What Is Peace Without Peace Within?

BOOK REVIEW

Long Way Out: A young woman’s journey of self-discovery and how she survived the Navy’s modern cruelty at sea scandal

By Nicole Waybright and Jim Bastian

Speak Peace, 2016

552 pages

When Nicole Waybright read from her debut novel at the Friends Meeting House in Cambridge, she signed my copy, “I look forward to working with you in the Veterans’ peace movement.” An eclectic group gathered for this book release. Hippies. Harvard professors. Frequenters of protest marches. Folk singers. Poets. Scattered throughout the gathering of about 50 people, several youngish military Veterans took in the Quaker atmosphere, snacking on crackers and cranberry juice. A former Marine threw up middle fingers at a cameraman to avoid appearing on Facebook. Earnest tension — sometimes gruff, but always well meaning — permeated the space as Waybright’s tough and direct narrative tested everyone’s attention.

Picking up this hefty volume four years later, after about a dozen attempts to break past the first 100 pages, I read the personal reflections in the end notes. This is a good place to start, if you decide to embark on the journey this book requires. The end notes set clear expectations: “Whereas a commercial (up-market) novel might have its main character ‘do all the work for you,’ even becoming entertaining, a literary work — of which “Long Way Out” strives to be — asks the reader to do the work through thoughtful study and reflection.” Waybright uses Jungian concepts of authenticity and “the self” to frame her coming of age story.

Broken into 83 short chapters, the book might be read as a chronological series of vignettes. This format makes the opus more approachable, less academic. Still it is a heady piece of long-form fiction, as it dips with seething honesty into the fears and desires of a young woman as she engages in a six-year journey to become a Nuclear qualified Surface Warfare Officer (SWO). The text is discordant. It is provocative. It is difficult. The task of reading this book best suits those willing to grapple with large literary projects like those of George Elliot, Roberto Bolano or David Foster Wallace.

Released on the long tail end of niche digital publishing, “Long Way Out” explores the human foibles underpinning the use of military technology. Anyone interested in the sociological impacts of the gradual integration of females into military combat over the past three decades, will find an interesting perspective on a rarely discussed historical event in America. Waybright provides a necessary feminine perspective on the infamous rise of the first female to captain an Aegis destroyer, USS Curtis Wilbur.

Exploring her own fears, ideas and desires through a third person alter-ego named “Brenda,” Waybright brings her emotions up from the amygdala, the deep and recessive home of memories and anxiety, into the frontal lobe, into the light of reason. Digging up core beliefs that her protagonist built in her youth, she unflinchingly exposes her own flawed thoughts and emotions. She writes that Brenda “learned the most in life through delving herself into characters — seeing, hearing, experiencing, and sharing a character’s insights, or empathizing with a character’s lack of insight.”

Waybright explores racial and gender tropes as they fit into the politically correct narrative of the turn of the millennium, in which the book is set. She shows how a bureaucracy that promotes through evaluations (nebulous measures of character, based on an individual’s ability to function in the military’s unique social structure) and test scores pushes out reformers and free thinkers, in favor of people like the Captain of “the finest ship in the navy” USS Curtis Wilber, “all around phony and careerist, trying to speak about breaking down barriers for minorities and women with no heart behind his words.” During the change of command, as a female relieves a Filipino, projections of inferiority appear repeatedly. Brenda wrestles with her identity, positioned near the bottom of this rigid hierarchy. The flaws of all the characters in this book are on full display, including Brenda.

The central narrative begins toward middle of the book with Brenda on watch in port. She greets the new XO, “Are you a wife?” Cultural expectations that add psychological weight on women trying to advance in the military, appear with nasty rumors that become self-fulfilling. Subordinates speculate on Lieutenant Commander Gates’ mental health. Her response to the damaging gossip only makes things worse. “She wasn’t going to recognize others’ strengths and apply them; she was going to instead feel threatened and tear others down.” Plaques and honors, surface qualifications, do not compensate for her inexperience. “She was biting, cruel, duplicitous, and petty.” Belligerent outbursts begin on the first day she checks onto the ship. “I’m going to be the XO of this ship! Don’t you ever put me on the gaddamned fucking watchbill again unless I order you to do so!” This behavior erodes moral and eventually lead Gates’ crew to work around her, doubting her competence with even basic ship handling.

Aesthetic details become mechanisms for exercising power. Rather than instructing or guiding her juniors to find a niche on board, the new XO made junior officers feel worthless for wearing the wrong kind of earrings. “Small, ball shaped pearl earrings are allowed only with formal uniforms, not with khakis.” Waybright buttresses these outbursts of insecure cruelty by hypothesizing about the roots of this inferiority complex. “Restrictions on women had left Gates inexperienced,” Brenda believes. The system failed Gates as well, granting authority to her based-on surface characteristics (the fact that she was a qualified woman) rather than on performance.

This text avoids “grandeur, nostalgia or pride” as Brenda begins to catastrophize about her career path. Never living for the present, Brenda considers her progress through ROTC, her commission, and forward to the qualifications she needs to attend nuclear power school. Interested in advancing other women in her orbit, the bitter reality of exams, evaluations and timing foreshadows her future. “Striking for journalism is a bit like reaching for the stars,” says a deck seaman’s career counselor, likely heralding the beginning of the end of that sailor’s (much like Brenda’s) naval ambitions. “She should have gone Boatswain’s Mate.” Brenda argues that the seaman does not want to be a Boatswain’s Mate. The career counselor points out that there’s no time for on-the-job training (OJT) in journalism aboard a destroyer, the implication being that there is a lot of paint to chip. Besides, the seaman did not pass the exam.

Brenda’s effort to qualify, to please her superiors, interweaves with her quest to find her soul, as she considers the many paths that she did not take. She works to understand who she is, meanwhile “arguing in favor of sides that she felt went along with the persona she created.” Her thoughts on the purpose of militarism matures as her experiences on deployment compound. She reflects on the projected image of readiness, an imaginary ship-shape sleekness, versus the reality that half of the weapons systems on the ship do not function to capacity. Deck seaman pass time by painting over rust in the rain. “She realized that young people like her perpetually joined up as generation after generation of elders, government leaders, and recruiters portrayed war and military service as enticing, heroic, honorable, and worthwhile for the next generation.” With this book, Waybright explores the ineptness, the inexperience and the real human bodies who rotate through a complex array of roles often feeling insecure, comparing those to the idealized fictions of authors like Tom Clancy.

This text also acts as a mirror. Reflecting on Waybright’s story, I consider my own choices leading up to her book release five years ago. I see myself standing in a line of ten people across from Longfellow’s House in Cambridge, waiting for a signature on a paperback book that I would pick up repeatedly for the next five years, and begin again and again to be confounded by its density.

After finishing the book, I cycled through a progression of pictures of me on Facebook: here I am carrying a Veterans for Peace flag, wearing merch shared by a stolen-valor Veteran, a man who told other people’s war stories; here I am reading another person’s poem from an anthology of art and poetry by Warrior Writers outside Government Center in Boston, a wild beard highlighting the burn scar that I got as a child. A friend says I look like a strung-out Vietnam Veteran in these pictures. My Dad says I should take up acting. Here, now, five years later, I write about somebody else’s writing. To what end? It’s all about the journey, and on reflection, dissecting Waybright’s embarrassments and successes helped me to better understand my own. For anyone willing to put in the time, this book might do more than change your perspective. It might change the way that you direct your attention in your own life.