Enemies: Feeding Them, Loving Them, Working with Them

I have spent much of my life living in the land of enemies, working with enemies (who turn out to be friends), and learning the languages of enemies. I have been reminded of this quite vividly during the month of June and especially this past month.

Our deck is quiet now. A week ago Saturday, however, it was home to running children and feasting parents. Visiting from one of our out-of-town branches was a colleague who is moving on to a new job and with whom I have had a wonderful working relationship these past two years. It wasn't always that way, though. My relationship with Walsh began in a very adversarial way. We served on the same committee related to providing a specific service to a group of clients. The clients were mine; the service was his division's. Unfortunately, I disagreed with some aspects of the way in which the service was provided and conducted some research on the effectiveness of the service. That research showed that the service was ineffective, but Walsh did not want to accept that and kept pushing his personal experience as the deciding factor in how things were to be done. I actually had greater experience than he did, but he did not know it, and I felt awkward about pointing that out either publicly or personally. I thought that the research results should speak for themselves. Ultimately, I talked to Walsh's supervisor and got the changes made that I felt were needed. Two years later, new research showed that the changes had produced much better results than had the initial service. Obviously, this was not the best way to win friends and influence people, as the saying goes.

Walsh ultimately moved on from that division, and life became calmer. Then, I learned we were being assigned a new project and, surprise!, the contact person with whom we had to work was in our Washington office, with the program being headed by Walsh, who had transferred there recently. Ulp! This was a very visible project and it had to go well. I decided to approach Walsh from the view that the old position and work was in the past and not related to the current work so we were "new" colleagues in this new endeavor. It worked. He had responsibility for weekly reports, and, while I initially had been reporting directly to the CEO on this project, once Walsh became the nominal head, I began filtering all my reports directly to him, and he would combine them with his own input. It was easier for the CEO that way. Everything worked smoothly. He let bygones remain in the past, as did I, and, perhaps not surprisingly, over time, we became very supportive colleagues, especially after we had taken a few trips together associated with this project to a few troubled areas of the world (e.g., the Middle East).

Walsh retired at the end of June and came back to his earlier haunts to say good-bye to old friends. I invited him to a BBQ at our house. At the end of the BBQ, he told me, with some barely restrained emotion, that he had truly enjoyed working with me on this project and was hoping our paths would cross again. Who says enemies cannot become friends?

This scene reminded me of a similar one two decades ago. Right after the fall of the Soviet Union, I traveled to the Humanities University in Minsk, Belarus to work with the academicians from the Belarus Academy of Sciences. While there, the president and vice president of the university took me to dinner. The VP, it turns out, was an officer in the Red Army, a specialist in American order of battle, at the same time that I was an officer in the US army, a specialist in Soviet order of battle. Counterparts! It left him speechless and attentive. At the farewell party thrown in my honor, he was unusually attentive, complimentary, and social, in contradiction to his typical introversion. Someone asked me what I had done to him. I said, "I did nothing to him, but he took an enemy to dinner." (The whole story, along with some other "enemy" stories, can be found here: Three Vignettes and One Thought about Enemies.

When I defended my dissertation years ago in Moscow, I ended the defense, as expected, with personal words. The words I used, though, were not expected, and I have heard that people who were there still cite them today. This was just weeks after the fall of the Soviet Union; most of my time in the USSR was spent there during the Cold War. (I can truly say that I am a veteran of the Cold War.) What I said was: "Twenty years ago, I came to this country to look upon the face on the enemy. However, in twenty years, I have found only friends."

My favorite movie of all time is probably not nearly as well known as many other sci-fi movies, but it is indeed a good one. The name is Enemy Mine. In it, Dennis Quaid plays an Earther in a dogfight with a Drak who crashes together with his enemy on a remote, inhospitable, marginally inhabited planet. They learn each other's language, work together to survive, and when the Drak, a hermaphrodite, dies in childbirth, Quaid raises the child. It is a very touching movie. If you have not seen it, I recommend renting it.

Monday Morning Meditation #28: I Have Met My Enemy, and He Is My Friend

This week I finished I Samuel and read all of II Samuel. I have no idea why I just kept reading, with nothing touching me as a possible topic for meditation. Then, I realized that the two books taken together, with the stories of Saul chasing after David hither and yon, most usually for the purpose of trying to kill him, and David chasing hither and yon after women, with frequent time taken out for battle, provided a rich sujet for pondering.



Reading: I & II Samuel



Meditation: My first reaction after reading all the battles of Saul and all the battles of David, of the killing, of the deception was "what a bloody time that was" and "thank God I live in the 21st century. Then the image of all the wars going on today came to mind: the wars in which the US involved, the civil wars going on, and even the personal enmities that appear among supposed friends and in families. We are not far from David's time at all.



Then my mind wandered back to the Cold War. At that time, I was serving in the military, first as a soldier, then later, having received a direct commission, as an officer. The propaganda machine on both sides of the Atlantic churned out hatred day and night -- Americans of Russians and Russians of Americans. Hatred, fear, misunderstanding, cultural loathing, and all manner of ill along the very lines related in the books of Samuel. So how far have we truly come in the development of humanity?



Two incidents come to mind when I ask that question and when I think of war. One was a story from WWII in Belarus that was related to me by a decendent of the woman who experienced the incident. The other happened to me personally. I related both a while back on Mahlou Musings but will repeat them in full here although they are a bit long.



(1) Belarus. During WWII, advancing German troops would burn down entire Belarusan communities. To escape detection, the citizens of the towns would flee to the surrounding swamps as the Germans approached. In one small village, a mother of many grabbed her children and fled, only to discover to her horror upon reaching the wooded swamp that she had inadvertently left her infant in his crib. She wanted to go back after him, but it was too late. The Germans were already at the edge of town, and the townspeople made the mother stay in the swamp for fear of her giving away their position to the German enemy. The mother wept for her lost infant for three days. When the Germans vacated, the townspeople returned to their razed town, hoping to rebuild it. The mother walked along with them, in the blackest of grief. As the townspeople reached the outskirts, they saw one house still standing, the house that contained the crib of the infant who had been left behind. The mother, hardly breathing as a result of overlapping waves of fear and hope that crushed the breath from her, rushed into the house. There in his crib was her infant, well fed and happy. A bottle was beside the baby, and next to the crib on a rocking chair, which had obviously been used to feed and comfort the infant, was a German soldier’s warm winter shawl. To the shawl was pinned a note: “To the mother of this beautiful child.”



(2) Mahlou. In a most fascinating way, I once came face to face with the so-called enemy. That meeting remains one of my favorite memories. It occurred in a restaurant in Minsk in 1993. I was helping Academicians from the Belarus Academy of Sciences bring knowledge of individual differences in approaches to learning to the new textbooks being prepared in the Belarus language for K-12 students in a variety of subjects following the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the nationalization of curricula. The Humanities University gave us a place to work, and the president and vice-president took me and several other guests to dinner soon after my arrival. I sat catty-corner from Anatoly, the vice-president. For some reason, Anatoly and I began comparing our biographies and were stunned to learn that during the Cold War, I was an officer in the US Army and he an officer in the Red Army; we had both had the same specialty and held the same rank. For a brief moment, we stared at each other, then Tolya (after such a discovery, it was only natural that I would begin to use the nickname for Anatoly) exclaimed, “You were my enemy!”



“And you were mine,” I responded.



We marveled about this discovery until long after dinner had ended. How could it be that two people who seemed to understand each other s poluslova (from half a word), as the Russians say, had been directly targeted against each other in an earlier time? Both veterans of the Cold War, we found we had even more in common than our scholarship. Thereafter, every day Tolya would bring me candies or cookies for our break, and we would sit and marvel again at how strangely fate had wrapped our lives together — and that we had found it out. We shared no military secrets; there were really none of any value by then, anyway. What we shared was a new understanding of the word, enemy.



When it came time for me to leave, the Belarusans, as is typical of their culture, threw a parting party for me. Tolya kept jumping up with a toast and running over to hug or kiss me. This is not exceptionally unusual behavior except that Tolya was known to be an extreme introvert and rarely took part in toasting.



"What did you do to Tolya?" one faculty member asked me.



"I did nothing," I replied. "He took an enemy to dinner."



With the recent cooling off of relations between the USA and Belarus, Tolya has become locked away from me for now, perhaps even forever. Who knows when winds of politics will shift again? But now I know what lies behind the old Iron Curtain that is being drawn again between me and a land and people I came to know affectionately a decade ago. And for one bright and shining moment, I stood side by side in friendship with my enemy.



And that is far as I can go with you this Monday morning. I must retire to prayer to repent for those times that I have thought of others, any others, as enemies, to thank God for giving me the unusual opportunity to meet my enemy in flesh and blood and find him to be a friend, and to give praise for the way in which He teaches His children. After that, I will spend time in contemplation, my favorite part of the day, letting God take over the direction in which my relationship with Him moves.



I will now leave you to your prayer and contemplation, but first, I would like to bring to your attention a Monday morning prayer post that you might enjoy:



Fr. Austin Fleming, priest of the Archdiocese of Boston and pastor in Concord, Massachusetts, posts a prayer each Monday morning that he calls "Monday Morning Offering." I enjoy his prayers very much. I hope you also will find them inspirational. He has graciously given me permission to include a link to his blog on my Monday Morning Meditation posts.



For additional inspiration throughout the week, I would point out two sets of blogs: (1) the list of devotional blogs that follow the enumeration of Monday Morning Meditations on the sidebar of this blog and (2) my blogroll, where I am following a number of inspirational priests and writers about spiritual matters. I learn so very much from all these people. I highly recommend them to you.

Dona Nobis Pacem

The blogosphere, as most of you probably know, is celebrating today as a peace movement day. More information can be found at Mimi's site, where you can read the contributions of other bloggers on this theme.

As so often happens in my life, I experienced a moment of synchronicity as I was preparing this blog post. In the afternoon, I was in Arizona to give a graduation speech to a class of Arabic specialists. Without giving any thought to today's peace blog, I nonetheless spoke about peace, beginning my speech in a way not atypical of graduation speeches I give whenever linguists are among the graduating students. The Cold War, I tell them, was not won with weapons. It was won with words -- the words of Americans who understood Russian language and culture and the words of Russians who understood American language and culture. I was thrilled back then to be one grain of sand in the cement of the span that bridged the two superpowers and brought both to a cautious ally status. So, too, today, it will most likely not be weapons but the efforts of the Americans who speak Arabic and understand Arabic cultures and Arabs who speak English and understand American culture who will bring the current hot war to an end. General Abizaid has ascribed the success of the surge in Iraq to the contribution of American linguists.

Years ago, at the approaching end of the Cold War (although no one knew at the time that the Cold War was going to end), I served as interpreter for a remarkable man, Pyotr Volkovich, then vice president of the Belarus Peace Committee. During the Cold War, every major city in the USSR had a peace committee, composed of citizens dedicated to promoting world peace. You see, the Russians were honestly afraid that the USA intended to start a war against them. The members of these committees can today be considered veterans of the Cold War, So, too, I would argue can be that handful of us Americans working and studying in Russia at the time and those Russian scholars living and studying in America. My daughter, Lizzie, cherishes a button that says "Veteran of the Cold War." As the only Westerner in her Soviet 7th grade classroom, coping with distrust and dislike of Americans at the time, she considers rightfully that she has earned the title.

Pyotr I knew from my work in Belarus, one part of which in 1989 was to prepare bilingual documents for the Ministry of Education for an exchange with the USA. Therefore, I was subsequently brought to Portland, Oregon in 1990 to put together the corresponding set of bilingual documents for one of the Portland school districts to establish an exchange with Belarus. Since the Peace Committee provided the financial support for the exchange from the Belarus side, Pyotr had come along with the superintendent of Minsk public schools. The timing had been manipulated to allow Pyotr to be the keynote speaker at the International Rotary Convention that took place in Portland that year. I went to the convention to provide moral support for Pyotr or so I thought. However, Pyotr surprised me by ditching his Soviet interpreter and called out as he approached the podium, "Beth, so mnoi." (Beth, come with me.) And that is how I ended up being the interpreter for his very moving speech which focused on the need for peace. (I have posted details of his speech on Mahlou Musings.)

Perhaps the most potent advocacy for peace I have ever encountered is a poster drawn by a child, who contributed it to a contest for peace advocacy organized by the Moscow Peace Committee. Against a pure blue (sky?) background, the child had drawn a chalky white frame of a house encompassing a globe inside. At the top, the child had scrawled five words: "U nas net drugogo doma." (We have no other home.) No other words were needed, I think. That pretty much says it all, doesn't it? So, let's wrap the only home we have in the protection of peace!