Suited for Service
Intellectual Dad Grapples With Son's Enlistment in Marines

By Bob Brown

March 14 - A moving new book titled Keeping Faith: A Father-Son Story About Love and the United States Marine Corps chronicles profound changes, especially in the two men at the center of it. The book also raises some uncomfortable questions about Americans' feelings on who should and shouldn't serve in the military.

The product of a family of intellectuals, John Schaeffer attended a New England prep school. He was a young athlete and poet when he decided to sign up as an enlisted man with the Marine Corps. "I had never really lived a structured life before," he said. "I went to relatively liberal schools and you could sort of make your own program. But I had gotten to the point where I was ready to be out of the house and I went through my own, very small silent rebellion at that point."

The Schaeffers live in the seaside town of Salisbury, Mass. John's father, Frank Schaeffer, has earned his living as a respected novelist - Portofino and Saving Grandma are among his works. High expectations were set for all the Schaeffer children. An older son, Francis, went to Georgetown's School of Foreign Service; and a daughter, Jessica, graduated from New York University.

'That's for the Working Class'

Four years ago, when John announced he was joining the Marines, he was a senior at the Waring School in Beverly, Mass. Waring is the kind of place that sends its graduates to Harvard or Yale, and in fact had never sent a graduate directly into the Marines. Frank experienced a rude awakening when he saw how some other parents responded. "To the outside world, I was somewhat embarrassed," he said. "One parent said the school should have a meeting to figure out where it went wrong, that someone would do this."

Underlying that sense of dismay, Frank felt, were deeper prejudices involving race and class. "When a kid joins the military, the idea is, 'Oh, that's for the working class. That's for people who couldn't make it in school.' The idea of just someone rational and smart and articulate and intelligent like my son joining because he wanted to serve his country is just not fashionable, at least in the kind of circles I move in as a writer."

"I got a lot of questions in school," John said. "I think probably pretty much every teacher I had and every person I went to school with asked me why I was doing this, because it was completely unexpected."

Frank's generation also carried the residue of mistrust left by the Vietnam War. "And so my worry was very immediate and very real," he said. "And that is, Marines get killed."

In August of 1999, John went off to boot camp at Parris Island, S.C. He was the youngest child in the Schaeffer family, a fact that made his departure particularly poignant for his mother, Genie. "It wasn't just that John was going into the military," she said. "It was that he was the last child."

"I thought it was really the end of a childhood," Frank added, "but with a door slamming shut."

John admits to being terrified when the time actually came for him to report as a Marine recruit. "There's no way to, to get ready for [boot camp]. So I spent the entire day scared out of my mind, basically." That was how and when the process of change began for both father and son. The Marine Corps is considered the toughest of all the services, and in boot camp recruits are stripped first of their individuality. The needs and performance of the group are paramount.

During his first few nights, John said, "I was wondering what I had been thinking going into this crazy, crazy world."

"I worried myself silly while he was down at boot camp, every day," Frank said. "I would wonder what's happening to him. Is he gonna make it? Will he fail? Is he well? And at first there were absolutely no letters because they're just too busy to write."

Becoming Part of a New Community

With John in boot camp, Frank says he began to feel more discouraged and isolated from his closest friends - and closer to people he wouldn't have dreamed of knowing. "I stuck a Marine bumper sticker on my car. [Then] the guy in the local garage said, 'Hey, my kid brother's in the Marines.' The waitress over at Angie's, the diner where we go for breakfast from time to time, said, 'I have two boys in the Marines.' And all of a sudden I was connecting with people that normally I'd have no connection with, and realizing that I was a lot closer to them than I was to some of my oldest friends."

Training at Parris Island, John reflected on the differences between the school he had left, which encouraged students to make their own choices, and Marine boot camp. "[In school] even mediocre work occasionally would pass with some people. But in boot camp, if it's not perfect, you'll do it over and over and over again until you get it right. And I never experienced something quite that intense before.

"I think in boot camp I found something that I'd been looking for a sense of purpose. You knew what you were doing every day."

In a way, Frank Schaeffer was undergoing changes that were equally dramatic. He started to get involved in community activities, something that he, as an American raised abroad, never had done before. He helped fight development proposals that he felt would have damaged the historic marshlands near his home, including a plan to build a casino. "He'd never been involved in Salisbury town politics," said Frank's older son, Francis, "and he really jumped in a very strong way. And I think that relates to John because it tied him in with a group of people and made him identify as a citizen differently than he had ever thought about it before."

After three months, when Frank and Genie went to Parris Island to attend John's graduation from boot camp, they were struck by the variety of families who were also there. "There were white people, black people, brown people, Hispanic, Native American, lots of poor people, people arriving in the back of pickups and vans. We were truly the melting pot of America," Frank said. "While we in the stands were strangers, our sons were truly brothers. And that just impacted me massively."

Sharing Their Experience in Keeping Faith

To try to understand the changes that had occurred in each of them, Frank and John wrote Keeping Faith. They have been overwhelmed by the response, especially from military families. When asked whether he also has created a public relations bonus for the military, Frank replied, "I'm not glossing over anything. I have fear, I have anxiety. I have a certain amount of anger at some wasted time while he was waiting for security clearance. "But it, it's a book about a father loving his son. I would also say that I think a lot of people are very ignorant about the military. They don't understand that military is what it is."

John Schaeffer, now 22, is a corporal who works in a Marine intelligence gathering unit in the Washington, D.C., area. He is in the fourth year of a five-year enlistment. He will soon be deployed to the Middle East - a separation the family had anticipated as the possibility of war with Iraq grew. Frank and Genie recently visited John to say their goodbyes.

They are, naturally, worried as never before about the danger. When the changes in this family began with John's enlistment in 1999, there had been no Sept. 11 attacks, no sense of impending war. Frank says the distance he once felt as an expatriate has collapsed, but the concern he feels now encompasses much more than his youngest son.

"When you begin to move and be connected to personally in the circles of people who serve - military, cops, firemen, you name it - it changes the way you look at the world. You're no longer distanced from it; this isn't somebody else's problem. It's no longer a headline; it's your life you're reading about.

"I think John's joining showed me up and taught me something. It's taught me that the greatest generation is not behind us somewhere in history - that I've got a new greatest generation sitting right next to me."