Army time runs early, and o’dark-thirty comes fast.

I’ve put this uniform on for thirty years. In the predawn dark, muscle memory does the work. Service-T, boot socks, uniform trousers, web belt, boots. My hands make the adjustments without being told. Last, the blouse. Patches, rank, name tapes, precisely in place. Regulations matter. The process is almost ceremonial now. A rite worn into me through time and repetition.

An army uniform makes identity literal. Before anyone knows me, they can read me.

WYATT
COLONEL
U.S. ARMY

For the initiated, a glance to the left shoulder tells them who I belong to. A glance to the right tells them I’ve been downrange. Simple words and symbols that define me. Yet every one of them carries a story far larger and older than the body wearing it.

There are expectations attached. Someone who has never heard my voice can approach me already expecting an answer, a decision, a certain kind of conduct. He has read the uniform. I haven’t even opened my mouth.

My great-grandfather’s highest compliment for a man was “He’s good people.”

When I was a kid, I thought it was a quirk of language. Some small affectation that grew up in these hills like an old maple. Looking back, I understand it as a reflection on that man’s people. The family he represented. My great-grandfather saw the man before him through his memory of that man’s parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. It was the collective reputation of the Hills, the Blakes, or the Mussers.

The family name meant something to him because of something someone did or didn’t do fifty years earlier. It may well have rested on his own grandfather’s opinion of those people. A judgment could survive long enough that nobody left alive remembered the event that earned it.

“Steer clear of those people,” he would say. “They are not to be trusted.”

“Those people will look you right in the eye and steal the grease out of your skillet.”

“Those sons a’ bitches will pat you on the back just to find the soft spot where they can stick in the knife.”

Some ancient transgression alluded to but not explained. No story attached, just the finality of a verdict left to my boy understanding to conjure, make sense of, and obey.

Strangely, or perhaps predictably, the proclamations shifted my perceptions. Those people seemed suddenly darker, more suspect. Whatever evil act belonged to the past followed and implicated the descendants in the present.

I didn’t need to see them steal anything. I had been told what sort of people they were. Whatever they did afterward would arrive beneath that suspicion. Even kindness could become the hand looking for the soft spot.

I never wondered if I was considered good people back then. It never occurred to me that I might be one of those sons a’ bitches looking where to stick the knife. Somewhere, another old man might have had something to say about the Wyatts. Another boy might have been listening.

I think about it now—about how much that name altered me before I had any say.

Boy. Wyatt. American. Working class. White. Methodist. Appalachian.

They have all been my names. Some I outgrew. Some I outran. Or thought I did. Some were laid so deeply into my understanding that I had trouble recognizing them as an influence at all. They were simply how things were.

That may be where a name does its most lasting work. Before I could explain what any of those words meant, I was learning what belonged with them. What a boy should do. What sort of work deserved respect. Who was one of us. What could get a person talked about.

I could learn the shame before I understood the rule.

Those names instructed me in what was expected and what was shameful. They narrowed the possibilities before I knew there were possibilities to narrow.

They also shaped the names I chose for myself later.

I marched forward into my life, dead set on earning new names. I wanted to be good people. I wanted to be the useful man standing watch, the one who was calm under fire and knew how to shoulder the burdens of others.

Officer. Doctor. Colonel. Husband. Father.

I kept adding names, and the boy answered to every one of them. He learned to stand straight. To be the person someone called when things went wrong. He grew older inside the work until people began looking to him the way he had once looked to grown men. Still, somewhere beneath the titles, there was a boy who was listening for someone to say he’d turned out right. That he was good people.

Some of those names took years of study, work, and service. Others began with a promise or the arrival of a child, then asked things of me I had scarcely understood when I took them on.

I left little room for myself inside those expectations. If I was the man who knew what to do, uncertainty had to go somewhere out of sight. If I was the one who carried things, my own need to put something down became difficult to admit.

There is a difference between having a duty and needing to remain recognizable to yourself as the man who will always do it. From the outside, the behavior might look exactly the same. I am not sure I have always known the difference from the inside. I’m pretty certain I have not.

And good people is a comfortable thing to believe about yourself. It can make an ugly act seem like an exception before you have properly looked at it. My great-grandfather’s suspicion could follow another family through generations, whatever their intentions. I have been more willing to hear a defense of my own. I have allowed my good intentions to speak for me before I had properly accounted for what I did.

It is harder to question what I inherited when I am still using it to tell myself I am a good man.

I have to take what I was given and figure out what I want to keep. That should be easy enough. But those names I started with wore ruts in the road. Even when I turn toward something different, I can feel the wheels wanting to settle back. Sometimes the old direction still looks like the right one. Sometimes it is. I cannot discard every value I inherited simply because I inherited it.

But keeping it is not the same as having taken a hard look at it.

With fewer years ahead than behind, I have begun trying to distinguish what I chose from what I was taught to admire. The distinction may be impossible. Even the man making it was formed somewhere.

Strip away the names and there may be no untouched self waiting beneath them. Only the fingerprints of everyone and everything that taught me how to become a man.

One last check of the uniform.

WYATT.

When I was a boy, that name already contained dead men. Their conduct had entered it, along with whatever people remembered, misunderstood, or never bothered to question. Eventually I will be one of the dead men inside the name. My sons will carry it into rooms I will never enter. Perhaps their sons will too.

Somewhere in that future, someone may hear it and decide they already know something about the person standing before them.

I straighten the blouse and step out into the day.

What will my name require of someone who comes after me?

Will they be good people?