Reflecting on ‘Faith’

Novelist Frank Schaeffer became a best-selling author in 2002, when he and his son John wrote a book called “Keeping Faith” about John’s decision to enlist in the Marines.

The father now has written “Faith of Our Sons: A Father’s Wartime Diary,” which chronicles John’s deployment as an intelligence officer to Afghanistan during the U.S. war in Iraq. The following are excerpts of a recent interview with Mr. Schaeffer.

Q. Where is John now, what is he doing, how is he and what are his plans for the future?

A. John got back from the Middle East at Christmas after 11 months of deployment, and currently he’s in Maryland finishing his assignment in the military, still working in military intelligence. His plans are to go to a university this autumn.

Q. You’ve now published two books about your son’s military enlistment and service — this has become a defining theme in your already diverse and interesting life history, has it not?

A. Yeah, in a very unintended way, when John volunteered for the military, he opened up a completely new chapter in my own life as well. He volunteered, but we were drafted, because it was his choice. But once you become a military parent, you’re introduced to a new family that in my case I was not aware of before. I’ve been introduced to the America that gives back more than it takes, and that’s been a very moving and humbling experience.

I’ve had a lot of contact with military parents from all walks of life from all over the country and find often I have more in common with them than I have with some of my oldest friends, whose kids are not in the military and just don’t get it, don’t understand the heartache, don’t understand the day-to-day, hour-by-hour life that goes with having a kid who’s deployed and in harm’s way.

One thing that’s very much become part of my life is an awareness of how our elite, in terms of our political leadership, our media, our business leadership — the people with the money and the education — no longer pull their weight in this field. …

We’ve completely lost that honorable sense that the whole country pulls together in a certain direction when we’re facing problems. What we’re facing now is an elite that, you know, makes the money, has the privileges, and then a middle and lower class that provides patriotic young men and women who go defend us. There doesn’t seem to be any sense of shame in my class … in the media or business class … that other people’s children are always defending us.

Q. What’s your concern for the United States because of that separation, the lack of the upper class in the military?

A. My concern is, to put it really succinctly, this is really bad for democracy. You can’t have a society where one group makes all the sacrifices and another makes all the profit. … I think that if George Bush’s daughters were patrolling Baghdad as sergeants … or even working on a base refueling tankers in Bagram somewhere, it would actually be very good for the country. … I think the death benefits for a military person would be better if the ruling class had to watch their daughters, their sons, their children being orphaned with not enough to live on. I also think that they would be less hesitant to use the military, because they could look the country in the eye and say, “Look, I’m putting my own kid on the line along with yours.”

Q. It seems like you think if more people served in the military that would sharpen our country’s sense of morality.

A. I think it would. I think we’d be a more moral and a better nation, in a lot of ways. … Just watching, for instance, what has happened to my son as five years have gone by with him in the Marine Corps. He’s a man. He understands responsibility. He works hard. He’s completely reliable, and he learned these things making real life-and-death decisions in the Marine Corps. … We’d be better off if there were more people like my son. … The kind of coddled, inward-looking, therapeutic society we’ve produced would really benefit from having a level playing field at some point in people’s lives. …

The Marine Corps’ idea of self-esteem is that the Marine standing next to you is more important than you are. Well, it would be a nice thing for the whole country if there were more people in America who felt that way and less who were so incredibly selfish and narcissistic. The military has a way of getting that out of people.

Q. How is this second book, “Faith of Our Sons,” different from the first, “Keeping Faith,” both politically and personally?

A. “Keeping Faith” was something my son John and I wrote together. It gave me a lot of pleasure because it was a father-son project. This book, “Faith of Our Sons,” I really wrote first in diary form to keep my own sanity. …

Q. You say toward the very end of “Faith of Our Sons” that your son, after his second deployment, has lost his childhood. Yet, you say the same thing about yourself. Why?

A. I’m a typical product of my generation — ’60s, selfish, inward-looking, career-oriented, project-oriented, achievement-oriented. As I say, it’s a humbling experience to run into a class of people, the military and the families of those who serve, who give more than they take. It changed me to realize that these were actually better people than I am, and I’m beginning to learn from them. … I think a lot of people from my generation stayed children through their whole lives basically. …

The title, “Faith of Our Sons,” is hopefully prophetic. I hope the generation that comes after mine … will realize that those of us who came out of the ’60s, with all our failed attempts at self-revelation and values and the rest of it, will look at something deeper and better.

Q. It seems that in your life history you’ve tried to avoid, at least for the last several years, “causes” or “fervor.” But now find yourself getting drawn back into a very intense fervor for a cause. Have you thought about that?

A. I guess it’s true, it is ironic, in the sense that the last thing I would have expected to come out of these books or anything that I’ve written in terms of this period of my life, would be some sort of fervor and crusade of one sort or another. … My gut tells me there’s something wrong that only one class of American serves the country. My gut tells me it’s not good for the class that doesn’t serve, either. And my gut also says that we are going to have to treat the people who do serve, and especially their families, more fairly. Call it a cause if you want but essentially it’s an awareness that I’m talking about that comes out of this experience.