OCR Text |
Show began swimming for the shore. My father was a specialist in international ocean law, a naval officer who did not command a ship but rather the sea itself. At work he drew lines on the water and regulated travel for the Naval fleet guarding the Pacific. He determined the limits o. country's legal jurisdiction, the rules of engagement between ships at sea, the procedures necessary to keep straits and gulfs violence-free. Confidential files littered his desk, he wrote memos read by presidents, and worked weekends at the office playing "war games." The badge beneath the bars on his uniform secured his access to nuclear reactors and entrance into buildings whose walls concealed even the sound a typewriter key makes when struck. I often wonder how my father felt to be the one charged with legislating a body that covers two thirds of our planet, a body that never ceases, never stills, but rather roams the earth's surface in search of another shore upon which to hurl its feathery edges. Would he lie awake at night, briefs and opinions coursing through his mind, and shake at the futility of his task? Or did the rules never fail him? Did the kahuna never keep him down? Rules were my religion, and when they began to fail me in adolescence I only prayed harder. It took me close to twenty years away from the military to realize that the only truth worth preserving is the fact that the same body can both nurture and destroy. Such shades of gray had little place in my house growing up. You were either a patriot or a communist, an ally or an enemy, with my father or against him. 124 |