I often ask my students who their heroes are. Most can name parents, as they should, and many times I hear about other family members. I’m usually incredulous when a student can’t name anyone as a hero, mentor or inspiration. We all need someone that we know, that we can observe tackling the everyday tasks, to look up to and I pity those who have not had that experience.
In the spring of 1994 I journeyed from my home in Northern Virginia to the New River Valley of Southwest Virginia to attend
Radford University. I believe it was my second semester that I met
Dr. Nick Pappas, professor of political science. Pappas is a whirlwind in the classroom, shocking and confusing his students to tackle large and at time mysterious topics. It was through his reading lists that I first encountered Plato,
Simon Veil, and, of course,
Eric Voegelin. Pappas had a teaching tool that I still remember fondly. I imagine he developed it slowly, over the decades of dealing with poorly read, apathetic 20 year olds. Pappas was the first teacher that ever I had that introduced me to the gray, the troubling middle ground between two poles that exist between difficult concepts, realities and life. Instead of being disappointed that we had no frame of reference for any thought produced in classical Greece, Pappas would rush in pretending that we did indeed have the reference. For instances this was a common introduction to a lecture.
“Class! We will remember that in book five the of The Republic Plato………….”
Alone in his office many times he would remind me of what Kant, or Hegel had said yet he certainly knew I had no clue. He used to use this trick in such an unassuming way that he made you feel like maybe you had done the reading, or had heard of whomever he was reminding you about. It really empowered the student and made him and the material accessible.
Pappas, in moments too few, would expose his life. Born in West Virginia he played high school sports at a time when the Washington DC area was rural, sparsely populated and he would make me laugh when talking about his idyllic memories of the place. Having grown up in Woodbridge he would often ask me about Quantico, where he attended Marine Corps Officer Candidate School. He was always shocked when I told him about how developed the area had become.
The rumor was that he turned down an opportunity to play in the NFL to join the Marines. It wasn’t soon after his enlistment that he was deployed to South Vietnam, Da Nang to be exact, in some of the first months of the USA’s 1965 escalation. Once and only once he told me about the night his Commanding Officer ordered Pappas to lead a reconnaissance outside the base perimeter to investigate reports that the enemy was laying mines. His response, “How will we know if they have?”
He was wounded, something that is mentioned in Philip Caputo’s classic,
A Rumor of War. While researching this post I came across a recollection Pappas wrote for
American Heritage Magazine.
COMMISERATOR IN CHIEF
In 1965 I spent eight months at Bethesda Naval Hospital recovering from shrapnel wounds and two broken legs received in Vietnam. One day that fall, our corpsmen announced that some of us were to be wheel-chaired to a meeting with the President of the United States. Lyndon B. Johnson was in Bethesda for a gallbladder operation, and we had seen the famous picture of him pointing at his scar, presumably to reassure the American people that he was healthy and fit to run the country.
The young lieutenants and enlisted men sat dressed in their blue hospital garb, awaiting a thank-you or even a pep talk. Many in that room had ghastly wounds or missing limbs from high explosives, bullets, or fire. The President drew himself up and announced, “I know just how you boys feel,” then went on to explain that he had just felt the surgeon’s knife. The room was absolutely quiet, no response except silent amazement being possible. Lady Bird Johnson broke the strange miasma hanging over the place. After a Secret Service agent briskly walked in and called her out, she returned, beaming like a possum up a persimmon tree, to announce that she had some good news. Her daughter Luci had just got her first B in college!
Did President Johnson’s eerie speech to his warriors represent some kind of inability to articulate his war, politically or strategically? As I think back, there was a kind of spiritual brokenness hanging over the man even at that early stage of the conflict.
The redeeming part of the day was furnished by my future wife, Pam, who arrived by Greyhound from West Virginia to visit me at the hospital. Without a pause she walked right through Johnson’s security and unhinged a. guard at an elevator with the simple question, “Does this thing go up?”
—Nick Pappas is a political science professor at Radford University in Radford, Virginia.
Nick Pappas has a lot to do with why I’m teaching today. I can thank him for exposing me to some of the truths of life.
One of the concepts that I keep returning to in life is the idea of the Metaxy. The word comes from Plato’s Symposium and is used to describe a middle ground or an in-between. Plato uses the Metaxy as a metaphor for man’s journey from becoming to being. Later the word was co-opted and I would claim empowered by Voegelin (who Pappas once saw, lecturing at UVA, but that’s another story). Voegelin used the Metaxy to mean the permanent place where man is in-between two poles of existence. I have come to use the word Metaxy as the difficult terrain where life’s realities are discovered, usually through hardship and pain. Not quite earth and not quite transcendence. The metaxy is a place, where we all must go to lead a life worth living.
