Pink or Blue? A War Veteran Learns to Knit

 Copyright L. Daniel Mouer 1997


This essay was first published, in an earlier form, in my original "Genderwonky" blog. I then included it as a chapter in my memoirs book. In resurrecting "Genderwonky," I am now returning this piece to it's proper home.

My mother taught me to knit. Mind you, I didn’t learn how to knit from my mother, but she taught me nonetheless. She also taught me to sew. I don’t know why. My brothers weren’t taught these things, as far as I know. I don’t even think my sisters were. Maybe I was the only one who seemed interested. Maybe I just tended to hang around Mother too much.

I think I was probably 9 or 10 when she taught me to knit, but I didn’t actually begin learning how to knit until I was 58. I enrolled in knitting classes at a local knitting shop. Richmond, my hometown, has at least five knitting shops. For reasons I can’t fathom, I chose to take lessons at the oldest, best established store in town: the “West End” shop, whose habitués are mothers of children enrolled in the city’s exclusive local private academies. They are the wives of lawyers and doctors and politicians—no that’s not quite right. They are the wives of judges, chief surgeons, and governors of the Commonwealth. I drive to my lessons in my ratty little ‘72 Beetle. They drive in humongous Lincoln Town Cars, 700-series Beamers, and Range Rovers.

There are other places to learn knitting and to buy yarn. There’s the store with all the high-fashioned glitzy yarns and the workshops taught by international knitting stars. There’s the newer shop full of hip, high-end luxury fibers, all natural of course, down in what passes for Richmond’s version of Greenwich Village. Then there’s that newer shop with the laid-back, crazy, funny women who smoke too much and, I wager, keep bottles of whiskey or brandy tucked away with their stashes. They are fun-loving yarn-addicts, pure and simple. But, for reasons still unclear to me, I wound up in the high-brow shop with the tennis-club and equestrienne set. Go figure.

Let’s make one thing very clear. I am the only man taking these lessons. I continually hear rumors of other men who knit, but, so far, they are just rumors. “Lots of men knit these days,” says one of the shop’s owners. “But Dan’s the only straight guy, isn’t he?” Straight guy? But I knit! Some would say I can’t be straight by definition.

I point out to all who will listen that men do the knitting in Peru, that men were traditionally knitters at various times in “The Old World,” and that male soldiers in World War I routinely knitted their own socks! I get quiet, knowing smiles. No sense trying to tell anybody anywhere anything about gender. It is, after all, completely “natural,” and everyone knows all about it practically from the day they’re born.

I am working a cable row in the front on my alpaca sweater. I hope to complete it by the time it’s cold enough to wear an alpaca sweater. The ladies of the shop love to talk about the multi-colored socks I knit myself last year. “He even wears them,” one hastens to add. While I quietly knit away, my teacher, the shop ladies, and the other students all talk about babies. Always. Someone at the table is always knitting a baby sweater, or baby booties, or baby blanket, or a baby hat. Sometimes these items are being knit from a pure-white soft cotton or washable wool. More often, they are either pink or blue.

The talk invariably turns to when “the baby” is due, and whether the mother or grandmother in question yet knows “what it is.” That means, in case you didn’t get it, whether the fetus in question is on its way to becoming male or female. Even in this day of sonograms, lots of people don’t know. The parents-to-be all know, but they’re not saying. So even the expectant mothers are not revealing the big secret: they knit in white, or they make one item blue and one pink… “just in case.”

“Why don’t you make something green? Or purple?” I ask, playing the devil’s role, of course. Nobody bothers to answer. It can’t possibly be a serious question. I don’t follow up, because I’ve tried dozens of times. That conversation just doesn’t go anywhere, and, anyway, I’ve just dropped two stitches in the middle of a “cable back,” and that demands all my attention.

When the conversation isn’t about babies, which is rare, it’s about the older children: the boys in St. Benedict’s and the girls in St. Catherine’s. They don’t talk about the students’ grades or their sports accomplishments. Instead they discuss their summer art programs in Florence, and their intensive language programs in Moscow, and their pending appointments as congressional pages. But the real concern is not for this ascending generation, but for the babies, for what is being knit for them, and “what they are.”

Doing It In Public

My cousin recently needed someone to accompany her to the hospital for a surgical procedure. I knew I’d be stuck in the waiting room for three or four hours, so, naturally, I took my knitting. As time passed, other patients and their drivers/helpers/loved ones arrived. And every so often one would have a bag of knitting. Each of these knitters gravitated to my side of the room, made friendly inquiries about what I was making, gave their compliments, then took up an adjacent seat. After a couple hours, we had a phalanx of knitters, all sitting along one wall of the waiting room, chatting away merrily.

Knitters don’t just knit when they get together. We shared knitting stories. We shared knitting tools. We commented on color combinations and yarn choices. All the other knitters were women, of course. One of them noted my wedding ring and asked me if my wife were also a knitter. Of course I (and all the other women) took her question to really mean, “So, are you married or available?”

And so I comfortably lounged away a few hours, surrounded by women of all ages, knitting, knitting, knitting. Were I to suddenly find myself single, it would never dawn on me to go seeking company in a bar, when I could find myself a corner in any public space—say, a Starbucks Café—open my knitting bag, and soon have plenty of company.

Of course, not everyone is happy to see a man knitting in public. There is clearly something odd, suspicious, maybe even frightening about such a scene. I remember one time taking my knitting to the clinic at the VA hospital. It always takes my doctor way more time than seems reasonable to see me on appointment day. No sense complaining, though. I might as well just plan on getting some knitting done. And so I do.

On the day in question, I noted that my knitting had just the opposite effect as what I had experienced the day of my cousin’s surgery. I soon found I was sitting surrounded by empty chairs. Other patients were giving me a rather wide berth. But then, none of the other patients was also knitting. You see, most of the other patients were men: men my age or older. Men wearing their veteran’s hats, their combat colors, their manly accomplishments on their proverbial sleeves. These guys don’t knit. Or, if they do, they damn sure don’t do it in public! I’m the odd man out. I’m also a war veteran, and I’m wearing my colors, too. My combat engineer’s hat is set off nicely by the colorful stripes in my latest silky-soft scarf.

Finally, into the waiting room came a couple. They were much younger than I. Both were wearing some indications that they were in or had served in the military. I later learned they had both served in Iraq. She carried a knitting bag. After registering at the desk, she walked directly over to me, asked about my project, asked if she could join me, plopped down beside me and pulled out her work. Her partner—her husband, I soon learned—stood across the room glaring at me. He stood! He couldn’t even bring himself to sit. My knitting companion kept gesturing to her hubby to come join us, but he insistently stood and glowered.

After a few minutes, a nurse appeared and called the wife’s name, then took her back into the clinic to test her vital signs, etc. The man slowly approached me. I stopped knitting, met his eyes, and held my hands with the #3 needles angled just enough to suggest that they could serve as defensive weapons if need be. (For some reason, I tend to knit a lot of things with sporting weight yarns and small needles. For once I wished I had been working on a bulky Icelandic sweater. I would have been holding # 13s instead of # 3s!)

He stared into my soul and, I suppose, something he found there told him I was not really a threat to his marriage or his masculinity or anything else. Or perhaps he decided I was too dangerous, or too deranged, to tangle with. He grabbed a hot rod magazine off the rack nearby and walked back across the room to sit by himself.

What would happen to our planet if, all of a sudden, infant girls were swaddled in baby blue blankets? And what disastrous consequences could ensue if baby boys came bedecked with little pink pom-pom hats? What in the world can the world possibly find frightening about a 6’2” 200-pound man with a bag full of wool and knitting needles? What in Heaven’s name leads some people to a murderous rage at the very thought of a man in a dress and panty hose?

A former high school friend is a highly accomplished and respected poet. He’s 60 years old and holds a professorship at an major New England university. He has published numerous books and won many awards. Lately he has been writing to some of us, his former classmates, online, pouring out his heart full of hurt and his still-hot fury about how he was treated by the bullies in high school nearly a half-century ago. I, myself, harbored a fantasy of taking a baseball bat to one punk’s head for more than 30 years for beating me up and calling me a sissy. A recent study suggested that the rash of violent school shootings we have experienced in this country over the past few years were almost all perpetrated by boys who had been bullied and hounded and terrorized for not meeting some arbitrary norms of masculinity. In our culture we seem to think that violation of gender codes is an egregious offense upon society, punishable by torture and death.

It starts, innocently enough, by choosing to knit pink or blue. It proceeds from there by making girls who would rather have a Jedi’s light saber play with Barbie dolls. And if the gender variance hasn’t been shamed out of our children by the time they reach high school, we find it acceptable to let society’s goons try to beat it out of them. Besides schoolyard bullies, we have skinheads, good ol’ boys, queer-rollers, tranny-bashers, and many other sorts of “concerned citizens” waiting to finish the job. Call me Pollyanna, but I think we could end this sort of violence by knitting the rainbow for babies without first stopping to inspect their plumbing.

Manhood and The Killing Thing

copyright L. Daniel Mouer 2011

This essay was first published, in an earlier form, in my original "Genderwonky" blog. I then included it as a chapter in my memoirs book. In resurrecting "Genderwonky," I am now returning this piece to it's proper home.


The Rifleman

Until my wife decided to transition from female to male, I thought that war was the one situation in my life that would lead me most to question, contemplate, and refine my own ideas about manhood. After all, war is the archetypal context for testing courage and cowardice, strength and weakness, the litmus tests of masculinity. And, of course, there is the killing thing.  Men are supposed to kill,  at least be willing to do so, even if as a very last resort.

Our man-images are almost always killers, after all. Even Roy Rogers and Gene Autrey shot down a bad guy now and then, though I think the Lone Ranger always managed to shoot the pistols out of the bad guys’ hands. One can apparently avoid killing if one’s aim is good enough.

Really good men were not only reluctant to kill, but very reluctant: forced to it, after all. The Rifleman, Lucas McCain, was the widower farmer who lived outside of North Fork. A pinnacle of masculine goodness, he was tall, strong, God-fearing, a loving single-parent father. He wouldn’t hurt a flea, except when driven to it by confrontation with unadorned evil. And then his weapon, his simple rancher’s carbine, loosed its fateful lightning, week after week, round after round, and bad guys’ bodies filled the ditches and watering troughs and alleys and galleries of North Fork. Before the blood had stopped running, Lucas would stow his highly modified Winchester, with its large hand-loop lever modified to fire rapidly―a cowboy’s assault rifle―in his buckboard, then he’d grab his son, Mark, and ride home to complete the day’s chores.

The Rifleman television series was created by a master of the subject of violence and our cultural ambiguities about a man’s obligations to, and reservations against, life-taking. Sam Peckinpah  is best known for writing and directing The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs, and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.  All of his best-known works explore violence, especially men’s violence. I remember seeing Straw Dogs, certainly his most controversial work, in 1971. I thought, then, that the film was reflecting a national obsession with violence stimulated by seven or eight years of the Vietnam War. That same year the country encountered A Clockwork Orange, Dirty Harry, and The French Connection. But, for me, that was post-Vietnam. My developing years were informed by The Rifleman, not The Wild Bunch, and certainly not by Vietnam. Proper violence was the redemption of manliness and the essence of goodness. It contrasted starkly with the cruel, senseless, evil violence that brought suffering to the innocent.

My formative visions were in black-and-white. Bloodied black faces and club-wielding white sheriff’s deputies in Southern towns. Civil-rights marchers set-on by police dogs. And there were the newsreel visions of Nazi death camps, enemy’s films captured by the white hats, of bulldozers plowing naked bodies, stacked like cordwood, into vast trenches.  These evils demanded counter forces of good. They came in two very different forms. The fascist evil was countered by G.I.s, Tommies, and the French Resistance: the good guys. Our bombs were the good bombs, cast like the Rifleman’s carbine, only when evil demanded it. On the other hand, the evils of American segregation and racism were countered by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, by the Freedom Riders, by Martin Luther King, Jr., by a doctrine of non-violent confrontation. I was completely confounded by the competing rightness of the “Good-guy” force of the Allied military struggle over Nazism and Fascism versus the “soul force” of Gandhi’s spirit. I just could not figure out how to be a proper man. Would I walk quietly with a big stick, or be one to shout out loudly for what is right with empty hands, and a willingness to die for that right?

I did not want to enter the military if it meant participating in the war. I did not feel even slightly threatened by Uncle Ho. I was afraid of being killed or maimed. I was even more afraid of being incompetent as a man and getting someone else killed or maimed. This last fear, I realize now, was the fear that I might not be willing to do the killing thing when, or if, it became necessary. Oh, I was afraid of other sorts of unmanliness, too, such as physical weakness or clumsiness, or a lack of courage, but the Army pretty much trained those away.

On the rifle range in Basic Training I learned a trick. The pop-up steel targets could be knocked down more easily by aiming low. Either I would hit the target, or my round would land in front of it, kicking up a shower of sand and stones that, in turn, would hit the target and actuate the scoring mechanism. While I had been unwilling to “kill” targets on the bayonet training course, shooting into the sand and getting guilt-free scores on the rifle range suited me fine. And it won me a Sharpshooter’s Badge. Several months later, while training recruits on the machine gun course at Fort Leonard Wood, I discovered I could do the same thing with the M-60 machine gun. My moral pangs about sighting a weapon on a man could be alleviated by firing into the ground in front of the target.

Bong Son Plain

My company was attached to the 70th Combat Engineer Battalion.  Because we owned a fleet of dump trucks, we were used more often as a dump truck company and a general purpose combat engineer company than as a bunch of bridge builders. It was early in my year in Vietnam when the call came that my platoon would be working a mission in the Bong Son Plain, northwest of Qui Nhon. Bong Son was “Indian Country.” Not only were there numerous Viet Cong units, but whole regiments of North Vietnamese regulars were thought to be headquartered up there. The First Cavalry Division was engaged in a major campaign to secure this Province, and we were going to help. 

My memories are vague. We were working on clearing forest in a low-lying, somewhat swampy area. I don’t remember other 70th Engineer folks being there, nor even any 2nd platoon folks from my company. There was a detachment from a Navy construction battalion (“Seabees”) with heavy equipment. We were working together with them preparing a landing zone or landing strip. Our trucks were hauling bundles of steel matting. Our guys were wielding chain saws, hand-excavating “dead-man” trenches, and burying huge logs to which they secured the matting.

I was in my usual position, as platoon machine gunner, on the headache board of a dump truck. However, the trucks were needed to continue hauling matériel, so I was told to prepare a small defensive bunker for the gun. I used a shovel to hollow out a shallow pit, and then I filled a bunch of sandbags and stacked them around the pit. There is where I set up the gun and the spare boxes of ammunition. Nearby there was another, similar ad hoc bunker where I think our platoon leader’s radio operator was set up. Throughout the day the drone of saws and bulldozers was enhanced by the constant buzz of distant machine guns, the crackle of small arms, and the concussive whoomps of mortars or artillery. The air overhead was buzzing with helicopters, and occasionally with the passing of jet attack fighters.

What happened next is so strangely embedded in my mind, that it’s hard to describe it without it seeming bizarre. I became aware of the whiz-thud sounds of bullets arriving around me before I was even aware of the sounds of the rifles shooting them. I feel as though I was frozen in time and I sat there on some sandbags looking around, trying to see who was shooting, and where they were shooting from. I realized they were right in front of me, maybe only 200 feet away inside the tree line. I couldn’t actually see people, just the quivering of the leaves and branches. Then some shadowy life movements I recognized as legs appearing occasionally between tree trunks and bamboo stalks.

I seemed to grasp all at once, but in extremely slowed-down time), that there were a couple or three snipers, perhaps more, perhaps many more, firing away in my general direction from the trees at the edge of the clearing. I did not know, and could not determine, if anyone else was shooting. The racket of the heavy equipment and chain saws was far louder than the rifle shots. Slowly I became conscious that someone, the lieutenant perhaps, was yelling at me to shoot the gun.

My responsibility as the only immediate defense of this site was crystal clear. I had to return fire-for-effect. I had to find people targets and kill them, or try to. But that was not possible. How in the world had I managed to get into this ridiculous position as the conscientious-objector-cum-platoon-gunner?  In frozen time I plotted and schemed, trying to find ways to do both: to kill without killing, to protect those who were counting on me, myself included, without violating the lives of people I couldn’t even see, let alone hate. Rice farmers in pajamas: that’s how I pictured them.

“Lower the gun, you’re shooting the trees!” The voice again? My platoon leader? I was shooting into the tree canopy. I suppose I thought I could scare them away. Like the Lone Ranger, I thought maybe my machine gun could chase away the threat without any moral dilemma. But the threat continued. Men scattered behind trucks and bulldozers, looking for cover. The trees quivered ahead of me as enemy rifles continued firing. “Lower the fuckin’ gun!!!” And I did. Not at the quivering trees and shadowy life-leg apparitions among the tree trunks and bamboo, but at the ground just at the tree-line, just in front of the “target.”

The deafening roar of Huey helicopters came from nowhere, from behind and above me, at the treetop level. My head filled with the chop-chop-chop of rotor blades, the whine of the turbines, and a chorus of chukka-chukka-chukka from the choppers’ door guns harmonizing with my own gun’s song. Three of them banked hard just above me. As the third gunship passed, the door gunner’s left hand, which had lain across the chamber cover of his M-60 suddenly shot an exuberant middle finger toward the tree line, then morphed into a “thumbs-up” followed immediately by an “A-OK” sign aimed directly at me. “We did it! You and I,” he seemed to be saying. “We got the bastards!”

That day in the Bong Son Plain ended quickly as the Cavalry literally moved in to rescue us. We were hustled back to our trucks and back up the long mountain passes to our base camp. There was no searching for enemy dead or wounded. That wasn’t our role. We had to rest up so we could come back the next day and keep on hacking out forest and swamp and laying down steel. There was no debriefing. There was nothing but talk among my platoon mates about what had happened, and then chow, and then sleep.

Many months later I would have another chance to try out how I might handle the killing thing. That happened completely differently. Time didn’t stop. There was no conversation in my brain about philosophy. There were no words in my mind at all. It wasn’t surreal. It was, in fact, all flesh-and-blood too real. There was no  wiggling or quivering of leaves or a movement of shadowy forms, it was the face of a man, a young man, not more than 25 feet from my own young man’s face. It was all so plain. Only afterward did my mind begin to create, conflate, digress, imagine, and remove itself from what had been uncharacteristically clear. Unbearably real.

For more than forty years these and other wartime incidents have kept me wondering about my manliness. I am not Gandhi, obviously. I am not MLK. These were the “real” men, in my estimation. Nonetheless, I am here and able to contemplate ethical vagaries, and other men are not. Did I prove my manhood in war, or did I fail it? I’ve never felt like the Lone Ranger, and “Mad Sam” Peckinpah never gave us any real insights into what it was supposed to feel like to be Lucas McCain.