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Trauma has been my greatest teacher, and it has a message all human beings need to hear. If we do not listen to what trauma has to tell us, humanity will not be able to solve problems such as war, nuclear weapons, and environmental destruction. If we ignore the teachings of trauma, these problems we have created may cause our extinction.

Just as diamonds are buried in the darkness of the earth, the solutions to our human problems are jewels hidden in the darkness of trauma. If we listen to what trauma has to say, we will learn how to heal a wide variety of problems that affect our personal lives, country, and planet. If we uncover the secrets buried in the darkness of trauma, we will even learn how to navigate our most urgent problem of all—human existence itself.

Although trauma has been my greatest teacher, I have also been transformed by other sources of wisdom. This book expresses the essential life lessons I learned during four years at West Point and seven years in the U.S. Army. I also discuss what I learned from studying humanity’s greatest peacemakers. And I share the wisdom I received from the unsung heroes of peace and justice. These people are not famous on a national or global scale, but are among the best teachers humanity has to offer.

Martial arts philosophy states that an opponent can become our greatest teacher, because struggle can make us stronger. In this way my trauma has been both an opponent that has tormented me and a teacher that has molded me. Throughout history countries have used armies, mountains, and oceans to keep foreign aggressors off their soil, but trauma is an opponent that can easily bypass these barriers and invade our communities. My father was a veteran of the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and neither large oceans nor locked doors could stop the trauma he carried with him from invading my childhood home.

When we think of shadows we often think of the shade cast by buildings and trees, but war can also cast a shadow. Unlike a building that casts a shadow in a city, war casts a shadow in the human mind. The shadow of war is a metaphor for the trauma caused by war, and by understanding this form of trauma we can better understand all forms. War casts a terrifying shadow on those who are unfortunate enough to stand in its shade; I experienced this during my childhood when my father and I spent many years living in the shadow of his war trauma.

In this book I share the life-changing insights I learned as a child in a violent household, a West Point cadet, an active duty soldier, and a student of trauma. I express these insights through metaphors that help us see the world in new ways, practical lessons we can apply to our daily lives, and stories that provide realistic hope. The army taught me that stories are one of the most powerful communication tools. To explain how this book came into existence, I must tell you a story that began before my birth. It is the story of my father.

My father, Paul B. Chappell, was born in 1925 and grew up in Virginia during the Great Depression. Half black and half white, he lived under segregation. My father was a career soldier who served in the army for thirty years and retired as a command sergeant major—the highest enlisted rank. He met my Korean mother while he was stationed in Korea. They married in 1975, and I was born in Maryland in 1980 when he was fifty-four years old. My parents moved to Alabama when I was a year old. I was their only child.

Most African Americans born in 1980 are five generations removed from slavery, but I am only three generations removed. My father was old enough to be my grandfather when I was born, thus a generation was skipped between him and me. Furthermore, my grandfather was raised not by his parents, but his grandparents, two former slaves named Wyatt and Frances Chappell; thus another generation was skipped. According to the 1870 census, Wyatt Chappell was born a slave in Alabama in 1835 and Francis Chappell was born a slave in Virginia in 1842.

Because my mother is Korean and I inherited the shape of her eyes and texture of her hair, I grew up looking Asian rather than black or white. Although I look Asian, I was raised to see the world like a black person living before the civil rights movement. The U.S. Army had desegregated during the early 1950s prior to the major civil rights victories, and throughout my childhood my father constantly told me, “The army is the only place in America where black men are given a fair chance. You’ll never be able to get a decent job unless you’re in the army.”

As a child I tried to hide the fact that I was part African American, because to me it was bad enough being half Korean, since I was often bullied because of my Asian eyes. No matter how hard I tried to hide my African American blood, however, my parents reminded me that people would eventually find out. According to them, the army was the only place where I would be accepted despite my racial background.

In 1990 when I was ten years old, General Colin Powell was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest-ranking position in the military. One day when General Powell was on television, my father said, “Just look at Colin Powell. He is the highest-ranking soldier, and he is black! Where else in America is such a thing possible? Have you ever seen a black president?” My father died in 2004, before the first African American president was elected.

If two of the generations separating me from slavery had not been skipped, perhaps I would have grown up with a different attitude toward my racial background. My attitude was not based solely on what my father told me; it was also reinforced by the racism I experienced as a child in Alabama. When I became an adult, my mother tried to protect me by reminding me that racism would continually threaten my well-being. When I told her in 2009 that I was leaving the military, she shouted, “Are you out of your mind? Nobody is going to hire you. It’s bad enough you look Asian, but you’re also part black. Nobody is going to give a job to a black man who looks Asian.” My parents did not tell me lies. On the contrary, they told me their truth. They were describing life as they had experienced it and trying to protect me from the suffering they endured.

Interracial marriage did not become legal in all U.S. states until 1967, when the Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that laws banning interracial marriage were unconstitutional. Although interracial marriage was illegal in nearly all the southern states prior to 1967, white people were not the only ones opposed to it. Marrying when interracial marriage was still controversial in many parts of the country, my parents did not feel welcome in African American or Korean communities. Many Koreans did not like that my mother had married a black man, and many African Americans did not like that my father had married an Asian woman.

The fears we develop in childhood can dominate our behavior as adults. As an adult I tried to keep my racial background a secret, because my father said people would hate me if they discovered that a person who looks Asian is part black. Since I also felt alienated from the Korean, African American, and white communities—where many people saw interracial marriage as an abomination—I was afraid of how people would react if they knew I was a product of this abomination. I felt like I was carrying a horrible secret within me. Eventually I reached a point where I could not carry this secret any longer.

When people asked me about my racial background, I would lie by saying, “I am half Korean and half white.” But when I was a twenty-two-year-old army officer I decided to no longer keep my racial background a secret. When I began to tell people the truth that I was half Korean, a quarter white, and a quarter black, their responses surprised me in a way I never expected. Instead of being horrified, they seemed oddly pleased. One southerner I told responded by saying, “That’s a really cool mix.”

Responses like this shocked me at first, because it was difficult for me to believe that anyone could see my multiracial background as positive. But attitudes about race had in fact changed. According to a Gallup poll, in 1958 only 4 percent of Americans supported interracial marriage between blacks and whites, and by 2013, the amount of support had grown to 87 percent.1

Racism still exists in America today. I have experienced it firsthand and so have many other Americans from various racial backgrounds. Just because a black president was elected does not mean racism in America is dead. But if we have made progress on the issue of race, why can’t we make more progress? I have met some people who say African Americans are not any better off today than they were under slavery two hundred years ago. Whenever I hear this it reminds me of the pro-slavery and pro-segregation propaganda in the South that claimed black people were not treated badly and most slaves were happy being slaves.

To understand what state-sanctioned slavery truly was in America, a more accurate name for it would be state-sanctioned rape and murder upon a country’s own people. It was common for slave masters to rape slave women and murder rebellious slaves, and these crimes were tolerated by the legal system. Under the system of state-sanctioned slavery, an ordinary white person could murder a black person, admit to the murder without claiming self-defense, not even accuse the black person of committing a crime, and not be put on trial.

William Lloyd Garrison, an American white man born in 1805 who dedicated his life to ending slavery, tells us: “Let it never be forgotten, that no slaveholder or overseer can be convicted of any outrage perpetrated on the person of a slave, however diabolical it may be, on the testimony of colored witnesses, whether bond or free. By the slave code, they are adjudged to be as incompetent to testify against a white man … Hence, there is no legal protection in fact, whatever there may be in form, for the slave population; and any amount of cruelty may be inflicted on them with impunity. Is it possible for the human mind to conceive of a more horrible state of society?”2

Frederick Douglass, who was born in 1818 and rumored to be descended from his white master and a black slave, describes the complete lack of legal protection for slaves in the part of Maryland where he lived, and he debunks the myth that slaves were happy being slaves:

I speak advisedly when I say that in Talbot County, Maryland, killing a slave, or any colored person, was not treated as a crime, either by the courts or the community. Mr. Thomas Lanman, ship carpenter of St. Michaels, killed two slaves, one of whom he butchered with a hatchet by knocking out his brains. He used to boast of having committed the awful and bloody deed. I have heard him do so laughingly, declaring himself a benefactor of his country and that “when others would do as much as he had done, they would be rid of the damned niggers.”

Another notorious fact which I may here state was the murder of a young girl between fifteen and sixteen years of age, by her mistress, Mrs. Giles Hicks … This wicked woman, in the paroxysm of her wrath, not content with killing her victim, literally mangled her face and broke her breastbone … The offense for which this girl was thus hurried out of the world was this: she had been set that night, and several preceding nights, to mind Mrs. Hicks’s baby, and, having fallen into a sound sleep, the crying of the baby did not wake her, as it did its mother. The tardiness of the girl excited Mrs. Hicks, who, after calling several times, seized a piece of firewood from the fireplace and pounded in her skull and breastbone till death ensued. I will not say that this murder most foul produced no sensation. It did produce a sensation. A warrant was issued for the arrest of Mrs. Hicks, but incredible to tell, for some reason or other, that warrant was never served, and she not only escaped condign punishment, but the pain and mortification, as well, of being arraigned before a court of justice …

One of the commonest sayings to which my ears early became accustomed, was, that it was “worth but a half a cent to kill a nigger, and half a cent to bury one.” While I heard of numerous murders committed by slaveholders on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, I never knew a solitary instance where a slaveholder was either hung or imprisoned for having murdered a slave …

Slaves were expected to sing as well as to work. A silent slave was not liked, either by masters or overseers. “Make a noise there! Make a noise there!” and “bear a hand,” were words usually addressed to slaves when they were silent … It was a means of telling the overseer, in the distance, where they were and what they were about … The remark in the olden time was not unfrequently made, that slaves were the most contented and happy laborers in the world, and their dancing and singing were referred to in proof of this alleged fact; but it was a great mistake to suppose them happy because they sometimes made those joyful noises. The songs of the slaves represented their sorrows, rather than their joys. Like tears, they were a relief to aching hearts. It is not inconsistent with the constitution of the human mind that it avails itself of one and the same method for expressing opposite emotions. Sorrow and desolation have their songs, as well as joy and peace.3

Racism is still a problem in America today, but African Americans are no longer subjected to the full horror of state-sanctioned slavery, which denied slaves basic education (it was illegal to teach slaves to read and write) and gave them no legal protection against being beaten, murdered, raped, worked relentlessly without pay, bought and sold as property, and stolen from their mothers as infants. If someone looked white but inherited a small amount of African American blood from an ancestor, that person could also inherit the status of a slave and be denied basic education and any legal protection against being raped and murdered.

For example, if a boy’s father was white and his mother was a biracial slave, he could be treated as a slave even though most of his blood was European. Frederick Douglass said a man “could sell his own child without incurring reproach, if in its veins coursed one drop of African blood.”4

In a January 1864 issue of the magazine Harper’s Weekly there appeared photos of three mixed-race children who looked white. Their names were Rebecca Huger, Rosina Downs, and Charles Taylor. Harper’s Weekly also printed a letter about the children written by Colonel George Hanks. Colonel Hanks commanded a northern unit of black soldiers, and he was trying to raise money for the education of freed slaves. The three mixed-race children were slaves who had been freed when a northern army led by General Butler entered New Orleans. In his letter Colonel Hanks described the white appearance of the children:

Rebecca Huger is eleven years old … To all appearance she is perfectly white. Her complexion, hair, and features show not the slightest trace of negro blood … Rosina Downs is not quite seven years old. She is a fair child, with blonde complexion and silky hair. Her father is in the rebel army. She has one sister as white as herself, and three brothers who are darker … Charles Taylor is eight years old. His complexion is very fair, his hair light and silky. Three out of five [white] boys in any school in New York are darker than he. Yet this white boy, with his mother, as he declares, has been twice sold as a slave. First by his father and “owner,” Alexander Wethers, of Lewis County, Virginia, to a slave-trader named Harrison, who sold them to Mr. Thornhill of New Orleans. This man fled at the approach of our army, and his slaves were liberated by General Butler …

These three children, to all appearance of unmixed white race, came to Philadelphia last December, and were taken by their protector, Mr. Bacon, to the St. Lawrence Hotel on Chestnut Street. Within a few hours, Mr. Bacon informed me, he was notified by the landlord that they must leave. The children, he said, had been slaves, and must therefore be colored persons, and he kept a hotel for white people.5

Since it was illegal to teach slaves to read and write, Colonel Hanks wanted to provide former slaves with a good education. This issue of Harper’s Weekly included other photos of former slaves, such as a black man named Wilson Chinn and a black boy named Isaac White. In his letter Colonel Hanks wrote: “Wilson Chinn is about 60 years old … When 21 years old he was taken down the river and sold to Volsey B. Marmillion, a sugar planter about 45 miles above New Orleans. This man was accustomed to brand his negroes, and Wilson has on his forehead the letters ‘V. B. M.’ … [Of the 105 slaves who entered the Union camp] thirty of them had been branded like cattle with a hot iron, four of them on the forehead, and the others on the breast or arm … Isaac White is a black boy of eight years; but none the less intelligent than his whiter companions. He has been in school about seven months, and I venture to say that not one boy in fifty would have made as much improvement in that space of time.”6

As slave owners controlled their slave populations by using violence and forbidding them to learn to read and write, enormous governmental powers were also used to keep slaves in captivity. To better understand how unjust state-sanctioned slavery truly was, imagine if the role of American law enforcement officers was not to punish people caught with slaves, but to return their escaped slaves to them. According to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, any U.S. marshal who refused to arrest a runaway slave should be heavily fined, and any person helping an escaped slave by providing food, shelter, or any form of assistance should be heavily fined and imprisoned.

The fact that a descendant of slaves is able to write these words today, and the fact that attitudes toward mixed-race children have changed so much since the era when a few drops of African American blood could condemn a child to slavery, are proof that progress does happen. But this progress did not happen by itself. It requires struggle. Frederick Douglass said:

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will.7

One of the most effective forms of struggle is the art of waging peace, which was successfully used by Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Wangari Maathai, and many others. Waging peace applies pressure through protests, boycotts, and other democratic means. Waging peace also attacks ignorance and hatred at their root in order to transform how people think for the better.

Two hundred years ago women could not vote, own property, or go to college, and those who advocated women’s rights were ridiculed and threatened for challenging the oppression of women. American women did not gain these rights by fighting a war. Instead, they waged peace during the women’s rights movement. And although the American Civil War kept our country together, African Americans did not truly gain their human rights until they waged peace during the civil rights movement.

Unjust policies are always supported by inaccurate beliefs. For example, American opposition to women’s right to vote was supported by the inaccurate belief that women are intellectually and morally inferior to men. As long as the vast majority of Americans believed in women’s intellectual and moral inferiority, it was easy to think women would endanger society if allowed to vote, own property, and go to college. Slavery in America was supported by the inaccurate belief that African Americans are subhuman, born to be slaves, and happy being slaves. As long as the vast majority of Americans believed that black people were racially inferior, it was easy to view them as objects with no human rights.

People have had many different kinds of inaccurate beliefs. For most of human history the majority of people believed the world was flat and the sun revolved around the earth. These people were not stupid, but had based their views on the information most readily available to them at the time. Just as people had inaccurate beliefs about our external universe, most people today have inaccurate beliefs about our internal universe—the human condition. Again, these people are not stupid, but have based their views on the information most readily available to them right now. If we do not offer people accurate information about the human condition in a way that appeals to a variety of worldviews, we cannot solve problems such as war, injustice, oppression, environmental destruction, and trauma.

A widespread view today is the inaccurate belief that human beings are naturally violent. This book offers abundant evidence to show that human beings are not naturally violent. Furthermore, this book explores the hidden causes of violence.

In my other books I write extensively about the many causes of violence; this book identifies additional causes and provides more insights into curing the virus of violence. When someone gets malaria, cancer, or HIV, I have never heard anyone say, “Oh, that’s just human nature,” because people realize something has gone wrong within the human body. But if someone becomes violent, people often say, “Oh, that’s just human nature,” which assumes that violence is an essential part of being human (like eating and sleeping), rather than the result of something that has gone wrong. But what if violence, like an illness, has a cause that we can understand and prevent? This book will offer abundant evidence to support this claim.

Today it is common knowledge that war traumatizes the human brain. This is so noncontroversial that even pro-war people now say war is hell. But if human beings were naturally violent, why would war traumatize the human brain, and why wouldn’t people go to war and become more mentally healthy? If human beings were naturally violent, why would raising a child in a peaceful and loving environment be good for the human brain, and why would raising a child in a violent and abusive environment be bad for the human brain?

This book will challenge the inaccurate beliefs about violence that prevent us from creating a more peaceful world. Injustice benefits from the inaccurate belief that human beings are naturally violent, because if violence is as much a part of our nature as eating and sleeping, then I can look at gang violence among impoverished youth and say, “That’s just their human nature. It’s natural for them to murder each other. There’s nothing I can do about it, so why should I care?”

But what if human beings are not naturally violent? If violence is not an essential part of being human like eating and sleeping, but is more like an illness that occurs when something has gone wrong, then we can proactively do something about the causes of violence. Just as preventable problems such as malnutrition and lack of clean water can cause physical illness, preventable problems such as poverty, desperation, injustice, dehumanization, ignorance, bullying, and trauma can cause violent behavior.

According to Gary Slutkin, a medical doctor and founder of the program Cure Violence, which works to stop gang violence: “Violence is like the great infectious diseases of all history. We used to look at people with plague, leprosy, TB, as bad and evil people … What perpetuates violence can be as invisible today as the microorganisms of the past were.”8

This book is part of The Road to Peace series, a seven-book series about waging peace, ending war, the art of living, and what it means to be human. As the fifth book in this series, The Cosmic Ocean provides new answers to big questions about violence, peace, trauma, joy, oppression, war, environmental destruction, spirituality, the human condition, and humanity’s future. Just as inaccurate beliefs support unjust policies, realistic answers enable progress.

Like the other books in this series, The Cosmic Ocean shows how the road to peace is also the road of peace. In other words, the road that leads to peace is made of our dedicated efforts to wage peace. Because The Cosmic Ocean revisits a few of the central ideas from the other books, this book series can be read in any order. Each book journeys deeper into the human condition by expanding those central ideas in new directions and also introducing a lot of new content.

The Road to Peace book series journeys through dark places such as trauma, war, and racism, like passing through a foreboding cave, shadowy forest, or winding tunnel. But we will emerge on the other side with larger hope, stronger empathy, greater understanding, and practical tools we can use to improve our lives and communities. The stories in this book show how the brightest light shines in the deepest darkness, and how the answers human beings are searching for can be found in the darkest places of the human mind where many are afraid to enter.