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Good Advice(s)
If wisdom lies in learning from the experiences of others, then I am not particularly wise. My M.O. is more of a barely-learns-from-his-own-repeated-mistakes sort of thing.
But let’s start with the piece of advice I did take when my wife and I were expecting our first children: twins. We were talking to an older co-worker of mine whose twin boys were already on the other side of college. “Let me give you the most important advice about raising twins we learned early on.”
My wife and I had by then stopped blinking, and were probably both leaning toward him, E.F. Hutton commercial-style, waiting for the nugget of sagacity soon to anoint us both.
“Don’t try to be fair,” he said.
What? That’s it? What does that mean? Luckily for us, he elaborated. “Look, you will not always be able to do the same thing with each one, or give each one the same thing or attention all the time. So, from as soon as they understand what you’re saying, tell them, “yes, your sibling got it this time, but you’ll someday get something he/she doesn’t get, and it will all work out in the end, we promise.”
That not much sounding bit of counsel turned out to be genius. While it wasn’t bulletproof (because they were kids and they still complained), when they saw that what we said was true, it saved us what is surely an incalculable amount of grief.
Now, let us flash back to 12 years or so previous to that anecdote, to a time when I was still in my teens, in that golden and idyllic time where the vast, vast majority of young men my age are what scientists call morons. Not to brag or anything, but I’d like to think that I was just a bit dumber than that.
At 18, having just come from a meeting with a Marine recruiter, I told my father that I was going to pass on the contract to be a helicopter mechanic that I’d been on the verge of signing, and that instead I would bet on a device known as an “open contract:” a magical (as it was explained to me) document allowing me to choose from a veritable plethora of military occupational specialties (M.O.S.es), and–here came the best part–I didn’t even have to choose one until I was almost all the way through recruit training! Imagine the possibilities: Marine Force Recon; Marine Super Ultra Force Recon (I’d be in the inaugural platoon); Marine Sniper; Marine Tanker; Marine Aide-de-Camp To the Commandant; Marine Guy Who Loads Tough Looking Ordinance On Attack Aircraft, But Gets To Use A Forklift So It’s Not That Hard A Job; Marine Marine (something to do with yachts, I was given to believe); and lastly, Marine Action Film Star. This last M.O.S. required an extra dose of youthful delusion, as I don’t even have a face for radio, as the old joke goes. Mine is more of a face for print.
My father, without even looking up from his dinner, said: “never trust a recruiter.”
But dad, I said, the Marines wouldn’t lie to me! The Few, the Proud, and I’m pretty sure I heard “trustworthy” in there somewhere.
“Don’t trust ’em.”
Months later, at the end of recruit training, the Senior Drill Instructor was finally announcing everyone’s M.O.S.es, and we were all giddy with anticipation. Those recruits who were guaranteed contracts were a lot less giddy, though. Those chumps came in knowing already what their stupid jobs were to be. Even though my last name begins with a “C”, it seemed to take forever for them to get to me, since they were going by groups of occupations, rather than in alphabetical order. But some of the jobs sounded pretty good. One open contract guy got cartography, which probably surprised him more than the rest of us, since when I talked to him later, he said he didn’t even know the Corps had cartographers. And then they began reading off who got to be the 0311s, the Marine Infantry Riflemen, Backbone of the Corps. Well, it wasn’t Marine Action Film Star, but I’d be happy to be an 03, I thought. But they finished reading the names out, and mine wasn’t among them. Finally, my moment came.
“Campbell!”, Senior Drill Instructor Staff Sergeant Gaither said. “3381.” Ooh, that number is higher than 0311–much higher. Why it’s over three thousand higher! It must be something super exotic and exciting and involving a lot of John Rambo-style killing with large caliber weapons carried impractically on the hip! Awesome. Old Blood-n-Guts Campbell, they’ll call me. The bastard child somehow of Dan Daly and Chesty Puller, with Archibald Henderson as my godfather. I’ll be a legend. Just let me at those filthy enemies of America.
But then came disaster: “I like my eggs over-easy, Campbell. Food Service,” and he flipped the paperwork at me with some combination of boredom and contempt. The final count for the 20 of us who were open contract was something like 16 grunts, one (surprised) cartographer, and three cooks-to-be.
Fortunately for me, the denouement of this story was pretty good. I found I really liked being a cook, and even earned a meritorious promotion in my service school. Plus, when I got to that veritable cornucopia of single ladies, the Marine Barracks, U.S. Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, I even got to be on a crew-served weapons team for the year. .50 caliber machine guns are really, really fun, folks. Still, the whole drama would’ve been avoided had I listened to my dad. Having had a choice in my fate would’ve been better than letting the personnel-assignment propellerheads of Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children choose for me. Fathers: sometimes, they know things. Who’d have thought it?
Published in Group Writing
Good advice X two.
One of the reasons that I think people still resonate with “to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities” (did I get that correct?) is because it works.
It works in a family. I raised four children, each with wildly different expectations and demands placed upon them.
“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”
― Mark Twain If only we could all read and believe that earlier in life.
I have two children, a boy and a girl. They are as different as can be! I tried to be fair, but it doesn’t work because their needs are so different. Good advice. Thanks for sharing it!
It gets tough when friends get into the mix and one sibling gets invited to a special event while the other does not. Equal is not always fair and fair is not always equal.
I like the old line “We have three kids – one of each.”
Mess cooks are WAY under-rated. Or, I should say “good” mess cooks.
If you’ve ever been in the field for weeks or months and had a mess cook do it right, it’s the highlight of your day. I remember one who while in the field went out of his way to have a humorously decorated chalk board telling us what our meal was, and went out of his way to make sure the seating area was . . . well existing. Most times in a battalion you just eat on the ground and feel damned lucky you can. It’s the little things that make a difference, and often goes unrewarded.
I get annoyed when people denigrate those support MOS’s, but those cooks are often in harms way as much as anyone in the battalion, but even that isn’t the standard.
General Al Gray visited my squadron when we were in Iwakuni and he told us that he didn’t like the division of the Marines into “infantry” and “support” as is often done by the infantry. Every MOS and every unit supports the MEB/MEF commander, from cooks to aircraft mechanics to infantry.
Suspect that’s apocryphal. Twain’s father died when he was twelve.
Have twin nieces. Obviously, twins can be a lot more work than one child at a time. My mother stepped in to help with the twins quite a bit. She was there one day when they were two years old and noticed the interactions. Twin one would bully twin two. Every toy twin two picked up, twin one would take from her. Finally, twin two got fed up and took one of the toys back and shoved her sister away. Twin one started crying. Their mother who had not been paying attention came over, assessed the situation, and took the toy from twin two and gave it to twin one to stop her crying.
My mother says, “That’s not fair, (sister’s name).”
Sister asks, “What?”
My mother explained what had happened.
“Ooooh!” said my sister. She had no idea why twin two was always so defiant and angry about things. It was because twin one was riding roughshod over her all the time, and every time she stood up for herself, her mother would intervene on the side of her crying sister.
Wow, this hit home on two fronts; I was a twin and I was “open contract” when I left for Marine Corps boot camp. I can attest to the advice you got, because, even though we were twins, my brother and I were completely different. My “open contract” story ended a little differently because as I was interviewed by a major at the Military Enlistment Processing Center (MEPS) just before I went to the airport. He said, “so, how do you like the Marine Corps so far Private Smuckatelly?” Because I hadn’t received any training at that point, I told him I thought it sucked. He asked me my story of woe and I told him I had guaranteed computer operator and radio repair with enlistment bonuses, both of which were cancelled while I was on the delayed entry program. He was able to “hook me up” with a 6-year contract in aviation electronics with some incentives, but I could have easily been a cook had I said, “Marine Corps, good.” Fortunately, I was able to help my son navigate the Army recruiting process and get him IT and a $40,000 bonus; none of which the recruiter actually offered. I found out about these programs by searching online with my son before we went to the recruiter.
Hey Skyler, it looks like, to quote Gunny Highway, we chewed some of the same dirt. General Gray was my first commandant, but my trip to Iwakuni was with MALS-12 in 95 as part of 242 out of El Toro. Good times.
Yeah, that was in the winter of 88-89 with 242 in Iwakuni. I later transitioned the squadron from A-6’s to F/A-18D’s in 1991 as the AAMO. I signed all the logbooks accepting the hornets into the squadron. My job got really boring, though, because working on hornets was ten times easier than intruders. The job got boring because everything just worked.
It’s a small world.
I thought about opening with a variant of this very quote. The one I heard was the kid was 17 and the father had wised-up by 21, but it doesn’t matter whether he said it, really, since it’s brilliant and true. In fact it makes me sad for the person who actually said it, if Twain/Clemens didn’t, as he/she never got the credit for such a great apothegm.
Jonah Goldberg made the point recently that while societies are better off with free enterprise, individual liberty, and all that, individual families are socialist by nature.
Man, is this ever true. We have three kids, and they are as different from each other as can be. It’s terrifying as a parent that you can raise them in exactly the same way, but you have less influence on the final outcome than you think.
It can get under the skin of some cooks that they didn’t get much recognition, but I came to be philosophical about it. Food service, at least institutional food service, is not something where you should be focused on attaboys, but instead you focus on no complaints. If Marines come in day after day and don’t complain about the chow, you’re doing it right.
That’s why everyone loved Big Al, the Tankers’ Pal. I wish I’d been there when he arrived in Gitmo after things went off the rails there in ’84-’85. I heard he got everyone in the outdoor amphitheater on Marine Hill and was chewing out field grade officers in front of God and everybody, and threatening to pull the entire barracks off of the island.
Ah yes. We had one twin who was pretty devious in terrorizing her sister. She did not like it at all when her considerably bigger sister would fight back.
How are families socialist?
That is great that you were able to get those things, both for you and your son. I served before the general public, at least, could really look anything up on a computer. And I’m not sure I ever talked to an officer during my enlistment process, other than a doctor, and maybe one who administered the oath of enlistment. One thing that did bother me about my lot was that I thought I did OK on the ASVAB, but either I didn’t, or the Corps just needed what it needed that month, and I didn’t score as well as cartographer guy, and maybe the grunts. But some things are best not dwelled upon.
Man, you guys were lucky. I would’ve loved to have gotten Okinawa, and you both drew Iwakuni. Gitmo was, uh, strange.
I always say that had I not been present at the events, I wouldn’t believe my four had the same mother …
Because parents provide for their kids with no expectation of repayment or of some sort of comparable labor. So it really is, “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” We don’t charge our kids for food, and the chores they eventually do, aren’t exactly equal payment for services received. So socialism works, just on a really, really tiny scale, and only if genuine familial love is involved.
They’re not. They’re pure communist.
Communism works on the microscale. It just breaks down when you try to scale up to more than, oh, a dozen people or so.
Stay in long enough and you finally see everything!
That’s a very strange association with communism. Children are, at one level, a burden that need to be provided for; at another they are an investment in the future.
In other words…children are people.
I’ve always looked at it more from expectations and services provided.
Some of my kids got homework help – others were expected to get everything done without any assistance. My daughter was never expected to help out with home maintenance while two of the boys repainted the house, dug plumbing ditches, climbed down in the dark scary basement and did yards. The third? By the time he was 15 I gave up – anything he did was done so poorly it wasn’t worth the grief. Daughter’s lack of assistance was more than compensated for with her assistance with keeping track of everyone, willingness to pick up anyone at any time (even LAX!) and ability to throw a meal together on a moment’s notice.
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” Karl Marx
But in communism/socialism the children would get to vote on how much they take from the parents. Families are not communist/socialist societies. They are dictatorships.
Fair enough. I believe Jonah actually said “in my own family I’m a communist.” I figured that socialist was close enough, given that communism is based on Marx’s theory of socialism, but I guess I forgot where I was.
Soooooo…..Communism!
It is indeed. I was actually with MALS-36 in Okinawa from 89-91.
I see your point, but I’m not buying into the analogy. Children are not the same as adults citizens in a communist society. The child will age out of the family and will be freed at the age of majority. People can’t escape communism.