Occupational hazards

written by Joe

I am a history teacher. This comes with a few occupational hazards. I am a cancer patient. This, too, comes with some hazards, only one of these being actual cancer, and some of them magnifying the hazards of being a historian.

In the past eight days, my life has been a whirlwind of travel, gathering research information, finding a couple bombshells (literal and metaphoric), getting lost in the past, traveling, planning, teaching, treatment, and traveling. What there hasn’t been time to do is to think. To process.

History, I tell my students on the first day of class, is the recording and interpretation of past human events. So many words there… Recording. Interpretation. Past. Human. Events. And like Faulkner said, the past is never dead. It isn’t even past.

In nearly every facet of my life, I have been grappling with history for the past week, and to some degree, my place in it. There is much that I found in Washington that I can talk about freely on social media, and some that I cannot. There is some that I should discuss, and some that I should not. So you’ll have to forgive me for being a little vague as I get into this.

Paul Theophane Boyle is my superhero. He is my Captain America. He has been for more than half of my life. I do pretty well at recording the past human events of which he was a part, but it’s exceptionally hard for me to interpret them, because he is, and will always be, larger than life to me. Interpreting the events of his life, no matter how hard I try to do otherwise, is always done through icon-tinted glasses. I want him to be a hero.

As fate would have it, the more I learn about him, the more this seems to actually be the case. I remember being quite skeptical of Uncle Bill Boyle’s story of Paul’s death. It seemed too perfect. But then I found the AARs. And the Monan and Gravelyn memoirs. And then I got to communicate with Stan Bielen. Last week, I found the maps. Most importantly, I found that faded blue document awarding Paul the Combat Infantryman Badge that he never got; a CIB that would have automatically become a Bronze Star after the war.

As I sat at the National Archives a week ago this morning, I had tears in my eyes and I my hands were shaking. I mean, this was pretty much it, right? This was the proof, incontrovertible proof that Paul wasn’t just a hero in my eyes, that he was (or, if the madness of combat hadn’t fouled up the paperwork before he died, should have been) a bona fide hero, with the paperwork and medals to prove it.

So there it is. My relative’s a hero. Story ends. Except that it doesn’t.

In that paperwork, and in all of the memoirs I have read,there are some names that stand out time and again as people who didn’t perform very well in combat. Men who failed at missions they had advance notice would fail, and men died. Including Paul. What I’m struggling with now is this: As I put together a lesson plan about the lessons of the hedgerows, do I name names? And the reason I struggle with this? Capt. X – mentioned by name quite a bit –is probably someone else’s treasured, storied uncle. It’s possible that Col. Y– mentioned by name for incompetence – is the family legend that got some relative through the darkest days of his life.

I’m struggling with this issue mightily. I think about it when I wake up in the middle of the night.

Which parts of the past are best left in the past?

Is it possible to be interpret past events in such a way that you maintain each person’s dignity?

What do we do when our interpretations of past human events have the power to wound?

Is it our duty to be honest? Or to maintain honor? Can we do both?

My heart aches with this stuff. I am probably more sensitive to these than I have been in a long while. I remember when Samantha and I were  at the British cemetery in Bayeux, and there were German soldiers buried there; 6^th Fallschirmjager – same unit Paul was fighting when he died, and I remember saying to her, one of these could be the guy who pulled the trigger – and I can’t even be mad. If I can’t push injury on those guys, how can I even consider pushing injury on the guys on our side who made brutally bad decisions?

Where do we get that? Where does it come from?

I suppose all of these are questions we all have to ask ourselves at some point or another. They’re questions I have really tried to focus on this week, which has been a week where it’s difficult for me to focus on much of anything. I’m especially having a terrible time trying to focus on the work I need to do on Paul as I try to decide how to do this in a mindful way. And I think this comes back to the occupational hazards of being a cancer patient. Remember learning about Erikson’s psychosocial stages in your undergrad psych courses? Identity vs. Confusion? Generativity vs. stagnation? Integrity vs. despair?

I sat in a colleague’s class this week while her student teacher taught her psych class, and all of the Erikson stuff came back to me, and I had the horrifying dawning that I’m going through those last two stages concurrently, if that’s even possible – trying to define my role in my work at the same time I’m trying to look back on it. It’s like trying to blow bubbles in a wind tunnel.

Today, my scans came back with no change. I’ll throw some bravado on my left arm like a shield, and deflect things a little bit longer.  I’ll work on Paul’s story, because keeping him alive is the legacy I guess I’m trying to build. I need him to be a hero for me, but more importantly, I need him to be a hero AFTER me. What would Cap do? How would Steve Rogers solve this?

I hate to be the guy who writes “I could go on…” as a conclusion, but it’s midnight, and I’m exhausted after treatment and travel today. I sure wish I had the answers tonight.


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If you have not had a chance to see Joe's plans of running 50 miles to raise funds for Dr. Rini's research, you can fin it here.