From the Front Lines of the War on Terrorism, Part 2

This Man's Army
by Andrew Exum

(Page 2 of 3)

I grew up in East Tennessee, just outside the medium-sized city of Chattanooga. If ever there was a Southern city rooted in the past and struggling to find its path in modern America, Chattanooga was it. I was born half a mile from Missionary Ridge, site of one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. Cannons stand on all the high points of the city, guarding historical markers, standing sentinel for an era that died at the Appomattox Courthouse over a century before I was born. At least postbellum Chattanooga was more forward thinking than some of the cities even farther south. It had a thriving urban renewal program and could boast that most of its inhabitants heartily enjoyed living there.

I certainly did. I spent my adolescence playing football, running track, and doing all the normal things boys my age did. I was always small, until I hit puberty, late, in my junior year of high school, but I loved the outdoors and felt comfortable there in a way I never did on the athletic fields. I loved the mountains and sandstone cliffs that surrounded my home, and hiking and running along the dirt paths that led through the woods. In addition to being an agile rock climber, I was an avid reader. So when the sun was shining, I climbed. When it rained, I stayed inside and read. It was a simple childhood, and I felt blessed.

My father was a journalist and newspaper executive, my mother an English teacher at a girls' school in Chattanooga. They were divorced when I was eight, and after that I lived with my mom and younger sister, learning to be somewhat independent at an early age. My mother would leave for work with my sister in the early hours of the morning and return late at night. To earn extra money for my sister and me to have what we needed, she worked as an assistant to her school's basketball coach in the afternoons and evenings. I rarely saw her during the school week. I got myself up every morning and fixed most of my meals myself or ate them at school.

I was lucky to be able to attend a distinguished Southern boys' boarding school on partial scholarship as a day student, the result of my mother's work as a teacher at the crosstown girls' school. My father paid generous child support to my mother and contributed the rest of my high school tuition but, significantly, didn't plan on college. Or, I should say, he didn't plan on my going to college where I did.

He's a good guy, my father, but he had been a notorious hell-raiser when he was a teen. He went through six different high schools before finally graduating on a cold day in December. They sent him his diploma in the mail.

He went on to the University of Mississippi, where he partied hard and paid his way through his first semester by selling beer to all the fraternities and sororities on the black market. Oxford, Mississippi, was a dry town then, and my father used to drive a tractor-trailer full of kegs from West Memphis, Arkansas, making a tidy profit when he returned to school. This story was confirmed to me by some of my friends' parents who went to Ole Miss with my father, so unlike some of the more apocryphal stories about Dad, I'm inclined to believe it. He left school after a year, his departure no doubt hastened by the fact that he had urinated in the dean's convertible one night while drunk. It didn't matter, though. My father's future was assured, working for his grandfather at the local newspaper.

His own father was a brilliant academic who had long since drank his life away by the time my father left for college, divorcing my grandmother and cutting himself off from his own family. In his final years, the only members of the family he still spoke to were my sister and me. He had reformed himself by that point and used to tell us stories of his early life in Faulkner's Mississippi just down the road from his friend, the novelist and editor Willie Morris. He had moved to Chattanooga just before World War II and married into one of the oldest families in the city, the McDonalds. They had fled Scotland after the infamous Glen Coe massacre of 1692, to Ireland and then to Virginia, eventually moving west to settle on a small plot of land in East Tennessee in 1819. We have held the same piece of land ever since.

My father raised me to shoot rifles. He could never throw a football or baseball with me on account of his bum right arm that had been crushed when he flipped a Jeep onto it in 1973. So instead of playing sports, he would take me to our family farm and teach me how to shoot with a single-shot Winchester. He sat with me for hours while I fired at paper targets and cans sitting on the fence. When I was twelve, I got a .22-caliber rifle of my own. My father taught me how to control my breathing while taking aim, how to hold the rifle's butt tight into my shoulder, and how to gently squeeze the trigger instead of jerking it with my finger. We would sit high on a hill above a small stream, where my father would smoke cigars and drink Diet Cokes while I shot at targets he chose. Often, he would give me his empty Coke cans and make me run down the hill, put them in the stream, sprint back up the hill, grab my rifle, steady my heavy breathing, and fire enough holes into the cans to sink them before they could float away out of range. Eventually, he let me roam the woods of our farm alone to hunt snakes with the big farm dogs we kept around.

If my father's family held a genteel aura of Southern aris- tocracy, my mother's family was firmly rooted in the lower middle classes. Her father grew up on a small tobacco farm in South Carolina, moving to Chattanooga to begin a career as a photographer after serving in the Pacific during the Second World War. Her mother was from Louisiana, a former high school basketball star in the days of six-on-six half-court girls' basketball, who met my grandfather while working in New Orleans. He had a son from a previous marriage, and with my grandmother had three daughters. My mother was the second and would graduate from the University of Tennessee along with her sisters.

No one I have spoken to can understand why my mother and father ever married. My father's family and friends always figured he would marry someone from a more distinguished family, and my mother's family wondered how my mother - responsible, educated, down-to-earth - could fall in love with someone so obviously different from her. My father was charming but as wild and irresponsible as my mother was calm and balanced. I guess my mother saw in my father someone fun and unpredictable, as well as a young man with considerable talents. Writing a popular sports column for the newspaper, about the only thing that everyone in East Tennessee cares about, football, my father wrote with an understanding of his readers unmatched by any other writer I have ever read. He wrote for the common man reading the afternoon paper after a long day at work, and it was impossible to go places with my father and not be accosted by a fan of his column. In my mother, my father saw someone who could raise his children to be more responsible than he was.

After my parents divorced, my mother went along raising my sister and me just as my father had wanted, in her image - responsible, full of common sense, shunning anything flashy or ostentatious. Both my parents are of Scottish descent, but I got my Scotch frugality - short arms and long pockets, you might say - from my mother. My father was and is a legendary spender, always in debt. But I have inherited as many traits from my father as my mother. He was always hardworking, which impressed my mother when she met him, often holding down multiple jobs and reporting to work at the paper our family owned as early as four in the morning. When the workers at our paper went on strike in the seventies, my father worked twenty-hour days alongside the rest of the family, writing stories, operating the presses, and catching naps on the sofa. The strike broke after a few weeks, a defeat for the labor movement in the South but a proud moment for the family.

During high school, I took hard courses, studied equally hard, and took pride in my work. I also pa

Copyright © 2005 Andrew Exum

About the Author

Born and raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Andrew Exum is a veteran of Operation Anaconda. He reached the rank of captain with the U.S. Army Rangers before leaving the service in May 2004. He currently lives in Beirut, where he is studying Arabic at the American University.