FRIENDLY FIRE

At least twenty people were right there in front of the school the day Mr Miller had an egg dropped on his head as he walked through the front door. It was a direct hit: the egg struck his head square-on and ran down his face and behind both of his stick-out, pitifully pink ears. He barely flinched – just kept on walking, like it hadn’t happened.

He was our brand-new French teacher, Mr Miller. Shy and nervous, he had the look of someone who’d had a rough time of it as a kid, who’d never fit in.  He had all sorts of good teaching ideas that never went anywhere. Reciting poems, singing songs, doing paired conversational activities. Other teachers might have made these things work, but Mr Miller, in all his blushing timidity, lacked the ability to pull it off. Everyone could smell the weakness in him – even the other teachers. None of his students paid him the least bit of attention; even the good ones were liable to goof off in class.

How did he feel with that egg congealing on his head? On the wall in front of his desk, he had poetry about the evils of war, the human condition. Siegrid Sassoon and Wilfred Owen lamenting the futility of human conflict. Robert Burns mourning man’s inhumanity to man. (Working with 12- and 13-year-olds,  I cannot help but feel, he must have found these particularly comforting.) He was also a great fan of Gandhi and Reverend King, with pictures of them, and framed quotations about non-violent communication on his wall. But walking along the corridor with egg running down his face, did he really feel non-violent himself? Didn’t he want to catch one of those kids up in the parapet who’d lain in wait for him there, a whole dozen eggs in their arsenal? Who were, as he wiped yolk and white and bits of shell out of his hair with trembling fingers, whooping it up outside, reliving the wonder and glory of that satisfying direct hit? 

Shame on you kids! said our homeroom teacher. We didn’t deserve a good, decent teacher like Mr Miller. The football coach, on the other hand, thought it was all a hoot, a little good-natured fun. If a man didn’t know how to deal with an egg dropped on his head, he had no business being a junior high teacher.

It was early 1967, and the Vietnam War was in full swing. Thousands of young men were on their way to Canada, anxious to avoid the draft. Mr Miller, we had been told, was a conscientious objector. One of the first songs he’d tried so unsuccessfully to get us to sing in French was Peter Yarrow’s LeDeserteur.

Shortly after the egg incident, Mr Miller left the school. A year passed and no one thought much about him at all. Then a lady ran into my mother in the supermarket and mentioned that one of my former teachers had been killed in the Tet Offensive. Mr Miller hadn’t been killed in combat, it turned out. He’d been killed by friendly fire.