By Alicia LaMagdeleine, Interim Assistant Head of School
The year is rapidly winding down. Spring Break has come and gone. A flurry of standardized testing - both APs and ECAs - will start up soon. We just finished a highly successful Community Day in which students survived a zombie apocalypse and used the current film The Hunger Games to process a variety of issues on team work, injustice, and values-based decision making. And that makes me think of Dave Vesper, as I often do in this new position. I am here playing war games. He is actually at war.
It is his sacrifice of time and energy that is keeping me focused as the balls get harder to juggle in the push toward the end. Below are the words I read at his last assembly in December. While I find it hard to imagine what his day-to-day life must be like now, I continue to envision him as an affirming flame, a light in the darkness, to which we all owe so much.
I first knew Dave as an entity. He was on his first tour in Afghanistan when I was hired to be Chuck's assistant, and I knew him only as some one referred to, talked about. Because these were the days before Chuck's mastery of the iPad, he was a face on a website I was to check often for news. I think he only updated it twice. I saw grainy pictures of him in a desert, and looked up his photo in an old yearbook in order to make out his face. I met his wife, Lara, at a music concert Chuck went out of his way to make sure she attended because he swore that in the "old days" Dave never missed one. For months, I wondered why my new boss kept a tennis ball on his desk. It was clear everyone here cared deeply about Dave. I had no idea who he was.
And for some reason, call it the narrow-minded thinking of my twenties, I was certain that when he came back, we wouldn't get along. I had never really know anyone in the military, maybe an old high school classmate or two, a distant cousin I never really spoke with, but I had it in my head that if he was a soldier, we probably weren't going to have a lot in common. I was wrong. He was thoughtful. He was kind. He was committed to fairness and justice. He inspired his students. He saw value in the world. He loved the movie Red Dawn.
When Dave left the second time, this time to Iraq, this time as someone I knew and admired and cared for, it was while I was teaching Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun, an anti-war novel written in the wake of World War I. And I struggled with the tension I felt between my own beliefs about our country's presence in the Middle East and his willingness to go where he was needed and do what needed to be done. So I did what I it is that I do when I get stuck, I read a poem.
In fact, I scrapped everything I had planned for the day we sent you off, and I read the same poem, over and over again to each class I had that day. It was W.H. Auden's "September 1, 1939". Auden, who by the way writes later that he hates this poem, wrote the piece at the start of World War II. In it, he chronicles the history of modern man and his external skirmishes and internal anguish has inevitably lead him to brink of destruction so much of the world felt teetered on at that time. But he ends, however, like this:
"Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame."
Dave Vesper is one of the Just. The point of light that Auden saw piercing the darkness of a distant shore. He centers us, he provides for us, he protects us, and he helps us illuminate the best versions of ourselves. Carry the message forward Dave. We will hold the flame until you return. Good luck and Godspeed.
