Erasing the Word “I”

No classroom I had ever stood in front of as a teacher had prepared me for the lesson I was about to learn as a student myself: that two words, repeated correctly, could unmake and remake a man faster than any exam. Yes Sir. No Sir. Yes Ma'am. No Ma'am.

On paper, it looks like nothing, four short phrases a child could master in an afternoon. I had, after all, spent years teaching young people about respect, about hierarchy, about the proper conduct of a citizen before institutions of authority. I assumed, walking into this part of the training, that I already understood what was being asked of me. I did not yet understand that there is a wide distance between knowing a form of respect in theory and having it become the only language your mouth is permitted to speak.

The real difficulty was never remembering the words themselves. It was erasing everything I had used instead of them for my entire adult life. Ordinary speech is full of "I", I think, I believe, I was about to, I did not mean. It is full of explanation, the small justifications a person offers instinctively when questioned, the reflex of a grown man who has spent years being listened to, who has stood at the front of his own classroom and been the one asking questions rather than answering them under pressure. That reflex, I discovered, does not disappear simply because you have decided, overnight, to join the police. It has to be dismantled, piece by piece, under supervision, in front of witnesses.

I learned this not chiefly through my own mistakes, though I made my share of them, but through watching what happened to others. An instructor would ask a recruit something sharp and sudden, and if that recruit answered the way any reasonable person answers a question in ordinary life, with an explanation, a reason, an "I was only", the correction that followed was immediate and unmistakable. It was not about the content of what they had said. It was about the shape of it, the presence of a self standing in the answer where only two acceptable words were required. I watched recruit after recruit reach instinctively for the explaining voice they had used all their lives, and I watched that voice be stripped from them in real time, replaced, insisted upon, until the only words permitted to leave their mouths were the ones the moment demanded.

There is something humbling about learning a lesson secondhand, through someone else's discomfort, and understanding with total clarity that you are next. Each correction I witnessed landed in me almost as sharply as if it had been aimed at my own mouth, because I recognized, in the recruit being corrected, my own most natural instinct; the instinct to explain myself, to offer context, to be understood as a reasoning person rather than simply obeyed as a subordinate one. Watching it happen to others taught me faster than any mistake of my own could have, because it gave me the chance to adjust before my own turn arrived, to catch the explaining word in my throat before it escaped and replace it, at the last possible second, with the only answer that was ever going to be accepted.

It took time before "Yes Sir" and "No Sir" stopped feeling like a performance and started feeling like the truth of the moment. In the beginning, I said them the way you recite something memorized rather than felt, correctly, but hollow, my private self still standing just behind the words, waiting for its turn to explain. Slowly, though, something shifted. I stopped reaching for the explanation in the first place. The impulse to justify myself, to insert my own reasoning into a moment that had not asked for it, began to quiet, not because I had been broken of having thoughts, but because I had learned, finally, when those thoughts belonged and when they did not.

I understood, somewhere in the middle of this lesson, that it was never really about two phrases. It was about learning to place the mission, the moment, and the person in authority above the reflex of the self, a discipline that had nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with humility, the same humility the Soldiers Party had introduced me to a few days before, now being carved further, this time not into my body but into my mouth.

By the time this lesson had settled into me, I had stopped counting how many times I had said the words. They had simply become the only true answer available, in that place, at that time and I was, without fully realizing it, becoming the kind of man who could give it without losing anything of himself in the giving.