of the judges, referring to his experience behind the wheel of an Aston Martin, 007’s preferred marque, remarked, “I felt like Bond when I drove the DB9.”

I noted that the driver presumably felt like the Bond he had seen in the movies, the idealized secret agent, the character who has come to represent the man’s-man archetype, who is, as Raymond Chandler once wrote “what every man would like to be, and what every woman would like to have between her sheets.” This Bond’s tastes are sophisticated, his manners refined, his appearance elegant. To quote one admirer, “He looks very clean.”

However, not everyone saw him as such. Ian Fleming’s Bond novels were denounced by one of the writer’s contemporary critics, Paul Johnson, as collections of “sex, snobbery, and sadism.” Johnson did have a point. After all, the Bond in Fleming’s books was a chain-smoking (60 to 70 Turkish cigarettes a day), alcohol-abusing (half a bottle of spirits daily), philanderer with some deviant proclivities and little tolerance for foreigners.

Fleming, who himself smoked 70 cigarettes a day, drank heavily, impregnated a friend’s wife and then partook in numerous affairs after he married her, and supposedly exercised a spanking fetish, did not intend or view Bond as a degenerate. In fact, the author, who, not surprisingly, died of heart failure in 1964 at the age of 56, is said to have meant his hero to be just an ordinary guy to whom extraordinary things happen. According to Fleming biographer Andrew Lycett, Fleming chose the name James Bond because he wanted the character to be “unobtrusive. Exotic things would happen to and around him, but he would be a neutral figure-an anonymous blunt instrument wielded by a government department.”

As Kingsley Amis noted in his 1965 The James Bond Dossier, Bond is no superman. He must go into training-running and swimming-to prepare for his missions. He has to practice his marksmanship, and before defeating Moonraker villian Hugo Drax at bridge, he spends half an hour performing drills to perfect his cheating.

In other arenas, however, cheating came more naturally to Bond. In Moonraker, for instance, he was concurrently involved with three women, and all of them were married. (In most cases, Fleming’s novels and the Bond films share a title but few plot elements.) But Amis, who under a pen name in 1968 wrote Colonel Sun, the first Bond novel after Fleming’s death, argued in Dossier that Bond’s sexual exploits were overstated by Fleming’s critics. “Bond collects almost exactly one girl per excursion abroad, which average he exceeds only once, by one,” wrote Amis, apparently not taking into consideration the Moonraker troika. “This is certainly not at all in advance of what any reasonably personable, reasonably well-off bachelor would reckon to acquire on a foreign holiday or trip for his firm.”

Perhaps, but that bachelor probably would not threaten to spank any of his acquisitions, as Bond did to Honeychile Rider in Dr. No-”Honey, get into that bath before I spank you.”-evidence, Johnson and others claimed, of Bond’s sado-masochistic leanings. (It should be noted that Johnson’s mistress later revealed that the critic himself was a fan of spanking.) Amis dismissed these charges against Bond, writing that the critics were transferring the character’s violent exchanges with his enemies onto his dealings with women. “For however much amateur lip-curling toward women in general Bond may go in for,” Amis wrote, “he never uses an individual woman unkindly, never hits one, seldom so much as raises his voice.”

Amis would not have been able to convince Fleming’s wife, Ann, of Bond’s gallantry. She referred to the novels as “Ian’s pornography.” (She also characterized Amis as “a left-wing opportunist” when he sought a contract to write his first Bond novel.) Mrs. Fleming seemed to have concurred with Paul Johnson and other Bond detractors. Their take on the character and his escapades suggests that the next time you feel like James Bond, you should feel dirty and, figuratively speaking, in need of a bath, or maybe a spanking.

LARRY BEAN

 

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