Calvin Trillian: Lost son
Swiss Observer
By Calvin Trillin
The New Yorker
14 March 2005 Issue
This happened on Interstate 78, in New Jersey, in November of
2003: While listening to a story on NPR's "Morning Edition" about a
National Guardsman who'd been killed in Iraq, I found myself in tears.
At the time, I was driving from Manhattan to visit my younger daughter
and her new baby, Tobias, who was then about three months old. Because
my daughter's husband had to be away from early morning until late in
the evening on Tuesdays, I'd been going to New Jersey once a week to
keep her company and do a bit of babysitting; we called the
arrangement Tuesdays with Toby. The birth of a grandchild is an event
that tends to push emotions toward the surface, and that may have been
particularly true in my case. My wife had died in September of 2001.
The delight I took in Toby's arrival-and in the arrival of my older
daughter's baby, Isabelle Alice, who'd been born in the spring of
2002-was sometimes difficult to uncouple from the way I felt about my
wife's not having lived to enjoy her grandchildren. So you could say
that my emotional defenses were not fully in place. Still, I was
astonished that my response to a story about a young man I'd never
heard of, a thirty-year-old helicopter pilot from northern Illinois
named Brian Slavenas, was to weep.
First Lieutenant Slavenas, I was informed by the voice of Bob
Edwards, had been in command of a Chinook helicopter that was brought
down by a missile as it ferried soldiers on the first leg of their
trip out of Iraq for leaves. Sixteen people were killed and twenty
injured-one of the first big casualty reports in the period when
Donald Rumsfeld was still saying that the continuing violence in Iraq
was being caused by a few dead-enders. Brian Slavenas had been a
member of an Illinois National Guard unit that was deployed in April
of 2003, just a couple of months after he got his degree in industrial
engineering from the University of Illinois. "Morning Edition" ran a
segment on him by Susan Stephens, of Station WNIJ, which is affiliated
with Northern Illinois University, in DeKalb. He had been "physically
huge," Stephens reported-six feet five, two hundred and thirty pounds.
But from her first couple of interviews, with a high-school buddy and
with a teacher whom Brian had worked for during the summer as a
furniture mover, it was apparent that he wasn't the sort of big man
who used his size to intimidate. The teacher, Lance Gackowski, talked
about how, in pickup basketball games, Brian would cheerfully continue
to concentrate on putting the ball in from under the basket while a
couple of opposing players hung off him. The high-school buddy, John
Rossi, said, "He wouldn't hurt a fly."
Something else that Rossi said was not the sort of thing you'd
expect to hear about a young man who'd just been described in terms of
his size and strength: "We'd get into conversations and, say, if we
couldn't get a conclusion to something, the next day he'd go to the
library or go on the Internet and look up the information and call
back and go, 前.K., I figured out what we were trying to figure out.'
He just wanted to know." His step-mother, Christi Slavenas, said
something similar. Barely keeping her voice under control, she said
that Brian was "very self-disciplined and studious and interested. He
liked history. He liked reading, he liked talking to people about
ideas." Susan Stephens's segment had lasted only two or three minutes,
but it left a clear impression of Brian Slavenas: a powerful but
good-natured young man with intellectual curiosity. He sounded like
the sort of young man you'd want your son-or, yes, your grandson-to
emulate. I don't know whether it was that thought or the cracking of
Christi Slavenas's voice or John Rossi's statement "He was the best
friend you could have" that triggered my response, but for a moment or
two I had to consider pulling off the road.
I have to get on the record something else that happened while I
was listening to that segment from Illinois. I said-out loud, I think,
even though I was the only person in the car-"What a waste!" From the
start, I'd believed that the war in Iraq was unconnected to defending
ourselves against terrorism, and I'd been particularly disturbed by
the unfairness of who bore the burden of fighting it. Brian Slavenas
sounded like someone who had gradually made his way through college by
availing himself of the tuition help offered by the National Guard. I
was angered that he had been sent to die by policymakers whose own
sons were perfectly safe and who themselves, almost to a man, had
evaded serving in Vietnam. By the time I reached my daughter's house,
I had more or less calmed down, but in the months that followed I
never quite got Brian Slavenas out of my head.
I felt terrible about saying that his death had been a waste. Even
though nobody in his family had been in the car to hear it, I felt
that it had been disrespectful to them. I couldn't make the case to
myself that Brian had literally died defending his country-soon
Rumsfeld himself began denying that he'd ever called Iraq an immediate
threat to the United States-but I sometimes tried to see his death in
ways that gave it some nobility. I told myself that it's not the
soldier's place to choose the war or the battle. Defending the country
requires a ready supply of young people who are willing to go where
they're sent and do their duty, even if, inevitably, there will be
times when they're sent to fight an ill-conceived battle or even an
unnecessary war. Were the soldiers who stormed Gallipoli any less
heroic or patriotic than the soldiers who stormed Iwo Jima?
I found myself hoping that Brian's parents were true believers in
the war in Iraq, so that, unlike me, they didn't need to stretch to
believe that he died defending his country. I thought I'd like to meet
them someday. It's possible that I just wanted to offer my condolences
and tell them that their son sounded like a splendid young man. Or
maybe I wanted to find out if the impression I had of Brian from that
brief radio report was a true impression. I felt uneasy being so upset
about the death of someone I knew so little about. Finally, a year
after the Chinook went down, I decided to go to Illinois.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Before I left, I discovered that there had been a brief stir in the
press a week or so after Brian Slavenas died. A few stories were
written about whether the Chinook had been shot down because it was
inadequately equipped, but most of the coverage was about his family.
Brian's father, Ronald Slavenas, a school social worker who was born
in Lithuania and came to America as a teen-ager, had served in the
82nd Airborne Division between high school and college and had later
joined the National Guard; in the days following his son's death, he
told one reporter, "This country took us in very generously. My
philosophy is put your shoulder to the wheel." A son from Ron
Slavenas's first marriage-Brian's half brother, Eric, who is forty-had
been in the invasion of Grenada as a forward observer with the 82nd
Airborne. Brian's older brother, Marcus, had been a marine in the Gulf
War. Brian, like every other male in the family, had done a hitch in
the military right out of high school-he was a paratrooper, based in
Italy-and had later, for a time, served in the same Guard unit that
his father was in. When reporters went to Ron Slavenas's home, in
Genoa, Illinois-where Brian had lived until third grade, when his
parents got divorced-they found a large American flag and a wreath
bearing the words "America's All American Hero-We Will Never Forget
You."
But Brian's mother told a different story. In the view of
Rosemarie Dietz Slavenas, who'd just retired as an associate professor
of early-childhood education at Northern Illinois, Brian never had any
interest in being a hero and was under no illusions about the war in
Iraq making the United States more secure. In fact, she said, he had
tried to resign his commission rather than go to Iraq. Brian's family
on his mother's side had, instead of a military tradition, a tradition
of opposing wars. Rosemarie Slavenas had demonstrated against both of
the wars her sons fought in; she is a longtime member of the DeKalb
Interfaith Network for Peace and Justice, whose demonstrations tend
toward silent vigils. Her older sister marched against the war in
Vietnam. Their mother, now in her eighties, shares their views.
Brian's father had taken it for granted that there would be a
formal military funeral, but Brian's designated next of kin-and thus
the person entitled to make such a decision-was his mother. Rosemarie
Slavenas said that it was her responsibility to give her son the
funeral that was appropriate for his life. The service she arranged,
at the Faith United Methodist Church, in Genoa, was a civilian
service, with flowers rather than an American flag on the casket, and
no weapons in sight. Afterward, addressing some reporters and
cameramen gathered outside the church grounds, Rosemarie Slavenas
said, "George Bush killed my son. I believe my son Brian died not for
his country but because of our country's lack of a coherent and
civilized foreign policy."
Eric Slavenas, a strong supporter of the war, had said that not
having "Taps" and a flag-draped casket at Brian's service amounted to
"spikes in my dad's and my heart." Many of those who had attended the
funeral at Faith United Methodist later walked over to the Genoa
Veterans Home, a few blocks away, for a ceremony that included some of
the military elements that Ron and Eric Slavenas had counted on-an
honor guard and a memorial rifle volley and helicopters flying
overhead in a "missing man" formation and a bagpipe playing "The
Caissons Go Rolling Along" and a display of Brian's military
decorations. Marcus attended both ceremonies, but in interviews he'd
argued that American soldiers shouldn't have been sent to Iraq in the
first place. ("All of them should have been back here dating girls and
working jobs.") On the Internet, the split in the Slavenas family
generated considerable traffic, some of it ugly. One pro-war chat room
had dozens of postings gathered under the heading "evil shrew loses
hero son."
So many people came to Brian's funeral that the overflow had to be
accommodated in the church basement. There were a number of military
people attending in uniform, but there was no ceremonial military
presence. The eulogies were about the civilian Brian Slavenas. From
what was said at the funeral, it was obvious that Brian had an even
broader spectrum of interests than I'd realized. He was a serious
power-lifter, specializing in the bench press, but he was also a
serious pianist, specializing in Chopin. He loved skiing, but he also
loved chess. The friends who spoke said that despite Brian's range of
competence he was modest and self-effacing. He was, by all accounts,
embarrassed by attention and quiet with people he didn't know well.
Jennifer Lasiowski, who had gone out with Brian for a year when they
were at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said in her
eulogy that Brian was so shy it took him six dates to kiss her.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DeKalb County is a perfect rectangle of a county an hour or so
west of Chicago. Parts of it-the patch north of Genoa, for
instance-look like the sort of flat Illinois farmland that couldn't
have changed much in decades; the farmhouses resemble the picture that
springs to my mind when I hear someone who's from the rural Midwest
talk about "the home place." Genoa (pronounced Juh-no-ah) is a town of
four thousand where the main street is called Main Street and the
newspaper is delivered by a boy on a bicycle. To the south, though, an
occasional subdivision sits on former cornfields; DeKalb, a city of
forty thousand people about fifteen miles from Genoa, has not only
subdivisions but a strip of box stores and franchises that would make
an urban planner of any sensitivity weak at the knees.
Rosemarie Slavenas began teaching at Northern Illinois not long
after her divorce, so, in the days before most of the box stores and
franchises arrived, Brian grew up in DeKalb and made regular trips to
Genoa to visit his father. Wrestling is the big sport at DeKalb High
School, but Brian, who threw the discus for the track team and played
the drums in the marching band, wasn't a wrestler. For one thing, I
was told by Lance Gackowski, who coaches wrestling among his other
duties, Brian didn't really fill out until he had almost finished high
school. Also, in Gackowski's experience, effective wrestlers tend to
work off of some sort of anger. "Brian didn't seem to have that,"
Gackowski told me. "He was a very gentle person."
That's what I heard from Jennifer Lasiowski, a slim, direct young
woman who works in a Head Start program, and that's what I heard from
Ed Rubeck, a grade-school pal of Brian's who still moves furniture and
looks like he doesn't need much help with the pianos: Brian was a very
gentle person. Even Ron Slavenas, in describing a son who had died in
battle, spoke of Brian as "a gentle giant." Rosemarie Slavenas has
said that the last thing her son told her before shipping out was
"Mom, I don't want to hurt anybody."
Among the people I talked to in Illinois, in fact, there was a
remarkable consistency in how Brian was remembered. He was methodical,
working slowly and patiently on whatever skill he was trying to
acquire; at the gym used by the University of Illinois weight-lifting
club, he didn't miss workouts. His passion for flying was so strong
that, even after his engineering degree was in hand, he didn't
completely rule out a career in aviation; for him, the practical
appeal of the Guard had included not only tuition support but pilot
training. He was the sort of student who studied hard preparing for an
exam, was always pessimistic about how he had done, and almost
invariably turned out to have done very well. He was
thoughtful-someone who would always insist on taking the most cramped
spot in the moving van. He had a modesty so profound that it sometimes
seemed to shade into a shortage of self-confidence. His friends in the
weight-lifting club didn't learn until after his death about the
trophies he'd won in out-of-town tournaments. When I asked Jennifer
Lasiowski why she and Brian had eventually broken up-I don't really
know what made me think I had a right to ask that question-she said,
"He thought I could do better."
From the way she'd spoken of him, I suspected that she didn't
necessarily agree. Neither did I. Modesty may be particularly becoming
in the person of someone who could win benchpress tournaments and play
Chopin and fly a helicopter and co-write a thesis called "An Economic
Analysis of Combination Vaccines." I grew up one state away from where
Brian Slavenas grew up, and, as I spoke to his friends and family
about all he'd accomplished in his short life, I could almost hear him
mumbling what I've always treasured as the Code of the Midwest-"No big
deal."
Brian's brother Marcus struck me as an engaging young man, but he
is also someone who, at thirty-four, might be described by a school
social worker as still trying to find himself; when I met him, at his
father's house, Marcus was about to leave for Puerto Rico, where he
hoped to acquire the credentials to become a scuba instructor in
Belize. In the divided Slavenas family, from what I could gather,
Brian, the last born, played the role often associated with the first
child-the dutiful child who tries to please his parents and keep the
peace, the child who doesn't smoke or drink, the child who never gets
into trouble. Rosemarie Slavenas sometimes refers to him as "my wise
child." In Iraq, he wrote both parents regularly-devoting most of his
last letters to his mother to the care that should be given an ancient
family dog named Pepper and mentioning in one letter to his father
that he was considering staying in the military as a chopper pilot.
Lance Gackowski thinks that the breadth of Brian's interests, as well
as his inclination to stay out of the limelight, had something to do
with having parents who were divorced and held widely divergent views.
"Some kids in that situation just shut down," Gackowski told me. "He
tried to fulfill both of their visions of what a noble man should be."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ron Slavenas, who retired last year, has spent a good deal of time
travelling to military and community gatherings that honor his son.
His house, whose front lawn is dominated by a pole that flies not only
the American flag but the flag of the 82nd Airborne Division, has some
elements of a military museum. Slavenas has on display the triangular
box that was presented to him at the military ceremony, with a neatly
folded American flag and his son's medals. The walls hold, among other
military mementos, a huge gold-star flag with Brian's name on it and,
across from a pencil drawing of a Chinook helicopter, framed copies of
resolutions about Brian from dignitaries and legislative bodies. The
centerpiece of that display is the letter sent to the survivors of
every fallen soldier by the President of the United States.
Rosemarie Slavenas has been to a gold-star mothers' event, but
she's more likely to commemorate Brian among people who oppose the
war. In her house-in Rockford, where she moved in 2003 after she
retired-the only indication that Brian was in the military is that his
high-school graduation portrait, on the wall next to a similar
portrait of Marcus, has his dog tags hanging from the frame. A large
picture of an Indian in a canoe, a picture Brian painted when he was
eight, hangs on the wall above an upright piano. The piano itself is a
memento of Brian. In the two years that he attended Northern Illinois,
before transferring to the Urbana-Champaign campus, she could tell
when he got in at night because music would start wafting through the
house-"Chopin that would break my heart." Rosemarie Slavenas displays
no framed resolutions or official letters of condolence. She is still
waiting for an answer from her own letter to the President, a letter
that said, in part, "My beloved son Brian died for your red herring in
the sand. . . . He did not give his life. It was cruelly taken from
him by your rush to war."
Neither Ron nor Rosemarie Slavenas likes to dwell publicly on
their differences over their son's funeral, partly because they think
it detracts from the memory of Brian. Maybe for the same reason, or
maybe because the Midwestern instinct is to seek some common ground, I
found myself looking for ways in which they are not as far apart in
their views as they may at first appear. Rosemarie Slavenas, for
instance, is not automatically hostile to the military. She told me
that Brian did value the organization and discipline of the Army and
that the Army taught him important skills. She liked the casualty
liaison officer sent by the Illinois National Guard; at the funeral,
he walked by her side, in his dress uniform and his beret, from the
Faith United Methodist Church to the graveyard nearby.
In the Slavenas family, the one person who impressed me as a true
believer in the war was not Ron Slavenas but Brian's half brother,
Eric, who operates a landscape-contracting service near Genoa. Eric,
who says that he speed-reads a couple of hundred pages on current
affairs every day, assured me that weapons of mass destruction and
Saddam's links to September 11th have been found in Iraq but were
suppressed by the liberal media. Ron Slavenas, despite the military
displays, does not have Eric's certainty. He's a cordial man who seems
to try hard to see other people's point of view. Although he believes
that the United States has to persevere in Iraq now that our troops
are there, he has said that we went to war "a little too fast." He
told me that Brian, while being intent on doing his duty, was not
"gung ho, not a muscle-flexing warrior." Ron Slavenas wouldn't say
that his son tried to resign rather than go to Iraq, but he-and even
Eric-would acknowledge that Brian went in to his commanding officer in
order to "look at his options," eventually learning that resignation
after deployment is not permitted. To me, trying to resign and looking
at your options sound like they could be different ways of saying the
same thing.
Among the people I talked to-the Slavenas family, the friends who
visited Brian at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, just before his unit shipped
out to the Middle East-there is agreement that Brian would have been
delighted if one of his options had been to stay in Illinois. After
constantly shifting back and forth between college and the military,
he'd finally received the degree he had sought for years; in Ron
Slavenas's words, "The world was just opening up for him." On the
other hand, there is agreement that, once it was clear that such an
option didn't exist, Brian would have done what was expected of him,
as he always had. The way Brian went about things, John Rossi said to
me, was "If you're going to do it, you might as well do it full bore."
"The single most important thing for me is to keep his spirit
alive in my heart," I was told by Rosemarie Slavenas, who in her
letter to George Bush had described her son as "an honorable,
restrained, talented, caring man." I know that both of Brian's parents
believe that he lived a noble life. They're left with differences in
how he should be remembered. On my last day in Genoa, Ron Slavenas
took me by Faith Methodist, where the funeral was held, and by the
church cemetery, where Brian's grave is still without a stone. What
Ron Slavenas would like to see on the stone is something like "Brian
Slavenas, 1972-2003, First Lieutenant, Illinois National Guard,
Chinook Pilot, Operation Iraqi Freedom." He assumes that his former
wife would have different ideas, and so far he hasn't broached the
subject. It's indicative of how different Rosemarie Slavenas's ideas
would be that when she heard of her son's death she said, "All the
kindness has gone out of the world." If Brian had lived, I think he
would have continued to please both of his parents. He wasn't supposed
to be frozen as one thing or the other at the age of thirty. He was
supposed to live long enough to define himself rather than to be
defined by his mother or his father. Parents aren't supposed to have
to decide on a headstone for their child.
-------
Roedy Green
wrote or quoted :
>Brian Slavenas had been a
>member of an Illinois National Guard unit that was deployed in April
>of 2003, just a couple of months after he got his degree in industrial
>engineering from the University of Illinois.
It is not right to weep for someone who volunteered to kill children.
It was not as though he was going to defend his country.
"Never in human history have such genocide and cruelty been witnessed.
Such a genocide was never seen in the time of the pharaohs nor
of Hitler nor of Mussolini."
~ Mehmet Elkatmi, head of Turkish parliament's human rights commission
on Bush's genocide in the Iraq war. 2004-11-28
--
Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green.
See http://mindprod.com/iraq.html photos of Bush's war crimes
Roedy Green
<loo...@mindprod.com.invalid> wrote or quoted :
>>Brian Slavenas had been a
>>member of an Illinois National Guard unit that was deployed in April
>>of 2003, just a couple of months after he got his degree in industrial
>>engineering from the University of Illinois.
>
>It is not right to weep for someone who volunteered to kill children.
>
>It was not as though he was going to defend his country.
It is like getting all weepy for the death of a guard at Auschwitz.
He is of the same moral caliber -- doing unspeakable evil because he
was blindly following orders.
Both are war criminals.
Roedy Green
<loo...@mindprod.com.invalid> wrote or quoted :
>>>Brian Slavenas had been a
>>>member of an Illinois National Guard unit that was deployed in April
>>>of 2003, just a couple of months after he got his degree in industrial
>>>engineering from the University of Illinois.
>>
>>It is not right to weep for someone who volunteered to kill children.
>>
>>It was not as though he was going to defend his country.
>
>It is like getting all weepy for the death of a guard at Auschwitz.
>He is of the same moral caliber -- doing unspeakable evil because he
>was blindly following orders.
>
>Both are war criminals.
There is no difference. The guards at Auschwitz had infant sons too
and loving families. Their families though what they were doing was
heroic too.
Look how idiotically blind you Americans are -- no smarter than the
guards at Auschwitz killing Jewish children. Why is it any more noble
to kill Iraqi children than Jewish children?
The tortures and atrocities America uses are far more cruel than those
Hitler concocted.
See http://mindprod.com/iraq.html#TORTURES
http://mindprod.com/iraq.html#ATROCITIES
You Americans are stupid as Nazis. You don't even know how evil you
are. You don't know that you will go down in history with similar
infamy.
fairandbalancedhyco-limbaughfartdetector
<loo...@mindprod.com.invalid> wrote:
>On Sun, 20 Mar 2005 16:37:50 +0100, Swiss Observer <dp...@iprolink.ch>
>wrote or quoted :
>
>>Brian Slavenas had been a
>>member of an Illinois National Guard unit that was deployed in April
>>of 2003, just a couple of months after he got his degree in industrial
>>engineering from the University of Illinois.
>
>It is not right to weep for someone who volunteered to kill children.
>
Roedy, I don't think you read the thing.
The guy volunteered to get money to go to college, not "to kill
Swiss Observer
<loo...@mindprod.com.invalid> wrote:
>On Sun, 20 Mar 2005 16:37:50 +0100, Swiss Observer <dp...@iprolink.ch>
>wrote or quoted :
>
>>Brian Slavenas had been a
>>member of an Illinois National Guard unit that was deployed in April
>>of 2003, just a couple of months after he got his degree in industrial
>>engineering from the University of Illinois.
>
>It is not right to weep for someone who volunteered to kill children.
>
>It was not as though he was going to defend his country.
>
Of course you're right in principle, but I can't be as hard-hearted,
and I found it an extremely touching piece. I think there is a sense,
at least one sense, in which many of these soldiers are also victims
of Bush's aggressions, and indeed many aggressions back through
history. Some young soldiers bite the heads of chickens and revel in
slaughtering civilians, and I don't care about them, but others are
there for other reasons (whether a college education or to defend US
shores) and they get used by the industrial elite in the most obscene
ways.
I thought it was a great article, and I'm sorry that I spelt Calvin
Trillin's name wrongly. I don't know what came over me.
Buddy belt-fed
unclean animals after your cowardly deaths.
Swiss Observer
What was that spasm about>