Prejudice

It is such an ugly word. I like to tell myself I'm beyond it, past the myopia; blind and all-seeing. I like to say that because skin color means no more than hair or eye color to me; because gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic status or class, appearance, physical abilities or disabilities, job, talents, marital or family status, height, weight, educational accomplishments, religion or lack thereof - because this laundry list of descriptors are no more to me than the variety of fruits in the supermarket; that because of this, I am blissfully non-prejudicial. I buttress this with the fact that despite (or perhaps because of) growing up in a very multi-cultural area, I didn't realize there were race tensions until the Rodney King riots when I was in junior high; reinforce it with the rather surprising fact that I was the only white child marching in a Black History Day parade at school one year, and I barely noticed it; reassure myself by the fact that I don't use skin color to describe strangers or ask about someone's ancestors' accomplishments or care how bourgeois someone's money is.

It is all an uncomfortable illusion. I discovered that, this patrol.

It is not, I suppose, surprising. My father came of age in a city bombed by Germans night and day. Most of the earlier and more extended generations of my mother's family were killed in the Holocaust, or the raids and slaughter that preceeded it, to the point that my grandfather spent much of his adult life hunting for living relatives like needles in so many haystacks, combing phonebooks in cities around the world with sizeable Jewish immigrant populations. He eventually found (among others) a first cousin he thought he'd lost, who, along with his older sister, had hidden as children with a Catholic family in France. The older sister, who kept a graphic diary of their tribulations, eventually "converted" back, but this younger brother embraced Catholicism, eventually rising through the ranks to become - when my grandfather sought audience with him - Archbishop of Paris. There were once rumors he was in the running for Pope. He is gone now, sleeping with the others.

When I was in elementary school, there were still West Germany and East Germany and Berlin. West Germany was très moderne; East Germany produced female Olympic swim champions with hairy chests and deep voices; to Berlin went all the outreach music and drama and sports groups, to spread the good news of Western capitalism and maybe, to taste the dangerous bleakness of the Iron Curtain. Until one year at Thanksgiving, my family sat around in shock and whispered news of the Berlin Wall's incredible crumbling. That year, my mother purchased an enormous new National Geographic Atlas of the World. It showed Germany as a whole country, unified, asterisked - it hadn't happened yet;it was yet in expectation, not without a little fear. Germany had been partitioned for a reason.

But I digress.

For one of the operational periods of this deployment, we worked for a coalition task force commanded by a German admiral. (Later in the patrol, command shifted, as scheduled, to the French.) Our initial interaction withthe Admiral and his flagship was over chat, in an English still oddly accented even on-screen. They weren't the easiest to work with, or for. For our part, we were new to the operational area and to the operating guidelines. The stereotypical gruffness, curtness, rigid and directive control, all bore out in action. The pride, too: despite the "coalition" in our collective title, they repeatedly and intentionally monopolized the action, relegating us to the sidelines and claiming the glory for themselves.

Or maybe that's just how I saw it, through increasingly unsettled, prejudiced eyes. I think it was the day I watched the rotund German admiral proudly strutting across our flight deck to greet our commanding officer that I realized my almost physical revulsion. It struck every time I heard them speak over a voice circuit, read their operational directions, argued with them over tasking; even when I saw their brusque Saxon chat. All sorts of ugly stereotypes filled my mind, despite my best, most conscious efforts to banish them. I was unutterably relieved, finally, to leave them behind, more to abandon my new-discovered jadedness than to actually shift tactical control.

I experienced something similar in Gibraltar. I was with a couple of coworkers, shipmates, friends, and we were trying to find a restaurant on the waterfront for a wardroom function with the other officers. An older German man in a thick, faded navy blue cable-knit sweater intercepted us. "Where are you going? Maybe I can help you get there." We handed him our well-creased map. "Are you in the American Navy?" he asked.

I can't remember all he said. We were careful not to reveal too much of our operational schedule or activities, both still classified. He warned us not to jump off a cliff on the back side of the rock into the waters below, a wild idea carried out (surprisingly, safely) by a daredevil few US Navy sailors some months back. But mainly he was still stuck in the past. He didn't look quite old enough to have seen much, if anything, of WWII, but his entire conversation was couched in it. The post-war occupation. Limitations on shipbuilding and military reconstitution, industry, politics. Pride. A wounded pride glinted sharply from his pale blue eyes. He kept us talking there for a long time. He was suppliant, but proud, undaunted, challenging us in the subtext to both respect his country's accomplishments and yet pity him for our restrictions that kept them from achieving so much more. I felt sick. I kept picturing Nazis and freight-cars bound for concentration camps and piles of emaciated bodies. It wasn't his fault. I smiled and formed a few words, like you do when you're drunk, and was immensely relieved I didn't have to do the bulk of the talking.

Tobruk was the hardest, though. I've mentioned how my father's cousins fought and were captured there. How I read of the desert campaigns and Rommel's brilliancy in Churchill's history. The loss of life, the reversals of fortune, the direction of the whole war turning on "Torch" and Alexander's march to the sea. We toured the French and Allied cemeteries. It was solemn and sobering and humbling. But first, our Libyan hosts took us to the German cemetery. The French and Allied cemeteries were stark, sand-colored, unobtrusive. The Germans' memorial committee had erected an imposing brick monument, a castle with thick walls, two stories, an immense, imposing square on the cliff overlooking the city. We all piled out of the cramped bus into oppressive heat and blinding sun. I almost couldn't enter, where in the darkness, a shrine of sorts paid homage to the thousands of dead Germans who had conquered, then lost, the city, leaving abandoned tanks and miles of bloodshed, taking thousands of prisoners before eventually succumbing, themselves.

Inside, you stepped into the blazing sun in a large inner courtyard. Each side of the inner walls was carved with names, top to bottom, except the wall toward the city, which bore enormous, stylized soldiers and their countrymen, in service and in mourning, in relief against black granite, unwavering and undaunted. Beside them, a list of Libyan battles. I couldn't look. They were young servicemen, like us, sworn to fight and die for their country; but they had empowered Rommel, Hitler, the Nazis, the death machines. I couldn't move past that, not even in a memorial to the dead, sleeping in ignorance. The dead, soldiers, like us.

Climbing thick, winding stone staircases, you emerged again into the sun, on the wide parapet a good fifty feet above the memorial's floor, offering a commanding view of the city. In defeat, victory. It was hard to look. I felt sick. It wasn't the height.

Each time, again and again, I berated myself for my feelings, shrinking in shame. I was supposed to be beyond this, evolved or educated away from such crude, animal reactions. There's no pat answer to this one. Just humility, and a sick realization that I'm no better than those I'd so smugly judged.