The Armory
Maple City Dispatch: stories from the former “Fence Capital of the World,” Adrian, MI
by Nathaniel Berry
The National Guard Armory was built in the twenties, using the kind of stone-and-brick work that nobody knows how to do anymore. It was a place you rented for quinceañeras and weddings, and you didn’t have to think too much about the military trucks parked out back, behind the wire. They locked the building down after 9-11, and they cut down the trees on the front lawn. They obscured the building’s line of sight, some junior tactician probably argued, dreaming of Adrian, Michigan invaded suddenly by the bad guys from Red Dawn. Tactics had nothing to do with killing those trees—after the towers came down on all the TVs in Lenawee County, we needed some symbolic act of destruction to solidify our covenant with America, to demonstrate our eagerness to make sacrifices, to remind any who drove down Maumee Street that the time for beautiful things was over.
Adrian got more patriotic after the attacks, as vicariously shell-shocked small towns must. To us, patriotism meant flying American flags from sticks on our tree-lined streets, and it meant that kids in our schools got to say towelhead and not get detention. Mahdi, a friend of my parents from the Adrian College Chemistry Department, got the police called on him every time he went to the reservoir to check the water quality during those first, heady months, when we were united in fear and hatred of anyone we could cast as our enemy. We got sentimental, the VFW stuck a Vietnam-era Huey gunship atop a concrete pillar on Main, across from Gallant & Sons Small Engines. The helicopter is mounted at an angle that suggests an imminent crash; the invitation to remember how Vietnam turned out for our empire is probably more poetry than the VFW intended.
I hear a lot of talk about how the American people were sold a lie about Afghanistan, but I don’t remember us being sold anything. We were children, shown Afghanistan highlighted on a televised map, and the anchors told us that’s where the war was going to be. The president invaded Iraq and told us the war was to continue in Iran and North Korea. The next president invaded Libya, sent assassins by air into Pakistan and told us that Syria was next, and the president after that talked about expanding the war to Venezuela while troops died in Niger and our allies starved children in Yemen. We lash out at the world like a dying animal, instinctive and unconscious—but we are never sold a war. It’s unnecessary. Our rulers know we won’t be able to stop the next one, either.
They sent military recruiters to our high school cafeteria to hand out knockoff Livestrong bracelets and keychain lanyards. It was that easy to sell a career in the military to kids in post-industrial towns; jobs are scarce, college isn’t free. People left to fight the war less because there was anything at home worth defending, and more because there was very little at home left to lose.
Sam joined up after high school, but something happened during training and he never got deployed. When he came back, he held down the night shift at Wesco for a few years. I don’t know what he’s doing now. Kat’s ex-boyfriend went AWOL from training and came back broken, furious; he stabbed three people before the police beat him to the ground. Jeremy and Rachel did tours overseas and raise their kids on disability. Martin’s brother-in-law is still in the service. He isn’t old enough to remember 9-11, but he remembers when we pulled out of Kurdistan, remembers the faces of a lot of people who were useful to the American war machine until one day they weren’t. I asked him once if he thought we were doing any good over there. He laughed.
But, remember 9-11? Even Ivy-League, Red-Diaper-sickos like me remember 9-11. I watched it happen on the blurry, wall-mounted TV in Home Ec––later on repeat, on a TV wheeled in to the band room. Teachers wept and kids stared out the windows, watching the sky for more planes, as though Drager Middle School was going to be the keystone target of Bin Laden’s whole operation. Our president told us to keep going to restaurants and to keep buying things, and I watched the towers fall, zoomed-in, slow-motion, over my dad’s shoulder at dinner. We ate at the Grasshopper that night. We wanted to prove that the terrorists and the war-masters weren’t going to win. But we all know they did, right?
They won the minute we started bombing Afghanistan, they win every time a new target gets painted. We insist that people go hungry in places like Adrian, Michigan; we close schools in such places, we close hospitals so that they can afford to level places just like Adrian, Michigan—towns with names we never learn, in countries vaguely on the other side of the globe. The 21st century is written in daily 9-11s: in tragedies our empire imposes on someone else. By the time we cut down the trees at the Armory, we were committed to this. We were already lost.
They redid the interior in 2018—I haven’t been inside, but the renovations look promising. They refinished the floors and hung new lights, installed cabinets and stained glass that were donated from McKinley Elementary, one of the schools we closed in Adrian during the past twenty years. We can’t make beautiful things like we used to, but we can rearrange the remnants and clean them up into something nice. The Armory is a very attractive venue for anyone willing to risk a large public gathering, but I’m not sure who will be around to enjoy the trees by the time they grow back.
