I am seventy-seven-years-old.  The most persistent emotion I live with now is the surreal speed with which my life has passed and the connected feeling that it has all been a strange dream.  Dream or not, it is an age that summons up the inescapable verdict on how I have made use of those seventy-seven years.  Broadly speaking, my life has factually been one of deserved success and abysmal failure, triumph and disgrace.  Historically, it has also been a “man’s life” as that concept was once traditionally defined and understood by virtually all past males on earth until its inevitable demolition in the volcanic Baby-boomer Sexual Revolution of the 60’s.

However, arriving at a verdict on the living of my own life is not the only or even dominant energy behind this “Meditation.”   Martin Luther King, Jr. remarked: Somewhere along the way we must learn that there is nothing greater than doing something for others.  The “others” that this Meditation wishes to address are the young men struggling to find some constructive model for manhood in the ruins of the old ideal – a model in tune with the male body, mind and soul, not with the current feminist Nurse-Ratchet model parodied in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

That the developmental landscape for all boys and men has been radically remodeled by the feminist Sexual Revolution cannot be challenged.  There are many ironies in this revolution.  Not least, is the historically and breathtakingly unique speed, depth, success, and bloodlessness of this Revolution.  Although all boys and men have been uniquely and pointedly reimagined and challenged, the “American male” has been the chief villain in this fundamental makeover.  Part of this “Meditation”, then, however bitter a pill it may be for feminism to swallow, must be a strengthening and modeling recitation for our forlorn lads and men of the extraordinary and unique achievements of the male in history.  Achievements without which the feminist Sexual Revolution, with its thankless I-am woman-hear-me-roar-anti-male-Western-Civilization dogma would not have been possible or even imaginable.

This Meditation is embedded in a personal memoire shaped by the general subject of manhood.   Ultimately and necessarily, the definition of manhood directly affects the shape and reality of concepts like freedom, justice, and citizenship, as the tyrannically male Sharia laws in Islamic states starkly testify.  Except in myth and the rattled imaginations of our extremer feminists, there has never been a community governed by Amazons or Barbies Dolls with their accessory Ken tagalongs.  Nor has there ever been a war where women triumphed over men.  This ought to be a sobering truth for our ahistorical, absurdly belligerent Helen Reddy’s.  Without the willing assistance of authentic men, their pretensions are no safer than a house built on sand next to a sea of tsunamis.  Without properly raised and educated men, the future of our Republic will not survive the multiple wounds, confusions, and conflicts of this century.  It is mainly this recognition that has driven a seventy-seven-year-old, semi-retired, puttering male citizen to put on his armor and write this meditative memoir.

One final introductory caution is in order in my writing this memoire. In 1520, a fierce Italian mercenary, who was also an uncommonly amusing realist, found himself imprisoned under the urgencies of imminent execution by Pope Leo X.  He made the following sensible observations about memoirs generally and his own in particular.  “Give a condemned prisoner writing materials and it is certain he will make use of them.   The shadow of death rouses a creative ferment – a false one, no doubt, but nonetheless sincere.  However sincere this ferment may be, men are limited by what they have been in life, and the Angel of Death is no miracle worker.  Impending annihilation often pushes the most unlikely individuals into a confused writing orgy.  After all, even a moth will abandon itself in the candle’s flame to a flurried instant of divine frenzy before the mystery of approaching death.  The moth is writing his memoirs.”

I am not presently condemned by a Pope or anyone else.  However, I am 77, an age when only the zealously optimistic can ignore the felt imminence and reality of what this war-hardened mercenary called the mystery of approaching death.  At 77, even among the fittest, the evidence of mortality presents itself like a detachment of determined spies on the frontiers of consciousness in multiple shapes: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.  So, like that mercenary and that moth, I find myself writing a memoir.

For whom?  Certainly, as already stated, for opening a conversation among young men in search of an authentic and confident male identity.  And, also, for my children and godchildren, for whatever edifying or cautionary or merely curious use they may make of this memoire.  Just as certainly, for myself, as an effort to discover whatever larger purposes have defined my life and its troubled times, and as a sort of summing up and final punctuation before I step off into that unknown land from which no traveler returns.

But there is another motive.  It has been my rare historical privilege to walk the earth a free man.  That rare and inestimable privilege was conferred on me at birth as an American.  I would, then, if is not too much of a pretension, like to leave some thankful testament of how that privilege shaped me.  How the unique experiment America launched in 1776 enlarged in every way the possibility of a fuller and richer life for me than I could have had anywhere else – a unique experiment that in fact changed the world and, on the whole, did so for the better.   The question of whether I deserved or made the most of this privilege is only a more specific restating of whether I have lived my life well or poorly – whether my “manhood” ultimately made sense.  Or, alternatively, all considered, has my version of manhood, citizenship, and freedom been nothing more than the living out of an old falsehood now rightly consigned to the dust bin of history.

Without memory no one could make a connected sense of his/her life.  Not all memories are equal.  In terms of changing or assessing my life, what mattered most have been those memories that recorded transformational feelings or challenges.  Feelings and challenges that seemed to simultaneously combine an exclamation point with a question mark.  The exclamation point woke me up.  The question mark called for answers.  For me, those special memories are best expressed in personal and historical anecdotes, which acted like latitude, longitude, and altitude intersections on the mapping of my life.  The challenge seems to be how to integrate those anecdotes into some larger, explanatory, and directive order.

Before any journey, particularly an exploratory journey into one’s own past, it is best to begin with a compass and certain guiding resolutions.  The True North of this journey shall be an examination of the relevant facts without any excusatory gloss on my own actions and choices.  Memory being a politely selective judge regarding one’s own faults makes this resolution especially necessary.  Although I have been a sort of exile in my own Baby-boomer generation, it is an exile that I myself chose.  Accordingly, I do not believe I have in any sense been a victim, so there will be none of the confessional handwringing and psychobabble self-absorbed self-pity and self-excuse so popular today.

Having had considerable practical experience in using a compass on complicated terrain, both as an Outward Bound mountaineering instructor and as a combat squad leader in the jungles of Viet Nam, I begin this exploration with no illusions about the difficulties of keeping to True North.  For what terrain is more complicated with challenges than one’s own or another’s motivations and choices in the living of life?

John Hyland, a veteran of two tours of combat duty in Vietnam, mustered out of the U.S. Army at Fort Dix, NJ.