His Name Was Sherwood Baker
- His Name Was Sherwood Baker
On August 22, 2013, my uncle killed himself. I don't know why he did it, in part because I never really knew the man. He was stationed overseas with the Marine Corps for much of my childhood, so our interactions were limited. Occasionally he would return home and my extended family would gather to share stories and play bluegrass music late into the night. In one of my earliest memories, my uncle stood on a chair in my grandparents' kitchen and yelled at the ceiling about how tall my older sister had gotten since he last saw her. She blushed and we all giggled. I've been told he was funny like that.
This memory is more the exception than the rule. Even now, as I sit here and type this essay, my recollection of my uncle remains imprecise. His physical features are distorted. His face shifts and slides, refusing to coalesce into anything resembling the pictures I have of him. I cannot hear his voice or recall his laugh. I do not know what he smelled like.
What I do have, when I think of him, is a set of warm feelings informed by a lifetime's exposure to popular representations of martial masculinity. When I was a child, these representations consisted primarily of He-Man and G. I. Joe, later replaced by Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who were themselves later replaced by Mel [End Page 119] Gibson and Tom Cruise. Like the toy-robot Transformers of my youth, these individual representations of martial masculinity have, over time, merged into a composite figure of idealized masculine conduct, one that is more hero than human. My uncle is part of this aggregate.
The problem is that suicide is not part of that figure. Suicide is antithetical to the values associated with popular representations of martial masculinity. Heroes do not kill themselves. Heroes do not entertain feelings of helplessness, guilt, anxiety, fear, depression, and paranoia.
These discrepancies are difficult for me to resolve. The easiest solution is willful ignorance. I can simply disregard anything that threatens my youthful memory of my uncle. This option strips my uncle of his humanity by denying his lived experiences, but it allows me to preserve the only relationship I have with the man. Alternatively, I can reject my memory of my uncle as counterfeit, but to do so is to call into question a constellation of values that I have projected onto his person, values that I have sought to uphold in my own life. Either way, I must close off part of myself. Either I live in a state of denial or I excise principles that (though complicated) are important to who I am.
My dilemma is a national dilemma. My experience is our collective experience. A cursory survey of American popular culture reveals a country obsessed with hero worship. Video games fetishize America's war on terror. Movies like Lone Survivor, American Sniper, and Hacksaw Ridge invite audiences to imagine American forces as noble crusaders combating evil in the world. Television shows like 24 and The Unit offer highly sensationalized renditions of martial violence that build, episode after episode, into a climactic, masturbatory homage to male heroism. Over the past decade, the Pentagon has paid sports teams tens of millions of dollars to incorporate patriotic celebrations into their programming. The National Football League regularly celebrates hometown heroes, and college football teams often stage surprise reunions between families and soldiers returning from overseas deployment, much to the delight of adoring fans.
And yet beneath this spectacle a simple fact remains: Nearly a platoon's worth of US soldiers kills themselves every day. This has been widely reported. I am not revealing anything new. The military [End Page 120] has launched numerous initiatives to combat this trend. Experts like Sebastian Junger and Nancy Sherman have written extensively on the topic. Documentaries such as The Wounded Platoon and Thank You for Your Service have offered intimate accounts of the struggles that many veterans face upon returning home from combat. Former President Obama has spoken eloquently on the topic. Still, veterans continue to commit suicide with military...
