4-minute read

A word for hell
Army football
College reunion

A Word for Hell

There is a word in Japanese for hell: jigoku (JEE-goh-koo).

I found it in a memoir by Setsuko Koizumi, widow of the writer Lafcadio Hearn. She remembers the two of them on a trip in the Province of Hoki:

We wished to stay there for a week, but the inn was crowded with people having a gay time, drinking and making a great deal of noise. Hearn saw them, and immediately pulled my sleeve. “We cannot stay. This is jigoku (hell). It is no place for me, even for a second.”
— Setsuko Koizumi, Reminiscences of Lafcadio Hearn

Hearn spent twenty hard years as a drifter before he found, in Japan and in his marriage to Setsuko, the quiet that let him become one of the great interpreters of the East to the West.

Jigoku is the word for what he left behind at the inn. Anyone who has worn the uniform knows this feeling. It is not the noise.

It is the weight you carry when no one is close enough to pull your sleeve.

Reminiscences of Lafcadio Hearn by Setsuko Koizumi (1918). Short, tender, and in the public domain, so free editions are easy to find online. Link to online translation.

*

College Reunion and Army Football

I read that passage again after my 35th reunion at West Point, a weekend as loud as any inn Hearn ever fled.

Army beat Tulane on Saturday with a field goal in the final second (Army 20, Tulane 17). Nearly 30,000 people on their feet at Michie Stadium. Hearn would have reached for my sleeve.

129 Pints

In the fourth quarter, in the new Michie Stadium suites, I heard Greg Gadson speak. In 2007, near Baghdad, a roadside bomb took both his legs. He talked about the surgeon who kept him alive with 129 pints of blood, more than ten times what a human body holds.

The doctor was my classmate, Brad Woods, and he was there in the suite with all of us. Brad held on to a wounded soldier, pint after pint, and would not let him go.

In my season ticket seats sat my guest, a young officer not long off a field training exercise. During the exercise, another officer had taken his own life.

He was a captain in the U.S. Army, not yet thirty. He had enlisted as a teenager, deployed twice, and was weeks from taking his first company command. His family has said the crisis came without warning, before anyone could reach him.

Brad reached Greg in time. No one reached the captain.

That is the distance between the two stories.

Our guest cheered with us, because that is what you do during a football game, and because sometimes the loudest place in the world is the place you can carry something heavy.

Grief and gratitude and a field goal at the gun, all in one afternoon.

This ONLY happens at an Army game.

The Other Place

My own story begins at the same seam Hearn lived on, between East and West.

So, for the record: the loud and boisterous inn was jigoku. The reunion was not. It was the other place, the one where someone is always close enough to pull your sleeve.

If you’re near Alexandria Thursday or Frederick Saturday, come find me.

IF YOU ARE STRUGGLING
If you or someone you love is struggling, call or text 988. Veterans and service members, press 1, or text 838255.

MORE EVENTS
All upcoming talks and signings: treehouseletter.com/events

*

*