This is my second book for the 2nds Challenge (hey, what a coincidence!).
I’ve been eager to read this book since I signed up for this challenge, and now that I’m done with it, I feel like I’ve hardly read a single word. Seriously - I started this book yesterday and finished it today, and yet most of it seems to have passed me in a flash. Good thing or bad? I don’t know yet.
Faith of Our Sons is a chronicle of a father’s rite of passage, as he travels from being someone who admits to once having a “couldn’t-care-less attitude…about men and women in the military” to someone who thinks of all Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan as HIS Marines. This is a poignant account of someone who embraces the military culture after his son enlists in the USMC and deploys to Afghanistan in 2003, just as the U.S. invades Iraq. It’s the story of a man who struggles how to define his patriotism in the wake of his son’s military service. Most of all, it’s a diary of a father and his anxieties about his son being in harm’s way, articulated in such a way that many of his fears remind me of my own mother’s overprotective nature.
The book is laid out diary-style, with entries by Schaeffer that detail everything from the moment his son John tells him he would be deployed to John’s return from his second tour in Afghanistan. Interspersed throughout the entries are poems and prose pieces by John, notes from Schaeffer’s wife Genie, letters and emails from other parents and loved ones of military personnel, and excerpts from newspaper articles. I admit to feeling like a voyeur through much of my reading, someone reading the latest email over Schaeffer’s shoulder or eavesdropping on the too-brief phone conversations with his soldier son. The flipside of the coin, however, is that the layout probably helped me get through the book so quickly.
Schaeffer is straightforward in expressing his concerns about John’s safety while deployed. At times he’s almost arrogant about it, especially when talking about it with others. His email arguments with his friend Frank Gruber are almost appalling, but I have to remember that worry can drive some to act so out of character - and in Schaeffer’s case, I’m not sure he was acting out of character at all.
Most of the political debate about the war is left out of these pages, save for the one op-ed Schaeffer includes about some of his Greek Orthodox churchleaders signing an anti-war declaration, whom Schaeffer criticizes for using religion to make political statements. Instead, Schaeffer indulges in a running commentary about patriotism, about military service for one’s country and how he comes to appreciate his freedoms and liberties more as a parent of a U.S. Marine. To some these inner monologues might seem overly sentimental and jingoistic, but Schaeffer knows when to draw the line. The reader can also see how he derived his inspiration for his other book, AWOL, which I read earlier this year.
I do recommend this book if you, like me, are intrigued by the military culture and want an inside view from someone who’s indirectly involved, as well.
