Paul Chappell - Soldiers of Peace

I am not a pessimist or an optimist, but a realist. Today the word realism is rarely used to describe reality, but has instead become a disguise for cynicism. As I show in my other books, I am a realist because extreme trauma, a lifetime of studying the human condition, and my experiences in the military have allowed me to understand the many causes of violence and rage, along with their potential cures. As I will show in this book, I am a realist because I perceive the nature of time realistically, which has given me an abundance of realistic hope.

My existence has also given me realistic hope. In 1958 only 4 percent of Americans supported interracial marriage between blacks and whites. By 2013 the amount of support had grown to 87 percent. I am living proof of the change in attitude toward interracial marriage, because my mother is Korean, my father was half black and half white, and I grew up in Alabama.

My father, Paul B. Chappell, was born in 1925 and grew up in Virginia during the Great Depression. Half black and half white, he lived under segregation. My father was a career soldier who served in the army for thirty years and retired as a command sergeant majorthe highest enlisted rank. He met my Korean mother while he was stationed in Korea. They married in 1975, and I was born in Maryland in 1980 when he was fifty-four years old. My parents moved to Alabama when I was a year old. I was their only child.

Since my childhood, my father told me that the only place in America where a black man had a fair chance was in the army. Because he grew up before the civil rights movement, and the army had desegregated prior to the major civil rights victories, he believed that black men were treated better in the army than in civilian society. In fact, one of the influences that led Rosa Parks to oppose segregation was her job as a secretary on a desegregated military base. Historian Jeanne Theoharis, in her book The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, tells us:

One further insult in Montgomery [Alabama] came from the disconnect between the treatment blacks encountered on the integrated trolley on Maxwell Air Force Base and the citys segregated buses and other public spaces. Indeed, blacks and whites worked together at the Maxwell base, which had an integrated cafeteria, bachelor hall, and swimming pool. Rosa had worked at Maxwell for a time, and [her husband] Raymonds barber chair was on the base. You might just say Maxwell opened my eyes up, Parks noted. It was an alternative reality to the ugly policies of Jim Crow. Parks sometimes rode the bus [on the military base] with a white woman and her child, sitting across from them and chatting. When they reached the edge of the base and boarded the city bus, she had to go to the back. Thus, Rosa Parks had direct personal contact with desegregated transportation in her own hometown. This visceral experience highlighted the sheer arbitrariness of segregated public transportation and made riding the city bus even more galling.

My parents pressured me to go to West Point, not only because they thought I would have limited opportunity as a result of being part black, but also because they had seen how white people, African Americans, and Koreans rejected me as a racially mixed outcast. After all, white people were not the only ones who opposed interracial marriage, which was illegal in nearly all southern states prior to the 1967 Supreme Court decision Loving v. Virginia. Marrying when interracial marriage was still controversial in many parts of the country, my parents did not feel welcome in African American or Korean communities. Many Koreans did not like that my mother had married a black man, and many African Americans did not like that my father had married an Asian woman.

When I told my mother in 2009 that I was leaving the military, she shouted, Are you out of your mind? Nobody is going to hire you. Its bad enough you look Asian, but youre also part black. Nobody is going to give a job to a black man who looks Asian.

My parents did not tell me lies. On the contrary, they told me their truth. They were describing life as they had experienced it and trying to protect me from the suffering they endured.

I left the army in 2009 as a captain and began working as the Peace Leadership director for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, a nonprofit organization cofounded by its current president, David Krieger. When I told my mother about this new job, she asked me, When David Krieger hired you, did he know youre part black?

Yes, I replied.

She said, Well you need to thank him, because he is a white man and he hired you, even though he knew you were part black. I have thanked David Krieger in words many times for giving me the opportunity to work full-time for peace, and I thank him with my actions by doing my best to serve the mission of peace.

The United States of America is far from perfect today and has a long way to journey on the road to peace, but Id much rather be part Asian and part African American in 2015 (the year I am writing this book) rather than before the civil rights movement in 1915 or during slavery in 1815. Today I often meet people who respond in a positive way to my mixed racial background, which is something I could not imagine as a child in the 1980s. This is also something my father, who died in 2004, could not imagine. Again, our country has a long way to journey on the road to peace, but if we have made progress, why cant we make more progress?