Septimus Gardens

Digging In

Twenty-one years ago, in the Marine Corps School of Infantry, I learned the phrase ‘digging in’. Literally, it meant to build a defensive position or to hold one’s ground. We used short collapsible shovels called ‘entrenching tools,’ a label held over from the First World War, though we never dug any trenches. The modern military digs fighting holes, narrow gashes in the earth six feet deep intended to keep the shrapnel out and withstand the weight of an enemy tank. This spring in my own home, I discovered a new definition for digging in, new to me, that is, but old to the world.

In 2004, I went to Iraq. Being an urban conflict we dug neither trenches nor fighting holes; we resided in whatever buildings we could find unoccupied. But that phrase ‘digging in’ endured and we did dig in. The struggle to make any visible headway in Iraq was intense and heartbreaking. The lives we sacrificed and took could not be applied to any tangible victory; there was no advance to map; there was no ground taken or lost. Our perseverance lay in our ability to remain static and withstand the deepening tension between Iraqis and ourselves.

Today I am home again—my body is at any rate but my mind has never been able to fully return from the battlefield. I am steeped daily and nightly in the memories of the desert. I’ve been home for five years now. My life has become entirely about managing those memories and I’ve learned some valuable techniques. I’ve traveled to Jordan to work with refugees, for instance, written a book, ridden my bicycle across the United States, and spoken to thousands of people about the wars of our time. It is the latest of my strategies, however, that has pulled me back to those days of digging in.

I stood on my property one morning looking across all the dead materials I had to clear off—the sticks, the leaves, the fallen branches—and it made me weary. I’ve had enough of death, I thought. I want to get involved with life. So from that day I decided to grow things. I marched to the shed and rummaged among my tools to find what I’d need to create gardens of vegetables, fruits, and flowers. I don’t know a thing about gardening; I’ve never planted a seed in my life but I knew when I put my hand on the shovel that I’d need that. 

Digging in has always been, for me, about killing or keeping myself from being killed. In war, soldiers score the earth with their shovels, some of them essentially digging their own graves. The first time I pressed the heel of my boot on a garden spade I felt the shift inside me like tectonic plates beneath the surface. As I dug into the soil with my fingers, pulling out the rocks and the roots and preparing it for sowing, I felt the ground in an entirely different way; I saw it in a new light.

The act of digging as creation rather than destruction has been deeply stirring to me, so far anyway. I’ve only just started. Since beginning the cultivation of my land I have found the weight of my war memories less ponderous than before, less haunting, less tyrannical. They are my memories and they will always be there, of course, but gardening has somehow overshadowed them as if the plants were growing wild inside my head. I say let them grow and I’ll use my memories for compost.  

And by the way, I don’t believe it is simply that gardening work is engrossing or even that it is rewarding. It is both, certainly, but there’s something more. The entire process of growing from digging in to harvest is perfectly representative of the life cycle. All species struggle, in their own manners, to sustain themselves. It is the natural and logical pattern of existence. Only the human race works so hard to destroy itself.

It saddens me, sometimes, to think that I devoted most of my adult life to this business. After a while the causes for war cannot penetrate the essence of our purpose as warriors—to kill. If we do it long enough, it is what we become. The causes no longer matter. With the green movement underway and a revitalized interest in the environment, local produce, and public gardening surging into the American consciousness, I feel I am back in synch with life’s intrinsic momentum.  

Coming home has been more than just adapting to life in the aftermath of war; it has been very much about remaking myself. Beneath the ramparts of my consciousness there is still the man I could have been; I know it. Envisioning that character and creating him has been a slow process. All of my life’s experiences have shaped my identity and perspectives but war, I think, has made a disproportionate claim on me. I need to take a little back and I will. Gardening is going to help. And I can smile now when I think of digging in.

 And so began the Septimus Gardens