What the Warrior Forgot

My grandfather told me a story when I was young, maybe six or seven. He said in the old days, before the reservations, before all of it, a warrior had four responsibilities. Not three. Not two. Four.

First, protect the people. Everyone knows that one.

Second, provide for the people. They know that one too.

Third—and this is where the TV version stops—care for the children. Not just your children. All children. A warrior who ignored a child in need was no warrior at all.

Fourth, and this is the one nobody remembers: feel everything fully. A warrior who could not weep at beauty, who could not sit with grief, who could not let his heart crack open at a sunset or a birth or a death—that man was not strong. He was numb. And numb men make dangerous decisions.

My grandfather said: "The people who took our land, they only kept the first two. Protect and provide. They threw away the other half. And then they taught our boys the broken version."

I have thought about this every day of my adult life.

I run a talking circle for men on the reservation. Tuesday nights, community center, folding chairs, bad coffee. Some nights it's four guys. Some nights it's twelve. The youngest is sixteen. The oldest is seventy-one.

We don't do therapy. That's a word that makes men here walk the other direction. We sit in a circle and we pass a stone and whoever holds the stone talks. Or doesn't. Sometimes a man holds the stone for five minutes in silence, and that's his contribution, and we honor it.

Last month a young man—I won't use his name—held the stone and said he'd been sober for ninety days and he didn't know who he was without the drinking. He said alcohol was the only thing that made him feel like the pain had a volume knob. Without it, everything was loud.

Nobody told him to man up. Nobody quoted scripture or statistics. An elder across the circle said, "I was you, forty years ago. It stays loud for a while. Then you learn to hear what the noise is actually saying."

That's it. That was the whole intervention. One man telling another: I was you. I survived this. You will too.

The boys I work with—fifteen, sixteen, seventeen—they get their idea of a warrior from movies. From video games. The warrior fights. The warrior wins. The warrior doesn't flinch.

I ask them: "What does a warrior do after the fight?"

They don't know. The movie doesn't show that part. The game doesn't have that level.

I tell them: After the fight, the warrior goes to the river. He washes the blood off his hands. He sits alone and lets the shaking come. He weeps if he needs to. Then he goes back to the village and holds his children and tells them what he saw, so they will understand the cost of violence and choose it only as a last defense.

That is the warrior tradition. The whole thing. Not the highlight reel.

I lost my own son to alcohol seven years ago. He was twenty-three. He was the funniest person I ever knew. He could make a room full of grieving people laugh. And underneath the laughter he was drowning, and I didn't see it because he performed strength so well.

The night he died, I went to the river. It was November and the water was almost frozen. I knelt on the bank and I howled. Not cried—howled. Like an animal. My hands in the mud. My face to the sky.

My wife found me there an hour later. She didn't say anything. She knelt beside me and put her hand on my back.

That is the fourth responsibility. Feel everything fully. I failed to teach it to my son. I will not fail to teach it to the boys who sit in my circle on Tuesday nights.

The warrior tradition was never broken. It was stolen. We are stealing it back, one stone passed at a time.

“The warrior tradition was never broken. It was stolen. We are stealing it back, one stone passed at a time.” Click to tweet →