And it was still hot.

Goodnight, Mr. Sendak. The world is better for having known you.

It’s another beautiful day in Honolulu. Most of the 117 days since my wife got on the plane to go back to Kandahar have been beautiful. Most of the next 250 or so days will also be beautiful.

Thursday night was not a beautiful night in Afghanistan. It was, as Snoopy would type, a dark and stormy night. First reports suggest that this was likely a factor in the crash of a UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter in Helmand Province. The helicopter was one of two that were on a CASEVAC mission. They were en route to an Afghan National Police checkpoint that had just suffered a suicide bombing that killed four police officers and wounded seven more. The first news reports indicated that survivors were considered “unlikely”. Later reports confirmed the deaths of the four American soldiers onboard.

The last time I had any contact with my wife was before the first reports of the crash. This is not unusual. Attempts are made to restrict communications between troops and families in the immediate aftermath of a fatal incident that involves the unit. The Army – understandably – wants to avoid accidental notification of the next of kin. And my wife’s job is such that she is almost undoubtedly busier than normal right now, and probably won’t have time to call or email for the next day or two.

Yesterday, I worried. I did not go to bed until after 10 pm. I was up at 6 this morning. By 9, I had moved from worrying to waiting.

The Army attempts to notify next of kin as rapidly as possible. Notifications are made in person, and unless absolutely necessary notifications are not made between 10 pm and 6 am. When nothing happened by 9, I knew it was almost certain that four other families had been visited by someone of equal or higher rank than the casualty, accompanied by a chaplain or a second soldier, in formal uniform, without alcohol on their breath, and familiar with the local emergency numbers in case of “adverse medical reaction”.

So now I wait. News reports have identified two of the four dead soldiers. The names of all four will probably be released in the next day or so. A memorial service will probably be scheduled for later this week at the airfield chapel.

Once the formal identifications are released, assuming my luck holds, I get to feel relieved and guilty for feeling relieved because someone else is suffering the pain I was hoping to avoid.

If it sounds like I’ve written this post before, it’s probably because I probably have. This is not my wife’s first deployment. It’s not the first time that I’ve waited out news of a helicopter going down. It’s not the first time that I’ve dealt with stress by writing about it. All that has probably come together before. I hope – but do not expect – that it will not happen again.

I have not gotten used to any of this, but none of it’s new. It’s part of my normal life. Statistically, there is something like a 99% chance it’s not part of your normality.

We’ve been at war for over a decade. We’ve been sending the same people to fight that war, over and over again, while the rest of the country worries about whatever it is that people choose to worry about when they have no real ties to the war that the military - their military - is fighting.

Afghanistan is not one of the daily concerns of most Americans. I think most people like it that way. When someone asks me what my wife does, I say she’s an Army doctor. When they ask me where she’s stationed, I say Kandahar. Then there’s an awkward pause. And they talk about the weather.

I have not served one day in the military, but I stopped thinking of myself as a civilian a long time ago. My experiences have become so disconnected from the understanding of most Americans that it's hard to consider myself to be part of that broad civilian group when military matters are concerned. I can't even watch MASH the way I used to. Now I spend half the show wondering how Mildred Pottter, Peg Hunnicut, and Radar's Uncle Ed are doing.

There are lots of magnetic ribbons stuck to cars declaring the love the American public has for the military, and the support they offer. But one of the local bases loses its library two weeks ago, one of the arts and crafts centers closed, and the gyms and pools had their hours cut. Morale, Welfare, and Recreation programs - which I consider to be a mental health resource - took yet another budget hit.

I am the spouse of an American soldier. Because I am the spouse of an American soldier, I feel alienated from the life that most Americans lead.

There is something very wrong with that.

Picture taken in Waikiki on St. Patrick's Day.
Canon 7D
1/200 f/4
cropped version of original

Go find a five year old. Go on, do it. I'll wait.

When you do, ask the five year old what a judge does. Did the answer have something to do with locking up criminals? I'm guessing it did.

Criminal law is where judges usually appear in the public consciousness. It's where judges usually appear in public culture. It's the image we're all familiar with - the black-robed figure behind the bench, looking down at the participants in the drama. Most of their dialogue consists of lines containing the words "sustained" or "overruled". (There's probably some sort of Writers Guild requirement involved somewhere.)

And it's good for kids to know that there is a justice system there to help keep us safe. It's good for them to know that there are people whose job it is to figure out if the person accused committed the crime and punish them if they did. But it's not enough.

And that's where the protagonists of this little post come into the picture.

I just started reading Karl Llewellyn's The Bramble Bush. This book is Llewellyn's attempt to explain the law and law school to people who are getting ready to start law school. Llewellyn gets to the core of what the law is early on:

What, then, is this law business about? It is about the fact that our society is honeycombed with disputes. Disputes actual and potential; disputes to be settled and disputes to be prevented; both appealing to law, both making up the business of law. But obviously those which most violently call for attention are the actual disputes, and to these our first attention must be directed. Actual disputes call for somebody to do something about them. First, so that there may be peace, for the disputants; for other persons whose ears and toes disputants are disturbing. And secondly, so that the dispute may really be put to rest, which means, so that a solution may be achieved which, at least in the main, is bearable to the parties and not disgusting to the lookers-on. This doing of something about disputes, this doing of it reasonably, is the business of law.

Karl Llewellyn
The Bramble Bush, p. 5.

Enter, 80-some-odd-years later, Sesame Street and United States Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor. And Goldilocks. And a very pissed off Baby Bear, with a somewhat broken chair.

As some have pointed out, the case might have been dealt with in a manner that glossed over a few minor issues with Goldilocks conduct. Trespass doesn't get mentioned, the subject of property rights is bypassed, and she definitely seems to have dodged the bullet on the felony breaking and entering thing (and possibly a real bullet or two if the Castle Doctrine had been brought into play). But those are all side issues.

The key thing - the take home for the children - is simple: judges help settle disputes. Sure, some of those disputes will be between the prosecutor and an accused criminal, but a lot of them will not involve criminal conduct. They're disputes between people who might not be friends, and might not want to be neighbors, but are still part of the same society, the same community. The courts, and judges, are there because it's good for all of us if all of us are able to settle our disputes in a civil way.

In addition to putting the reading list in this post, I'm going to set it up in its own page to make it easier to find. I'll use italics to mark off the title of anything I'm currently reading. I'll use bold for the books I've finished. I'm going to try to review books once I'm done; I'll add links to those reviews as they appear.

I'm going to add a second section under the 'official' reading list. These are also books relevant (at least I hope they are) to my shift to legal reasoning and education. Some of these are books I've found on my own; others have been recommended by regulars at a discussion forum that I frequent. These will also be marked off with italics while I'm reading them, and boldface once I'm done.

The lists can be found below the fold.

-------------------------
The 'Official' Reading List
Taken From the William S Richardson School of Law
Law Library 1L Survival Guide

* Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen Liliuokalani
Kindle
Nook
iBooks
IndieBound

* Billy Budd by Herman Melville
Kindle
Nook
iBooks
IndieBound

* Bramble Bush by Karl Llewellyn
Kindle
Nook
iBooks
IndieBound

* Bleak House by Charles Dickens
Kindle
Nook
iBooks
IndieBound

* Broken Trust by Samuel King & Randall Roth
Kindle
Nook
iBooks
IndieBound

* Who Owns the Crown Lands of Hawaii? by Jon Van Dyke
Kindle
Nook
iBooks
IndieBound

* Buffalo Creek Disaster by Gerald M. Stern
Kindle
Nook
iBooks
IndieBound

* To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Kindle
Nook
iBooks
IndieBound

* The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Kindle
Nook
iBooks
IndieBound

* The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court by Bob Woodward Scott Armstrong
Kindle
Nook
iBooks
IndieBound

* The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin
Kindle
Nook
iBooks
IndieBound

* A Question of Choice by Sarah Weddington
Kindle
Nook
iBooks
IndieBound

* A Civil Action by Jonathan Harr
Kindle
Nook
iBooks
IndieBound

* Damages: One Family's Legal Struggles in the World of Medicine by Barry Werth
Kindle
Nook
iBooks
IndieBound

* A Defiant Life: Thurgood Marshall and the Persistence of Racism in America by Howard Ball
Kindle
Nook
iBooks
IndieBound

* Brush with the Law by Robert Byrnes and Jaime Marquart
Kindle
Nook
iBooks
IndieBound

* Gideon’s Trumpet by Anthony Lewis
Kindle
Nook
iBooks
IndieBound

* One L by Scott Turow
Kindle
Nook
iBooks
IndieBound

* The Moral Compass of the American Lawyer & Truth, Justice, Power, and Greed by Richard A. Zitrin & Carol A. Langford
Kindle
Nook
iBooks
IndieBound

* Becoming Gentlemen: Women, Law School and Institutional Change by Lani Guinier
Kindle
Nook
iBooks
IndieBound

* Law School Confidential: A Complete Guide to the Law School Experience: By Students, For Students by Robert H. Miller
Kindle
Nook
iBooks
IndieBound

* Getting to Maybe: How to Excel on Law School Exams by Richard Michael Fischl
Kindle
Nook
iBooks
IndieBound

* The Law School Labyrinth: A Guide to Making the Most of Your Legal Education by Steven R. Sedberry
Kindle
Nook
iBooks
IndieBound

* Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, Lynne Truss, (Gotham, 2004).
Kindle
Nook
iBooks
IndieBound

* The Elements of Style, William Strunk, Jr. & E.B. White, (4th ed., Allyn & Bacon 1999)
Kindle
Nook
iBooks
IndieBound

==========
The not-so-official reading list.
Some of these are books I've found on my own. Others are books that were recommended to me by members of The Fogbow - a discussion forum that I've been spending a lot of time hanging out at lately. This is currently incomplete. I'll finish pulling the recommendations and linking them in the next day or so.

*A Constitution of Many Minds: Why the Founding Document Doesn't Mean What It Meant Before, Cass Sunstein
Kindle
Nook
iBooks
IndieBound

*The Invisible Constitution (Inalienable Rights), Lawrence Tribe
Kindle
Nook
iBooks
IndieBound

*A Season for Justice, Morris Dees
Kindle
Nook
iBooks
IndieBound
Amazon

*A Matter of Interpretation: Federal Courts and the Law, Antonin Scalia
Kindle
Nook
iBooks
IndieBound

*How Judges Think, Richard Posner
Kindle
Nook
iBooks
IndieBound

Rainbows are beautiful. They're also a great way to see the effects of optical phenomena in the atmosphere. Light entering raindrops is refracted, reflected, and refracted again. The red wavelengths are bent less than the blue. If you stand (or sit, or drive) so that the sun is behind you and the raindrops in front of you, and the circumstances are right, the effect is a gorgeous band of colors arcing across the sky.

Rainbows have been important in mythology, art, and culture all over the world, and throughout history. They've been used to symbolize many things, mostly involving a connection between the heavens and earth.

Rainbows are often seen in Hawai'i (that's why they call us "the Rainbow State"). Here, in addition to being beautiful, they actually provide us with some knowledge that can be extremely useful in the short term future. Specifically, if you are driving toward a rainbow, it should remind you to close the moon roof.

If you'll excuse me, I'm going to go finish drying the car.

One thing I would caution for women in general is not to sacrifice their own career goals for their husband’s education. As an academic, I know plenty of couples where the woman worked at what she considered to be a temporary job to put her husband through school, but rather than return the favor later (as implicitly promised), they got divorced. Sacrificing one’s own ambitions puts a lot of stress on the marriage, no matter which spouse is doing the sacrificing.

This is something that sounds a lot like a good chunk my life trajectory. I guess a little background is in order here.

I started college right after high school. I didn't struggle in high school - "struggle" implies effort, for starters - but my grades were not good. (The teacher comment that stung the worst, made the most lasting impression, and contained the most truth read, "Michael has achieved the mediocrity to which he so obviously aspires. Thanks, Fr. DiGiacomo.) The reputation of the school and my SATs were such that I was still able to cruise into a state school without expending substantial effort on my application. Made Dean's List first semester. Somewhere around a 2.5 my second semester. Somewhere over a 1.0 my third.

The truth of the matter is that I didn't have a single freaking clue what I wanted to do with my life. I strongly considered three or four different majors during those three semesters, had a hell of a good time actually experiencing life on my own, decided that dropping out was preferable to flunking out, and did the Gen-X thing for a couple of years. Moved out of the house, moved back in with my parents, moved back out, worked at a few different jobs in a few different fields, and just generally flowed along the path of least resistance. Fell in love, got engaged, conceived a child, got married.

The woman I married - who is still absolutely the love of my life - spent the same four years working and studying her ass off. She got into medical school, and started seven weeks after we had our eldest child. She went through medical school on active duty in the army, so we had (just) enough income to let me stay home with the baby while my wife was at school during the day.

Over the last decade-and-a-half, I've worked some, gone to school some, spent a couple of years as a stay-at-home dad, and moved around the country a bunch as my wife's military and medical careers have moved us from base to base. My wife's been the breadwinner, I've made every one of the parent-teacher meetings. It's been a hell of a ride, and I've enjoyed it. But it definitely has involved some sacrifice when it came to my own career and educational ambitions. (Fortunately, it took quite a while for me to develop real career and educational ambitions, so that bought us some time.)

For the most part, that's actually wound up working very much in my favor. (And/or I'm good at lemonade-making.) I've had the luxury of quite a bit of time to explore different options, and the ability to not get locked into something I wind up not liking in the end. It's entirely possible that this has saved me from becoming a miserable son-of-a-bitch of a scientist.

There is still some resentment. That part is real. My wife's doing an important, meaningful job. I'm going to parent-teacher meetings and taking the kids to appointments. I've been catching myself feeling jealous more often, and starting to get a little resentful - this despite the fact that most of my sacrifice has been entirely voluntary. I'm going back to school in the fall, and it looks like we've (knock on wood) managed to arrange things so that I'll be able to move through school as a full-time student and on into an actual career, and that seems to have done the trick as far as my own petty and unfounded feelings of jealousy and resentment are concerned.

This is all a really long-winded way of getting to me mostly agreeing with Nicole and Maggie. Sacrifice stresses marriage. The less sacrifice is involved, the better. But that doesn't mean sacrifice is universally a bad idea, or even something to go out of your way to avoid. Sometimes, it's the right thing to do under the circumstances, and love is often worth a lot of sacrifice.

There it was. Right there in front of me the whole time.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not under any misconceptions about being able to spend three years studying then run right out and save the world from itself. I get that most lawyers spend most of their time mostly doing things that are much more mundane. I'm fine with that. It's not like all of science is winning the Nobel Prize.

The law, when it's at it's best, is how we protect society from society. It's how we balance the freedom to swing a fist - or chop down a tree - with the freedom to breathe clean air through your nose.

That's something I want to be part of.