On my first visit I asked
A stock question about
Whether you’d been in the military.

Marines, nineteen sixty-six, you said,
A hint of menace in your eyes.
I never talk about it.

On my way out the door
I asked your wife about a
Tree in the front yard,

Its branches capped with
Blue and green and pink
Bottles made of glass.

It’s a bottle tree, she said.
Pointing at a cobalt blue bottle
Glinting with sunlight,

She told me it had
Special power to lure in
Ghosts and lurking spirits.

They get trapped in there, she said.
Then sunlight burns them up
So they can’t haunt us anymore.

Eight months later
You could no longer walk.
I rolled your wheelchair

Onto the warbled porch
Where we sat and talked
About how rough life is.

I never told you about
Vietnam, did I? You whispered.
I shook my head.

As you spoke,
Your eyes averted,
I looked at that cobalt blue bottle

And imagined it slowly filling
With blood and shrieks
And grief and the sound of

Rotor blades and the smell
Of burning flesh and the
Taste of splattered gore

And the sensation of
Adrenaline pulsing and
Memories of home and

Buddies who were killed
And of fear and rage and
betrayal and weeping

That lodge in your throat
Before you swallow
It all down

Into your belly.
Don’t ever tell anyone
About this, you said,

Your hands trembling,
Jaw shivering.
I asked if there was

Anything else.
You started to say something
But stopped yourself.

No, you said.

Only the dead have seen the end of war –Plato

he lies down, finally to rest.
grey light bands his closed door
with no silver at the edges. They said he left
one foot in the sand. wait, a head
no, a hand. the pale orange bottle, only
dust at the bottom, slips from his
fingers. one missed his mouth
small, white, and round, it
shines from the dark floor like
a little moon. In the space
between shadows and dreaming
his way to death, he smoothes a dressing on
the hole in Seth’s neck, he wraps
a scarf on Nick’s face, still
burning with chemical fire, he
lowers Jeremy’s hand, still gloved,
into a black trash bag. His
pupils sharpen to pinpoints, his
chants flatten to breathlessness, these,
his friends’ names, hammered into
cold steel necklaces
Jeremy, Seth, Nick
beckoning
from darkness

won’t someone tell him
you’re not crazy
you should want to go home but
stay a while
stay and be here with me

The brass buttons are piled in a bowl
that sits on the shop counter
beside the cash register,
so I buy one,
watch as the clerk drops it
into a paper bag, gently
folding the open end over
so the button doesn’t fall out. 

Such are the tender considerations
we resort to when it comes
to Union buttons mined
from Marye’s Heights, the field
blood transformed into a massive
trauma center, and those many
soldiers, hastily tipped into graves
scratched higgeldy-piggeldy in the earth
and quickly left, without markers,
abandoned to the underground,
earth’s crowded room,
to work its magic on the soldiers
and their uniforms under
the same gibbous moon
shining down on life going on,
so that one day a treasure hunter
turns the detector’s sensitivity
to high, reaching well past
unreadable trash,
finally capturing a deeper
signal to shovel through grass,
past stones and worms, into dreams
of wealth or glory, pulling up
a solitary, now verdegris button
bent slightly as the soldier
fell hard perhaps against a rock
that would sleep unchanged beside him
until the treasure hunter conspired
to craft a stranglehold on history
proclaiming that this discovery
announced an end of sorts to the story
of a fallen soldier,
one that can be labeled,
one you can put a price on,
but the truth is that buttons
cannot be counted on
to hold a jacket snug, can even
loose their hold on the fabric
of dignity, on the fable
of victory, if what they hold
has been released to flourish
underground forgetting
that perfection is elusive
and we are not perfect
though we hurl ourselves at it
again and again.

Checkpoint                                                                                      

The car came from nowhere, it came
from everywhere –

white blur and tire squall,
a four-door payload
of heat and pressure and steel.

When it is over, there is just
the tinkle of falling brass and a man
slumped
in a pool of broken glass
and coolant on hot asphalt,
calm as a corpse.

Doc cuts his shirt.
His face is weathered by years
of this. Layers
of skin and yellow fat pucker
from his open side.

He breathes.

In the trunk of the rusted-out sedan,
where the bomb
should be,

there are only two tanks,
an oxygen mask, and a box
filled with apricots and dates.

There are Four Ways to Die in an Explosion                                  

First the blast rips limbs
from the torso. Throws tender bodies
against concrete walls. Pulverizes
bones against pavement. Those closest
to the bomb are never found
whole.

Then the fragmentation.
Little pieces of metal debris,
like the one that punched
an acorn-sized hole through the back
of Sergeant Gardner’s skull.

Heat from the explosion starts fires.
Vehicles Burn. Ammunition
burns. People burn,
alive. When a driver is trapped inside
white-hot steel, prayers
must be said silently for the smoke
to take him first.

Pressure collapses
lungs and bowels. The bleeding
happens on the inside.
It can be hours
before the skin turns pale
and the bulk of a person
drops.

None of the anatomy is safe,

so when the time comes, pray for the blast
or fragmentation. Pray for the heat that vaporizes.
Pray for the kind of pressure
that makes the world dark and silent
before the bitter taste of iron
and cold panic.

Good Friday, Udairi Range Complex, Kuwait                                 

The first time I saw the sun
rise over the desert
it was 4 a.m.

Across miles of sand
and rusted hulks, the throbbing
of heavy guns echoed.

Over the horizon,
where the beginning and the end
meet and disappear, Friday arrived.

We saw the jeering crowds, the scourge
and spear-tip, the crown of thorns
and the crucifix, waiting.

What could we have known about atonement?
What did we know, then, of judging
the quick against the dead?

 

The head, decapitated,
it sits on a shore, at some corner of the world.
Desperation is what they feel as blood gushes out from the half-neck.
Death, however, has always been there,
nothing new, an enslaving event.
The name of the deal was predefined –
“flight”. It has been around since the Order of Assassins.
Part of us see the beauty in all this, even when the tortures last
till the moon starts to shine over us.
Sir!
There you lie, your frail length almost pours out from the bed.
And here I am, by your side, barren inside,
yet my mind replays a moment with you,
where you feed me freshly-picked strawberries.
My worst nightmare is finding a way into my life,
into you, through your flesh and bones
yet my heart replays a moment with you,
where you dress me with freshly-picked strawberries.
Sir!
Many calls for prayer have been sung.
And here I am, can’t look away.
My devotion may be in vein, but what I’m losing now is transcendental.
You missed most of it, as they held a mirror to your nose
and checked if you still breathed. So beautifully you lay there.
Before this fate, I was as effective as a human shield.
Here I am, bitter as rock, by the frilled duvets,
thinking how we must keep you alive
and not sickly-yellow and quiet like this.
See? I’m here by the frilled duvets, ice cold,
thinking how I crave to coil up next to you.
Sir!

We finally made peace with death. First our eyes watched the floors, then our fists beat our chests. Distances reached, horizons obtained, flasks of scarce water and worn sheaths. Almost everyone lost their sons to this war. Our sons. Our people. They believed in the protection of their shields and wanted to go as far as it got them, is that why we say our hymns for our sons, on and on for days? Is this our fate?

I decided I’ll surpass fate and kismet and luck or whatever. So here I am, standing before that reckless hope. I grabbed it by the chin, pushed it against a wall and I let anger take control. I asked it, and I was quite sincere about it too, “How is it that death gets in?”

The way you put your head on my head,
lifeless, breathless, heavy.
Your word is my law, and I stand by its chime.
With largest oceans behind my back,
you were my creation, and I gave you away.
Your first steps, your first words, have been my challenge.
And the way you put your shoulders on my legs.
Sir!
Greatest storms whirled inside me, and, oh, I prayed
to the Almighty; to His holiness, I presented all of my organs,
but they pulled out my womb, or what’s left of it,
and even then, all that mattered was you, sir.

Something penetrates, once, twice, my spleen watches it happen, smells pleasant, like linden, my favorite, something to go for a child is being created, from the char of my liver, my flesh puffs, my flesh grows fat,
count those things that penetrate me, arms maybe, one, two and three,
stop there, stop at the second syllable of my name, I did not do this to
me, I did not choose to carry this burden

Beings must produce, yet I’m barren inside.
Your look is my law, and I stand by its tingle.
With vastest moors behind me
you were my darling, and I gave you away.
Your first words, my sultan, your highness, have been my challenge.
Beings must produce, yet I’m barren inside, and you’re lovely inside.
That’s what you said

All this glory and all these gifts, what use do they serve, I pondered for
a long time and I could not find the answer. I knit for a long time, laces
and wools too, wore them in the cold maroon rooms of this palace, in
the cold of my own body, cold, songs were cold, my violin was warm,
only to me. They took me right away, and no surprise there, I was
pretty, I stayed quiet when they split my legs, but I’m known for
kicking quite hard. How funny, the way things change so much so fast,
we were a thousand and now I’m just one, do the winds always bring injustice with them or does it travel in the pockets of soldiers?

Crying my lungs out, biting my tongue, fires scorching my stomach,do these all go together for me now?
Or have I just comprehended death and broken apart while at it?
If we can’t breathe where the dead go,
tears can flood, for the duration of the earth’s age even,
quail with rice or grape compost.
He found his place in the history books
as did I.
It takes courage to stand before a dagger; I did,
I stood still as a brick and I shed tears.
If it wasn’t for your shadow, I’d call you my child,
my life, my signature, the one that makes me get lost in those oceans.
Don’t be hurt, because I’m ordinary, I think you’ll outlive me.
You’ll have no idea though how we managed to get that life out of you.
I bit my tongue, held back at every chance, and saved the pain along my spine.
My womb dried off and shrunk, they pulled it out, but I
will not give up on your scent.
I yearn for your chest to rise up to the highest,
for you to take one deep breath.
If it wasn’t for your soul, I’d call you my child,
my flesh, my bone, the one that makes a prisoner out of me.
Don’t be hurt, because I’m ordinary, you’ll outlive me.
I think I see the blue of your eyes again, yes.
You’ll have no idea though, what getting that life out of you cost us.
I bit every part of me within my reach, saved the pain deep in me.
The nightingale dried off and shrunk, they pulled it out of me,
but I will not give up on you.
How hard it was to bring you to life!
If it wasn’t for your soul, I’d call you my child.

Sign off my sentence, my tears are my sin.
Tightly tie the rope around my neck
and tightly tie a knot to the rope that goes nowhere.

Translator’s Note: The story, although fiction, sits in actual history, and gives us some pointers towards having an understanding of era and geography. Topkapi Palace is in modern day Turkey, and was mostly used as the emperor’s residency during the Ottoman Empire’s rule between 13th and early 20th century. The Order of Asssasins, Ḥashashiyan or Ḥashīshiyya, was a radical Nizari Isma’ili sect that assasined Muslim and Christian leaders before that time period. The ordeal of flight, as in the work towards enabling humans to fly by any means, caused controversy in the Muslim world in the past, since it is simply unnatural for humans to fly, but attempts are encountered in Ottoman history. The story, too, is likely placed in a time period where such attempts stir political balances.

Three Snapshots of Superman’s Mother

Budapest, Hungary.  December 1944.

This stagnant end squats over its vile start
Faster than a speeding bullet!

from the slag pile, the louse waste
More powerful than a locomotive! 

the fecal secretions of war
Leaps tall buildings in a single bound! 

the girl’s father was sought for
It’s a bird, it’s a plane, its Superman!           

the column of Jews being
Truth, justice and the American Way. 

marched to the river.
            This is a job for Superman.

It was then that God stole her belief
but left her fraught wonder.

Fort Collins, Colorado.  November 1963.

The vertical hold hop-skips,
horses drawing hearses
plod inside the droning box,
fusing to the vitreous reflection
of his mother’s tear-streaked face. 
Preschool Superman stews. 
No president calls Him to Dallas.
He was not consulted
on preempting His TV show for this
dull parade.
His caped powers, though mighty,
are no match for the elegiac bagpipes or
the morose Kennedys on this untuned Magnavox.

Alexandria, Virginia.  April 2016.

Floating in my feeble galaxy of lost atoms,
I peer at an old picture frame. 
Behind glass the girl’s silver halide half smile
issues a cautious greeting across
this astronomical distance of longing. 
I orbit that smile’s twilight glow —
a planet where love has nowhere to go.

Google Earth

Somewhere Gerardus Mercator
met on an equator
the ragged hunter who first drew
from warm pitch and raw whisk
the rugged path she found
to the grazing grounds.

Their compasses agreed:
on friable parchment
mapmakers must have
their maniacal dragons, their
flawed seas, and their ranges
of rumpling blunders.

An old wall was woken by
a flattened paper globe,
a remnant copy etched
by an ancient calligrapher
with a cliff grip
chiseling a copper plate.

It is easy to see what is lacking here:
a map’s crinkle, or its volcanic dimples,
green alpine frock, sweat of ocean.
No chance for glass-headed pins,
and lands not thick nor lean are pliably lying
on a polarized screen.

Swipe past the displaced perspective
and its warning of the asphalt assault,
sharp canines snapping
at the ribs of gated jungles,
as the electric sky thunders
down boundless data.

In this benign monitor light I read
about the first arrow and its story
of the bloody hand that held it
and the slaughters that it stopped.
We daily stride newly into changeless air
on the journey to pixel from dot.

Homecoming

He doesn’t feel quite right, being there—
same house, a little run down, dirtier
than he remembers. They smile and shake his hand,
escort him to his room—with everything
just where he left it.

+++++++++++++++++++++Then, they surprise him—
they leave. He hasn’t been alone in years.
When night arrives with no boots to shine, 
no weapon to clean or letters to write,

he listens for threats that never come.
He’s up and moving before everyone
to stalk the house, lock and relock each door,
his family asleep in separate rooms.

*
Days later, he finds a retail job at Sears,
takes orders from some stateside twit named Greg.
When he’s had enough, he slams Greg into a wall—
Then, no more job.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++He starts to drain his savings.
His family adjusts to him being home.
They start ignoring him, which he prefers.

*
Deer season now. He packs his rucksack, grabs
the shotgun, leaves the family a note
and hikes out to the deep woods of Ohio.
First time he’s felt himself: carrying
and wearing his BDU’s, scarfing MRE’s.

He sets up camp near where he tracked a deer-
swatches of scraped oak-bark and tramped ground
mark its territory. On the cold, hard ground,
he sleeps the best he has in months.

*
He wakes, packs up his gear and climbs the oak.
Wandering back to friends, to when he knew
what was expected, back to when he had
a purpose, when he knew his life mattered.

In the tree stand, he sees the shotgun’s dirty—
a stick jammed in the slide and around the chamber.
He pulls it out, unloads the shells, and wipes
the weapon down with the pre-oiled rag

he carries in his pack. He does a functions check,
reloads, then sees a deer, a five-point buck
breaks cover and stands, looking him in the eye.
He aims the shotgun, breathes. The deer just stares. 

 

On Not Dying

I’m glad I didn’t pull the trigger
on the .44 magnum while

the barrel was in my mouth.
Oh, I’ve done crazier shit—

Walking at night along
the handrails of bridges, backwards,

to entertain laughing friends.
Drinking rotgut whiskey

on top of abandoned buildings, hoping
never to wake, but always waking again.

After the war, during a protracted
divorce, unable to see my kids,

I’d wake from a nightmare to grab
my gun and patrol the perimeter

of my ranch-style in Richmond,
Indiana, to make sure everything’s

secure, everyone’s safe.
Finding no threats, I’d sit

on the couch, in the dark, feeling
stupid, still fighting—

for what? I didn’t die there
and I refuse to let it kill me now.

 

Nocturne                                                                                                        

I’m awake-the bed shakes
as I bleed out, alone, a blade still
buried in my thigh.

I feel the warm wet
on my legs but it isn’t blood.
I throw the sheets in the washer,

retreat to my favorite chair.
Flipping through reruns,
I settle on a comedy I’ve seen.

It’s dark. I hear his breath
wheezing slow. The odor  
of cigarettes as he drives the blade

deeper. I scream—my dog barks.
The windows blush:
I’m on the floor, the TV

flickering the news of a new day.

MISSION 376: PATIENT X

There’s dirt in his mouth now

                                                                                    you
know that for sure.

There’s Earth inside his bloated belly

                                                                                    you
know that for sure.

The worms might have eaten away his ragged skin by now

but the metal is still there.

Splayed on the satin or cotton lining

like sad coins of a wishing well.

His casket might be oak, or cherry wood

                                                                                you hope it was something sleek

and aesthetically pleasing

                                                                             you hope the flag was soft enough

for hands and cheeks that needed touching.

PROLONGED EXPOSURE THERAPY

Ten minutes staring at
a fountain pen stabbing,
scribbling paper.

A rocket hit a concrete wall
I told her.

Water spots on bifocal glasses
blurring iris’s, flickering like
burnt out pixels on a screen.

A desk placard bolded
with professional credentials
hooraying the study of mental illness.

A rocket hit a concrete wall and

Tic-tacs shaking in my red purse
snapping the container at its neck
revealing the candied-mint nonsense
delaying my esophagus to stretch
in the direction of answer.

A rocket hit a C-130 fuel tank spraying
shrapnel

Her voice dives
down into the depths
of her vocal cords
pulling out
forced tonal sympathy
an octave of care.

If
you’d like, I can prescribe you Zoloft today.

The rocket hit a concrete wall
the metal
a rocket
hit
the fuel tank
a concrete
w
a
l
l

DOXIES AND RUM

My Dachshund

                   watches me pour

                                                my
third

                                      rum and
Coke.

                                                          His
bowed legs sit

                                      firmly
under

                                                                   his robust

                             chocolate colored
chest.

                                                          Eyes
beaming

                                                                             not
in judgment

                   but acceptance.

                                                Captain
Morgan’s

                                                                   leg
swung firmly

                                      resting on
a barrel

                                                                    he winks, opens his mouth

                                                and
howls a whistling screech

a
rocket’s screech.

A
hand over his mouth

                                      I quiet
him.

Pouring
the rest in the empty glass

                                                                             the
ice breaks up

                                                                                      dissolving
into

 themselves.

                                      Spice,
sugar, caramel,

                             washes away the
dryness in my throat

and
salt from the sinuses stuck there.

                   Salt that I refuse

                                      to expel

any
natural way.

                             My Doxie jumps on
my lap

                                                                   smelling
distinctly of corn chips

for
no reason at all.

                             He rests his head
in the crevice

          of my arm

                             sighing deeper

                                                than
I thought he could.

The
War in Coming Out

Today we honor those soldiers who fought for our country
against oppressing forces. It was a matter of showing up.
Like Leonard said, They gave me a medal for killing two men
and a discharge for loving one. Howard told me how it was
a point-blank question in the draft line for Vietnam: Are you
a homosexual? Howard didn’t lie. The man started
screaming, We have another f-g here. We have a queer one
here. It was a matter of showing up.

The
War in Men

When they enter, the guards strip them down and beat them.
The guards shout, demanding compliance. They are shown
their quarters. The guards continue, tell themselves, it’s
either us or the prisoners. They don’t care why they are here.
The guards didn’t choose to be here. They say, The prisoners
must have done something, or they wouldn’t be here. As
small as serving time to be sent back to the front or as big as
waiting to face prison in the US. Little self-assurances
fenced in and in solitary confinement.

The
War in Their Duties

My father joined the National Guard to avoid being drafted.
When the draft came, the National Guard was sent over.
Same old song and dance. Cliff said he saw the action
through the helicopters. He saw the bullet holes and repairs
needed, as his duty was to fix them. Cranked up I Can’t Get
No Satisfaction. Gordon told me he served in Vietnam, too.
He played French horn. He played Reveille. He played Taps.

CASAVA
REPUBLICS

Juba

Child of lost sperm in sunsets of
political masturbation

Wagadugu

Deadline of our
revolutions

Darfur

Constipated stomach ,disease ravaged,
bloodless dozing  monk.

Nairobi

Culture lost in the dust of Saxon lexicon
and gutter slang

Soweto

Xenophobia
Drunk and Afro-phobia sloshed.

Marikana

Cervical blister of the unfinished
revolution fungi.

Harare

Corruption polonium deforming elders into
political hoodlums

Congo

Lodge of secessionists and human
guillotines

SAD REVOLUTIONARY LULLABIES

……..Sing songs of afghan circumcised,

Damascus masturbating bullets

Sing Belafonte Sing!

Of
revolutions that never crawled, sing!

Lumumba, see whiz kids castrating
political gods

Nkurumah, see them mutilating
revolutionary goddesses

Sing Kunta, Sing Kinte

I am tired of revolutions importing
colonial mood,

Propaganda decayed pimps frying anthems
like frikadels

Tired savages roasting constitutions in
corruption oil pans

Sing songs of freedoms that never walked,
Sing!

RHETORICS

Mandela, the summer sun that rose through 
rubbles of our winter

Gadafi and Sadamu making shadufs and
pyramids

…… . another spring

Obama and Osama pulling rich political
carrot in Segorong

Robin Island slept golden nightmares and
charcoal dreams,

Soweto virgins cracking their under feet
in the long walk to freedom

Faces carrying the burden of  freedom and
anthems.

Mosul Reflections

Ten years and the place is not the same.
Memory of green hills in a dry land,
cratered by what fell from the sky.
I don’t know whether to trust the image
on the screen or the one in my mind.

One I only knew as Sayyd gave well water,
sweet tea and mince meat on laffa.
We were tired from the spring rains,
three days in the stomach of the country,
we sank into the hard wooden benches
and we ate.
                  I thought of Jonah, not wanting
to travel here, and when he did, enraged
at an apocalypse that never came –
how he rested under a bush then watched
it die.
            The father of the family smiled
as I ate — both of us, with time, smiling.

Dost thou well to be angry?

His child in the corner never took her
eyes off me.  Her mother would glance
over, expressionless, as if waiting
for something that never happened.

Rain fell like mortars, knocking the edges
from the dirt roads, craters in the middle.
In a few minutes it would take us with it,
descending.  We’d see the fragments,
some carved reliefs; we’d wondered
what we’d destroyed,  what we’d left
the world – an image of broken rock
in need of a makeshift savior.

St. Martin in the City

Hunger sometimes reaches up
grabs your cloak while you’re riding.
You can’t shield your eyes,
or go into hiding.
Every treasure you’ve carried home,
is never enough.
A beggar beside the road, lifts his head;
loose skin and sullen,
he shivers and so do you.

* * *
The day before we shipped
I was walking with Preacher
into the Walgreens for cold
medicine and we saw a man
asking for change.  ‘Pity it
couldn’t be him,’ Preacher said,
not waiting while I fished for coins.

Since returning the eyes
of every refugee leap
out of every face.

* * *
The stuff of nightmares.

Suffering
you thought you knew.

Sometimes it happens, a hand
reaches out and causes
you to draw back – until
you see your fear in their eyes

both surprised how easily
the veil between you parts.

The Rearview Has Two Faces

Your memory has two faces.  The thought occurs
as you adjust your mirror in the chapel parking lot.

The eulogy’s done its job, a few tears from even
the most stoic, stone-faced ground pounders,
the cracks in the First Sergeant’s voice as he belts
‘Smithson,’ once, twice and again – as he waits
for a response that never comes.
                                                If you believe the words-
he defended the abstraction of freedom with every fiber,
never showed late, said his prayers, and flossed.
You remember an emails he sent.  ‘When I get back,
there’s a lineman job in Oklahoma.  And the houses
are cheap.’  Days before he did it.
                                                You remember the night
on your property, shooting empties off fence posts.
‘I’m not going back,’ he said.  And you knew he would.
Frustrating as hell but reliable.  And you’d rather
have sincere doubt than cocksure and careless.

The sun from the East burns the side of your face
through the driver’s side window.  In the rearview
you can see your left side turning red.
                                                            Yeah.
The night he told you, you didn’t sleep, agonized over
what to do about what he hadn’t done yet.
And when he showed that morning, early,
two full duffel bags and a goofy grin, you chided
yourself for doubting.
                                    You look one more time.
Sometimes he’s there sitting in the back seat,
an afterimage lingering after the flash has burned,
you still trying to regain your vision.

We start again:
With promises made for silver pass, platinum deferment,
tithing calls go out to the faithful wealthy,
subscribers to the graveyard newsletter.
Minute Men race for lifting choppers.
Laughing to say, “Your war this time,”
Buffalo Soldiers rattle dice on the hangar floor.
Bayonets strike when the Continental Army razes
river villages, hospital ships at the pier.
Raid command reminds, “Steel does not discriminate.”
Camping at desert’s edge, pilgrim rangers
lift prayers to the Judges, purity rings
glistening at rifle bolt and bandolier.
A burial procession pays praise,
follows a lynch knot regiment
through an air raid evening.

The River Sheriff wipes his cock
on a daughter’s dress, washes his hands
of a prisoner’s dreary clamor.
Bare feet twist in broken glass.
A favored son wobbles his feeble penis,
pees in a hunting field distressed at his trophy.
With bodies in a ditch,
evidence concealed in the weeds,
we have lessons located in news video.
Take a lie, a grifter’s spittle,
as the plan to beat a jury to the border.
Cross of Honor raised and burning,
The River Sheriff gestures to his girlfriends—
the weary one and the captive,
passes them a check and a signed bandanna.
The Humvees load under shelling.

In the February shock,
the Millennium March is a charge to the sea,
freed inmates a scarecrow caravan.
Drones departing overhead,
we find vehicles at the shoreline,
water lapping at burning suitcases.

Remembering Beirut, Halloween ‘83

The ground beds a stuffed effigy with bulging leaves.
Through peculiar affinity
it resembles some soldier.
Notice the guise of these clothes.
Consider its uniform grubbiness. Be a witness.
Here is frailty.

I lug the dumb body as if carrying my own reflection.
In another land some marine is dragging the dead weight
of his friend from the steepness of a ditch.
Hear the solstice hour toll? It’s the season of reaping
soon to be celebrated, full-fledged, on All Saint’s.

Jack O’ Lanterns gape from their pumpkin infernos.
They tug at my form, a sinewy candle lending motion to dusk.
The moon wears the same face of negligence,
staring directly through, perpetual, obsessive.

Skulking beneath it I haul my likeness on a cross
of dried corn stalks. In the garden a fire rages.
Leaves crackle, russet, auburn, yellow. Witches burnt pure
of skin, the singed autumn embers ascend and I let,
with a gasp, my twin fall to be caught.
In stacked grass, the silhouette burns and smolders.

Let flames state metamorphosis, take change
from the depths, their swaying shadows.
Let them be purged, untouched by harm and rise fertile
from earth to winter the long haul of a death and a grievance.

Tonight something in me was sacrificed but saved by the struggle.
Let it be just an event ritualized for one night
and not a sequence, serpentine, leading to another whole era of hell.

Map Pins

& photo opportunities—
A world between say, this
President’s address & some plane’s covert
loading. Operation
Heartbreak. That’s
melodrama, effete
emotionalism. Stick with
facts. Contracts. Point A
& Point B, land masses &
bodies of
water, the planetary typography
worn on a polyester shirt. There’s

import, exports. There’s the dollar
value status, the stock market
resources who happen to be human,
each significant as a billboard
but not all necessarily advertised.
An after-thought that would seem, the
boardroom memo, a game of

telephone,
the press      (cover)
reports     (up)     inside leaks      (dodge)
a thousand pricks      (question &
answer)     of light      (the cameras)
fastened by      (flash)    brass tacks

Forced Labor

The long haul is the term for strain.
To go in, sweatshop ore digger, your colony owned
by a bigger government who, in turn, is at war with a different one…
Sure, to go in, after the Big A & surrender subsequently:
reality a mirage but for body counts, headaches,
the daughter, photosensitive who can’t leave darkened rooms & dies
anyway, at 39, her siblings, one female born without bones,
& the next, presently 50 but burying his youngest,
such recessive aberrations passed on by their Mom,
a Korean import from Japanese mines…

Sound
familiar?

To put bombs behind us, prejudice, an epidemic,
look at Bikini Island on film:
the natives packed up, the burned homes,
and those natives told,  shown diagrams:
“Testing Site. ” “You are at war.”
Foreign phrases. News to them. The pictures helped
while they smiled, waved at cameras none had ever before seen.
Next in came the Navy, understanding perhaps as little,
leaving 2 goats shorn and placed in metal crates:
no hemp to chew through or bolting when meters hit red.

To many, in tinted goggles, watching, the blast was:
“Magnificent.” “A firecracker”. “A sunset.”
Others thought it “a let down.”
Still, all the votes were not yet in—–
There were still those sailors swimming through such liquid marble,
the clean-up crews, the witnesses touching charred Palm,
their uniforms Geiger-clicking & their flesh as well,
having to shower, be re-tested & wash wash again
to get radioactivity off.
The same happened elsewhere, only to town-folk.

This is the humanity within inhumanity, that, in ignorance,
we bombed ourselves, & this is the knowledge:
genetics, marrow-solvent,
a tunnel pushing to upturn the stone fetuses.

In P.S., another news item my fingers squeeze:
a photo, its caption snatched from the TV page.
“Mushroom Cake, Navy Admirals Blandy, left, & Cowery,
assisted by Mrs. Blandy, celebrate first atom bomb test, 1946.”

Here’s the close-up: two hands, the Blandy’s,
joined by a knife slicing frosting, the confection rising,
a cloud of froth as washed out as Mrs. Blandy’s hat.

Joe Pan popped up on many veteran writers’ radars in 2014. He had recently written the first great poem about what let’s call the Global War on Terror, “Ode to the MQ-9 Reaper.” At that time it was possible to find the poem in pdf via Pan’s website; it may be that this is still the case. Many downloaded it and read it, and reread it, and were carried away by its vision and drive, and talked about it over beers in trendy taverns. It is a powerful poem, urgent, reckless; it is also, in its own way, scored through with hope and possibility. In the MQ-9 Reaper’s flight one hears the screech and wail of Hart Crane’s “The Tunnel”—one also sees the flash of a seagull’s wings, turning over the Brooklyn Bridge and out to sea:

& I get why we heart the hype. Your sleek iBomb design is haute Apple adorable: the extended wingspan, the ball turret cam. Viewed full-frontal, Hellfire missiles hang loosely clamped to the horizon of your asterisk body, itself a fusion of X-Wing Fighter & Lambda-class Imperial Shuttle from Star Wars, a sexy sort of curvilinear Geek Goddess whose forehead slope recalls the stately dolphin fish, rear propeller the whirr of a rubber-banded planophore. Behold our Indian Springs Sphinx, riddled with weapons.

The MQ-9 Reaper is a type of drone capable of firing missiles. It was well known to soldiers who deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan between 2005-2012, and also to people who played the video game “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.”

“Ode to the MQ-9 Reaper” is simultaneously the drone itself—its physical characteristics, an accounting of its capabilities, its uses—and a way of looking at the world when one is an American. The poem is an exploration of the specific type of systemic power capable of producing a thing like a drone. It begins with the narrator’s third-grade, childhood self dreaming the Reaper into existence, and then wanders through the past and present, shifting perspectives and narrators to catalogue the ways in which seeing and thinking about the Reaper has come to dominate modern life.

As a collection of poetry, “Operating Systems” elaborates on the Ode (the collection’s final and ultimate poem) as an extended preface, delving into how people think about and communicate with the world around them. Written mostly in free verse, “Operating Systems” offers an unsparing look at how people live in a world predicated on well-meaning urges, and desire, and hope, and need. It is less a manual than a guidebook to a world where subjectivity and perspective shift along with the narrator. Each poem is a formula for a moment in time, a mechanism by which that moment plays out.

The collection is organized into five sections of six, six, five, seven, and one poem, respectively. Each poem is assigned an OS or “Operating System” in code, that offers some insight into the poem’s meaning and tone, from the serious (Thanat*OS) to the whimsical (Whack*OS). It’s meticulously organized, which helps orient readers on the one hand, and gives one a sense of confidence and security that Pan’s poetry is deliberate, in addition to beautiful. One can sometimes become lost in a collection of poetry, especially when it is sincerely felt and written; Pan is one of those rare poets who balances the intense emotions he evokes with careful attention to how each poem’s construction.

In spite of the overarching concern driving the collection—the worry that when we aren’t using operating systems to govern our own behavior, we have given over our agency to a series of literal operating systems that choose our friends, and our news, and the things we buy, the poetry we read and (worst of all) the wars we fight—in spite of that all, “Operating Systems” maintains a dogged optimism. In poems like In “Tattoos,” where a garden thrush that endures the stings of bees for a meal becomes an avatar for desire, and “Bedford Avenue L,” where Pan shows how in spite of the formulaic modes of language and mechanics of social interactions, the impulse to help or assist others can be sufficient in a moment of crisis:

This is the moment I tell you you will be okay
& this is the moment you say no.
I do not know who I am
& this is the moment you say no.
I do not know who I am telling this to.
I do not know myself in this moment,
& I do not know you. But hey buddy, hold on.

This underlying redemption exists in the Ode as well, as when its narrator discusses one of the oldest operating systems to appear in the book: the story of Abraham and Isaac on the mountain, envisioned from the perspective of a son having the story read to him in bed by his father.

“Operating Systems” should be read and considered at length. It is not easy or accessible, in contrast with the systems that almost everyone uses to facilitate the minutiae of their daily lives. If much of life is an effort to simplify communication, and the acquisition of those things that bring people satisfaction, isn’t it necessary and good occasionally to step back with a good collection of poetry, to pose the question?

The Shoes That Bore Us

It is a dream of kind slippers that coddle bunions appeased
by hands mittened as the same kind slippers
holding warmth as forgiveness for all the combat boots
sogged by brackish muck of wars
when not hoisted in the occasional stilettos of never regrets
a conundrum of cognitive dissonance stabs the dreams
of where ever we had been, we escape to now over racked rails
rocked goat paths and deer runs you think it’s a man’s world until
it is not

a sidearm presses to a right hip as cupped palms to iliac crests
walking boundaries and borders skirting domains of possibilities
that astrological forecasts stagger out on slow printed pages
like stammering promises spoken by the dead selling real estate,
“Check Mate”
no choice is a lie when the inevitable is an illusion, no freeze to suffice
that fighting, although futile,
is still taking a stand

 

Unhinged Again

a stone leaves the hand that flung it-air escapes
constricted vocal cords – a vomiting wild – enraged urgency and angst

kinetic makes contact – leaves bruises the color of bludgeoned
fists pounding flesh is quiet.  I can’t remember if I was screaming

my face and shielding hands turned overripe plum purple
sweet with sticky juice that dribbles down chins

attracts sugar bees you swat in autumn sun
that smells of maple leaves red with change

this hammer drives the firing pin into a child’s memory, my memory, of cap guns
explode a thousand times greater than a simple pop & puff

a chunk of lead propelled, is unhinged
from the mansplaining – the antagonistic prod of condescending joust

I was stuck in a ring of double fisted doubts: leave don’t leave
I didn’t know that I was a prisoner of white picket conditions

like my mother. Was she also a prisoner? A side bar of recollection
a nursery rhyme my mother sang to me:

 “Peter, Peter, pumpkin-eater, had a wife and couldn’t keep her
He put her in a pumpkin shell, and there he kept her very well.”

I know my Mother knew when I was being beaten
there – my face laying with one ear pressed to cold linoleum

the other, an upward funnel catching my Mother’s vengeful whisper
“get up…get up…fight”

to be marginalized – a side note or comment, placed in the periphery, only seen
when the reader desires or deems worthy of notice

only one of us walked from that house that day
to be silenced – a voice, a room, a home, a door closed upon it

a mind made up, barred entrance, not worth the time to view, hear, acknowledge
I’m writing this and telling you words are a privilege

voice is a human right thrown as stones – they fall from the wind

 

Crying Over Continents

windfarms
white wake of ferries
channel crossing

a nonstop jack hammer knee
Morse code through time zones
pounding out instructions, the next destination

I’m not letting go like I used to. I feel heavier
in my gathering of nuances, intimacies –
You watch someone for hours, days
you learn what time they take their dog for a shit
turn on the garage light – the one just right of the workbench
and always with their left hand
You learn to recognize the screams of a woman
in an upstairs back bedroom being struck
or the subtle moans of make up sex easing across the back yard
from windows never locked and left half open

Or maybe,
it’s the man in the downstairs apartment under yours
that you watch shaving his son’s head before forcing
the kid to wear a chain and crucifix bigger than the kid’s malnourished chest with ribs that break at 0200 hrs
when Dad comes home drunk, no sex, and vile. The mother
died mysteriously, they say, in a different town, a different country

Intimacy is being there as a ghost
being fed the compromise of “I’ll never do it again”

Intimacy is being there at the end
and being held in the mantle of a dying eye

Hurry up

–

Halt. And quiet,
Marines sleep.

–

Covers askew
necks cocked
weighted by
the waiting.
Dozing softly
in dark down-
time flutters by.

–

Sweet & sour
breath bellows,
flickering life.
Bellies swell &
roll heaving
hearts into a
billowing pyre.

–

Ares kisses each
Achilles slowly.
From his lips—
welding dry ice—
wafts the incense
of men burning
in god’s slag.

–

Still in sleep—
mouths agape.

1.

The book arrives. By mail and on the cover. There are clouds.

Gray clumped in altostratus heaps. A military helicopter headed.

Into thick sky that stretches off. The bottom right hand corner of cardstock.

Or how the title. The War Makes Everyone Lonely makes me think of 2007.

How my husband deployed to Afghanistan. And how lonely we both were.

When he came home.

2.

Graham Barnhart’s poems are about war.

What war is.

What war is not.

Like clouds his poems

gather.

3.

There is a musicality to them. Barnhart’s poems.

The transformer outside his sister’s house –

still humming somehow

(Everything In Sunlight I Can’t Stop Seeing)

How the hum makes memory.

Reminds Barnhart of war –

electricity quieting in the wire when the sun

scrapes its knee bloody up the mosque steps

(Everything In Sunlight I Can’t Stop Seeing)

Or how. When he was at war. For Barnhart –

every insect droning is a cicada

(Unpracticed)

4.

Or bullets. How –

Bitterness sounds like this: steel-tongued

cascades pouring out by the handful.

(Range Detail)

5.

At home there is. A child playing an oboe.

Through a window and after.

After Barnhart comes home from war dull.

Growing dull or the music of it.

Human breath pushing down an oboe’s neck.

Blast of sound. How the boy –

he sounds like a robot learning to speak,

but now and then an almost “Ode to Joy”

or “Lean on Me” outlines itself, and I forget

I am going to die.

(Belated Letter To My Grandmother)

6.

Barnhart’s poems are electric.

Like voltage in a box. Or moving down a wire.

How it is this constant current.

The persistent hum of still being alive.

And then the jolts. When you remember.

7.

Remember yes.

Writing to his grandmother a letter about the letters

he never wrote.

While he was away. How Barnhart writes –

to say yes

yes, the guns were loud –

loud like gods applauding

(Belated Letter To My Grandmother)

8.

But most of all there is tension.

Tension in Barnhart’s poems.

9.

Tension between war and home. Between

remembering war and leaving it behind or

how –

Flashbacks

don’t announce themselves.

It takes so little.

(Everything In Sunlight I Can’t Stop Seeing)

In one poem, Barnhart is flooded with it.

Memory of barracks and army green wool.

White sheets. Film reel dark rooms.

Passing moon.

The fire watch and screams. Of a drill sergeant.

How Barnhart writes –

I told her all of this when she found me

standing in the bedroom doorway.

(Somnambulant)

10.

The tension is a distance. Between

what happened and how he cannot

describe it. Or regret. When he does –

Behind headlights growing darker

night against the snow, I regret saying

kind of like Afghanistan aloud

with my mother and grandmother

in the otherwise silent heat of the car

(Sewing)

11.

In Barnhart’s poems, there is a sense that

coming home from war is displacement or

this placement outside of time. How –

tree branches, black

in the dawn sky, resume their grays and browns

by lunch. The black wrought fences continue

leaning into their rust, rigid and failing

(Everything In Sunlight I Can’t Stop Seeing)

Everything remains. Goes on.

And Barnhart writes –

there

is no war in this but me.

(Everything in Sunlight I Can’t Stop Seeing)

12.

Or the tension between what is real

and what is not. How there is training

for war. Watching grainy videos of men

over there. Placing bombs. Or defecating

under almond trees. Set to pop music.

Only to emerge in America –

sunbright Texas

tobacco juice hissing on the tarmac.

(Capabilities Brief)

13.

How soldiers play Call of Duty. To pass time.

This game of war. Where –

Rifles were weightless. Bombs fell with nothing

close to oversight. Injuries meant

heavy breathing –

a red-tinged screen.

(Medics Don’t Earn Killstreaks)

But in a video game, war is fiction. And unreal.

How –

there’s no difference between urgent and expectant.

No need to estimate under fire

the percentage of a body burned.

How much fluid to administer. How much per hour

they should piss out. No need to pull the bodies to cover.

They disappear without you

checking their pulse.

(Medics Don’t Earn Killstreaks)

14.

And the unreality of war is not limited to what is virtual.

Barnhart describes an army recruiting advertisement.

A child hugging a soldier. Her brother or her father.

How the word army is used five times. Strong six.

But there is little war. How there are no –

piles of feet

on airport roads

and no one assigned to shovel them.

(Notice and Focus Exercise)

And –

No blistered trigger fingers.

No depressions in quiet skulls

(Notice and Focus Exercise)

15.

In Barnhart’s poems, war is –

Another year refusing water to children.

When they made the universal gesture for thirst

along roadsides you wouldn’t stop.

(Days of Spring, 2016)

It is bombs –

A bombing at the gate before you arrived

was just a story you knew about rubble.

(Days of Spring, 2016)

It is guards at a gate –

hired to die so you wouldn’t when another bomb came.

(Days of Spring, 2016)

16.

Barnhart’s poetry acknowledges militarism.

Acknowledges aggression.

The physicality of deployment.

Occupying space in a country

that is not your own.

Barnhart remembers arriving in a village

raided by American soldiers. Arriving and –

Dressed
like the men who killed

their
husbands, we passed out sewing machines

to
widows so they could make clothes

for their children and embroider cemetery flags.

(Sewing)

17.

Or in Iraq. Dinner with a man who called himself. King of Kawliya.

Who fed them meat peeled from goat bones.

How they fed each other from their hands.

Barnhart writes –

I remember my fingernail

against a man’s lip .

(Shura)

Or how later –

the women who had prepared our food

and waited with their children for us to finish

were given to eat what we had left.

(Shura)

18.

There is leaving in Barnhart’s poems.

War and

what it leaves behind.

Remembering transitioning a village, Barnhart writes –

all the small corners in that small base

were pulled open. Picked blessedly clean.

Before our dust-wake settled, no stone,

if we had stacked it, was left standing on another

(How to Transition a Province)

This is the tension.

Between going to war but not staying.

Between leaving a mark and wanting

to leave nothing at all.

And the complicity when it is not possible.

19.

Barnhart remembers H.E. rounds. Their smoke and

dust. How –

illume
shells – packed light and smoke

and
shot too low – drop phosphorous

through
civilian fields we aren’t

supposed
to burn, so we wait down

the cease-fire in the bus that brought us.

 (Indiana-Stan)

There is privilege in leaving. Because –

Over there, if the wheat

or poppy crops catch, we can leave

those fires as soon as they start.

(Indiana-Stan)

20.

This is the complexity of going to war.  

21.

When imagining himself on a dating site.

And choosing a profile picture.

Barnhart writes –

Hope it all says: confident

and responsible.

As an aggressor

aware of his complicity.

(Tinder Pic)

He acknowledges –

there will be left swipes

for that arrogance.

For trying to play imperialist

and dissenter without seeming too

patriotic or worse –

apathetic. Naïve or too reckless.

Unwary and soon to explode

(Tinder Pic)

22.

This is the complicity of it.

23.

Or how
because. Because Barnhart is a medic. D18.

U.S.
Army Special Forces Medic. There is a tension.

Between going to war and going to war as a medic.

24.

How the word medic in Latin.

Mederi

Means to heal.  

25.

During
deployment, Barnhart works with a physical therapist –

learning
to scrape sore tissue

with
a slice of machined steel  

curves
to match the shape of the musculature.  

Like
a cradle or scythe, you said to no one

(Days of Spring, 2016)

In
Barnhart’s poems. This is the tension.

How
he is both. A cradle. And a scythe.

He writes
–

And that was how morning found you,

sometimes
a cradle, sometimes a scythe

(Days of Spring, 2016)

26.

But out
of it. Out of this complexity of war.

The
complicity of it. Comes Barnhart’s poems.

Like
the purple loosestrife he describes. That

grows
at the prison near Mazar-i-Sharif –

gathered

trembling
against the walls

(Tourists)

27.

Barnhart
imagines himself –

a glowing green eye in a gargoyle mass.

(0300)

28.

He
describes going to see an informant.

How
he is remembering the man and his cell phone video –

Hacksaw tugging neck skin.

The careful
way you spoke in English

my
uncle, my brother, my uncle’s son. Your
finger

touching
each shemagh-wrapped face.

The
one you couldn’t name I knew was you

(Informant)

Or how
Barnhart’s poetry is like this.

How in
his telling it. He straddles worlds.

Reveals
secrets. Identifies himself. And

invites
the reader. To find themselves.

29.

The
war. The war stretches on like sky.

Across
countries and deployments.

How this
war does not ever end.

30.

Because how many years ago. When I stood on that corner watching.

As a plane
hit the first tower. And a plane hit the second tower. Fire.

Or
people clinging to the metal. Slipping and jumping and falling and

how
the two towers crashed down.

31.

There is a poem about post 9/11 tear gas training.

Words PRO PATRIA MORI in red.

Above a cement hut door. To die for your country.

Or how. After. Barnhart writes –

Somehow
outside, somehow after

on my
knees with everyone else, purging

years
of sediment phlegm from scraped alveoli,

I saw
the line waiting to go in, heard

the
men behind me learning to drown.  

Learning
to breathe that evil pure as air.

Motes
of gas, like dust in sunlight,  

wafted
from the exit labeled DULCE ET

(Post 9/11 Gas Training (II))

32.

How
many. Soldiers have gone to war. Gone to

war
post 9/11 and how many have come home.

And how
many.

How
many dreamed of its sweetness.

33.

There
is a futility.

Poems
about training and more

training
or the feeling that it may

not
matter.

34.

Barnhart writes –

Today
I can deadlift four-oh-five.

When
I can move four-ten it will

not
stop a bullet or

the
overpressure of a bomb

(Cultivating Mass)

There is a sense of inevitability.

Because
–

A
tourniquet will work  

unless
it doesn’t

(How To Stop the Bleeding)

35.

Language
is questioned.

Its
privilege. How Barnhart inscribes diplomas in Pashtu.

Only
to be told. By the Major. To write them in English –

The
Pashtu,

he said,
is lovely

but unofficial.

(Certificates of Training)

36.

Or the
task of announcing he will deploy again.

How Barnhart
imagines his words as bats. How –

I’ll
probably just open my mouth,

wait for something to fly out

(Telling You I Will Deploy Again)

Or when the words don’t come.

Barnhart describes hitting them

with a racket.

Scoops and sloughs them outside.

And –

Regretting,

only
a little, the need, the abrupt

cessation
of a fragile thing,

that terrible
satisfaction, even  

with
these apologies hanging limp,

crumpled in the rhododendrons.

(Telling You I Will Deploy Again)

37.

In
trying to describe to his father –

the
dull machine chunk

of a
rifle’s sear reset between rounds

(What Being In The Army Did)

Graham
offers –

maybe
there is no word

(What Being In The Army Did)

Just
space.

Air
between bars. Distance between keys.

To
which his father replies –

No,
he said,

there
is definitely a word

(What Being In The Army Did)

38.

And
Graham questions poetry.

Remembering
a photograph of two dead bodies.

Men wrapped and left on a dirt field. Barnhart writes –

bodies

sloughed
in a field then photographed.

In
their repose

deserving
more than this poem

and
its portions

of
sky framed by power lines.

(Deserving
(II))

39.

Of
course. Loneliness is this.

This
futility. The question.

Of
whether anything makes a difference.

Or if
words are enough.

40.

But
in Barnhart’s poems. His words

are
the answer. The raveled call to

prayer.
Or his surprise to see a boy –

kneeling beside his bucket to kiss the dirt.

(Call
to Prayer)

The shared
humanity of experience.

Even
in war. Even in our loneliness.

41.

In
his poems, Barnhart sews together.

The pieces
of war. Memory. Leaving

and coming
home. What it means to

fight
a war and care for its wounded.

42.

He
describes history as a skeleton –

each city suturing

new skin to the skeleton.

(Pissing in Irbil)

Or
how his poems are flesh.

Attaching
themselves to the

skeleton
of what happened.

Wrapping
bone in meaning.

43.

At a poetry
reading, Barnhart sees a bee

dragged
by a spider. As the poet who is

reading
says –

Those
with the time

for
poetry don’t deserve it

(Deserving
(I))

Barnhart wonders –

The
poetry or the time

(Deserving
(I))

44.

I am
not certain we deserve either.

But,
as I read Barnhart’s The War Makes Everyone Lonely,

I am
grateful.

Grateful
for both.

1.

Celebrate them.

2.

Celebrate the soldier who went to war

Just to kill.

This soldier accused of shooting and

Killing civilians. How the men from

His own platoon. They say he did it.

He shot civilians. He shot at civilians.

Shot a girl in Iraq in a flowered hijab

In her stomach.

Blooming wound. Like a daisy eye or

Hole in her gut. How he shot an old

Unarmed man dead. His white robe

Drenched red. The stain a spreading

Blood sun.

And they say they saw him. Saw him

Kill a teenager.

An ISIS fighter. Wounded and waiting

For a medic on the dirt floor in Mosul.

How they say the soldier said

Lips into a radio

Don’t touch him.

Because he’s mine.

Before driving his knife deep and deep.

Hunting knife

Into the boy’s neck. Through skin and

Muscle. Tissue and ligaments an artery.

3.

Or how

There is a photograph.

The soldier squatting in the sand.

Full battle rattle next to the ISIS boy.

His dead body. Face up. Arms bare.

Calves exposed. His legs sprawled.

And the soldier. How he has the boy.

His hair. Gripped in the fist. And he is

Yanking. Yanking him. The boy’s head.

His face up. For the camera.

How in the photograph.

The boy is dead.

And the soldier is smiling.

Because the boy is not a boy.

He is deer kill.

3.

Celebrate him.

Celebrate that soldier and the way it felt

When he held that soft sweat tuft of

Human hair.

Between his thumb and fingers like.

Like feathers.

4.

And why. Why stop there?

How there are more. More soldiers

5.

Soldiers who stood over dead bodies

On a video. Standing over the dead

Bodies of Taliban fighters they killed.

Killed in war in Afghanistan.

How the soldiers exposed their penises

And urinated on the bodies. Urinating

On the dead bodies or how

They are laughing.

Celebrate them. Celebrate those soldiers.

Celebrate how they felt when that stream

Of urine. Their urine.

Hit the men. Hit the dead bodies. Hit dead

Legs and dead torsos. Dead faces. Splashing

Open dead eyes. Into dead mouths.

Celebrate how.

How it felt. When their urine

Filled the dead men’s nostrils.

6.

Celebrate Abu Ghraib.

Celebrate that it happened. Celebrate

Soldiers who stripped prisoners naked.

Raped them with truncheons. Strapped

Dog collars around their necks. Soldiers

Who dragged men on leashes like they

Were dogs. Who placed bags over heads.

Made men stand on boxes with wires

And electrodes attached to fingers and

Skin. Soldiers. Soldiers. Soldiers who

Tortured men.

Soldiers who piled men. Piled men up

And into contorted piles. These piles

Of tortured human flesh.

7.

Celebrate them.

8.

Celebrate all the soldiers who do it. Who

Do things like this.

Celebrate them even though. Even though

The military is filled and filled and filled

With soldiers who

Would never. Who never do these things.

9.

Just don’t say. It is because

They did nothing wrong.

Don’t say. Don’t say they didn’t do it.

10.

Celebrate them because you know.

You know they did.

11.

Celebrate them because you like it.

Faces

                     oak branches reach               
through villages                    veiled
beneath nuoc mam frowns, —

enlightened cracks                creak
above unwilling spills
leaving
                                every chào buổi sáng
                                every gaze

                                                                 very little

Sir, Yes Sir

& there was never any toilet paper
never any soap            not even a blanket
                                       just salivary glands
washing up against    underarm hopes

& yesterday                  eye had a sore throat
dry as hashish
salty as the Dead Sea
& from my ass
chickens continue to fall
like spent shells
cracking the red         green chickadees

& today                         eye shot around
looking for                   regurgitated sweat glands
while
              Monday
              Wednesday
              Friday
              every Sunday
                                     eye bury rubber thalami
deep behind thick lips asking
When will the chopper arrive?

This was metabolized as a journey
never ridden with a smile as
                                    eye digest what’s left in my boots
scraps from blue potatoes in my underwear
minister to seasons, —
             crucifying Charlie
             rebuking Snoopy
             backsliding Lucy

& tomorrow
before a billion points of aortic lights                                                
cast across a face-less velvet canvass     twirling                    
with 7 spleens ducking & diving             whirling                               
                                     eye watch Mars
salute every Corporal                         
yelling with every breath                                                                                                       
                                    eye followed my orders…!

Silent as Impression Made by Stone

Silent   as an impression          made by stone
Black onyx flamed with writings       to go gentle     in the night
So it is that I   a Mysterious Traveler                          walk this way alone

In this silence              I sit on the side           of the dirt bone
Waiting at the edge     of the black line          of the farthest woods
Silent   as an impression          made by stone

Where all who believe             this                              sarcophagus sown
Well into the hands                 of Osiris and Ra          as mummies
So it is that I   a Mysterious Traveler                          walk this way alone

All but a water lily      speaks              in the shadow                          of a lotus tone
I go formless   shadowing-less            across wading waters              tarrying
Silent   as an impression          made by stone

Delivered        on parchment paper                             to a mass of one
This message   driven from     essence long since gone
So it is that I   a Mysterious Traveler                          walk this way alone

In my will        take this much             without loan
Paint me                      crate me                                   canvas this I say
So it is that I   a Mysterious Traveler                          walk this way alone

The Blood of Rain

Drowning in meadow-spoken roots, I reach for heartfelt songs, once, so rich with oxygenated virtues, twice, so free from an unforgiving life. Songs gleaned from salvific tomatoes, flowing sweet the Nile. Voyages imprismed as a glint refracted without blink, without smile, messages to splat against something, anything – life-supporting droplets passed with grass concern, lawn pity. What was there: a bed of crabs to obscure the analgesic dirt, the antiperspirant stench, the grandeur embodying a crimson stance. Like knuckles half-curled tapping on the drum of a shack, shadow of a room existing as a postal address with but one letter in the box, this song of rain continues to pour dry. Behind closed mores, I lick deliberate snowfalls, wrangled after birth. What did this mean? From where does this floodwater spring? My cup remains half filled, cracks lining its bottom have laid their webs. I watch reminiscent musings of pellets fall, nerve endings teleconference heme & beryl-blues & female & globin & woman & man & child, all raced by fashionable weather, as I drown, listening to the pulsations of torrential veils.

Why am I so thirsty?

Pillar of Salt

Raining fire, burning steel …
And now I see haunted

Images of headless
Bodies bathed in bloodstained

Sand of a mannequin
Head with a swollen face

And lifeless eyes looking
Back at an explosion,

A disfigured Humvee
Staggering down the road,

A charred and gaping door,
A torso hanging out –

The Mannequin

I am not a mannequin!
I am a pillar of salt!
I am the salt of the earth!
My heart is heavy with sand.

An earlier version of “Pillar of Salt” appeared in O-Dark-Thirty, March 11, 2013.

 

A Letter to Greta

“…so pitying and yet so distant,” Cecil Beaton

Among my father’s posthumous
flotsam recently washed up in my house,
I found a letter, postmarked 1928,
addressed Miss Garbo Hollywood Cal
(Private!), stamped RETURN TO SENDER,
sealed unread and stored for sixty years
inside its author’s desk. Held to light,
the envelope revealed a trace of earnest
cursive written to a star flickered
on a million screens. I set a kettle
on the stove to steam the letter open
and expose the heart of this dead man,
once vestal boy, husband to three wives—
one widow, one dead, one faithless
(also dead)—fighter pilot with cleft chin
and good teeth whose friends had died
from too much war or too much booze,
who, if asked, what happens when you die?
would sip his drink and say, “you rot.”
When the envelope at last unglued,
I found a time-fogged photo of a skinny
school-age boy standing contrapposto,
looking straight into my eyes. I slipped
the photo and unread letter back inside
the envelope, taped it shut, and late
that night went outside and burned it all
as offerings to a heaven of Gretas.

Operation Odyssey Dawn, 2011[i]

See Naples and die, Johann Goethe wrote,
the deep-dish bay, smoke plumed Vesuvius,
the castle and the terraced hills, the fleet
at anchor, tended by a swarm of skiffs.
Gigs skim from ship to shore, filled fore and aft
with sailors, their paychecks cashed in lira
to spend on booze, tattoos, and prostitutes,
and reams of postcards they’ll forget to mail.

At night the fleet is rigged with winking lights
and swings according to the wind and tide,
couched in swells of trough and crest, rocking
sleeping sailors above the sea scrubbed bones
of city sacking Ithacans who heard
the Sirens’ hymn and never more saw home.

[i] International military operation against Libya, including elements of the American Sixth Fleet, homeported in Naples, Italy.

 

Dead Shot

Drunk or sober, but mostly drunk,
he had a knack for seeing
and a gun like twelve-gauge Euclid
to make the dizzy world cohere.
That he spent hours as a boy
splitting three-inch blocks his father tossed,
busting them clean with a twenty-two rifle,
one hundred, two hundred in a row,
is not explanation enough:
he became his sorry old man’s trick.
Imagine this: a case of shakes, cross-eyed
from the night before, he’d shoot trap
and never miss, pump-twelve booming,
two discs shattered in one tick,
but never draw a bead on anything
that breathed, no early morning vigils
squatting in a duck-blind—too hung over
for one thing, and for the other,
his skill was calculating proofs
with rapid fire theorems as tangents
angled into exploding resolution—
until he drew one on himself.
At sunset he would drink and watch
the purple martins slice the falling light.
His last night he tacked a strip of tin
outside his room so he could hear the rain
rinse clean and clear the drunken dreams
in which he split the moon.

 

Chiaroscuro

for John Jennings

The muffled pull and puff of breath, the soft
insistence of his need, dispel my dreams
and I wake up as swaths of headlights sweep
my wife and child, composed into one shape,
gigantic night rebounding through the room
while they lie still, curled on the cusp of sleep,
mouth to breast and filling god with god.

In Which I Serve as Outside Reader on General Petraeus’s Dissertation

[The current version of the Army’s Field Manual on Counterinsurgency, FM 3-24, originated as a doctoral dissertation written by David Petraeus at Princeton.]

Premise flows from premise like water over the edge
of a waterfall, entrancing those not caught
in the turbid spray, those not lingering in the limestone
chutes that channel the first descent. Dulce et decorum,
those molecules in free fall, powerless to reverse
dictates of gravity, whether they be composed
of dollars or bodies. A theorist must maintain sense of scale,
must view war at an appropriate distance, so that its beauty
may emerge like a cold, perfect moon that draws the restless
from their beds with dreams of space flight. The best way to lie
is to get one big whopper on the table and move on quick
to crystalline truth after truth in a train of plausibility
so compelling we don’t see how down becomes
up, so convinced are we by the quality of our reasoning
that be leads to see and eventually to eff and tee, and the best
first lie aligns with ones we’ve already bought, like how we cheer
Frost’s traveler in the yellow woods longing for the road
not taken, nodding along with his glib boast that non-
conformity explains contingency because we can accept
failures chosen on noble grounds more than unforeseen
leaf-covered ways that erupt when footfalls complete
the circuit of pressure plate IEDs. Mr. Petraeus, your counterinsurgency
tools could only work in countries we didn’t create, republics not birthed
by death from above, and so I regretfully conclude
this dissertation presents the naked assertion of imperial power
as the contribution of a helpful guest, final proof that
intelligence and gulled innocence, in general, betray us.

Double Rainbow at Dawn, 15 North at the 10

The rubberneckers slow down
as they do for other hazards,
brake lights merging into
the penumbra of a double rainbow
due west of the traffic lanes,
while in the East the rising sun
irradiates vapor-soaked air.

We are all late, looking askance
at the fireworks of nature,
wondering how our priorities
match up with this display.

Double, not just one: two arcs
of vibrant color proclaiming
peace on earth if we
don’t kill each other
trying to take it in.

Here’s how it happens: you get a text. Or you see a cryptic post about the
importance of friendship and “reaching out” on Facebook. Or an email. Then, the
phone call comes.

“Hey man. Don’t know if you heard, but Jack Smith died.”

And you already know what that really means. Gun, drug overdose, poison, car
exhaust. One of the many ways to undo or interrupt a fragile system.

Last year I totaled up the number of people I knew, personally, who had
committed suicide—people I’d met and hung out with, something more than a quick
“hello.” The number was seven. I knew of three people, personally, who took
their lives when I was a boy or a young man; two boys killed themselves in my
orbit when I was in my teens, and a high school classmate and lacrosse teammate
took his life sometime after college, perhaps in my mid-twenties.

Since that time, at least four soldiers with whom I served or whom I knew,
personally, took their own lives.

Not surprisingly, the event that precipitated this introspection was the
suicide of a captain whom I’d covered while reporting on NATO
maneuvers in Romania for Foreign Policy.
He was the eighth person I knew, personally, to kill himself. When we’d met, he
was acting as the S3 of an armor battalion as a senior captain (something I’d
only ever seen done by higher-ranking officers), and he was highly respected by
peers, subordinates, and superiors. I heard that he had a wife and kids back
home, in the United States. He’d sat down on train tracks and waited.

But eight doesn’t tell the full story, because those were just the people to
whom I had a direct connection, who decided to send themselves West for reasons
only they know. One Sunday in March, after climbing into bed, I scanned
Facebook a final time (always a mistake) and saw people that I served with
discussing the suicide of someone with whom I’d served, a soldier I didn’t remember.
And that experience—the experience of seeing other veterans process
the untimely death of a friend or loved one that I’d met in passing, someone
with whom I’d stood in military formation, suicide by one degree of separation—is
something I’ve processed more times than I can remember. Fifteen? Twenty?
Thirty? It happens, I’d say, around once every two or three months. Making that
calculation conservatively, at once every three months, for the eight years
I’ve been out of the military, produces the number 32.

That doesn’t count the soldier who shot himself rather than return to
prison, or the soldier who got so blinding drunk out one night that when he
decided to drive home, he forgot to buckle his seatbelt, and ended himself in a
wreck of metal and glass. They’re two of the eight.

It does include the brother of a soldier who died in Afghanistan,
himself a veteran, who died of “soul sickness,” according to the obituary—and
many others whose families and communities would prefer not to characterize the
death as suicide, though it is. It does include a soldier who hung
himself when I was on active duty with the Army. They’re two of the estimated
32.

The most
recent statistics from the Department of Veterans Affairs says that the
problem of veteran suicide is bad and getting worse. A
story from The Military Times from September of 2018 headlined
“VA: Suicide rate for younger veterans increased by more than 10 percent” did a
good job of quantifying the problem:

In 2016, the most recent data available, the suicide rate for veterans
was 1.5 times greater than for Americans who never served in the military.
About 20 veterans a day across the country take their own lives, and veterans
accounted for 14 percent of all adult suicide deaths in the U.S. in 2016, even
though only 8 percent of the country’s population has served in the military.

Numerical terms, though, are abstract. You read “twenty a day” and think,
maybe, that can’t be right or it’s horrible, or what about the context or those
poor veterans or any of the other socially conscientious things a person
might think when confronted with an impersonal tragedy, and it’s still too far,
too distant.

In the coming months and years, as the remaining soldiers and sergeants and
officers I know transition out into their civilian lives, 32 will increase to
33, and then 34, and so on into the uncertain future. At some point—not too far
off from now—I’ll have lost more comrades to suicide than we lost to the
Taliban. The count will continue its irresistible climb.

Suicide is on my mind not only because of the actions of those around me,
but because it is something I have considered in the past.

It crosses my mind occasionally, the vigor of its allure weaker than before,
now more an echo of a masochistic urge that is dismissed as quickly as it
arises. But I used to think about it often. I became accustomed to thinking
about death. I fantasized about dying in battle (gloriously) or by accident (absurdly),
and that fantasy conquered and remains in a compartment of my heart. Each time my
heart contracts, pushing blood through my veins, that compartment whispers—“what
if this were all to stop?” Over time, the thought became habit.

It took a lot to break me of that habit. I had to learn not to covet some
brief control over the terms of my demise. PTSD therapy at the West Haven
Veterans Affairs helped, and finding my wife, and friendships, and work.

But then, many of those soldiers who ended their lives had wives or husbands,
too; they had friends, and children, and jobs. Their Facebook pages were
active. They shared their happy memories of comradeship in times of war—of
exhilaration, and love, and respect. They were not so different. Their hearts,
too, must have asked, “what if?”

That’s what makes it all so maddening. Sometimes a person’s suicide seems
rational—a response to hardship, or the accumulated result of smaller bad
choices and regrets. When one hears about a promising life gone to drugs and
debt, nobody thinks “how could that have happened” (and everyone’s grateful
when it doesn’t), and similarly, something about the experience of being in the
military lends itself to this type of sensible suicide. Then, sometimes, it
makes no sense at all, from a rational perspective, or from the emotional side.
There is simply no accounting for it.

And the lack of an explanation for why
this is happening means we don’t have a good sense of what to do to reduce or
resolve suicide. Perhaps we ought to better fund national institutions and
publicize hotlines, so those desperate people who find themselves at bottom due
to drugs, or alcohol, or gambling, or bad choices can, in spite of it all, find
respite—a bed to sleep in, a job to pay the bills. Currently, $8.38 billion
goes to VA Mental Health services and programs, while there is $186 million
dedicated to Veteran Suicide Prevention and Outreach programs; one can only
imagine how grim things would look were this number cut, though it’s difficult
to imagine things improving substantially were the number much larger. A
scandal that unfolded last year about money
unspent implies that greater efficiency could contribute to the mental
health of veterans. But on a certain level this isn’t about money, it’s about
despair and solitude, the lack of company. The rich and professionally successful,
too, commit suicide.

Meanwhile, if one views the government with skepticism, and thinks that a
person’s tax dollars ought to go to charities instead, we can prioritize the
expansion of regional and local charities to accomplish the same task. This runs
into the same problem as expanding the VA, which is to say, the problem of
throwing money at a problem human empathy is best equipped to handle.

On that note, on a human level, we can be more available to the veterans in
our lives—not responsively, not reactively, but assertively, checking in with
them, calling, writing occasionally to see how they are doing. But this is the
dearest solution of all: anyone who has wrestled with depression themselves or
in a friend or family member understands that there simply isn’t time enough to
think positively for another human who’s gripped by despair; our own lives are
consumed with the requirements of job, and filial piety, and the duties of the
father, and mother, and husband, and wife. Living our own lives well guards us
against dark impulses, but as every new parent knows, it can be utterly
exhausting to live two lives for even an hour, let alone every waking hour.

A too-obvious fix of not going into war so casually any more, such as was
the case with Iraq and Afghanistan and could be the case in Venezuala or North
Korea, is rarely discussed with any degree of seriousness, though it ought to
be.

Adopting all four of these measures will still not solve the problem of
veterans committing suicide. They will help, and because they will help, we
ought to do them, but veterans will continue taking their own lives. We can’t
save everyone.

This leads to a more troubling thought. If there are people who cannot be
rescued by individual action—who cannot be saved by even the most
technologically advanced and intrusive state—who are be saved neither by
religion, nor by secular charities—what then? We are left with a group of
honorable people who wanted to serve their country, often during times of war,
who subsequently commit themselves to self-slaughter. A group of people who
are, in one regard, the type of sons and daughters we’d like, and on the other
hand, shameful cautionary tales.

Ancient Rome and contemporary Japan viewed suicide as, potentially, an
honorable act. There have been other non-Christian societies whose mythology or
narratives contain room for people who no longer wanted to live; paths of last
resort, obviously, but dignified exits to the next world. If we have confidence
that the life we have created here on earth is more attractive to people than
death (and that, surely, ought to be the most primitive, basic idea animating a
developed society), surely there ought to be an acceptable place for those
folks who can no longer abide here.

Look, we’d all like to help, according to our ability and bandwidth. But the
fact is, when it comes to trauma, the damage to veterans is already done. Many
combat veterans or those victimized by bullies or sexual assault were lost
years ago, and the bill, as they say, is just late coming due. Some of those
veterans could probably be saved by aggressive professional and personal
intervention, but let’s be honest: that’s not going to happen.

Instead, it’s only a matter of time before the next suicide, which will add
itself to the others that came before. And we’ll all be left sitting in our
chairs with the terrible news ringing in our ears, wondering: what happened to Jack?
That young soldier, jumping down off the front hood, his dusty armor slapping after
a long patrol, or seated by a campfire, laughing, full with the power and
confidence of their youth? What happened in the intervening years, what caused
them to make that choice, in that moment? Could I ever do that? What if…?

I don’t know your name, but we tried to kill each other once.

Do you remember it? It happened on November 5, 2005, on the second day of our big weeklong offensive in Husaybah, Iraq—a dense square of markets, mosques, and homes tucked into the corner where the Euphrates River meets the Syrian border. Nearly 2,000 U.S. Marines, me among them, had stormed into Husaybah before sunrise the previous morning. We had attacked across the trash-hewn desert west of town with our eyes coated with the green electric glow of our night vision goggles. We quickly smashed into the first row of homes and shoved our rifle barrels into the faces of the sleepy men who opened the doors and blew apart the locked doors of homes that had been abandoned. Children startled awake by our voices and our boots shrieked against their mothers in terror. I remember that.

Husaybah had been a violent place for us then. Plenty of our Marines had died there before we came, and our leaders wanted Husaybah mollified once and for all, and so we searched through your homes, sifted through your cupboards and closets, through your unmentionable things with the anger of a raw nerve. We looked for anything that tied the houses and people living inside them to Al Qaeda-in-Iraq forces, or ‘AQI’—just another letter set in the endless greasy sop of military acronyms.

On my second afternoon in Husaybah I stood on a roof and gazed out over the geometric madness of buildings that surrounded me. It was cloudy. Parts of the city crackled with rifle fire. You appeared around a corner of a wall that defined the small compound of a house the same way chain link fences surround our yards. I liked the walled compounds for their dominance and privacy—like fortresses. Gray metal fences are just ugly and noisy. Walls can last forever. You appeared from behind it wearing a dirty gray sweat shirt and pants, like the track suits worn by fat New Jersey mobsters. You already had the launcher on your shoulder. It was made out of white PVC pipe with a cheap wooden handgrip and a battery switch bound with electrical tape. We always laughed at them whenever we captured one. Compared to our shoulder-mounted anti-tank rockets, our wire-guided missiles, and our heat seekers, your homemade bazookas were shoddy and infantile, completely weightless against our intractable technology and sophistication. But we knew they could kill, and if we had found you before you fired it, or just simply found you carrying it, building it, handing it to someone else, or even burying it in your cousin’s backyard in a rage of benevolent rebellion against all war, we would have blown your body to pieces with high explosives that have been tested and refined and improved since the First World War. We would have scattered your atoms in a wide plume with a professional calculus learned and taught and relearned in the way of tradesmen, which is what the American military was and still is today: a profession of arms, trained to execute the final thousand meters of American foreign policy, which in this case was to kill you. We’re good at it. American troops train for battle like athletes and our officers study war like scholars. To us you are dilettantes, a junior varsity team. Many still feel this way.

Yet given all this you pivoted around a corner in a dirty sweat suit and aimed your homemade rocket launcher at my friends and me. As I sit here now I think about the resolve it must have taken to do that, to build this cheap weapon and aim it with the hope and faith against the best weapons in the world created by some of the richest nations in history. Surely you must’ve felt it when you wheeled around corner. Yet it didn’t seem to matter to you, did it? Was it God or money or hatred or maybe just boredom? You are an Arab man. An Iraqi man. A Sunni man, no doubt. Faith has driven plenty to violence. But so have debt, hunger, oppression, and just blind hatred. Did you shoot at me for those things? Can I blame you? There are many Americans, more Americans than I’m comfortable with, who stock their homes with firearms and talk as if an invasion is a real possibility, be it from some outsider or from their own government. But there is little chance of invasion for us. I am from a country that will likely wither and die by its own self-destruction.

But that wasn’t a luxury for you, was it? We were in your country uninvited. You turned from behind a corner to see a real invader. What did we look like to you? I imagine we looked like armored toadstools perched on your roofs with our black weapons held at our chests. I saw you. I saw your eyes. They were wide and filled with terror. Did our sight scare you? Your face was haggard, your hair and beard short and ragged. You looked like you were in your late twenties, perhaps older. It’s hard to say. I only saw you for a few seconds, but looking back and remembering . . . Yes, I’m certain you were maybe twenty-eight, thirty at the latest. You were older than me. I was twenty-five then. Thoughtful, but brash. I could almost hear you chanting your battle cry—Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar—over and over and over again, begging your God for victory or maybe just to spare your life, your breaths short and fast as you quickly aimed and fired. Were your palms wet? When the circuit closed on your launcher your body was surrounded with a wispy cloud. I heard the rocket motor fire. A Marine near me yelled “RPG!”

***

Surely you remember the Persian Gulf War. How could you not? I was ten years old. My stepdad was in the U.S. Air Force then. He was sent to the Emirates to fix the American fighter jets we deployed after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. I was in fifth grade then. As I turned and walked up a broad snowy path between a set of houses on my way home from school a cold afternoon in January, I noticed my friend Chris trudging through the deep snow toward me.

“Come on, dude. Something’s going on,” he said. “I think it’s started!”

We waded through the snow and plopped cross-legged in front of the television in his living room. We watched titillated as the special news reports showed grainy night-vision video of your anti-aircraft tracers arching toward our fighter jets high above your capital city. Whenever the screen erupted with the white flash of an exploding bomb we cheered because we knew we had killed some of you. There was nothing gory about it. We didn’t see your blood or your body parts. It was clinical and precise. Even later, when we began to see the fuzzy bomb camera footage aired on the nightly news as 1,000 pound bombs crashed into bridges and factories and aircraft revetments, we saw the thermal signatures of your people—maybe your soldiers, maybe not, but all unlucky unlike us—become engulfed in the smoke and fire of our long-learned ability to destroy the human body.

Soon your whole army fell apart in front of us. When our tanks and armored vehicles crossed the border, you surrendered to us by the thousands, trudging across the desert half-dazed with your hands above your heads, flapping coalition leaflets imploring you to surrender. When you did fight us, it was almost cartoonish. Stories came back to us from the desert, or “The Sandbox” as we called it, of the shells from our main battle tanks punching through two and three of your tanks with a single shot and of bulldozers burying your troops alive right in their trenches. Just over 1,000 of our troops were killed or wounded fighting your country. To die as an American in the Persian Gulf War quickly became the unlucky punchline of a sad joke. We were so good at killing you that within four days of launching the ground offensive we annihilated an estimated 20,000 of you like we annihilate anthills in our backyards or roaches in our cupboards.

Our whole country felt as if we had returned to the heady day’s right after World War II, when America basked in the destruction of two of the ugliest regimes in the history of the planet. We used your body to eradicate the ghosts of our mindless destruction in Vietnam. We felt as if we had returned to glory, that a curse had been broken. Our money had killed the Soviet Union. Our bombs had killed your fellow Iraqis. Our army was confirmed best in the world. We were Americans, natives from the “city upon the hill,” citizens of God’s Country. We sang Lee Greenwood songs at school recitals. Your destruction was our absolution. We felt invincible.

Americans rarely seem to make the connection, but the two wars—the one our fathers fought in and the war where you and I finally meet—are really all part of one big war, at least in a spiritual sense. Our victory over the forces of your dictator gave us carte blanche to press our moralistic notion of empire upon your people through the use of our bolstered military confidence. Because of your indomitable dictator, coupled with a strain of American Exceptionalism, we despised you all collectively. After your generals surrendered at Safwan in March of 1991 we restricted your airspace and suffocated you with the boot heel of economic sanctions. We dangled food before your face in exchange for your precious oil. Sometimes Saddam Hussein took it. Other times he did not.

The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 had nothing to do with your dictator, and certainly not your country, but I can’t help but think that many of your citizens saw the smoke and ash of the fallen World Trade Center, the cavity drilled into the side of the Pentagon, and the detritus of Flight 93 scattered across a field in Pennsylvania and realized with a quiet dread that your country, as proxy for your dictator, would inevitably be called to stand tall and answer for crimes real or imagined. If you didn’t, the subsequent rumblings and fist poundings from our punditry would have certainly signaled our brutal intentions. Americans wanted blood for the death of our citizens, and in many ways it was a completely justifiable desire. Our people were killed because of religious extremism, by Bronze Age clerics and zealots who failed to understand the concept of free will, and who harbored just as much sanctimonious moral superiority as the Western governments they claimed to loathe and sought to punish. You had nothing to do with it, but we came and made our demands anyway, and then we dropped more bombs.

I was a Marine by then. In late March of 2003 I watched our “Shock and Awe” air campaign smash Baghdad into rubble on CNN. I watched fire and high explosives rubble the skyscrapers of your capital with clarity of a dumb Michael Bay action flick. None of that grainy bomb camera footage that marked the opening moves in 1991. This was the modern era of the mass media spectacle. The scene felt like a cheap gratuitous facsimile of the first time, like a movie sequel that tried cover up a cheap plot with high-powered special effects.

Our leaders paraded themselves on television like conquering warlords before our troops had even crossed the border from Kuwait, counting the gold their hordes hadn’t even pillaged yet. We never discussed your plight or what you may have wanted for your own futures. You were never even considered. We just shrugged it off. We told the world we were coming to rescue you from the clutches of an evil dictator and that we would be greeted as liberators. It was only by sheer luck that the results of our hubris briefly matched your exuberate expressions of freedom when your fellow Iraqis beat on the statue of Saddam in Firdos Square with fists and the dusty soles of their shoes. But that exuberance didn’t last, did it? That same dumb hubris prompted a U.S. State Department toad named Paul Bremer to fire your entire defense industry, a move which put hundreds of thousands of trained Iraqi security personnel—men who wanted to rebuild your country, perhaps even you—right out of work and single-handedly created an insurgency (up to and including ISIS) that locked us into a quagmire for the rest of the decade. A hubris that killed and wounded so many of us and exacted a still-untold cost on you. It was the same hubris that put you and me at odds with each other.

***

And so here we are, back to the moment you closed the circuit on your homemade rocket launcher and tried to kill me. I might say you were brainwashed by psychopaths who arrived in the chaos of our occupation and who used the intellectual shackles of religion to make you a willing participant in my death. There is also the hard possibility these same psychopaths dangled a few hundred American dollars before your impoverished eyes, or maybe just pressed the hot blade of threats against the lives of your family in order to accomplish their bidding, which in this case was to kill Americans with a rocket propelled grenade.

Before I could seek cover behind the wall that surrounded the roof, your rocket exploded with a sharp crack against a building nearby. My veins were flooded with adrenaline and terror. My eyes had widened and my mouth drooped slightly. The sound reverberated across the madness of Husaybah for a number of seconds before it blended into the chatter of distant firefights. My joints felt stiff. I breathed slowly and began to unravel a knot of fear in my gut.

None of the others said much of anything. I suspect we were all ingesting just how lucky we had been. Had you raised the tube a few more inches your rocket might have carved a path right to the wall that surrounded the roof we commandeered, right to where we stood, and exploded with the same flash, spraying hot slivers of metal that might have pierced our bodies and punched frothy little holes into our livers and lungs. The sudden overpressure under our Kevlar helmets might have burst our eardrums and detuned our synapses. You might have killed us. But you were nervous and afraid, so you didn’t.

You appeared again a few seconds later. I saw you in a gap between two buildings as you ran. I knew immediately it was you who had fired the rocket because you looked back over your shoulder at us with wide eyes and a face that seemed to me as if grayed by terror. The emotions that arose in me in a millisecond I can only really describe as a crossbreed of disgust and atavistic rage, backed by the same glaze of self-righteousness that put us in your country to begin with. I was a member of the most skilled military on the face of the planet with the largest reach of any dominion since the British Empire. You were a terrorist from a broken nation. I raised my rifle.

Though it happened too fast to do so then, as I brought my rifle to my shoulder I could trace a trajectory of wanton caveman stupidity from your body to my barrel, through my rifle, and into my shoulder and beyond, all as a dark timeline of American foreign policy misadventures and the stone-crushing hubris of empire that created them. I could trace a hard red line back to the elected officials—thereby including many of us—who had read just enough glorified history to think America was somehow anointed with the right to interfere and manipulate the fates of other nations, as if your wishes, hopes, and aspirations for the future of your country seemed to be of little worth if they didn’t match our own. I can’t help but believe that to be true. We found nothing in your country. No weapons of mass destruction. No nuclear program. No terrorists but for those we ultimately brought with us, in part because of opportunistic religious thuggery, but also because of our ham-fisted American bombasticism.

For many years after 9/11, the United States, in many ways, became Captain Ahab from Moby Dick, chasing the White Whale of our national security through the “War on Terror” to all corners of the world. Like Ahab, we’re a nation with a wounded soul. A whole subset of our population refuses to allow itself to heal. Many of our people gnash their teeth with blood-thirsty indignation and rage, shaking their fists at lands they’ve never seen or even understand. Every anniversary of 9/11, we beat against our sores with old reels of doom and loss. Civic leaders, campaigning politicians, and even sitting statespersons routinely trumpet the call to arms with the fear of your hordes running through our streets with zealotry in your heart and a bomb strapped to your chest. They bang their gavels and shovel money and citizenry into the black maw of war to kill you, hoping that one more body—more than 200,000 civilian casualties in Iraq, so far—will pack that festering wound and finally bring peace. They do this in spite of the understanding that coming into your country was just a few short semantics away from being an outright war crime. But every time we lash out with drones, precision bombers, and surveillance measures the thin vindication that follows clouds a realization that every single bomb we drop, every bullet we fire, and every person we kill in the name of security only chips away at our overall safety. We will simply never be able to kill enough to bring about peace. But we’ll certainly try.

***

And so, with my rifle in my shoulder, I fired three shots.

My bullets struck out with the same thick vitriol that left my mouth when I saw you running away. I don’t remember what I said, but it was undoubtedly profane. My eyes were wide and white with controlled, but crystalline rage. The brass shell casings jingled against the concrete roof and settled. I clicked the rifle safety and let it rest against my body armor. I lit a cigarette. All that bile settled inside me and my heart rate slowed. The rage and indignation was suddenly replaced by a hollow sense of futility.

What am I doing on this roof with a rifle trying to kill you? I wondered. The thought left as quickly as it came; there was no sense in asking. But the hollowness remained and later grew, fueled with similar experiences. For many years after there was a small part of me that grew angry when I thought about you trying to kill me with a rocket propelled grenade. RPG’s are serious business, and you tried to kill me and my friends with one. Over the next few years I would think about you with the same self-righteousness that carried us to your country. Slowly, though, after I put away my rifle and left the service, the self-righteousness morphed into emotionlessness, then finally retrospection.

Regardless of my feelings, I’ve always wondered if you are still alive, and I have to recognize the odds are not in your favor. If we did not kill you before we left Iraq in 2011, then perhaps you died in Syria. Or maybe you were forced into ISIS—the monster that filled the vacuum once we finally left—and the threadbare Iraqi military cut you down, or perhaps we finished what we started and bombed you with our own airpower in our campaigning. Maybe you were killed by Kurds, or by pro-Syrian forces, or Syrian rebels, or perhaps by Russians. Or maybe you’re still out there, lost to the blinding winds of the Forever War, trapped by the flippant whimsy of our commitments.

I’ll understand if you don’t wish to hear any of this. Many things I write here are for you; some of them are for me. I cannot expect either of us to forgive the other for our intentions, nor can we reasonably ask for it. We intended to kill each other for reasons that were both out of our control.

Sometimes I daydream that perhaps the same futility that flooded me after I shot at you also filled your veins, and that you fled the war. I like to think you have a family, maybe a business, and you’re living in peace somewhere. Sometimes I wonder if there is ever a chance when you and I might walk through Husaybah and marvel at the stupidity of our insignificant little battlefield. I wonder if one day I will be able to talk with you, to explain to you how the world I lived in brought me to the world you lived in to destroy your life and finish ruining the lives of those who might have loved you. I want to explain to you what it looked like to see you in your town as I stood on its rooftops with the weight of an empire pressing me toward you. I want to show you the world we lived in when I came with my friends to kill you and others in the name of security for my people. We call it freedom and liberty, but what we really mean is security. I want to show you all the neuroses that fueled the tanks we sent rumbling across your streets and sent high explosives blasting into your home and the homes of thousands of others, neuroses that loaded the bombs onto our jets and dropped them from the clouds and turned to rubble the bones of so many of those you may have known. I want to show you how afraid of the world we had become and in many ways still are today. I want to show you the worth of all the tin gold trying to kill you has earned me, has earned us all. Unfortunately, that will have to wait; I’m still trying to tally its value.

But all these thoughts are nonsense and so I cashier them, yet I know they’ll return at bored moments while I am driving to work on a cloudy Tuesday morning. They’ll show up when I’m jogging, reading a book that I’ve grown bored with, or walking home from a bad date. But no matter how often I think of these things, whenever I think about those three bullets I shot at you and the fear and rage and blinding national stupidity that fueled them I’m always glad about one thing:

I’m glad I missed.

Here are some facts about

The Great War. It started in 1913.

We know that from books.

and the scarred nobles

grandma met in the deli

off 23rd and 8th,

Ich hätte gerne eine Bratwurst

they’d say, eyes scared red.

 

It was my fault; I must admit,

quanta exist in different places and

in different times;

some have been in my brain,

and also in Hitler’s old brain

the war’s most famous vet.

Not quite Afghanistan; still, his war

and my war was the same,

A vicious trick,

Russian saboteur

made disasters, it’s true,

walk with me here:

the Soviets invade in 1979.

Great Britain joins France

as the Marne collapses,

a wet snowdrift, over-heavy

in 1914. Add the numbers.

We surround ourselves with stories,

these fluid lines always converge.

 

Remember that line, the human

marching through town, shrive-faced,

boots laced tight, cap perched on his

kiss-me forehead, rifle shouldered,

we’re gonna beat the Hun—

there’s another line, now, 451AD,

Attila plundering across the plain,

stopped by whom? The Roman? No—

Aetius heads a motley crew of Frank

and Gaul, Suebi, Goth and Visigoth,

and Saxon! Yes, the Germans saved

the West from Hunnic rule!

Until—it always comes around to this,

that boy marched home again

some years after the great siege,

at Verdun, Ypres, or Somme;

really it doesn’t matter.

Siege used to mean sit, but he won’t;

not without his boots and cap,

all that chipper stuff gone,

he’s been unseated, the siege lifted

his mien took on a leaner slant,

suspicious eyes for prying words

could not prepare a waiting world

for what came next.

Plenty! Champagne avec vous

on all the quays and ways

of Venice, Paris, Bruges;

Sur la table, Monsieur?

If you weren’t there, you can’t know,

and he wasn’t. All there.

***

When will war weary of me. Woeful wight,

wailing across the width of destiny,

I sprawl comfortless in a rancid hole,

a thick cloth great-coat stiff with sweat and grist

my second skin, then, for a skull, some tin

riddle: helmet, brain-pan, will you sit still?

The unfrozen mud’s alive, the stench, strong,

rat I’d say, someone’s let them in. Writhing,

muse for a Rosenberg, a whole den’s worth:

and that’s a good day, without bullets, bombs,

or the whistling artillery storm—

the rain of steel shrapnel, cutting like wind

across Europe’s newly irreligious plain—

flesh, it seems, has a its breaking point, splits wide

the human spirit spills, squandered, betrayed

amid the great gulf between my chilled hand

and the quiet, marble hand of German kin;

or British, or French—what odd clay. The flesh

grieves, parted by that vast, pitted waste,

unshrivened the filthy flesh yearns to be

whole again; compartmented, sufficient,

Unified. one man, one nation—one God.

***

A great civilizing wind stirs on the plains.

Leaves cast off the towns, like trees,

the Supple young men march in step

all balled fists, full of boasting oaths

they stride, ennobled by a promise

of liberation, plunder, and rape.

The best of the land! This lot’s the best!

But someone’s pulled a cruel prank.

At the front, the sergeant calls time

with a note pinned to his back. It reads:

“Take my wife, she’s free.”

Below, a crude sketch.

 

***

 

On a computer or smartphone,

an educated citizen

has just checked the market. It’s up,

cause for optimism, and sun,

and a feast fit for all the hounds

who prowl our sordid memory,

just looking for some sad excuse

to get me back out in the fury

.

Jean, not Jean

by Matthew J. Hefti

 

When I look in the mirror, I think I look stupid. Otherwise, I don’t even think of how I look. But when I do look in the mirror, it’s like I can’t look away. Also when I do, I pick a lot. Today is especially bad.

My mom said once that it’s anxiety from stress.

My dad said, he’s thirteen. What’s he got to be stressed about?

 

I’m pretty torqued on the way to school. I don’t really know why. I think it’s because I missed the bus. I missed the bus because I couldn’t stop picking at myself, and I think it’s because I can feel everything—like how tight my socks are and how my feet are already a little moist and my socks aren’t doing anything about it, and my shirt’s a little tight in the armpits and it’s pulling at my armpit hairs, and one of the hairs in my eyebrows is curled or something and it’s really annoying me, and I think maybe I have a hair growing in my ear. I’m not sure.

My mom asks what she can do to put me in a better mood.

I tell her that she doesn’t have to do anything.

She says my happiness is important.

It’s important to you, I tell her.

 

Jean isn’t at school today. He’s probably my best friend. He had an allergic reaction yesterday. He’s allergic to pretty much everything.

Mr. Rogers is subbing again because Mrs. Neumann is sick. Mr. Rogers hates when we call him that and tells us to call him anything but that. We called him all kinds of things for a while, like Mr. Fluffy Head and Poo Poo Bear, but it got boring because he really meant what he said about being able to call him anything. He didn’t care.

You wouldn’t guess it by his name, but Mr. Rogers is this tough looking dude that used to be in the military. He still has a flat top.

Mr. Rogers calls Jean’s name three times, pausing for infinity each time as if it’s not completely obvious there’s an empty desk and no one is responding. But he says it like Jean, like something you wear or like he’s a girl, but his name is Jean, like Victor Hugo’s hero. It rhymes with Shawn. You’d think he’d know that by now.

 

I’ve never read anything by Victor Hugo, but that’s what Jean’s mother always says when someone says it wrong: It’s Jean, she says. Like the greatest hero in western literature, drawn in full by Victor Hugo. Except she says litra-ture. And then if people say, who’s that, she won’t answer. She just snorts a little like they’re stupid.

I asked his mom once if I could see the picture of the Jean in the book. She said, What do you mean? I said, the one drawn by Victor Hugo. She snorted. I guess she thinks I’m stupid.

 

Jean told me that his mom named him that because the Jean in the book is like a kind of Christ.

I asked him what that was supposed to mean since there’s only one God.

He said, he’s not Christ. He’s a type of Christ.

I said, you can’t be a type of something if there’s only one of that thing.

He said he asked his dad about it once and his dad said that the only thing he’s the hero of is the miserable ones.

Who? I said. Jean or Christ?

Jean shrugged. Both I guess.

 

I used to call him Jean too. Even though it’s Jean, not Jean. Everyone did. He’s small and kind of nerdy looking. Plus he’s sick a lot, and saying Jean made us feel stuck up. But now most of us have gotten used to it. It’s just his name.

 

I didn’t call him Jean because he was nerdy. I called him that because he was my arch nemesis. He stole my job as milk monitor last year, when we were in sixth grade. Each of us had a class duty, and I had the best one.

It wasn’t the best because counting the orders and getting the milks at lunch was so great or anything. But the milk monitor for the fifth and sixth grade classroom had to go with the milk monitor for the seventh and eighth grade classroom. And Heather Saint James was the milk monitor for the seventh and eighth graders. Heather Saint James didn’t have the prettiest face—that was Jennifer Gohrman—but she did have the biggest boobs in the school.

 

The way it worked was, the older kid would bring the milk crate and wait by our door. That was like the signal to Mrs. Neumann that she needed to wrap it up. Then she’d say, raise your hand if you want chocolate. Then, raise your hand if you want white. You’d count the hands and then go to the gym closet with the older kid to get the milks, and then you’d bring them back.

Heather Saint James would put the milk crate on the ground to slide open the big fridge door to get the milks and put them into the crate.

I could see right down her shirt where those big heavy things were hanging. While she waited for me to stammer the count for our class, she would stay bent over like that with her hand on the bottom shelf. Like she didn’t even realize they were there.

 

To get to the gym closet, you had to walk through the whole school and then finally the principal’s office. You could go through the gym instead of the principal’s office, but we weren’t allowed to go that way.

When I was in fifth grade and David Pfeiffer was the milk monitor, I thought they made them go through the office because they were afraid the milk monitors would start playing in the gym on the way there. That was before Jean even went to our school.

But then when I got older, I realized that didn’t make any sense because all the balls and toys and stuff were stored in the gym closet, which is where you had to go to get the milks anyway.

After I had spent some time as the milk monitor myself, I realized they made you go through the principal’s office because they were probably afraid that if you went through the gym, you’d probably goof off in other ways. I never did though.

Jean says I chickened out and had plenty of chances, but that’s not what happened. What happened is that he stole my job.

 

One day while I was doing the sweater stare—it was fall by then—I had forgotten the count when Heather Saint James asked me the numbers. I thought fast and gave her two numbers that added up to eleven. That’s how many students we had in our class after all.

But Jean doesn’t drink milk. He’s allergic. According to his mom, deathly allergic. So the real number was supposed to add up to ten.

I should have guessed that anyway because that’s how many kids had been in my class my whole life until Jean showed up. But I remembered the new kid made us eleven.

 

It wasn’t the first time I had gotten the numbers wrong. It wasn’t even the first time I made the mistake of bringing back eleven milks. But the first time I did it doesn’t count. I just did it that time because I thought that Mrs. Neumann would let me have the extra chocolate instead of taking it back.

She didn’t like that.

I told her I couldn’t take it back because Heather Saint James already went back to her classroom.

She told me that she was sure I would find my way. She was always saying that, even when it didn’t make sense in context.

 

The time I forgot the numbers on accident, she asked why I brought back the wrong number of chocolate milks again.

I told her it was because I forgot Jean was allergic to milk.

She said, you know who won’t forget that Jean is allergic to milk?

No, I told her.

Jean. That’s who.

So she made Jean the milk monitor.

When I told my dad what happened, he laughed and said, Well, there’s dramatic irony for you.

 

I was pretty mean to Jean for a while. Then one day he asked why I cared about being milk monitor so much, and I told him it was obvious.

He said it wasn’t obvious to him.

I mentioned Heather Saint James.

He said, that’s it? Then he claimed he didn’t care about that because he could look at all the boobs he wanted because they had the internet at home. I think he just wanted me to like him.

He offered to stick his finger in one of the milk cartons so I could get the job back. I think he wanted to be liked so badly that he would have really done it, but I told him not to because they might give the job to anyone. And if someone else got the job, he’d just be risking his life for nothing.

It made me feel bad that he was so obsessed with being liked that he would risk his life to get a friend and also give up the chance to sneak peeks down the shirt of Heather Saint James.

So I said sorry for being so mean and that I wouldn’t view him as my arch nemesis anymore.

 

After me and Jean became friends, I asked him why he came to our school.

Jean said the public school told him he missed too many days. He didn’t want to be stuck in fifth grade.

So I asked him why he could be in sixth grade in our school when everyone said it was harder than the public school.

He said the state couldn’t tell our school what to do. Then he said our school was just as easy as public school. But going to any school is a waste of time, he said.

He had a point there.

When I asked him why he didn’t just get home schooled, he said his mom told him that all home school kids are weird.

He had a point there too.

But why our school? I asked. You’re not even Christian.

Yes I am, he said.

But you don’t go to our church, I pointed out.

Are you stupid or just brainwashed? he asked.

I told him he could use some milk of human kindness.

We both had a good laugh at that one.

 

It was milk that gave Jean the reaction yesterday, but it could have been anything considering practically half the normal foods in the world are like phosgene or mustard gas to him. I learned about phosgene and mustard gas yesterday in history class, not from Mr. Rogers, but from Jean.

When history class started, Mr. Rogers asked what we were learning about from Mrs. Neumann.

Jean told him World War One.

Tabby Gardner raised her hand and said, why do we always have to learn about wars in history class?

Mr. Rogers told her it was because wars were like the epicenter of an earthquake in a country’s timeline with seismic waves moving out in every direction. If you wanted to, he said, you could pick any given war and study the whole country’s history just by studying that war. You could ask yourself what led to the war and then what were the consequences of the war. By asking what led to the war, you could go as far back into history as you wanted. By asking what the consequences of the war were, you could study all the history from the war until the present and then as far into the future as infinity if you wanted.

Tabby Gardner told him we’d already been studying World War One for infinity.

I have to admit, I was pretty bored myself.

Well, Mr. Rogers said, if a war is like an earthquake in a country’s timeline, then wouldn’t a World War be like an earthquake in the entire world’s timeline? So doesn’t it make sense to spend time studying it?

Okay, Tabby Gardner said, but we already know everything about it.

Then tell me what you know about the war, Mr. Rogers said.

Jean raised his hand, like always.

Mr. Rogers said, I want to hear from Tabby. But then she didn’t say anything for a long time, and Mr. Rogers called on Jean, like always.

Did you know, Jean said, that in World War One, they used phosgene and mustard gasses? Also, did you know that the Germans would hit troops with gasses that could get through the gas masks? It would hurt their eyes and nose and stuff so bad that they would take off their masks, even though that could kill them. Then after taking off their masks, they’d inhale the phosgene and mustard and stuff like that. Their lungs would start to blister and their eyes would bleed or they’d start coughing so bad they could puke up their stomachs and all sorts of stuff.

Tabby Gardner raised her hand.

Mr. Rogers called on her.

Real prissy she said, can we please not talk about blistered lungs and puked up stomachs?

You could tell Mr. Rogers was thinking about it because he didn’t say anything for a while.

Then he said, so like I was saying before about the earthquakes, I actually know a guy who got messed up really bad—big red oozing blisters all over his body—after he put a mustard round in his truck thinking it was a regular old projo.

Then he told us all about IEDs made with chlorine tanks, stock piles of mustard rounds, troops that got gassed that couldn’t get benefits once they got home, and how the whole reason we were there was because some General convinced the UN that there were WMDs there.

Jean ate it up. He loved that kind of stuff.

 

But what happened with the milk yesterday was, after history class we had lunch. I was reading the joke on my milk carton, and I said, I don’t get it.

The jokes were like numbered in a series. Everyone with a number five, for example, would have the same stupid joke. An example would be, Why was the cow jumping up and down? Because it wanted a milkshake. But that wasn’t the actual joke yesterday.

Mr. Rogers was at his desk eating his lunch and drinking his milks—he always ordered two chocolates. He asked me what number I had.

Twelve, I told him.

Me too, he said. It’s a pun.

But I don’t get it, I told him.

He said, you know back when I was in school, milk cartons didn’t have jokes. They had pictures of missing kids.

But these have jokes, and I don’t get this one.

Instead of jokes, we’d have to look at pictures of these kids who were abducted, he said.

Jean asked what the joke was.

Mr. Rogers said, it’s not a joke. It’s a pun.

Then Jean said, well then read me the pun.

Mr. Rogers said, you wouldn’t get a pun like this if I told it to you. You have to read it.

I can’t read it myself, Jean said. I’m allergic to milk.

When I was a kid, Mr. Rogers said, we didn’t have all these allergies either. All this helicopter parenting. Kids are too sheltered these days. Protected from everything so they can’t handle anything.

I think Jean didn’t want to look weak in front of Mr. Rogers. He grabbed my milk carton to look at it for himself. And I guess a little spilled on him or something because it wasn’t long before he started turning red and wheezing and everything.

It’s a good thing Mr. Rogers was subbing that day, because Mrs. Neumann probably would have freaked out. She’s the nervous type, but Mr. Rogers has all that war training.

Mr. Rogers acted all calm like it was no big deal. He asked Jean if he had an EpiPen and where it was. It was in his desk, so Mr. Rogers grabbed it in no time and gave him the shot. Then he pointed at someone and said, you, go down the hall and have the secretary call 911. Then he pointed at me and said, you, go in the top pocket of my backpack by the right side of my desk. There’s an EpiPen in there. Bring it to me.

In pretty much no time, the ambulance had come to take Jean to the hospital.

Mr. Rogers said it was just a precaution.

 

Jean loves Mr. Rogers. Every time he subs, Jean spends all recess talking to him, and Mr. Rogers doesn’t seem to mind.

But today at morning recess, Mr. Rogers just stands at the corner of the soccer field with his hands in his pockets. He swings his foot back and forth like he’s kicking apart an ant hill or something, but he does it the whole time. He never looks up at the kids to make sure we’re not fighting or anything.

Mr. Rogers looks pretty lonely without Jean there. But before recess is over, the principal comes out and says something to him. Mr. Rogers doesn’t say anything back. He just goes inside early and the principal follows after him.

 

I asked Jean once why he wanted to waste all his recess time talking to the teacher about boring stuff like history.

He said we had to study history because those who don’t study history will be doomed to repeat it.

Sounds like the opposite would make more sense. If you don’t know about it, it would be pretty random to repeat it, which makes repeating it seem pretty unlikely.

I told him so, and he said we should ask Mr. Rogers what he thought.

I told Jean I’d just take his word for it.

 

But I guess Mr. Rogers is pretty lousy at the whole not repeating history thing. What I mean by that is, Mr. Rogers isn’t in the classroom when we get back inside from recess. While we’re all just waiting around, I hear Paisley Schmitt say they fired him because he was talking about bleeding eyeballs and coughed up stomachs during history class yesterday.

That makes sense coming from her.

I say that because the first time Mr. Rogers subbed for us, he told us not to ask if he killed anyone unless we wanted him to kill us. Then the principal made him apologize to the whole class after Paisley Schmidt narced on him to her mom.

And it’s doubly believable because Mrs. Neumann shows back up, even though she still looks sick and sounds like she’s going to cough up her stomach.

 

I don’t think Mr. Rogers is as great as Jean does, but I think he’s okay. He says bad words sometimes when he’s telling stories, and you don’t often get to hear a teacher say swear words. It’s easy to distract him and his stories are pretty good. Better than Mrs. Neumann’s anyway.

But that’s kind of just how he is. He’ll talk to you like you’re on the same level.

Like when he started his apology speech after Paisley Schmitt narced on him. He said, apparently, you’re not supposed to talk about killing with middle schoolers. You could tell he thought the whole thing was stupid by the way he said apparently.

Me and Jean had a good laugh at that too.

 

Editor’s Note: “Into the Tunnel” is the first chapter of Patrick Hicks’s new novel, ECLIPSE.

“The rocket will free man from his remaining chains, the chains of gravity which still tie him to this planet. It will open to him the gates of heaven.” 

—Wernher von Braun

He was tired and cold when they arrived from Auschwitz. The moon hung above him, battered and beaten, as he trudged down a long concrete road with thousands of other men. The train that had carried him across Germany huffed in the night. A whistle pierced the frosty air—it was a single note, strangled into silence. The huffing engine took on water and he licked his dry lips. He tried to swallow. Searchlights paced the dark as dogs strained against their leashes, their front paws wheeling the air. Guards stood along the road and yelled at the prisoners to move faster, faster. Behind him, bodies were tossed out of the railcars. They hit the pebbly ground in sickening thuds. Stones skittered away.

Eli Hessel glanced at the moon. It looked like it had been pistol whipped, wounded.

“Move it, you pieces of shit!”

Another voice chimed in. “March in unison! Your left . . . left . . . left.”

He had no idea where he was or where he was going. The shadowy bulk of a hill was on his right and, in the moonlight, he could see that a haze of pine trees lined its ridge. To his left were strange metal cylinders with nozzles on them. They were stacked on flatbed rail cars.

The men kept moving, trudging, schlepping. Their wooden clogs clacked against the concrete road. Dogs continued to snap and bark. There was the smell of wet fur. And there was something else too, a smell he couldn’t quite place at first. It was a mixture of oil and creosote. There was also—he breathed deeply—there was also the smell of decaying bodies. It was the stink of rotting meat and grapefruit. That’s what a corpse smelled like. During the past few months he had plenty of time to familiarize himself with it.

But where was he?

The journey from Auschwitz had been hard. They’d been stuffed into wooden cattle cars and, as they rocked and clattered over hundreds of miles of tracks, these men, who had been crammed in cheek by jowl, had to relieve themselves where they stood. The weakest slipped to the floor. Many of them never got up again.

Eli stumbled. He was woozy. His lips were chapped and his tongue was leathery. It hurt to swallow. He couldn’t make spit. On his lower back, at that place where the spine meets the pelvic girdle, he had a perfect bruise. A hobnail boot had kicked him into the cattle car a few days ago when he left Auschwitz, and although he couldn’t see it, he knew it must look like a horseshoe with studded dots. Whenever he twisted his waist, a sharp firework of pain sizzled up his spine. He worried that his vertebra was shattered but there was nothing he could do about it. He had to walk faster. He hobbled. He tried to stay at the front of the line because prisoners were being beaten with metal rods behind him. The road beneath his clogs was splashed with oil. Or maybe it was blood? It was hard to tell at night.

“In unison, you pieces of shit! Left . . . left . . . left.”

He ignored the nipping pain in his stomach and watched his feet move on their own. The blue and white stripes of his trouser legs swung in and out of view beneath him. He wondered if they were being taken to a gas chamber. He’d seen it happen at Auschwitz many times before. He’d seen whole families walk down a gravel path to a gas chamber and he’d seen the black tar of their bodies rumble up from a crematorium at night. Flames shot out from the chimney and the whole sky above Auschwitz was stained a dull orange. The heat from thousands of bodies made the moon shimmer.

He focused on his swinging legs and didn’t think about his mother or father, his younger brother, or his grandparents. They were gone. They’d been turned into ash long ago. And yet, against all odds, he was somehow still alive.

“Faster, you sons of bitches!” a guard yelled. “We don’t have all night.”

Maybe he could run away? Maybe he could slip into the night?

Barbed wire was on either side of him—he could see that—and there was the shadow of a wooden guard tower illuminated beneath a searchlight up ahead. No doubt the fence was electrified. To run would mean—what, exactly? All of Germany was a concentration camp.

“Move it you useless eaters, you pieces of SHIT!”

The guard was from Berlin. Eli could tell from his accent. How could he be so angry, so full of venom? And while he was thinking about this, something surprising and alarming appeared up ahead.

The rail tracks curved into a mountain. There was a tunnel. A huge one. Two massive sodium lights sparkled overhead like twin stars and they cast long shadows on the ground. A cloud of moths jittered in the lights and, for a long moment, he wondered what they might taste like. Dusty, he thought.

When it became obvious they were going into the tunnel, Eli looked around in wild terror for a chimney or a vent. Were gas chambers in there? Underground? His muscles tensed and he almost stopped walking. He had to force his legs to keep on moving even though he was shakingly afraid of what he would find up ahead.

Calm down, he told himself. It didn’t make sense to ship them halfway across Germany only to kill them. The Nazis could have done that at Auschwitz.

“It’s okay,” he whispered to himself. “Yes, all is well.”

But the claws of fear continued to scratch at the inside of his skull. His asshole tightened and his eyes darted to the left and right. If this was a work camp, where were the other prisoners?

The moon was swallowed by a cloud and this made the dark beyond the searchlights absolute. The moon had been snuffed out, choked. Two enormous iron gates on either side of the tunnel were wide open, and camouflage netting was strung above the entrance like an awning. A white wooden sign was suspended from the ceiling and someone had taken the time to get the calligraphy just right.

Alles für den Krieg
Alles für den Sieg

Eli looked around. It was understood by everyone that German was the only language that mattered in the Reich. If a prisoner was confused or didn’t understand something that was shouted at him, well then, he would learn soon enough.

When they entered the tunnel, a sudden dampness fell over his skin. It felt like a heavy wet cloak had been placed over his shoulders. He began to shiver. And somewhere up ahead, metal banged against metal—it was deep and rhythmic—double-syllabled—bah-wung—bah-wung—bah-wung. There was also the low hum of a generator to his right. Floodlights cast grotesque shadows on the wall. He looked around and realized that everything he could see must have been hewn out of the rock by hand. The floor. The walls. The curved ceiling. How many prisoners had died making this place, this cave?

They passed a cluster of SS guards who stood around laughing at some joke. They smoked and paid no attention to the column of prisoners that shuffled past them. Bright balls of orange glowed at the ends of their cigarettes. They pushed each other playfully and talked about roasting a wild boar. For a moment, Eli allowed himself to imagine what it might taste like. The fibrous meat, the juices, the sucking of the marrow from bone.

“Keep moving!” someone shouted from the rear. Surprisingly, it was a French accent.

Steel pipes were bolted to the walls and he wondered what they were for. When he looked up at the high rounded ceiling he felt claustrophobia run though his chest like spiders. For several long moments he had to fight a wild urge to run. What if the ceiling collapsed? How many thousands of tons of rock were above him? Eli looked for support beams but couldn’t see any. The air around him was thick and oppressive and cold. It crowded his lungs. His nose was chilly.

He focused on his wooden clogs. They were badly stained from the mud of Auschwitz and he counted his steps as a way to control his fear.

One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . .

All is well, he told himself. Yes, all is well.

When he looked up, he saw a winch and two dangling chains. The rhythmic banging got louder. Bah-WUNG. Bah-WUNG. Bah-WUNG. There were hundreds of prisoners working in the tunnel up ahead. They were dressed in blue and white striped uniforms like him. The light was weak and this made the underground world feel sunken and submerged. What were they doing? Mining for gold?

As he got closer, he realized they were hunched over tables and assembling something that looked like gearboxes. Others worked on metal tanks.  Down a side tunnel, a group of prisoners carried a huge nozzle. It was the size of a church bell.

“Drop it and you get twenty lashes!” a voice roared.

It was a kapo. This man was given extra food if he agreed to do the dirty work of the Nazis. In exchange for beating his fellow prisoners, he was given a good night of sleep and a full belly. The nozzle suddenly teetered sideways, the metal cone slipped against the wall, and when it bounced onto the ground—sending out a low ringing sound—the kapo immediately began hammering a prisoner with a stick. The blows rained down. Bloody stains formed on the man’s back.

“Be gentle with that!” the kapo shouted. “Gentle! Gentle! Gentle!”

An SS officer watched all of this with bored curiosity. Cigarette smoke vented from his nose. Eli studied this man’s clean face, his manicured hands, and he couldn’t help but notice the high polish of the man’s jackboots. They twinkled in a perfection of night. Eli turned away when the guard looked at the parade of arriving prisoners. He knew better than to look the SS in the eye. Surely the rules of Auschwitz must apply in this place too.

“Fresh rags,” the SS guard yelled out. He took a long drag on his cigarette. “Welcome!”

As they marched deeper into the tunnel, Eli saw that many of the prisoners didn’t have shoes. Their feet were bloody and caked with grime. He also became aware of the overpowering smells around him: diesel, the sulfurous burn of arc welding, and there was something else too. He recognized it from that factory at Auschwitz. His teeth tasted of iron. There were pools of water on the floor and he wondered if he could bend down and cup some into his hands. A kapo, however, was marching next to him. The man twirled a metal rod.

All around him were the scrapping of spades against wet rubble. The floodlights of the tunnel gave way to carbide lamps. Soon everything flickered and it was hard to see. He stumbled over a thick cable and nearly fell. Others were having trouble too.

When they rounded a corner, he decided to chance it. Eli bent down for a handful of water. It was beautiful and wet and primal against his skin, but when it passed over the dry seal of his lips he spit it out. It tasted of urine.

A moment later, they came to a halt.

The sound of hundreds of clogs coming to a stop filled up the tunnel. It was like horses clattering to a standstill.

At first, Eli couldn’t tell what was before him. He squinted and waited for his eyes to adjust. A skirt of light fanned onto—he wasn’t sure what, exactly. There, in a long line, were giant metal tubes that looked something like torpedoes. Maybe they were for a secret submarine? Maybe they were for a massive U-Boat and they’d be sent across the Atlantic to attack New York or Boston?

A high-pitched voice came from the edge of the light.

“Mützen…ab!”

Eli and the others immediately took off their caps and slapped them against the seam of their trousers. They stood at stiff attention.

There was a long pause and, during this silence, Eli felt a sneeze coming on. He wriggled his nose in the hopes he could fight it off. In Auschwitz, he once saw a prisoner get hit in the face with a crowbar for sneezing. It killed the man. He fell to the ground like a sack of wheat. The tingling continued deep in his nasal cavity, so he held his breath.

A man in a business suit stood before them. He wore a white smock and, even from this distance, Eli could see the sparkle of a Nazi pin on his lapel. Lurking in the distance were SS officers. They stood back, smoking.

“You’re in the heart of it now,” a kapo yelled. He extended both arms as if he were a magician. “Welcome to Takt Strasse.”

Eli had grown up in Berlin and he knew that a takt was a baton used by an orchestra conductor.

The kapo, who had the green triangle of a criminal stitched onto his striped uniform, pulled out a wooden club from behind a metal cabinet. He paced back and forth before adding, “On Takt Strasse, I keep time on your heads if you don’t move quickly enough. Do you understand, my assholes?”

He brought the club down onto an imaginary head.

“In this place we build rockets.” There was a deliberate pause. A knowing smile. “Yes, my assholes, we create machines the Americans and the British cannot even imagine. Our technology is going to win this war. You’re standing in the future.”

Eli looked at the torpedoes and nodded. Ah, he understood now. They weren’t designed to fly through the water. They were designed to fly through air and come crashing down onto cities. His eyes opened in the horrible realization of what was around him. Each one of these rockets could kill…how many?

“You are enemies of the Reich and in this kingdom beneath the mountain you will work to destroy your own countries. Do you understand me?” There was another wide smile. “In this place you will build wonder weapons the likes of which the world has never seen.”

He held the club and moved it like a scythe. “This is your last home, my assholes. The only way out of this camp is through the chimney.” He opened is arms. His voice was suddenly bright and friendly. “Welcome to Dora!”

Eli didn’t know what any of this meant, but he had a good idea. In Auschwitz, after his family had been sent into the sky, he had come to understand such speeches. In this place called Dora, death was a way of life. There would be death in the morning. Death in the afternoon. Death in the evening. Death would be everywhere, like oxygen. Death. Death. Death.

“Listen up,” came another voice. It was deeper and darker. “Approach the table in groups of five. We need to process you.”

And so it was that hundreds of starving men entered the most secret concentration camp in the Nazi empire. When it was Eli’s turn, he held his cap in both hands. He decided this made him look like a beggar, so he stood at attention. He stiffened his back.

“Age?”

“20.”

“Do you speak German?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Occupation?”

He needed to make himself useful because the Nazis believed one simple and ironclad rule: only valuable workers stayed among the living. Everyone else was wheeled into the darkness.

“I’m…an electrician,” he lied.

The prisoner behind the desk stamped a green work order and handed it to Eli without looking up. There was a number with an inky swastika punched over it. 41199.

Eli Hessel, a Jew from Berlin who hoped that many decades of life still lay ahead of him, turned from thoughts of the dead and let his mind focus on clear, clean water. Yes, he thought, he’d love a tall glass. There would be ice cubes, big ones, big enough to sting your upper lip when you took in the cool wetness. It would flow down his throat, wet and pure.

And with this image hovering on his tongue, he stepped into a sub-tunnel.

He went to work.

*    *

The official name of the camp was KZ Dora-Mittelbau. The KZ stood for Konzentrationslager and work began on the tunnels on August 28, 1943 when a hundred prisoners from nearby Buchenwald were ordered to dig into the hardened rock of an abandoned gypsum mine. By the end of 1943, some 11,000 prisoners were hammering and blasting their way through a stubby mountain called the Kohnstein.

“Mountain” is too grand of a term, though. It was a ridge that lifted up from lush farmland, jack pines sprouted up from its hump, and it was home to a rich variety of wildlife. Beneath the soil was a tough rock called anhydrite. It was so hard, in fact, that tunnels didn’t need supporting beams, which is precisely why the Nazis decided to create a factory deep inside its heart. Huge internal spaces could be chiseled into the center of this mountain and, as a result, no American plane would ever spy the assembly line of V-2 rockets hidden inside. The Nazis knew the enemy would fly on, seeing nothing, suspecting nothing, and even if they found out what was happening in the cool depths of the earth, no bomb could ever punch its way down to the factory floor. It was a natural fortress. It was bomb proof. The war could never touch it.

In the early days of the camp’s existence, the growing cavity of rock was a place of constant noise and dust. Emaciated prisoners blasted holes into anhydrite around the clock. They hunched against walls before each deafening explosion—they pinched their eyes shut and held their breath—and as they crouched there with their hearts racing they must have wondered if the ceiling would collapse. Would the tonnage of rock suspended above continue to hold?

While they imagined a waterfall of rocks tumbling down onto their bodies, that’s when the cracking detonation of TNT happened up ahead. A huge cloud of rolling white covered them, it submerged them. Dust particles filled up their lungs. Whenever they spit, their saliva became like paste.

Once the dust settled they were ordered to clear away the largest chunks of rock. The prisoners were ghosts that tossed huge jagged pieces into rail cars called grubenhunten and then, by sheer force of will, these men muscled the carts down a track and out into the sunlight. There, they tipped out their load, turned around, and went back into the tunnel for more.

These withered men with burst eardrums slept inside the mountain. And because there was no plumbing, this meant sanitary conditions were beyond disgusting. Men relieved themselves into barrels of diarrhea, they walked across streams of excrement, and they were given hardly any drinking water. As a result, disease spread at a fearsome rate and prisoners fell to the ground in unrelenting numbers. Still, the work continued. It went on day and night.

For the Nazis, they didn’t care who lived and who died. It was slave labor. The bodies of these men were the property of the Reich. Even now, we’re not entirely sure how many prisoners perished from all the blasting and hauling but the numbers are thought to be in the thousands. We do know that the dead were hauled away to Buchenwald where they were burnt in a crematorium. The SS at Dora-Mittelbau felt this was too inefficient—all those trucks traveling back and forth, wasting gasoline—so they requested their own oven for burning the dead. This wish was granted.

By early 1944, Tunnel A and Tunnel B were finished, along with rail tracks that led out from their gaping mouths. Some 35 million cubic feet of space was now available for rocket assembly. If we think of Tunnel A and Tunnel B running parallel to each other—with a slight S curve to both—there were forty-six smaller tunnels that connected them. In this way, seven and a half miles of space had been chiseled into the Kohnstein. The world’s largest underground factory was finally ready for use and, if everything went according to plan, the Nazis would soon rain warheads down onto cities in a way the world had never seen before.

One thing was certain: the idea of a rocket was about to move from the realm of science fiction into the realm of science fact. What would soon rise up from blueprints would not only change the course of the twentieth-century, it would rumble down through the years to come. It influences us still. It threatens us still.

*    *

Eli knew none of this when he arrived because the prisoners who built the tunnels were all dead by the summer of 1944. However, even if he did know how Dora-Mittelbau had been created, would it really matter? Not to Eli. He only cared about the narrow road to survival. This was part of the literal and figurative tunnel vision that existed in the underground camp. All living prisoners felt this way. The present and the future were all that mattered. The past? The past didn’t matter. It was a place of pain and loss. The past held images of happier times and of family members who had all been murdered. And so, Eli didn’t think of the past. It ceased to exist. It was a weight that threatened to drag him down.

He was housed in Barrack 118 along with 400 other men. It was a clapboard shack with thin windows and a dirt floor. It was one of many barracks that had been set up outside the tunnels and the whole outdoor complex was surrounded by electrified wire. Searchlights roamed the night. In the distance, dogs barked and he could hear classical music drifting out from the SS camp. Occasionally, laughter sliced the night air and, once or twice, he heard the sound of gunfire. The SS at Dora consisted almost entirely of men who had long careers at other concentration camps. They knew what they were doing. They were stone faced professionals.

Triple layered bunks had been shoved into Barrack 118 and it was here that shivering men nuzzled into each other for warmth. As the curfew siren wailed out, Eli searched for sleep. After sixteen hours of work—during which time he’d seen five men collapse from hunger and another beaten to death—getting a good night of sleep took on existential importance. A night of sleep might repair the damage that had been done to his joints and ligaments, it might help clot wounds, and it might allow his back to heal.

His uniform was infested with lice and, whenever he tried to slip into the syrupy void of rest, he could feel little mouths walking across the landscape of his body, nibbling here, nibbling there. If he thought about it too much it seemed like his skin was on fire, like he had already been shoved into the crematorium.

He scratched his eyebrow and felt a white speck moving beneath his fingernail. The man next to him twitched in sleep. His breath stank and, gauging from the smell of shit that was on the man, he obviously had dysentery and hadn’t made it to the barrel in time. While the man snored, Eli studied his skeletal face, how the eyes darted back and forth beneath papery lids. Maybe this man, this stranger with a homosexual’s pink triangle on his uniform, would magic into a corpse in the next few hours? Such things happened. Just yesterday the kapos woke up Barrack 118 for morning roll call and seven men had died during the night. One of them had hanged himself.

Eli glanced out the window. The moon was pock-marked and brilliant. He saw that it was bleached white, just like the walls of the tunnels of Dora. In the drowsy chambers of his imagination, he wondered if the moon and the tunnels were made from the same rock. He saw himself quarrying into the moon, digging down, down, down, deep into its belly where he could sleep in peaceful glowing warmth. Sleep, he thought. To drift away…

A gust of wind rattled the window.

He adjusted his wooden clogs beneath his head. They hurt the base of his skull but that was far better than waking up to find that someone had stolen them during the night. Imagine walking into the tunnels with bare feet, he thought. He could almost feel the cold against his toes.

When he was kid, he loved feeling grass beneath his feet. July sunshine trickled down through oak leaves and the warmth was delicious. He imagined stopping at a café for a slice of chocolate gateaux. Maybe he’d sink a finely polished fork into frosting and lift the crumbling goodness to his lips where—

He opened his eyes and felt a hundred mouths on his body. Stop, he counseled himself. Go to sleep. Go to sleep so that you may live.

And with that, he drifted into the abyss.

The lice, meanwhile, continued to feed.

*    *

Unlike other camps in the Nazi system, Dora didn’t have a grand gatehouse that prisoners marched through on their way to forced labor. In places like Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen, and Dachau, the phrase Arbeit Macht Frei was emblazoned over a main gate. By contrast, the gate at Dora was simple, artless, and had no such phrase. There was, however, an unofficial slogan in the camp that everyone knew. It hung silently in the air. Sometimes the SS even said this phrase during roll call. “Vernichtung durch arbeit.” Extermination through work.

This was the essential element of Dora and we should note that between the years 1943 and 1945, one in three prisoners died there. Work camps like Dora realized they didn’t need a gas chamber: they simply had to work prisoners to death and, by doing so, they could extract as much useful labor as possible.

In his first week there, Eli came to know Dora well. There were the tunnels, of course, where he and thousands of others were forced to work. This underground area of camp was called Mittelbau, and this is where the world’s first rocket was built. In the years to come, the designer of the V-2, Wernher von Braun, would shed his Nazi past and go on to create the thunderous Saturn V for NASA, which lifted American astronauts to the moon. The bargain for the United States was simple: ignore von Braun’s past and in return he would deliver the most powerful rocket the world had ever seen. Whenever questions about Dora-Mittelbau did come up in later life, von Braun would simply smile and talk about Apollo, and Tranquility Base, and the bright pull of the future.

To the west of the tunnel entrance was the SS camp. This was off limits to the prisoners and yet, whenever they marched past, they could see fine homes, a fancy pub, dog kennels, and vegetable gardens. Just to the south of the SS camp was the rail yard where the V-2s were loaded onto trains and sent to launching pads across Germany. Further to the west was the gatehouse of the prison camp. Aside from a horrible stench lifting into the air—a stench that stung the eyes—the first thing a visitor might notice would be the guard towers, the searchlights, and the barbed-wire. The prisoners were woken at four in the morning by kapos. They entered the barracks with rubber truncheons and flayed away until everyone was assembled for roll call. Thousands of striped uniforms had to stand at attention while the SS strolled among them, roaring out commands. Dogs strained at leashes. Men in guard towers yawned and smoked cigarettes. They lifted their machine guns and took aim while a swastika on a flagpole snapped and rippled in the shadowy blue of sunrise.

Roll call lasted for hours. The prisoners stood at attention with their caps off while a kapo read off their numbers in German. Eli listened for his new name as a soft breeze moved through his uniform. He was no longer Eli Hessel. He was 41199.

The numbers were always shouted out.

“VIER EINS EINS NEUN NEUN!”

“Jawohl!”

He raised his hand and was counted among the living.

As the count went on, crows circled overhead. They wheeled around and landed on barrack rooftops. They cawed and hopped. Sometimes, if the wind was right, Eli could hear church bells bonging in the valley below. Wisps of smoke lifted up from unseen chimneys. He wondered what they were eating for breakfast. Eggs? He liked to imagine eggs. Boiled. Poached. Fried. Scrambled. Thick with butter.

When they were dismissed, everyone rushed for rutabaga soup, a slice of moldy bread, and coffee that tasted of acorns. When Eli drank the soup for the first time, he noticed that it tasted of petroleum. Blobs of oil floated on top. The soup arrived in fifty gallon drums—they probably held fuel once—but he didn’t care about this. He poured the soup into his mouth and tore at the green bread. The coffee too disappeared. When it was all over, he looked at his dirty hands and ached for more. Many of the prisoners went over to the empty metal drums and began to lick them clean with their tongues. One of the cooks, a burly man with thick forearms, hit them with a ladle.

“Stand back. That’s all for today!”

Some prisoners ate lice off their shirt. Others ate snails off fence posts. Others tried to eat leaves or tufts of grass. Eli watched all of this and wondered if he, too, might do the same thing in a few weeks. Yes, concluded. Yes.

An announcement crackled out from the camp loudspeaker. “Attention . . .” There was a shriek of feedback. “Return to the roll call square. Return to the roll call square immediately.”

They moved back and lined up. A brass band started to play and, in this way, thousands of men marched out of Dora for the tunnels of Mittelbau. The work day had begun.

As they moved for the tunnels, and the rockets, and all that the future might bring, Eli glanced at the guard towers. The wind picked up and the trees began to rustle. Birds soared overhead, riding the currents into quieter valleys. Behind the prisoners, the crematorium rumbled softly. The tall chimney looked like an inverted rocket. It belched up tarry exhaust, staining the bright blue sky with the fuel of flesh and bone.

His arms were heavy and he shuffled carefully to keep his clogs from falling off.

They turned for the tunnel. It was a gigantic black opening, a wide mouth. Soon, the long column of starving men were swallowed by the mountain. Eaten.

Eli focused on what lay ahead. No matter what happened, he told himself, he must not give up. He must fight to the death to live.

 

I met a woman on my way to Iraq.  Just before I stepped onto the midnight plane to Baghdad, she asked me what should have been a simple question:

“Who do you work for?”

Her name was Moni Basu. She was a journalist. She had thick dark hair, an intense demeanor, and she wore a helmet that said “Evil Media Chick.”  We were drinking coffee at a picnic table behind a beverage kiosk at the back of Ali Al Salem base in Kuwait. Her traveling companion, a photographer named Curtis Compton, had caught shrapnel from an IED during a previous embed.  A moment before, Moni had given me, a rookie journalist, an important Arabic term: mutar saif.  It meant lies, bullshit, summer rain, a thing that just didn’t happen in the desert.

I told her I worked for a magazine called “CQ.”

“GQ?”

“No.  CQ.”

“You write for Congressional Quarterly?”

The questions never stopped with Moni. She could smell the bullshit.

“Convergence Quarterly,” I said.  “It’s a new magazine.  This will be our first issue. We’re sponsored by North Carolina A&T.”

“You work at North Carolina A&T?”

I nodded nervously. I’m white.  A&T is a historically black college in Greensboro, North Carolina.  Many people argue that the student protest movement of the 60s began at A&T when four courageous young men conducted a sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter on February 1^st, 1960.  This was the part of our history that we advertised to the world.

“Do you know who graduated from there?” Moni asked.

“Uh, Jesse Jackson?”

“Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?”

She said it like that, like a question, like she couldn’t believe that I was here with her and didn’t know this crucial fact.  It was early March, 2008, the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion.  I’d been working at A&T as a lecturer in interdisciplinary writing for the past three years, but didn’t know a thing about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

“This is the guy who masterminded the attacks on 9/11,” Moni said.  “You don’t know who Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is?”

Moni glanced at Curtis who was applying a cloth to a lens with calm circular strokes. It was just beginning to dawn on me that I might be in way over my head, like maybe I was the man my father was afraid I was, a rube destined to die a ridiculous death in the coming days, my charred body hung from a bridge in some war-torn hamlet, men in loose-fitting garments cheering as my ashy corpse twisted in the wind.  Or they’d put me in one of those orange jumpsuits and cut off my head, whoever “they” were.

I took a long sip of my coffee.  Surely, whatever crush I had on Moni would not be reciprocated given my astounding ignorance about the war on terror.  There I was, about to embed with Navy SEALS in Haditha, one of the most dangerous cities in Iraq, and I had no idea about the man who had started the very war I was trying to cover for a magazine that hadn’t even released its first issue.  Yes, I was the guy who had traveled seven thousand miles to learn that the mastermind of 9/11 had been educated in my own backyard.

“Excuse me,” I said.

Rather than behave like a good journalist and question Moni relentlessly about KSM, I retreated to the bathroom to attend to suddenly struggling bowels.  I stared at the graffiti from the troops:

Chuck Norris doesn’t consider it sex unless the woman dies.

Chuck Norris’s tears cure cancer.  Too bad he never cries.

Here I sit, cheeks a’flexin, ready to unleash another Texan.

Here I sit, upon the crapper, ready to produce another rapper.

Can’t wait to go home.

Have a nice war.

They called my bus.  I put on my army surplus helmet and bulletproof vest, jotted down a few notes about the jokes in the toilet. I sat close to Moni as the bus filled up. I didn’t want to lose her. I felt like I needed her, and I wasn’t used to that feeling, that fear. Basically, I didn’t want to be left alone in Iraq. On the drive to the plane, I made small talk about the record-breaking drought back home.

“It’s so bad in Atlanta,” she said, “that I keep a bucket in my shower just so I can save enough water for my garden.”

We walked across the tarmac and up the ramp into the loud bloated hull of a C-130 Hercules.  It was me, Moni, Curtis, four soldiers, and two contractors. The C-130 is an exposed experience, a cabin stripped of padding and panel, the seats nothing more than net and pole, the lights a dim red, white, and blue, the floor studded with traction pads.  After the plane took off, Moni fell asleep and so did one of the soldiers.  Another sat with his headphones blasting so loud it sounded like spit was coming out of his ears.  I smelled grape Kool-Aid powder.  I looked around at the seemingly calm faces occasionally jostled by the turbulence.  There was no turning back.  For the past six months, I’d been obsessed with seeing the war for myself and escaping the media-saturated mindfuck of left versus right, peace versus war, WMDS, beheadings and 9/11 conspiracy theories.  I wanted to see the thing for myself and now that I was here I couldn’t stop thinking about how blind I’d been to the very place I was escaping:  America:  my own backyard.

Other than KSM, what else had I missed? Was I about to get kidnapped and beheaded, my father dropping to his knees in our front yard with photographers clipping pictures all around him, just like the dad of Nick Berg, the famous decapitated contractor?  And were contractors—these men snoozing all around me—were they the bad guys like everybody said?  Was America evil? And why were our troops so infatuated with Chuck Norris?

All the lights went out in the Hercules, the cabin a dark tunnel of jiggling multi-national bodies as this massive airship began its spiral descent to Baghdad, the famous lights-out, corkscrew roller-coaster free-fall approach the military’s way of evading RPGs and demonstrating to rookie journalists just how simultaneously colossal and agile America can be if she truly wants to keep herself a secret.

 

_____

 

Baghdad seemed calm before dawn, more a dense constellation of sapphire lights than a bombed out wasteland.  I pressed my cheek against the glass of the Blackhawk.  Here was one of the oldest cities in the world, Babylon herself on a Sunday morning.  As a thirteen-year old boy I’d seen SCUDS and Patriot missiles doing their duty on the news, my country at war for the first time in this city down below, but Iraq meant nothing to me back then.  In high school, I owned a bong named the Enola Gay.  History was just a game, a trivial pursuit, a place to get names for marijuana paraphernalia.  Now I was here, in the center of the mediated world, seated next to Moni and Curtis and two soldiers manning swiveling guns as we strafed over the dark crawl of the Tigris River.

We touched down on a slab of cement behind a barricaded building known as LZ (Landing Zone) Washington.  Apparently most of the soldiers at this chopper terminal for Green Zone activity were employees of a contractor firm known as Triple Canopy Security Solutions. Moni, Curtis, and I walked into the office with two soldiers who were in town for a court-martial.

The first thing I noticed inside LZ Washington was a photo on the wall, an autographed black and white shot of Chuck Norris next to the sign-in desk.

“What is the deal with all the Chuck Norris worship?” I asked Moni.

She shook her head and smiled, like I was paying attention to the wrong things.  As we waited for a our ride to CPIC, the Combined Press Information Center, I stepped closer to the Norris board, the little flapping scraps of pink and green post-its framing the autographed photo, the post-its scrawled with doggerel travelers had dedicated to this classic example of the Whitmanian American, that man who contains multitudes. Norris’ life was actually quite remarkable, I realized at that moment.  Not only was he an actor, but he was also a former contractor, a highly decorated martial artist who formed an entire school of Karate, and, on top of it all, he was a devout Christian political wonk who’d recently taken over William F. Buckley’s conservative column in hundreds of newspapers, railing against premarital sex, gay marriage, and other such signs of the apocalypse.  The picture of Norris I saw posted in LZ Washington had him seated atop a motorcycle that might as well have been a white horse.  Beneath were bits of wit like:

Chuck Norris doesn’t read.  He stares at the book until it gives him information.

Chuck Norris wears cowboy boots.  They’re made of real cowboys.

Chuck Norris doesn’t mow his grass.  He dares it to grow.

I wrote down as many of these jokes as I could, determined to keep alive the lighter side of Iraq, but as we drove through the sunrise streets of Baghdad, I couldn’t stop thinking about what Moni had told me just before we’d gotten on the C-130.

“You don’t know who Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is?”

How bad is America’s amnesia, its will to blindness?  And to what extent is that blindness connected to our sense of humor, our addiction to nervous, absurdist jokes? Was I the only one who didn’t know the names of our enemies?  How little did we know about “them”? From the back of a Humvee, I looked for faces.  We passed by monolithic cement barricades, flashes of street vendors with exhausted leers pushing bales of blankets, a statue for the soldiers who’d fought against Iran in the grisly chemical weapons fueled war of the 1980s.  God, how did I not know that the man who started this whole “war on terror” was a graduate of the school where I taught? Was the gap a function of too many rips off the Enola Gay as a teenager?  Was I the only American who was this clueless about the Global War on Terror? Sometimes I felt extremely uncomfortable about just how much I had in common with the fool we’d elected President: George W. Bush.

 

_____

 

My father gave me some advice before I left for Iraq.  He said that Operation Iraqi Freedom was just as much our civil war as it was theirs.  He said all anybody talked about in the press was whether we were the good guys or the bad guys.

“But what about them?” he said.  “Who’s their good guy?  Who’s their George Washington?  That’s the story you want to find.  Talk to them.”

That was my goal.  I knew I had bigger fish to fry than the graffiti dedicated to Chuck Norris, but talking to actual Iraqis without intrusive oversight was easier said than done.  After being in Iraq for more than a week, I still hadn’t met a single Iraqi.  On the eighth day of my tour, along with my military escort, a large mustachioed Mormon named Reynolds, I landed at Al Asad, a sprawling base that reminded me of summer camp, soldiers jogging and playing volleyball, fobbits zooming around in golf carts, a commissary store loaded with candy and chewing tobacco and cellophane wrapped soft core magazines displaying pin-up girls. Around three o’clock in the afternoon, under a shelter at the back of the base, as I was paging through a men’s magazine, I heard a familiar voice.

“Eat Boy!”

I looked up from my picnic table and ran down to the barricaded cul-de-sac where my SEAL platoon had parked their humvees.  I hugged my old friend, now the Lieutenant for this platoon that was actually a Joint Special Operations Force (mostly SEALS mixed with contractors, CIA, and Rangers).  Diet was a man I’d known since I was five years old.  He looked different, his thick bristly mustache designed to create an air of gravity and power—what the Iraqis called wasta—but to me, it was pure comedy, a nod to the porn stars of the seventies or perhaps the viceroys of nineteenth century colonial England, Panama Jack.

“Nice stache,” I said.

Diet commented on the disproportion between the hair on my face and the hair on my head.  Whereas he was growing a mustache, I was growing a beard, having learned from him that while mustaches suggest power to Iraqis, the beard suggests holy man.

“You’re in the back,” Diet said, as we stepped towards a humvee with the name “Leonidas” spray-painted on the back.  Leonidas was an ancient Spartan king, and also a fictional character from a recent movie, “The 300,” which followed one Spartan unit’s heroic exploits during the battle of Thermopylae. According to historical legend and the movie, the Spartans died valiantly fighting against King Xeres and his Persian horde, the Spartan story told only because Leonidas was wise enough to send a man named Dilios away from the platoon on the night before the decisive battle so he—Dilios—might tell the story of the soldiers’ bravery to the masses.

“We’re driving?” I said.

Diet nodded and smiled.  I was surprised and pleased, and scared shitless. I’d enjoyed the aerial views of Iraq, the absence of Iraqis, but was growing a bit suspicious of the embedding strategy, the careful hopscotch from base to base, the way we avoided all the spaces between, the people.

“You scared?” Diet said.

“Should I be?” I said.

“No,” he said.  “That’s part of the story here.”

I put on my helmet and ceramic plated vest. Complacency Kills, said a spray-painted sign on the edge of Al Asad.  A soldier named B. Dubbs was driving as we passed beyond the wire, the concertina and the cement barriers. Diet passed back a tin of Copenhagen.  I threw in a pinch, feeling like high school, about to go rallying through the woods on a winter day, except we weren’t entering a state forest or the rutted lanes of an apple orchard.  This was a war zone.

Diet had described Haditha to me as the West Virginia of Iraq, a triad of tribal villages a hundred and fifty miles northwest of Baghdad.  Unemployment was seventy percent.  There was desert everywhere, many of the people making a living the way they had for thousands of years: fishing and farming, ghostly figures shepherding goats on the smoke-plumed horizon.  There were men in robes selling what looked like lemonade from cheap collapsible roadside tables.

“That’s gas,” Diet said.

I nodded my head.  Children ran along the shoulder with their hands outstretched.  We threw them candy, jolly ranchers.  I felt good.  I loved the way the desert sky was skinning my eyes, the taste of my fresh chaw and its fiberglass shards tearing through my gums, the feeling of sharing a buzz with Diet in this surreal landscape that seemed to go back and forth between war-torn and exotic, novel and vivid on the one hand, tragic and impoverished on the other.  I listened to the gobble of radio communications, smelled the sweat of the men, saw fruit stands pass by along the road, date palms and eucalyptus, a graveyard of jets, a black burned out hulk of a sedan on the shoulder a reminder that I was not in the Disney version of Iraq anymore and that, at any moment, one of these swaddled and stoic-faced roadside strangers might decide to press a button on a cell-phone he’d converted into a remote control and thereby remind me that not everybody shared the enthusiasm of the children for the foreigners with their tanks and their sunglasses and their gargantuan guns and their swollen lower lips.

I tried to keep my head in the moment as we approached Haditha, my vision of the world at that moment an opaque dust-smeared profile of Diet riding shotgun, his face a single sunglass eye and the edge of that thick mustache, a wire coming out of his ear, his lips mutely mouthing orders into a mic as we passed through a gate, and then we could suddenly see a lake to our left and the Euphrates valley to our right down below, this ancient river of grade school lore now a roaring spout from the cement jaws of a massive dam, the slabby Soviet architecture and the sulfurous smell of the Haditha Dam not enough to mute the feeling of ancient resonance, the awe of seeing distant cities of mud huts clustered behind palms on the east and west banks, a vast desert stretching out forever on the southern horizon, no billboards anywhere.

“Can we go for a swim?” I asked.

“You do not want to swim in there,” Diet said.

I wondered what that meant.  Was the river polluted or was he wisely discouraging the appearance of recreation, a spring break scene of buddies privileged white men splashing around in sacred waters while dark people downstream were cutting each other’s heads off? I’ve always been a sucker for symbolic baths, half-hearted ablutions.  When I see a new body of water, I want to swim.  I kept telling myself to shut the fuck up, to remember the wisdom of Mark Twain: “It is better to keep silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.”

We parked the humvees and stepped out, were greeted by a pack of sand-colored mongrel dogs that threaded their way through our dispersing ranks.  I gave one a tentative pat, stretched my legs and spit out my dip, then looked around the base at black missile-shaped tubes of inflatable boats leaned up against the cement barriers that fortified the borders, red and green storage containers forming a wall against the southern end of the camp, an empty plywood watchtower like the first leg of a Trojan horse.

“Who’s on the other side?” I asked Diet, as we stood on the bank of the river looking across at the camp on the eastern shore.  He told me that was where the contractors slept.  Sure enough, I saw the letters “KBR” sprayed in red on a cement wall, a few extremely thick men milling around.  Kellogg Brown Root was a subsidiary of Dick Cheney’s old company, Halliburton.

“What do they do?” I asked.

“They more or less take care of the trash,” Diet said.

The great secret of my time in Iraq, I thought for awhile, was that trash, the burn pits KBR ran and the rash of scary symptoms discovered in soldiers and in Iraqis, or maybe, I came to think, it was a chemical weapons discovery at the Haditha Dam, a story one of those KBR contractors told me in a tent one night back in Kuwait.  According to him, we never told the media about these “WMDs” because the serial numbers indicated American origins. This was a big story, I thought, as big as they come, but after I put it out in The Mantle the very week C.J. Chivers of The New York Times released a similar story about such weapons being discovered all over Iraq, I realized people didn’t care, that our complicity in Iraq’s development of the very WMDs we’d used to justify the war meant nothing to most Americans.[1] [2] No, I now believe that the big secret of Iraq is still that thing my father told me to explore: the people.

Diet showed me the trailer where I could take a shower, then ushered me into a maze of corrugated storage containers.  I followed him across a wooden plank past a dark empty plywood room.  Behind this was another row of these metal containers, the “ConEx” boxes that served as the sleeping quarters for his men, each door sprayed with their nicknames, monikers like “Lurch” and “Tree.”  Diet’s door was marked by two big black letters:  “LT.”

“Damn.  Not bad,” I said, as I walked inside and beheld strands of Christmas lights forming vines above a red bed and a wall decorated with an ornate tribal tapestry, the pattern a pointillist spread of teal and brown leaves.  I saw trunks of care package goodies everywhere, a Macbook on a desk under a reading lamp.  Behind Diet’s computer sat a black and white photo of his father from his time in the Marines during Vietnam.  Above the photo were Diet’s books, including a tattered copy of William Faulkner’s Flags in the Dust.

As Diet took off his gear, I sat down in his black swivel desk chair and read through his Faulkner.  I came across a line on a page that had been dog-eared, a passage I wrote down for some reason:  “When a feller has to start killin’ folks, he most always has to keep killin’ em.  And when he does, he’s already dead hisself.”

“You hungry?” Diet asked.

“What do you think?” I said.

“I know.  Stupid question.”

He laughed.  Eat Boy’s always hungry.  Diet offered me one of his care-package nutrition bars, something with flax and honey and other progressive ingredients.  It felt good to eat, to take off my shoes, to savor for a second the sense—the illusion—of finally having arrived.

“Fucking Eat Boy,” he said.

“Bet you never thought this was going to happen,” I said.

“No,” he said. “To be honest.  I didn’t.”

I looked at the cutouts of women from Maxim magazine he’d taped to the walls.  He had a white dry board on the back of his door.

“Let’s come up with a list of five stories,” he said.

I didn’t like the sound of that.  I told Diet I could find my stories on my own. Diet, for good reason, looked at me skeptically, or perhaps paternally is the better word, or maybe it was close to the same look Moni gave me when I asked about Chuck Norris and told her I’d never heard of KSM.  All three of them—Diet, my dad, and Moni—knew I knew nothing, and thought this was to my detriment, but sometimes I wondered if there wasn’t a certain advantage to my naïvite.

“Just out of curiosity,” I said. “Why does there have to be five?”

“It’s a good number, Eat Boy.  One story a day for a full work-week.”

Three months earlier, after our local newspaper had backed out on sponsoring me because my father had threatened their editor (his patient) with a lawsuit if anything happened to me while I was in Iraq, Diet had called from me Haditha and challenged me to “be a man,” to make the trip happen in spite of my father’s resistance.  So, like my president, I faked my way into Iraq, came up with a magazine of my own.  I was proud of this, my American ingenuity, but as Diet stood there telling me what stories to write, I felt like he was meddling.

“I wanna meet some Iraqis,” I said.

“Right now?”

“Yeah.”

“You wanna meet Captain Allah?”

“Yes, I wanna meet Allah.”

That’s how the name first sounded to me—Captain Allah—Captain God.  Like, sure, let’s go straight to the top.  I had no idea who he was, but he sounded important and he definitely sounded Iraqi.  Diet and I walked back through the maze of trailers that finally spilled out into the open air of the Iraqi night, some of the brightest stars I’d ever seen, the lighting of the base kept deliberately low, the vast miles of desert all around us offering no diffusing glow to the constellations, Orion stippled with a dress of chain mail armor, stars below his belt I’d never seen before.  I spun around in the cool night air like I was stoned, saw a tall black SEAL walk out of the shower hut with a towel around his neck, saw the mongrel dogs play-fighting down at the southern end of the base by the red punching bag hanging beneath the watchtower.

We walked into the room of one of the platoon’s translators, a thick-bearded Jordanian named Rami who had a large American flag posted over his bed in the same fashion that Diet had a tribal tapestry tacked over his. Cutout pictures of women in skin-tight apparel modeling machine guns dotted Rami’s walls.

Diet was briefing Rami on what was about to happen and I was admiring a photo of a blonde woman in a black dress wielding a black rifle when a tall man with a feathered mullet and a gold tie walked through the door, his entrance worthy of a sitcom scene.  I half expected a studio audience to explode into a roar of applause.  He was gangly, a silver pen clipped to his left breast pocket, his white dress shirt and olive suit freshly ironed, his eyes moving left to right in a furtive display of awareness and anxiety that evoked Kramer’s character from Seinfeld.  But this was unhinged, unrehearsed.  Here was a man like me, who did not know his role, and no feature of his appearance suggested this more than the feathered mullet.

“Matt, this is Captain Al’A Khalaf Hrat.  He’s the leader of the thirty man Iraqi Swat Team we’ve been training over the past few months.”

“Assalamu Alaikum,” I said, rather proud of myself for remembering this rote greeting.

I shook the man’s hand, felt a strong calloused grip.  He responded with a deep voice and an abridgement of the conventional crib sheet Arabic greeting:

“Salaam.”

He took off his jacket, revealing a shoulder holster, two pistols tucked beneath his arms.  He took that off as well, spoke at length, looking back and forth between Diet and me, never once looking at Rami, which I thought was “interesting,” as they say.

“He wants to know where you’re from,” Rami said.

Either Arabic is the most inefficient language in the world or Captain Al’A wanted to know more than just where I was from.  Rami wore a tan jumpsuit with an American flag above his left breast.  I was anxious, aware that a lot was going to be lost in translation.  I had my journal in my hands with all of the questions I wanted to ask, but felt tempted, as I almost always do, to improvise, to throw my notes aside, and go with the feeling of the moment.

For the first time in my life I was not only in Iraq, but I was finally sitting with an Iraqi, the leader of a SEAL trained SWAT team, perhaps the Iraqi equivalent of Vic Mackey, Michael Chikliss’s character from my favorite cop show, The Shield.  Was it possible that Captain Al’A’s mullet meant to Iraqis what Mackey’s shaved head meant to Americans?  Was I dealing with the alpha dog, the badass, a rogue cop, the sort of man who made his own rules?  I kept getting this comic vibe from Captain Al’A, the ghost of the American mullet and its connotations of “I don’t give a fuck, throw me another beer” mentality.

After telling Al’A that I was from a town close to Washington, D.C. I decided to forget my questions about statistics and George W. Bush and the fifth anniversary of the invasion and “the Al Anbar Awakening,” and I elected, instead, to ask him about his hair.  I told him I liked his mullet.  I told him that I understood that different hairstyles meant different things to different people, that the mustache was supposed to mean power and the beard holiness, “but what does the mullet mean?”

I exchanged a quick look with Diet who shook his head in crestfallen disbelief.  Captain Al’A crinkled his eyes and also looked toward his boss, perhaps not expecting the interrogation with the American journalist to broach such serious subjects as the symbolic significance of a mullet. I felt like such an amateur. I wondered what Moni would do.  Over a hundred thousand Iraqis had already been killed in the war and I was asking questions about hair care.  I looked down at Al’A’s feet, determined to get serious with the next question, scolding myself for my improvisational approach, my belief in naïvete perhaps nothing more than the sophist’s justification for laziness, a tragicomic foreshadowing of the America to come.  In the seconds between my question and Al’A’s answer, I noticed the Captain wore ankle length socks.  There were subtle pin stripes in his pants, a sharp pleated crease.  He removed a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket and offered me one.

I took it.  We both lit up.  And then he began to talk, his deep voice drawn into higher registers by the frenzy of his thoughts, glottals and hisses clashing, Rami listening from his desk, the Captain seated on the translator’s bed, Diet standing over us.  When Al’A finished speaking, he took a deep inhalation and blew a clean two-pronged stream of smoke out of his considerable nostrils, his face—his wide eyes and large nose a bit reminiscent of the Muppet character, Gonzo.

“He says that his men are not afraid of death,” Rami said.  “He says that in some cities his haircut is not allowed, that it means a man is gay, and if you are gay you can get killed.  But he is not gay.  He just does what he wants.  He is not afraid of death.  He has lost eight family members, three brothers kidnapped and killed.  His uncle, who was the police chief—he and his three children were murdered.  It has been a terrible time for Hadithans.  Hundreds of people leaving the city for Syria and elsewhere.  Refugees.  There was a man, an insurgent, who spoke to an American in public so everyone could see.  Fifteen minutes this man and the American talk so everyone can see.  Then the insurgent goes and kills an old innocent man, a barber.  What do you think people thought?  Do you understand the game they play?  You cannot be afraid of death.”

Lately, I’ve given a lot of thought to this moment, the story that emerged out of that question about hair.  Many of the men we armed in Al Anbar, men like Al’A, joined up with the Islamic State.  Many of those who did not continued to flood Syria, contributing to the destabilization of that country and its civil war that goes on to this day. So I’ve thought about Al’A’s words a lot, his story, the flood of death in his family.  I’ve thought about these words specifically: “You cannot be afraid of death.”  This value, what some used to call bravery, has not aged well in the twenty-first century, or at least the American version.  Sometimes we now call people who embrace death “cowards.” The absence of fear in the face of death runs totally counter to the American way of life and the way it’s so structured around careerism and self-interest, retirement and insurance and health care, keeping people alive into their nineties, banking their bodies in the faceless retirement communities we find near our beaches and deserts, Florida and Arizona.

That night I looked into the spaniel calm of the Captain’s eyes as another divided slide of smoke issued from his nose.  A million thoughts were rushing through my head.  I thought of Native Americans, the ones who got the haircuts and joined us, the ones who didn’t, the Shawnee who occasionally came to dance at my elementary school when I was a child. Was I engaged in a timeless rite in that moment, sharing tobacco with a Brave? How ironic was it that the white man, or at least the white man’s corporation, was now the one to provide the tobacco? And who, truly, was the savage in this “game” of drones and beheadings, snipers, IEDs and WMDs? What would you think if you were in the Captain’s shoes, an Iraqi man working with Americans in the heart of a war that might well be illegal and might possibly (and simultaneously) produce positive unintended consequences, your every move fraught with the implications of poverty versus complicity? A simple conversation could cost you your life.

I felt a tremendous surge of affection and pity for Captain Al’A. We continued the interview.  I learned that he belonged to the tribe known as the Jughayfi. He was born the son of a worker at a local oil refinery.  He witnessed the Iran-Iraq war and thereafter the first war with America.  For a long time, like most Iraqis, his hatreds were pure, thoroughly controlled by an oppressive regime and its lockstep media, a government that kept tight control over the textbooks in the schools.

“You were not allowed to think,” Al’A told me. “Everything was military.”

God, I wanted to drink a beer with this guy and tell him about what it had been like the last five years in America, generals galore on TV, generals on the radio, CIA on NBC, assassins on Fox, anchorwomen cheerleading the war, military budgets exploding, everybody in the country shaving their head like yours truly, everybody with their support our troops bumper stickers and tree ribbons, every chicken hawk politician suddenly with polished flag pins posted on their lapels, country musicians turned to jingoistic sycophants for the war machine, everybody every day constantly reminded by the streaming ticker on the TV that we were living in code orange and it was all the fault of people like Captain Al’A.

“How have things changed?” I asked him.

“Come downtown with me,” he said.  “Come see the souk.  It used to be so small you could fit it into the back of a truck.  Now it’s like, it’s like—it’s like Europe.  It’s like Paris.”

Rami laughed, said to me, “Matt, it’s not that nice.  Definitely not Paris.”

“You should come to the market,” Al’A said.

I looked to Diet like a teenage son begging permission from his father to go to a party with the older guys, that archetypal convertible revving in the driveway.  Diet looked back at me like I wasn’t quite ready to take that ride, a long pointed blink.

“Don’t worry, Eat Boy,” he said.  “We’re going downtown tomorrow.”

I was terrified—thrilled, intoxicated by war, confident in the seal of my spectatorial membrane, my security detail. I’d never been “downtown” in a place where barbers were murdered in the streets, a city where there were “attacks” every day. I felt like I was doing the right thing. I was finally getting around to my father’s advice. I was talking to an Iraqi. But there was still a veil over the scene, a translator and a lieutenant, cement barriers everywhere outside.  To go “downtown”—that might actually qualify as reality, an authentic “beyond the wire” glimpse of Iraq.  Hot dog!  Come on, Daddy-o! Can’t I see beyond the walls?

Diet told me to wrap it up. I suggested a photograph with the Captain before calling it a night. Then, in a moment I’ll never forget, Captain Al’A stood up and brandished a small bottle of “Axe” cologne. This baffled me. We’d been sitting incredibly close the whole evening and not once had he broken out the cologne. Smell, of course, is not conveyed in a photograph, so why the hell would a man spray himself with cologne prior to a photo?  To comb one’s mullet or tighten one’s tie—this I understood.  But as I flew back to America, I couldn’t stop thinking about this final gesture. Why had this man with a mullet sprayed himself down so profusely with cologne before locking arms with me? Was this a custom my crib sheets had neglected to apprise me of? And why, of all colognes, was he wearing Axe? And why do I focus on trivial things like haircuts and colognes when there are body counts and ideologies and elections and secret prisons everywhere?

Perhaps the answer is simple. I don’t know. I’m a coward. I’m an American idiot. But maybe that’s too easy, modesty to the point of dishonesty and disavowal. So let me try to step it back. Most Americans know Axe as the Walmart of colognes. Axe is the most aggressively advertised cologne slash body spray on the marketplace, a cheap and strong smell for young men looking to score. Axe is what we advertise to the young after advertising Viagra and Cialis to the old and Coke to all. As I sought Iraq, perhaps Iraq sought me as well, reaching out with the one smell that could not possibly be misinterpreted. Maybe Iraq, too, was befuddled by the multitudes Chuck Norris contained, the strange mixed messages of our muse and our media.

Ultimately, whether Iraq and Captain Al’A were are as confused about us as we were about ourselves, I think it’s safe to say that I’ll never forget either. Captain Al’A, the way his mullet brushed my bare scalp as we wrapped arms for the photo, his locks dusting me with a musk laced with body odor and American tobacco, his ribs for a moment in contact with mine, their texture uncovered by his absent holster, the awareness of those bones sharpened by that most pungent of musks; begging for my approval, hungry for my adoring stare.

 

[1] http://www.mantlethought.org/world-literature/spring-break-iraq

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middleeast/us-casualties-of-iraq-chemical-weapons.html

 

M. C. Armstrong embedded with JSOF in Al Anbar Province, Iraq. He published extensively on the Iraq war through The Winchester Star. He is the winner of a Pushcart Prize. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in Esquire, The Missouri Review, The Gettysburg Review, Mayday, Monkeybicycle, Epiphany, The Literary Review, and other journals and anthologies. He is the lead singer and rhythm guitarist for Viva la Muerte and lives in Greensboro, North Carolina with Yorick, his corgi, whose interruptions to his writing are frequent but welcome.

Where were you when Michael Herr died in 2016? What were you doing? Did you listen to the opening voiceover of Apocalypse Now? Martin Sheen’s main character said “all I could think of was getting back into the jungle. I wanted a mission and for my sins they gave me one.” Did you watch Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket at the helicopter scene when Matthew Modine’s Joker asks the doorgunner “How can you shoot women and children?” “Easy,” the gunner replies, “you don’t lead ‘em so much.” Or did you go right to the original source, a first edition of Herr’s Dispatches from the bookshelf and flip to the passage when Herr overheard a bunch of infantrymen watching a helicopter full of journalists fly off an LZ, leaving Herr behind —“one rifleman turning to another, and giving us all his hard, cold wish: ‘Those fucking guys,’ he’d said. ‘I hope they die.’”

I did none of those things. I was aware of them all, though, when my internet surfing tripped up against the news that Michael Herr had died. The journalist that I, like all my peers who once reported from Iraq, Afghanistan, Panama, Yemen and all the other places, wished we could have been.

It had been a long time since Herr had written anything, the last a short book about his dead friend Stanley Kubrick. The ultimate sin for any writer is silence, and by my reckoning Herr had chosen silence since 2001—an interview in a documentary “First Kill,” and nothing since. The author of Dispatches, the book that is the accepted highest standard for embedded reporting, had nothing to say about 15 years of war in the Middle East and South America in which journalists of all size and stripe broke their backs to emulate his style, approach, and see-it-all mindset. He had nothing to say about any of it— no comment on Sebastian Junger’s calling his own book War, as though it could somehow be definitive; no television commentary on Fox News or PBS, no taking a stand one way or the other; Herr neither boasted nor complained when reporters and freelancers, present company included, aped his surrealistic style in ways much more akin to plagiarism than homage.

I emulated him from my first moment in Iraq as a reporter in 2007. I got off a helicopter at the LZ at Forward Operating Base Summerall and a young captain offered to take my bags. “I packed them,” I told him, “I’ll hump them.” I learned that lesson from Herr, who wrote “I never let the grunts dig my holes or carry my gear.” And I thought of Herr when I first introduced myself to the soldiers at the Bayji Joint Security Station, where I arrived a month after a truck bomb nearly destroyed the place.  The soldiers would look at me with either a scowl or a strange grin. Like Herr said, “It was no place where I’d have to tell anyone not to call me ‘Sir.’”

When I got back, I couldn’t wait to talk about it, sending photos and stories here, there, everywhere, hustling up any publication I could. That was 2007.

Now, it’s been eight years since my last time in Iraq. I think about it every day. I wonder how my life would have played out, if I hadn’t gone? Would I have been one of the ignorant yahoos yelling at TV, certain that my opinion was the right one?

Maybe Herr’s silence was a form of discipline. If he realized he had nothing left to say, maybe it makes sense. Otherwise it was a sin, for bottling up his wisdom and pulling a Salinger while the world crashed down around him. Call it coping, choosing peace and quiet over the endless cacophony that’s only gotten worse—why demean oneself in such a world? Would his opinion or observation have carried any extra weight because of a book he wrote in 1977? Chances are much better that in raising his voice, he would have only made another more target for revisionist history. What did he make up? Is Dispatches really nonfiction? Composite characters? Is he a fabulist? Did he even go to Vietnam?

Iraq and Afghanistan were chockfull of Pentagon lies, media misperceptions, and first-person “so there I was” memories. What would one more blowhard have added to the mix?

Instead, Herr retreated into the silence—not even mystery, since there was no Salinger-esque clamor for his reemergence. Surely, we was sought out now and then, but those entreaties didn’t reach the public (at least as far as a Google search can find).

Three movies, three books; that was his output, more or less. And hardly full credit for all of them – he wrote voiceovers for Apocalypse Now and The Rainmaker, and co-wrote the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket. Most of Full Metal Jacket’s dialogue came directly from Gustav Hasford’s underrated The Short Timers. R. Lee Ermey took a lot of credit for improvising the drill sergeant’s dialogue—but plenty of his profane monologues are right from the book; anyway, Hasford died in 1993, so he’s not around to correct anybody.

And Hasford’s no saint. I own his personal copy of Dispatches, annotated with quite a few short references, including a few times where Hasford wrote in pencil: “Problem. Did I steal this?” next to scenes that appear suspiciously like moments from Dispatches. Nothing major: a scarf on a character, a description of a spooky night. Maybe the word “spooky” itself, which both Hasford and Herr loved and used in equal measure.

Herr co-wrote the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket with Stanley Kubrick, but Kubrick didn’t have the balls to go for Hasford’s original vision—in the movie, the drill sergeant is killed by Vincent D’Onofrio’s tubby Private Pyle.  It’s the same in the book—with the vital change that the Gunny knows what’s coming, knows Pyle has lost his marbles and is about to shoot him dead—and the Gunny is proud of him. He created a killer and he knows it.

The second change is even starker. In the movie, a sniper kills Joker’s friend Cowboy, and later, Joker kills the female sniper.

In the book, the sniper is never seen, picking off members of Cowboy’s squad one-by-one until finally Cowboy is in the sniper’s sights, shot in the legs so he can’t move. The sniper intends to draw each desperate man in the squad out from cover as they try to rescue their wounded.

Joker knows this, so Joker shoots Cowboy, who knows it’s coming and whose last words are “I never liked you, Joker. I never thought you were very funny.”

In 1987, it’s unlikely a movie audience would have accepted a conclusion where one American soldier mercy-kills another. A lot had changed since 1979’s Apocalypse Now, which ended with Martin Sheen’s Willard decapitating Marlon Brando’s Colonel Kurtz.

The modern version would probably feature Navy SEAL Team Six swooping in at the last minute, rescuing Cowboy and Joker as Mark Wahlberg laid down suppressing fire and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson karate-chopped whatever faceless Muslim jihadist villain presented a threat. He would probably choke a female Muslim terrorist to death with her own hijab headdress – saying “That’s a wrap, bitch.”

It makes sense that Michael Herr remained silent, given our current culture. He’d lived long enough to see Vietnam demystified and reconstructed—turned into “do we get win this time?” foolishness matched with Vietnam’s real-life economic boom. Vietnamese tourist posters once used the English slogan “A Country, Not a War.” By 2017, it’s doubtful that clarification is even necessary.

Herr became a devout Buddhist, meditating at his home in upstate New York. It certainly sounds like a man at peace with himself, who was coping just fine with everything he’d seen and done.

This generation eof soldiers, journalists, and contractors has just started reckoning with these issues. As a coping method, “silence” is certainly the last choice many of us have made. Dignity, modesty, humility—all surrendered just like the old Iraqi firebases were lost to ISIS, overrun while we weren’t even looking. Who can blame us? This merry-go-round has too many brass rings hanging just within reach: book deals, screenplays, talking slots on news programs and bytes of space in internet columns, essays in collections that might be read, might not. So much to say, and too many years to go before Herr’s perspective is finally attained.

What it comes down too, maybe, is trying to add to the obituary – to overcoming that sense of dismay when one realizes its first paragraph is likely written. Herr got there – he knew what the first paragraph would basically say: “Author of this, screenwriter of that; lauded as a visionary journalist who created a new method of war reporting, who turned the businesslike voice of Ernie Pyle inside out, crafting war reporting as a surrealistic nightmare—and yet so entertaining.” They didn’t say that in so many words, but it would have been honest if they had—and I’m not sure to call it “entertaining” is a compliment. Herr did show that war reporting—embedded reporting, specifically—could capture the soldier’s voice and life while keeping the real focus on the writer. Pyle didn’t, not really. Herr’s prize—and curse—was presenting his story first and foremost. For those of us today writing in first person, third person, it doesn’t matter—it’s a means to an end, and the byline is often the subject.

My bookshelf is full of novels and nonfiction telling war stories from dozens of points of view. There is the patriotic jerkoff next to the self-flagellating regret; the melodramatic tale of a bright-eyed lieutenant rests on top of the cynical observer laughing at his own joke; a detached reporter unwilling to choose a side rests on a shelf full of world-weariness and guilt. My own literary attempt is right there with them—all my reporting packaged in my own self-produced creation, a marketing tool and manuscript to send to publishers back when I had something to say. It doesn’t hold up—my conclusions fall apart, what I think I saw in 2009 revealed as a mirage just a few years later. I’m glad it wasn’t published.

I’m certainly like to hear myself talk like the rest of them—I write reviews of books related to the wars, offering my take on somebody else’s. Now and then, I trundle to a library or small venue where the silverhairs spend an evening, and I narrate my photos and encapsulate my three summers spent in Iraq. It’s a paying gig; I can reuse my script and just make sure to change the venue’s name when I thank them for having me. I know the questions that they’ll ask. It’s all very familiar, and if it’s boring to me, I tell myself it’s maybe new to them, and isn’t that worth something?

I was in the Army, went to Iraq in Desert Storm decades ago. I play the veteran’s card when I can, an easy comeback against the sunshine patriots of this rancid and toxic modern era. But like my presentations, it all starts to feel a little hoary, my version of Fat Elvis creaking out “Love Me Tender.”

Still, in writing classes, I do enjoy using different drafts of my work as examples of revision—to show how the overblown melodrama of the first draft becomes a reasonable conclusion by the final. It’s a form of coping, the drafting and revision that is—working out the absurdities that no audience should be subjected too. But like I tell the students: You don’t know that at the time. I meant it when I wrote it. Nobody sets out to write a bad first draft.

Think of our emotional investment with a first draft as a kind of reverence—we’re so pleased with our words, with our thoughts and with ourselves. The revision process requires us to be—in Lester Bangs’ perfect words—contemptuously indifferent, to be willing to cut things out without passion or prejudice.

In that vein, I have deliberately disconnected with the soldiers I spent that Iraq time with, eliminating our ties on social media—no harm done, no big blowups, just a casualty of their grotesque Trumpian politics and my disinterest in tolerance of the same. We weren’t friends. What was it we spent together in Iraq? A month? Three? In the scheme of my 50 years, no time at all. It’s an edit; a paragraph in my story that doesn’t fit anymore.

If I walked into a classroom and started spouting the virtues of Dispatches, I’d be preaching to a room of those who have never heard the name of the book or the author. I would have to spend time raving about it, and who is interested in hearing some old man run his mouth about the “bad old days of jubilee?” There are so many other books to read, and who says Dispatches is better than any other? I thought it was Michael Herr, you thought it was David Finkel or Sebastian Junger or Clinton Romesha or Siobhan Fallon, or Zero-Dark-Thirty or Lone Survivor or whoever or whatever you thought spoke to what you expected a war experience to read like, to look like, to capture the violence and the chaos in a way that made you say: “they got it.” You wouldn’t believe me if I said there was a time when we agreed on Michael Herr. He’s been copied and parodied and distilled and diluted until he’s just another name from another time, another war, and what’s he really got to do with what we’re talking about anyway?

Elvis Presley died in August, 1977, and Dispatches would be published two months later. In the next 10 years, Herr would then help on Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket—that trio arguably the most iconic creative outputs born from Vietnam. But from 1987 to his death in 2016, nothing of true note. Still, enough that, for a time, Michael Herr was the agreed upon war reporting standard—the center of the spoke from which everything would radiate.

What does Elvis have to do with it? Because Lester Bangs’ 1977 prediction was right: When it comes to rock and roll, my generation has never agreed on anything like our parents once agreed on Elvis. When it comes to war reporting, no future generation of reporters will agree like we once did on Michael Herr. And nobody—nobody—will ever repeat his decision to sit on the sidelines during 15 years of war filled with reportage from so many of his imposters—and say nothing.

I am the most envious of that. His ability to take himself out of the game, to accept that what he had to say was said, in a book on a shelf. If we ever want to know what he thinks, we can always go right there, to words that will not change.

I’ve left behind my own record, of stories here and there, of essays and reviews in this publication or that. In my reporting, I did my part to make these wars palatable for the masses. I feel a hint of moral crime in that participation. And it happened during a war. Put war and crime together, and what do you come up with? Did that thought occur to Michael Herr? Did he see all his copycats and sycophants and think “be careful what you wish for?”

Michael Herr showed us how to cope in a world riven by noise and discontent. Just be quiet. He has been dead for many months, but I need not bother to say goodbye to his corpse. I only wish I could say goodbye to you.

With much respect for Lester Bangs, and Elvis Presley.

Nathan Webster reported from Iraq in 2007-09 as a freelance photojournalist. He is also an Army veteran of Desert Storm. His work appears in many publications.

An excerpt of the debut novel Sid Sanford Lives!

by Daniel Ford

Sid stepped into the desert surrounding the cramped forward operating base just as the sun surged over the distant mountaintop. He scratched his patchy, three-day-old beard. He inhaled deeply, the already warming air singeing his raw nostrils. The sand didn’t crunch so much as slither away from the hot breath of desert wind.

He eyed the line of beige Humvees parked by sandbags piled waist-high. He strode over and climbed into the makeshift garage. Sid propped himself against the tall front tire of the closest vehicle. He stretched out his legs and crossed them, feeling the full weight of his still stiff boots on his ankle. He shifted his position just enough so he could awkwardly pull his notebook out of his back pocket. He stuck his pen behind his ear, sure the words that had been eluding him since the troubled descent through the mountain range would come before the afternoon sun boiled his internal organs. For now, Sid propped his head up against the hard, black rubber and tried to remember how he’d landed in this dusty valley.

Roger Ray’s slamming door muffled the newsroom’s buzz. So many conversations from which Sid had long ago felt disengaged continued in shouted whispers once Ray started howling in earnest.

“I’d be weakening my damn city desk in the middle of a mayoral election,” the aging editor said. “On top of everything else, I’d be giving you, a little pissant, a promotion ahead of, frankly, a long line of more goddamn qualified reporters.”

“Someone else can cover the Bronx borough president’s philandering and embezzling,” Sid said over Ray’s incoherent grunting and molar grinding.

“Plus, I’d catch all kinds of holy fucking hell from the board…” Ray said. “Wait, what did you say?”

Sid patiently reached into his messenger bag and retrieved a blue folder that looked like an overstuffed jelly donut. He tossed it on Ray’s desk and watched as he casually flipped it open. Ray rolled his eyes as he read the top sheet, but that hadn’t stopped him from skimming the tax forms, illicit photos, and tawdry phone records bulging underneath.

“Sources?” Ray grunted.

“Waiting for a phone call from whomever you decide to assign the story.”

Ray held Sid’s gaze, hoping his young reporter would wear his self-satisfied grin just long enough for him to slap it off his face with a hefty Sunday newspaper.

“This doesn’t change anything,” Ray said, slamming his hand on the pile of front-page fodder. “I could just as easily order you to write this.”

“I have a draft someone can polish if that helps,” Sid said. “You don’t even have to use my name. Actually, I’d prefer you didn’t, I don’t want to get banned from Harlem and its chicken and waffles.”

“Listen, son…”

“I believe you owe me one,” Sid said, his jaw stiffening.

Ray waited a beat before nodding weakly. He got up, sat down on the edge of his desk, and put a hand on Sid’s shoulder.

“A desert warzone isn’t an appropriate place to overcome personal demons,” Ray said.

“That’s not what this is about,” Sid said. “I’ve just moved beyond writing about tainted politicians and transit complaints.”

“You better hope so. You survive our security training and I’ll think about it. That’s the best I can do.”

Sid took the deal and flew out to the Middle East three weeks later.

A sharp pain in his shin brought Sid back into the present. He cursed his luck, certain he’d been stung by a scorpion. However, the pain dulled quickly, but not before another kick to his boots forced him into a crouch. His eyes burned red as he opened them fully. He put his hand against the sun and made out a camouflaged hulk wielding a wrench standing in front of him.

“Scared the fucking piss out of me,” the soldier spat.

A tobacco-infused glob of spit now sparkled in the sand between the two men like a brushstroke of oil puddled in a Queens parking garage.

“Sorry,” Sid muttered.

“You’re not supposed to be here. I could have put a bullet in your fucking head. Probably give me a damn medal considering you’re a reporter.”

“I get it,” Sid said. He brushed the sand off his pants as he stood. “I’m leaving.”

“Don’t be a pussy,” the soldier said, extending his hand. “I’m Mason.”

“Sid.”

“Oh, I know your name. We get daily briefings on how to talk to you.”

“Is that why no one has done it yet?”

“Fuck, easy killer,” Mason said. “PR is not our strong suit.”

“Funny considering that’s part of your mission.”

“Enjoying the heat while you’re preaching at me?” Mason asked, slapping a wrench into his palm.

“Had to get out of the AC,” Sid said. “Too small a space and too many closed windows.”

“You want to open those bulletproof windows for the enemy, be my guest, but make damn sure me and my friends are all in the latrine when you do. And try not to make too much of a mess for us to sop up later.”

“Yeah, well, never been a fan of central air. Messes with my sinuses.”

“You been in a sandstorm yet?”

“No.”

“Might change a few of your preconceived notions about our little air conditioned shit box.”

“I didn’t mean to offend anyone.”

“Well, could you not offend anyone a few paces to your right. I’ve got to park my ass under the vehicle you’ve been using as a hammock.”

“Right,” Sid said. “Yeah.”

He moved out of the way and heard Mason slide under the front bumper. Sid rubbed the back of his head.

“Something wrong?” Mason asked from beneath the vehicle.

“Can I help you with anything?” Sid asked.

“You know much about auto repair?”

“Not really, no.”

“Then I’m good.”

“Well, how about I just keep you company then?”

“Like to work alone.”

“This is the longest conversation I’ve had in days,” Sid said. “Give me something.”

“I didn’t shoot you, what more do you want?”

“Son of a bitch,” Sid mumbled.

The clangs and grunts stopped. Mason wagged his boots back and forth.

“Coffee,” he said.

“Do you want anything—?”

“Black.”

“You got it.”

Sid headed back to the FOB. He found another hulking figure in fatigues leaning up against the counter, waiting for the coffee pot to finish gurgling.

“Lieutenant Núñez,” Sid said, keeping a respectful distance.

The officer growled something through his dark mustache that sounded like, “motherfucker.” Sid contemplated reaching for his notebook and peppering Núñez with questions before the man had even poured his morning coffee, but thought better of it.

“Given any thought to my, um, repeated requests?” Sid asked instead.

The officer’s severe, but sleepy, brown eyes motioned toward the coffee pot.

“Got it,” Sid said, grabbing two Styrofoam cups from the stack.

“Thirsty?” Núñez asked.

“Getting one for your mechanic.”

“Are you referring to Sergeant Ward?”

“This would be a lot easier if you didn’t break my balls every time we had a conversation.”

“But it wouldn’t be as fun,” Núñez said. He filled his mug and turned to walk out the door. “Don’t bother my men without my permission or I won’t talk to you at all.”

The officer knocked into Sid’s shoulder as he left.

“Sir?” Sid called out.

“You’re not ready to leave the wire,” Núñez said, pausing in the hallway. “Some of my men aren’t ready. Request denied.”

“Thanks for your time, Lieutenant…” Sid muttered.

He knew picking fights with commanding officers wouldn’t get him anywhere, but he hadn’t been raised to keep his mouth shut (or respect authority for that matter). However, Núñez had just confirmed Sid’s suspicions about the base’s preparedness. What Sid couldn’t piece together is whether that mattered in this country or not.

Sid returned to the Humvee and found Mason’s boots pointing out the opposite end. Sid pounded his fist up against the bumper.

“Jesus H. Fuck!” Mason yelled out.

Sid heard tools thump against the sand.

“Delivery,” he said. “I’m allowed to give you coffee, right?”

“Hell yes,” Mason said.

After climbing out from the car’s underbelly, Mason grabbed the cup and downed the coffee in one swallow. He tossed the cup back at Sid who caught it while preventing his own coffee from sloshing out.

“That must have felt good,” Sid said.

“Nothing feels good here. Needed a jolt.”

“Happy to help. Does this mean I can ask you a few questions?”

“Hope you’re not looking to fill column inches with me,” Mason said. “I’m a pretty boring story.”

“Yeah, I figured that out pretty quick,” Sid said. “But I’ll take what I can get right now.”

“What are you writing about?”

“Don’t know yet.”

“See, you want us to engage, yet you have no fucking clue what your plan is.”

“I’m here, that is the plan. A lot of people have questions about what’s going on over here.”

“Tell you what, a lot of guys over here have a question or two on what’s happening.”

“Maybe we can learn from each other.”

“When can I say I’m off the record?”

“Whenever you want.”

“And you can’t use what I say?”

“That’s how it works.”

“Then I’m off the record.”

“Fine by me.”

Sid leaned up against the door, burning his elbow on the hot metal handle. He pulled it away, more pissed about the squad’s antipathy than by the glowing red blotch on his arm. Mason wiped his forehead with an oily rag and then got back to work.

Mason clamped his thick hand down on Sid’s shaking leg.

“Really? Still with the fucking nerves?” Mason asked. “The mission is over, fucking relax.”

Sid adjusted his helmet and nodded.

“Lieutenant, Bob Woodward here is still pissing himself,” Mason yelled above the roar of the Humvee. “Any suggestions on how he can calm his delicate senses?”

In the passenger seat, Núñez turned his head slightly and growled something that sounded like “fucker.”

“Well, I wouldn’t do that to your mother,” Mason said. “Just sit tight, we’re almost home.”

Sid had hounded Núñez for nearly a month to authorize his first patrol. The squad now fancied itself a crack staff, impervious to the anxiety and turmoil endemic to other platoons across the desert. Outside of the occasional pop-pop-pop in the distance, however, none of the men crowded in the FOB had been in a firefight or had to halt a long caravan in order to investigate and detonate an IED. How would they react in the face of something more treacherous than cleaning out latrines or standing at attention for Reveille?

It turned out that Sid’s hands refused to stop shaking the moment he parked his ass in the Humvee. They shook all through the meeting with the hard-eyed, sun-scorched elders of the nearby village. Núñez listened patiently to the staccato Arabic flying off the leader’s rotten teeth like acid. He absorbed the overwhelmed translator’s stuttering and backtracking while nodding and trying to maintain eye contact with his counterpart. Sid watched as younger, more anxious men prowled along the back of the tent, shouting and pointing every so often. They had been stripped of their arms before entering, but their danger still permeated the cramped space.

“What are they pissed about?” Sid had asked Mason.

“No water. Limited food. Enemy offering it all at discount prices,” Mason had said. “It means we’re fucked. Now shut up and keep close to me or anyone else with a gun.”

Sid’s concentration was broken by Mason leaping out of his seat and climbing on top of a snoozing soldier in the rear of the Humvee.

“I said move your hand, Bee,” Mason shouted, slapping his subordinate on the cheeks.

“Wake the fuck up, this ain’t fucking nap time.”

“Sorry, Sergeant,” Bee said.

“Up all night playing ‘Call of Duty’ again?” Mason asked.

“Nuh-uh, Sergeant,” Bee said.

“Christ, just what Uncle Fucking Sam had in mind when he signed your sorry ass up,” Mason said, retaking his seat. “Has more goddamn kills online than he does in real life. Put that in your article, Sanford.”

“Why do they call you Bee?” Sid said, ignoring Mason’s jabs to his bicep. “Hard to figure considering your nameplate reads Zdunczyk.”

Bee glanced at Mason, who nodded his approval.

“Real name’s Frank,” Bee said.

“I’m aware,” Sid said. “Why Bee?”

“Aw, tell him,” Mason said, throwing in another scoop of tobacco below his bottom lip.

“My first day in the mess I wanted to make conversation,” Bee said. “So I started talking about this article I read about bee hives being like a communist society. Then I started in on the similarities and differences between hives and military bases. Kind of explains it all.”

“You’re so fucking lucky ‘Queen Bee’ didn’t stick,” Mason said. “Whole squad was fucking howling so bad Núñez smoked the shit out of us. So worth it.”

Sid reached the pocket of his flak jacket and pulled out his recorder. He waited for Mason’s affirmative before turning it on.

“Why’d you sign up?” Sid asked.

“No one needs to hear that fucking story,” Bee said, wearily looking at the slim device. “No offense, sir.”

“This is your penance for conking out,” Mason said. “Be thankful it’s not fucking licking my boot whenever the fuck I tell you to.”

“Yes, Sergeant,” Bee said. “It all started when my father was murdered…”

“Murdered?” Sid asked, the quake in his hands now having less to do with nerves or the Humvee’s shimmy.

“Yeah, couple of townies broke into our house looking for shit to pawn to buy meth or some shit,” Bee said. “My dad went to investigate and they dropped him with one to the head before he could raise his pistol.”

“Holy shit,” Mason muttered, spitting tobacco juice into a cup. “Where were you?”

“Getting high in the woods with a bunch of fucks from school,” Bee said. “We all passed out there. Cops ended up coming out to find me. We all scattered thinking they were going to bust us for weed. Ran home and right into the yellow caution tape like a goddamn marathon runner.”

“They catch the bastards?” Sid asked. “I mean…did they apprehend the suspects?”

“Nah, this is the best part,” Bee said. “They stepped over my dad and started ransacking the rest of the house. Probably looking for money or trying to cover their tracks. Make it look like there were more than two shit kickers. My mother had holed up in her closet and waited for them with a Remington 870 shotgun she bought on layaway from Walmart. Blew both motherfuckers away when they opened the door.”

“My kind of woman,” Mason said. “Shit, sorry about your Pops, but this is making my shit hard.”

“So how’d that lead to you enlisting?” Sid asked, once again ignoring Mason.

“Despite being relieved, my mother was pissed as hell I wasn’t home when it all went down,” Bee said. “She told me that since she took care of my father’s killers, the least I could do was go shoot some towelheads in the desert. Sorry, is that too crass for a newspaper?”

“I’ll clean it up, don’t worry,” Sid said. “You regret it?”

“Only regret I have is not killing those pricks myself. And not having a chance to kill anyone here. Fucking glad-handing political bullshit isn’t my thing.”

Sid nodded and pressed the pause button.

“Thank you for trusting me with your story,” he said, extending his hand. “I’m sorry to hear about your father.”

“Oh, I don’t trust you for shit,” Bee said, shaking Sid’s hand. “But Mason does and I report to him. I’m just as liable to shoot you next time you come near me.”

“Understood,” Sid said. “Just make sure Mason’s behind me when you do it. Takes care of both our problems.”

“You fucks know I’m still fucking here, right?” Mason asked.

The Humvee’s breaks squealed like a downtown bus as the hulking transport swerved abruptly. Sid tumbled into Mason’s lap just as the cup of dip flew out of the Sergeant’s hands and onto Sid’s chest.

Núñez shouted something unintelligible from the front of the vehicle.

“Shit,” Mason said. “Look alive, fellas.”

Sid’s nerves actually calmed as the camouflaged men around him checked their weapons and reached for additional ammo. He heard a distant whistling that aggressively faded into dense thuds nearby.

“Fuck, we’re in the shit now, boys,” Mason said.

The Humvee shook after a mortar landed a few yards away, spraying sand and debris across the small windows. The whistle intensified as the enemy’s aim improved. Núñez’s orders came out in a stream of profanity and pseudo-Spanish as he exited the front seat. Sid could feel the ripple of steel and sand as the Humvee continued to race across the desert. Mason shoved a finger into Sid’s chest.

“What did I fucking tell you before?” He asked.

“Stay close,” Sid said. “Preferably next to someone with a weapon.”

“Good,” Mason said. “Don’t fucking forget it.”

And then the world went white.

***

https://www.amazon.com/Sid-Sanford-Lives-Daniel-Ford/dp/1947048104

http://www.writersbone.com/

Daniel Ford is the author of Sid Sanford Lives! He’s the co-founder of Writer’s Bone, a literary podcast and website that champions aspiring and established authors. A Bristol, Conn., native (and longtime Queens, N.Y., transplant), Ford now lives in Boston with his fiancée Stephanie. He’s currently working on a short story collection.

 

U S Grant on the Disbanding of the Iraqi Army

I heard thunder in the mountains
witnessed soft amber lightening in the clouds
saw in the saplings, & yearling whitetail, promise.

When I reached out to take Lee’s hand
to shake, I noticed also, the newness of his uniform
recognized that my own had been caked by
mud & dirt from my ride, & knew then
those questions which had kept me awake
the awful headaches which
overtook me, were for naught.

We had achieved our grand strategy
while in Richmond, the opponent was mired in tactics.

Magnanimity & benevolence being
my best & softest weapons
I applied them aggressively & fed
those desperate men, twenty-five-thousand
meals. I pardoned them & let them keep
hold of their horses therefore denying
them any excuse to develop into a resistance.

This I did in prudence
not wanting to ask the great General to surrender
instead providing him a means
to retire his army from the battlefield, with dignity.

 

---

Blue Ridges

Virginia moon, like a wet breast of an old lover
firm like an unripe doughnut peach, has been playing

hide & come find me with clouds & shadows.
On the night highway, road signs like

men in robes, guard rails like teeth or head stones
deer with their headlights look, stand poised

& ready for martyrdom.
Rain clouds blacken the sky; after it rains, Sairan

give the mountains their name. A blue heron lifts it wings.
Southern faces carry confederate residue

like a disaster or a nude woman, I stare.
When is a plantation no longer a plantation?

On the lake shore, with nutria, turtles, brown recluse
& copperheads, I know, I know these waters.

The small voice in my head says leap
it says, these waters will mask your smell.

How will I live here, in the south?
When my belly warns me, be home by dark.

 

---

Charlottesville

A woman sits next to me on the bus
I have nothing to say so I look out the window
& I think, if this was a generation ago

& I chose to ignore or respond to this lady’s
entreaties, I might’ve become like strange fruit
ripening in a southern summer.

I want to throw up.

A brochure reminds those of us unfamiliar
in its quaint, elegant way, that “you” are now
in the rural south where respect & gentility….

I hope this woman doesn’t expect a toothy smile
or a chortle, or that I will step off the sidewalk
or keep on listening to her go on & on.

 

---

Aleluya

Flocks of birds, explode like atoms;
cottontails, in coyote scat.

 

---

Climate

In the market, we look past each other
even as we both reach for strawberries
Excuse, me.
, excuse me.

 

*

 

I have a habit of biting my nails.
I fear being bitten by water moccasins.
I dread country roads during new moons.
Last night, I mistook, the whitetail, for spirits.

 

*

 

During afternoon rumbling
wind shouting through fractures in stone
like an invocation from the dead
for hemlocks to sacrifice their branches.

 

*

 

Slaves’ tears fall from heaven, floods
our plantation, loosens clay, rounds out pebbles.

 

Photo Credit: Matthew Brady

While it’s fallen off the news somewhat, one of Donald Trump’s most conspicuous campaign-trail promises was to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico. Not only did Trump say that a wall was necessary, but he said that he would get Mexico to build it, conveniently ducking the question of cost to U.S. citizens. This is because the border between the U.S. and Mexico is long, and walls are expensive. Especially the kind of well-built walls that are required to stop crafty humans from getting around them.

Ukraine has a wall of its own. Or, at least, it’s building a wall. Sort of. In September 2014, during the height of Russia’s attempts to intervene in Ukraine, shortly after Russia occupied Crimea and during the beginning of its ongoing incursion into Ukraine’s east, lawmakers developed a plan to create a wall between Russia and Ukraine.

The wall received some coverage in Western Press—not much, but some—because building a wall along thousands of kilometers of territory is a big project, and the wall had a big number attached to it: 4 billion UAH (at 8 UAH to the dollar in 2014, $500 million, now at 26 UAH to the dollar, or about $160 million). The wall was scheduled for completion in 2018, and building commenced. Since then, there have been questions over whether or not it will be completed on time, according to the printed standards. There have been allegations of corruption, as well as questions over whether the planned structure would be capable of accomplishing its military mission of stopping Russian infiltration and military intrusion.

A Wall in Name Only

Based on reporting that I have done, including visits to the wall and interviews with subject matter experts, national security personnel, veterans, villagers living within 10 km of the wall, and online research, if the wall is completed as promised and planned, it will not serve as a significant military obstacle against Russia. Without being able to find any evidence beyond official statements and visual confirmation that something is being built, it’s impossible to decisively state anything. Has money been embezzled? Maybe. It’s Ukraine, so, maybe probably. Is the wall being built to standard? Has every meter of the border with Russia been accounted for? There’s no way to confirm that construction has succeeded or failed.

 

As of right now, the wall consists of two elements. The first, which looks much like what the wall was supposed to be based on initial projections, are a series of well-developed emplacements near significant border crossing points along major highways. Ukraine’s State Border Service and military units staff and patrol these sections, guarding against sabateurs, infiltrators, and the possibility of a Russian military offensive. Practically speaking, of course, a ditch, concertina wire and double-fences won’t create much more than a brief tactical pause for even the smallest military unit (and no pause for airborne or air assault units)—but (apparently) according to military thinkers and the politicians who give them strategic guidance, something is better than nothing at all.

 

This reality has given rise to a new story: the idea that the wall will be useful for stopping criminal activity. Smugglers and illegal border crossings will be diminished by the wall, which (along with the security provided by the wall) will help make Ukraine a safer and more law-abiding place. This has some merit to it, although it’s also worth stating that every person with whom I spoke living near the wall viewed it as an eyesore at best, an actual nuisance at worst, and that it seemed (paradoxically) to be increasing smuggling and illegal activity—precisely the opposite of its intended effect.

 

Notwithstanding the views of its residents, the border area with Russia is startlingly, astonishingly open. When I visited the area north of Kharkiv last in February, I nearly walked into Russia. There was no wall present, though residents were on edge, and warned me (through the Ukrainian who was interpreting) that patrols came by every few minutes looking for people who didn’t have a reason for being there. I assumed that they meant Ukrainian patrols.

 

As of February 2017, two years after the battle of Debaltseve and three years after the invasion of Crimea, it was still possible to walk into Russia from Ukraine, more or less accidentally.

 

Why Should We Build a Wall?

 

 Walls require strength and power, and wealth. They require organization and commitment, and maintenance. They are also the single most noticeable evidence of a nation’s insecurity and fragility. What nation requires walls? What confident people would even think about erecting barriers? A weak nation, filled with anxious and neurotic people. And while this describes Ukraine to a certain extent—with all due respect to my Ukrainian friends, whom I love and respect, and with due respect for the idea of a country called Ukraine, (a) Ukraine as a country lacks significant allies, and has an overwhelmingly powerful enemy on its doorstep while (b) its people are justifiably traumatized by the repeated revolutions and various attempts by Russia and Russian agents to undermine their economy, political autonomy, military, and (writ large) their independence.

 

Those justifications don’t travel very well when the destination is the U.S.A. Although walls require power, money, and strength to build, they aren’t for the powerful, they’re for the weak, the fragile, the exhausted. Walls exist where there is no energy left to patrol, where one believes that some powerful energy or tendency toward chaos and entropy will, left unwalled, lead inexorably to conquest. This is what certain Americans believe: that a wall with Mexico is necessary, presumably because Mexico is more powerful, and left to its own devices, Mexico’s Mexican inhabitants will swarm over the border and destroy what they find on the other side.

 

Of course, if U.S. citizens legitimately believed that Mexicans constituted some type of threat, the response to Mexico would be different from wall-building. What Americans fear is not Mexico—it’s the loss of control, it’s not being able to convince others that it is in their best interests to behave according to America’s best interests. In many ways, this has been the story of the millennium, a slow-building narrative since the towers came down on 9/11.

 

On a psychological level, it seems almost certain that to Americans, the wall with Mexico is a replacement for the Twin Towers. We want to rebuild the towers and protect them from being blown up. We will call the product of this constructive but paranoiac impulse “The Wall with Mexico.” It’s a sad and quixotic impulse, if impossible due to constraints built into the space-time continuum.

 

But Why Build a Wall at All?

 

There are good points to be made against the building of walls. They restrict commerce, dampen the flow of accurate firsthand experience between citizens of different countries, reduce the ability of people to communicate, and lead to factionalism, nationalism, and the dangerous kind of international competition.

 

Walls are a last resort, when one must defend oneself against some foe that cannot be deterred by any other means. They are fixed positions that generate no revenue and require great sums for their upkeep. They can be avoided with the use of airplanes, rockets, and boats. They are as useful and necessary as fixed fortifications (which is to say, not very).

 

Ukraine’s excuse for building a wall is that it’s hard up for emotionally satisfying ways to thwart Russia. A wall is something that is seen, and can be measured, and will make it more difficult to enter Ukraine from Russia. There are many downsides, but from the perspective of Ukraine, a much smaller country than Russia, and isolated from meaningful alliances, building a wall is something (given that it actually gets built, rather than partially funded while the remainder of the funds designated to build it are pillaged by oligarchs).

For Americans, the question is different. To begin with, it is a more powerful country than Mexico—the most powerful nation in the world, in fact. Its southern border with Mexico is patrolled by drones, security personnel, helicopters, dogs, radar, and automatic detection systems. There is already a fence separating the two. Inside the U.S., it’s very difficult to exist off the grid without eventually running into some electronic or procedural requirement that will establish that one is in the country illegally (whether the people monitoring those systems do anything about it or not is a different question).

 

Normally, one builds walls under desperate circumstances when no other possibilities are available to solve some critical international question or another. Mexico’s turmoil stems from the illegal drug trade. The drug trade is profitable in part because it is so unpleasant to live in a capitalist society that objectifies its citizens that many U.S. citizens will pay excellent money for drugs that are easily fabricated and refined in Mexico, and in part because the U.S. (despite creating and abetting the conditions by which citizens would want to use drugs in the first place) has criminalized non-prescription drug use, artificially inflating the market to the point where Mexican citizens involved in the trade can afford to build private armies large enough to contend with the government’s military (or simply buy government units wholesale). Rather than build a wall with Mexico, it’d be cheaper and ethically more humane to do something about the drug trade—legalizing and taxing drugs would be an excellent first step.

 

Ukraine cannot “settle” with a Russia intent on its partition and destruction—Ukraine is left with the unpleasant choice of having to just grit its teeth and do what it can to prevent Russian intrusion. A wall isn’t the best way to do that, and especially when details of the wall’s construction are kept secret. Still, it’s understandable in a way that the U.S. wall with Mexico is not.

Pop Quiz

Which famous veteran author said the following?

“An anti-war book? Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?”

If you said Kurt Vonnegut, you’re one hundred percent, absolutely, overwhelmingly, incredibly, astonishingly wrong.

Yes, this quote does appear in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. Yes, Kurt Vonnegut the author of Slaughterhouse-Five, typed these words with his own two hands. But no, he does not say them. They are spoken by Harrison Star, “the famous Hollywood director.” The narrator (if the narrator is in fact Vonnegut) responds to the quote. The actual exchange:

“You know what I say to people when I hear they’re writing anti-war books?”

“No. What do you say, Harrison Star?”

“An anti-war book? Why not write an anti-glacier book instead?”

What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that too.

And even if wars didn’t keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death.”

This might sound like a quibble. The narrator ultimately agrees with Harrison Starr, doesn’t he? It’s not. To mistake the famous Hollywood director Harrison Star’s words for Vonnegut’s is to not only not get the joke, but to turn the living protest that is Slaughterhouse-Five into an artifact of a futility and resignation; it is to misunderstand what inspired Vonnegut’s masterpiece and the unique role art can play in the wars we still fight.

A Dostoevskian Digression

“Everything there is to know about life was in The Brothers Karamazov. But that isn’t enough anymore.”

This is Captain Eliot Rosewater. During Billy Pilgrim’s first mental breakdown, after he returns from World War Two and the Dresden firebombing, Eliot Rosewater teaches Billy about books, mostly Kilgore Trout, the excitable science fiction writer, but also about Fyodor Dostoevsky, the excitable religious writer.

I find this important. For all the obvious differences—aliens and spaceships mostly—Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Slaughterhouse-Five have a lot in common. They both wrestle with the possibility of free will in a deterministic universe. They both agonize over the impossibility of individual human action in an aggregate din of communal stupidity and vice. But more than this, they both tend to be remembered for the ideology the author despised.

Even those unfamiliar with The Brothers Karamazov will likely have read or heard of the “The Grand Inquisitor” section. It is often excerpted in literary anthologies. I have seen it published by itself and on the shelf at bookstores. In it, the atheist Ivan Karamazov tells his brother, the young priest Alyosha Karamazov, the story of a medieval Inquisitor. In the story, Christ returns to life. The Inquisitor arrests Christ. He tries to explain to Christ why He is no longer needed. People prefer earthly bread to the spiritual variety. The government will provide what Christ could not. Christ doesn’t respond with words. He simply kisses the Inquisitor.

This novelette within the larger novel is an eloquent, indeed almost perfect, argument against religion and proof of man’s spiritual poverty. It is so good that many critics believe that Dostoevsky secretly agreed with Ivan Karamazov’s unapologetic (and the Inquisitor’s de facto) atheism. Yet this is to confuse Dostoevsky the polemicist for Dostoevsky the artist. Dostoevsky embedded the Inquisitor’s argument within a larger frame, a single movement within a larger symphony. Only a fool would mistake a picture of the crucified Christ in the back of cathedral for the entire cathedral itself. To take Ivan’s story for the whole requires a seductive myopia on par with the Inquisitor’s (an argument could be made that this scene parallels a larger movement in miniature, but that’s different…).

On Tralfamadore We Are Forgiven

Those who have read Slaughterhouse-Five know the refrain “So it goes” well. Vonnegut describes the destruction of Dresden and a flat bottle of champagne with the same verbal shrug. It is, Billy says, a Tralfamadorian sentiment. To the alien race Vonnegut describes, death is not a big deal because at some other moment that which is dead is alive. Existence is “structured that way.” No one has to feel bad about killing people or people they saw killed. If we all saw the big picture, we would be content with the horrors we survive and the dead loved ones we forget.

Billy Pilgrim becomes a prophet for this new Tralfamadorian faith. It provides solace after the horrors he witnessed at Dresden. The irony is, of course, that this faith is no different than the old faith, the very pedestrian one that justifies past horrors by seeing them within a larger scheme of such horrors, that mistakes everything that happened as inevitable simply because it happened. But paralleled with one another, the two specious justifications and tempting causal chicaneries speak to the sparking mechanism, the relative and shifting dialectic common to any successful novel.

Think of it like a chorus of a Greek tragedy. These choruses often say something along these lines: “We are doomed”; “nothing means anything”; “is there any escape from the human woe?” The actors (and the plot) respond by proving the chorus only partly right, by committing the crimes and enacting the despair of the chorus. But in this conversation, in these repetitions and pointed articulations, a space opens up for the audience, for catharsis, for pity, for a world that is other than what is (Mikhail Bakhtin called this the dialogic imagination in Dostoevsky, but all worthwhile art employs to some degree this sustained thesis and antithesis, this ironic countervailing).

Here is Billy towards the end of Slaughterhouse-Five, again in a hospital. Bertram Copeland Rumfoord is in the bed beside him. A Harvard history professor, Rumfoord is a strong and outdoorsy man in the vein of Teddy Roosevelt—the narrator says Rumfoord actually looks like Teddy Roosevelt—writing a book about the U.S. Air Force. Rumfoord wishes Billy would just die so Rumfoord could forget his existence and finish the book. But, in what becomes the climax of Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy speaks up. He says he was physically there at Dresden. Billy saw the destruction.

“It had to be done,” Rumfoord told Billy, speaking of the destruction of Dresden.

“I know,” said Billy.

“That’s war.”

“I know. I’m not complaining.”

“It must have been hell on the ground.”

“It was,” said Billy Pilgrim.

“Pity the men who had to do it.”

“I do.”

“You must have had mixed feelings, there on the ground.”

“It was all right,” said Billy. “Everything is all right, and everybody has to do exactly what he does. I learned that on Tralfamadore.”

At the plot’s critical moment, the moment when Billy finally speaks, when he employs his moral authority as a survivor of a massacre, the fact that he is an individual who existed in time, at a time—who therefore means something rather than nothing­—Billy undermines his revelation with his talk of Tralfamadore. He justifies the Rumfoords of this world, those who say the last massacre excuses and ennobles the next. Everything has to be done because it has to be done, the ineluctable and geometric logic of the Inquisitor and cynical fanatics everywhere wins. The dialectic swings. Humanity, morality, and free will take it in the chin once again. Right?

No. Taken by itself, this exchange would indeed be an expression of profound despair. Slaughterhouse-Five becomes a book making fun of anti-glacier books. But it is not a book making fun of anti-glacier books. It is an anti-glacier book. It is an anti-glacier book because each of these pronouncements—these biting excretions of apathy and mordancy—exist in conversation with other modulated choric futilities, and within these parallel and expertly crafted rhythms, space opens up for a world without glaciers, without any large impossible blocks of necessary and ineluctable ice (to be clear, I’m talking about war here).

From Slaughterhouse-Five’s first chapter:

“Even then I was supposedly writing a book about Dresden. It wasn’t a famous air raid back then in America. Not many Americans knew how much worse it had been in Hiroshima, for instance. I didn’t know that either. There hadn’t been much publicity.

I happened to tell a University of Chicago professor at a cocktail party about the raid as I had seen it, about the book I would write. He was a member of a thing called The Committee on Social Thought. And he told me about the concentration camps, and about how the Germans had made soap and candles out dead jews and so on.

“All I could say was, “I know, I know. I know.””

Three “knows.” Note the italics on the third know. For the University of Chicago professor (as for his fictional doppelgänger, the Harvard educated Rumfoord), what we “know” has become an excuse not to act. Knowledge of one genocide clouds our vision of another. We despair of our condition and reconcile ourselves to it by parroting each historical genocide like some Gregorian chant in the church of moral abnegation.

Slaughterhouse-Five, taken as a whole, is nothing if not a hilarious satire of this criminal sentiment by supposedly sentient creatures—a rebuke to those who use knowledge of the past to excuse future repetitions, who lack the fortitude to imagine why we know what we claim to know, who in their desperation for forgiveness end up excusing the crime through a grotesque and pompous teleological satisfaction.

Like Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, Vonnegut’s success extends directly from how deeply Vonnegut subjects himself to what he doesn’t personally hold to be true (the inevitability of the Dresden firebombing and the Vietnam War), how artfully and doggedly he mines the implicit ideology of historical stupefaction, our lazy biological predestination, the complacent and smug morality that looks on war and murder and slaughter and says it was meant to be because it hurts too much to admit it (and we) equally could not have been.

Flying Backwards and Other Historical Angels

Many admire the scene in Slaughterhouse-Five when Billy watches the World War Two film backwards and bombers fly in reverse over Germany to suck shrapnel from the earth and the good people of America work hard to dismantle bombers and bury ammunition. I do too. It speaks to possibility. It speaks to a response to Tralfamadorians of other worlds and Rumfoords of this world. It speaks to a world where we are not implicitly forgiven our wars by the lie of power and fact of survival, where our blinkered unimaginative humanity does not excuse our repetitive and moronic inhumanity.

But I also especially admire another scene. It’s in the book’s first chapter. Vonnegut tells us about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. He describes Lot’s wife before God turns her into a pillar of salt:

“And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.”

Vonnegut is a pillar of salt. He doesn’t simply look back. He does not “record experience.” He writes an anti-war book that admits it might as well be an anti-glacier book, which makes the best possible argument for the permanence and monolithic nature of war, but adamantly remains an anti-war book. In short, Vonnegut’s expertly crafted and strategically balanced novel testifies to the radical instability of existence, including the supposed inevitably of whatever war we happen to be fighting. It is an explicit rejection of the iron laws of academic causality, of history as we claim to know it. It responds to those who pretend to believe in free will and learning but who in truth seek in history the precedent and justification for future ignorance and violence.

So this July 4^th over natty boh, fireworks, and talk of long ago wars please take a moment to think of Kurt Vonnegut—it might have been hopeless to attack a giant clump of floating ice with nothing more than a few jokes and stories about aliens, but we should love him for it, because it is so human, and we need all the humanity we can get in a world where endable wars never end and the massacres continue apace.

The lucrative Arms Sales market exists in the exact place where rational self-interest intersects with humanist idealism. Much as individuals have a right to exist, countries have a right to exist, and few would contest the prudence of building and maintaining modern weapons by which to protect that right. When a country builds weapons for its own military, and the purpose of that military is to defend, one may argue or object about the extent to which it is wise to train and organize the use of those weapons, but their necessity is comprehensible. Countries, like individuals, have a history of attacking one another.

While building weapons and equipment for self-defense is therefore fairly uncontroversial, selling said arms and weapons to people or nations that will misuse them—or, worse, are already engaged in busily and enthusiastically misusing them—is not necessary or prudent. This is because (1) human life is supposed to have an intrinsic value beyond anything money can buy, and (2) bullets and blasts tear open human bodies in order to spill out guts, blood, shit, and all the strange fluids that lurk beneath every human’s skin, maiming and/or killing them. How one uses weapons, therefore, is one of the most important things in the world, once the decision has been made to produce them for self-protection. Much as a war of aggression is immoral, the sale of weapons that will create the conditions of a war abroad is also immoral. That’s pretty simple. Or… is it?

Leaving Points on the Board

It is, it is simple. Nevertheless, in the ongoing effort to appear balanced, everyone’s favorite “sick man of the old media” The Atlantic recently published an article arguing that “Progressives” should stop allowing political rivals to monopolize weapons sales to other countries. Written by Army veteran of Afghanistan (this means the author knows the effect weapons have on his fellow humans), former Obama policy thinkfluencer, avowed Democrat and (apparently) Friend to America’s Arms Industry Andrew Exum, the piece is titled “What Progressives Miss About Arms Sales.” It offers a logically coherent argument in favor of profitability (political, industrial) over morality.

This argument has been made by many over the years. Readers familiar with the Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition likely know Satan’s temptation of Jesus Christ during the Son of God’s wanderings in the desert. Whether one is a devout Christian and believes that this was an actual event that occurred and Christ’s refusal to be tempted had the consequence of saving Christian souls by redeeming them from original sin, or one is an atheist and values the story as an allegory for how to resist debasing oneself and exhausting one’s moral and ethical (which is to say, one’s human) credibility, few would argue that actually Satan is the good guy with a smart idea, and Christ is the bad one who’s a dupe and sucker for not choosing all the kingdoms of earth (with their weapons-making industries) over the Kingdom of Heaven.

But that’s the piece’s argument, that Christ was a chump. The too-good Progressives are foolishly spurning Satan’s offer of cool, hard cash. They’re damaging America’s weapons industry by shrinking client pools, and eroding America’s ability to exist as chief of the Western hegemony [why American should be chief if it cares more about profitability than people’s lives is a question that goes unposed and unanswered]. These lousy point-missing Progressives are, through their Sunday-School fixation on morality (surely, the naïve morality of a decent if simple child), boxing Democrats out of controlling the Executive branch by letting Donald Trump and Jared Kushner take credit for sweet arms deals (“deliverables,” for those who have any experience working in government, according to Exum, who has). Presumably, it would have been better if President Clinton had been able to score this deliverable.

Exum describes two Progressive objections to selling arms to bad people, what he describes as the strategic objection, and the moral objection. The strategic objection boils down to modern variations of “we gave the mujahedeen weapons to fight the Soviets but then they turned Taliban and used the weapons on us so we should avoid doing that again.” This is a good objection, and reasonable. Exum’s answer is that if we don’t sell arms to bad people, other people will, so we should sell them to (a) maintain our influence with the bad people who want to buy our weapons, and (b) lower the costs of producing said weapons, for ourselves and for the bad people / bad actors. Exum himself calls this answer “quick and dissatisfying,” which is a good assessment, so I’ll just repeat it.

Objection #2 is “moral.” And here’s where I feel really bad for someone who deployed, and saw combat and the consequences of combat, and attended Sunday School as a child, and “has a lot of respect” for the Progressive standpoint (which opposes selling weapons to repressive, totalitarian, religiously intolerant and/or authoritarian regimes). I feel bad because Exum’s answer to moral objections is equally dissatisfying, to the point where one really wonders what compelled him to write and publish such an article.

The first part of his answer poses the sales of weapons to bad actors (in this case the Saudis) as hypothetical: “selling weapons to the Saudis that might be used in Yemen,” is how he characterizes representative Chris Murphy (D-CT)’s objections to the deal. In general, hypotheticals can be good—we’re not selling arms to the Ukrainians because hypothetically they might be used to start WWIII. But the arms deal with Saudi Arabia is unusually clear and—what’s the opposite of hypothetical?—actual. Weapons sold to the Saudis are either the exact weapons being used in Yemen, or weapons used to arm and equip soldiers in Saudi Arabia, freeing different weapons (that would otherwise not have been available) to be used in Yemen (or against rebellious Saudis, or anyone else). There’s no hypothetical about arming and equipping a regime engaged in warfare—you don’t get to choose which bullets Stalin uses to shoot Hitler and which he uses in a pogrom against Jews. It doesn’t work that way. Also, in this specific case, fuck hypotheticals, we’ve had 16 years of killing in the Middle East. “Uh, maybe they won’t drop that specific bomb” is the rhetorical device of a coward.

The second component of the argument is even more absurd. According to Exum, when Progressives take a moral stand against arms sales, it’s “leaving points on the board.” This analogy is somewhat confusing; unless there is another context for it with which I am unfamiliar, “leaving points on the board” describes the phenomenon in American football where Team A is penalized during a play in which Team B scores (practically speaking, usually, a field goal). Depending on the context and field position, the correct move for Team B’s coach is to “leave the points on the board” and accept the field goal’s result rather than taking the penalty and continuing to play but “taking the points off the board.” If there is sufficient time, or if the situation is desperate, the coach of Team B could elect to “take points off the board” and accept the penalty instead—if, say, time was running out and Team B needed a touchdown to avoid defeat, or, conversely, if there was plenty of time and the risk was worth it.

Exum’s formulation has the Progressives as Team B—the group which has scored a moral victory while Team A suffers the equivalent of a penalty by being seen to do something every scrupulous adult human knows is bad. Team B then elects to “leave points on the board” rather than use their position of moral advantage for profit. In so doing, though, Team B / Progressives somehow (the analogy does not make it clear) end up losing out to Team A, politically and financially. At best, this analogy is puzzled and incomplete—at worst, it makes a clear case to readers and thinkers that morality is something crafty people use to exchange for money, friendship, or political position.

What happened to arguing that generosity, kindness, and preserving the sanctity of human life were ends unto themselves? Surely, if one is being sincere, those ideals are incompatible with selling weapons to objectively unethical regimes. Wasn’t this the ultimate intellectual lesson of the enlightenment, combined with humanity’s experience with The Holocaust and other genocides in and around World War II? That after the hundreds of millions killed or forcibly displaced through warfare, ethnic cleansing, starvation, and outright genocide that there was ontological, immeasurable value to humanistic, non-utilitarian good, and that this good stood apart from whatever religion one happened to believe?

Collapse of the Democratic Party

Deliberately or not, Exum asserts that political expediency should be the point of human action, rather than an outcome of virtuous individual and/or collective action. This assertion is evil, plain and simple. It has been popular with mainstream or centrist Democrats for most if not all of my adult life, and as far as I can tell, has severely damage the Democrats’ ability to interest voters. By focusing on “deliverables” and “low-hanging fruit,” a certain class of people without any identifiable ideology beyond profit for profit’s sake has systematically bartered away the Democratic Party’s reason for having existed in the first place. The science of politics to them is how a target demographic group polls with a certain political position during an election year—not whether or not the content of that position is ethical.

As a Democratic Socialist, it seems plausible to me that this is simply one more manifestation of the way capitalism distorts and frustrates the will of the people, exploiting their work and the hours of life lived on earth to unethical ends. Pandering to a few million people who happen to be part of the industry pushing weapon systems sales to war criminals makes sense when you’re the CEO of a weapons manufacturing company whose bonus is tied to sales. When you’re a skilled mechanic, you probably care less about what you’re making, exactly, and a bit more about what that thing is being used to do. The capitalist system depends on convincing everyone that participating in the festival of rapacity and shitty unnecessary product-pushing stretching from Silicon Valley to Hollywood, from Hollywood to New York, and then to Washington D.C. is in their best interests. It isn’t!

We live in extraordinary times. Citizens have VIP tickets to the spectacle of hundreds of millions poured into developing and marketing a device for which no clear demand exists while veterans remain homeless. They watch on social media as poorly conceived, Democrat–backed charter school initiatives suck funding, teachers, and students out of the public system. They gape in astonishment as a popular Democratic politician stuffs donations from the pharmaceutical industry into his pocket and then votes against the interests of his constituency. And let’s not forget Obama basically robbing taxpayers to bail out the banks.

Why can’t establishment Democrats see how their ethically promiscuous attitude toward selling weapons is exactly what’s turning workers of all colors, ethnicities, nations and gender and/or sexual identifications away from the party, and from America? That losing votes isn’t a function of certain hyper-specific constituency platforms, but rather of conspicuous moral turpitude and blatant hypocrisy? Is the cash from Raytheon that good?

Globalism for Few, Insecurity for Many

The hypothesis floated by George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton after the Cold War was this: increase the amount of money earned in the developing world, cultivate a middle class abroad and at home, and democracy would flourish. This was a good idea, but it seems to have failed, in part because a “middle class” as we understand it in the U.S. depends on social mobility, and that’s actually been reduced since the collapse of the USSR. Fewer people have more money. Capitalism’s promise of a “better” life has been exchanged for the promise of a more convenient life. Convenience, conveniently, leaves plenty of room to argue for global and local exploitation, slavery, warfare, and all the awful shit most Americans and Westerners probably, if they thought about it, would say they don’t think is something in which they should participate (and certainly not abet).

Without an ethical anchor, without a firm understanding of the difference between good and evil, otherwise known as the difference between generosity and selfishness, one creeps inexorably toward the latter. Either (or both) Real and Allegorical Jesus Christ makes an important and powerful decision to embrace philosophical good not because it’s an easy thing to do—money, power, and dignified employment are seductive. The better the money, the better the job, the better the influence, the more seductive the choice. Important: Jesus spurns this choice, offered by Satan.

And choices that result in people dying in war (especially Americans dying) weigh particularly heavy on Americans’ consciences, more so even than more quotidian choices with equally far-reaching effects. One might think that if the lesson was going to be learned, that Democrats would have learned this lesson after getting us into Vietnam, and certainly after authorizing the use of force in Iraq (they did not). Somehow in spite of history, the American Center-left has slowly but inevitably arrived at the current moment, wherein an Obama Democrat and war veteran who knows what it means to make the argument claims that if we don’t arm and equip a horrific, repressive regime that is actively and enthusiastically murdering its own people as well as everyone with whom it disagrees and can lay hands on—Saudi Arabia, most recently—that China will do so, and we’ll lose money and influence. And oh, right, Democratic squeamishness has made it so that Trump can make this deal with the Saudis instead of the Chinese, and that’s why workers support Trump, because he’s willing to do what’s necessary.

This hedonistic, Satanic view of the world (selfishness and cynicism usually descend into Hedonism, very rarely sublimating into Stoicism) only accounts for one part of the equation (the financial part that we can measure precisely, today) and ignores the probability of any potential negative consequence, even likely negative consequences. But there’s another component—as long as we peddle weapons to bad regimes, we will always—as in, never not—live in a world beset by the type of systemic oppression and repression that only ever get resolved through violence. Regimes like the one ruling Saudi Arabia have a way of murdering their civilians and those of neighbors, then requiring more weapons.

The Piper Gets Paid

Arms sales will make people employed by military-industrial companies and consultancies more comfortable (not as comfortable as they would be if they controlled the means to production but that’s another essay). These people will buy homes, and afford medical insurance, and enroll their children in expensive private schools and universities. It’s a pretty good deal for shareholders with stock in Raytheon or Boeing or Lockheed Martin or Kellog, Brown and Root. Most of all it’s a great deal for the executives who run these companies, and the politicians who benefit from their campaign contributions.

Ultimately, if one is a patriotic American, like myself, one is forced to reconcile injuring or killing other humans with turning a profit. And I’m not sure a few dollars is worth it if it means losing my integrity in the bargain, assuming that the profit is even real. For every multi-year $100 billion dollar contract the U.S. signs with Saudi Arabia or similar execrable, criminal regimes, we dish out well over $100 billion per year fighting the terrorism that happens when the same criminal scum uses these weapons against their rivals in and outside their country. This does not reckon the value of a human life (priceless), nor does it factor in the financial obligations we incur for U.S. veterans of those wars. Ethically and financially, selling arms to regimes that are inclined to use them for bad purposes is a bad deal for the U.S.

And that’s what some people seem to miss about Arms Sales. It’s an easy mistake to make, for those who view financial or political profit as capable of redeeming morally objectionable actions. Progressives would be wise to continue “missing” this point.

How can a society so disconnected from its wars welcome back its fighting women and men? What do we lose when we privilege individuality over collectivity? WBT Writer Drew Pham joined in a panel discussion with Sebastian Junger on his book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, alongside Columbia University Professors Beth Fisher-Yoshida, Peter Coleman. Venera Kusari of the Negotiation and Conflict Resolution Program at Columbia moderated.

Watch the recorded discussion below:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feCPYV1MN8E]

Sebastian Junger is the New York Times Bestselling author of The Perfect Storm, Fire, A Death in Belmont, War and Tribe.  As an award-winning journalist, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and a special correspondent at ABC News, he has covered major international news stories around the world, and has received both a National Magazine Award and a Peabody Award. Junger is also a documentary filmmaker whose debut film Restrepo, a feature-length documentary (co-directed with Tim Hetherington), was nominated for an Academy Award and won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.   

Dr. Peter T. Coleman specializes in the field of conflict resolution and sustainable peace. Dr. Coleman holds a Ph.D. in Social-Organizational Psychology from Columbia University, where he today serves as Professor of Psychology and Education. He directs the Morton Deutsch International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution at Teachers College, and is the Executive Director of the Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict and Complexity at the Earth Institute. 

Dr. Beth Fisher-Yoshida is a faculty member and the academic director of the Negotiation and Conflict Resolution program, Director of the Youth, Peace and Security program and Co-Executive Director of AC4, all at Columbia University. Dr. Fisher-Yoshida teaches classes in conflict resolution and related fields and conducts participatory action research, and research in the areas of conflict and conflict resolution with a focus on intercultural communication, transformative learning and Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM). She i received her Ph.D. in Human and Organizational Systems from Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara, California.

Since 1989-1991 when every country in the USSR or the Warsaw Pact (save Russia) jumped ship at the earliest opportunity, reasonable people have asked the question: why does the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) still exist? This essay represents an attempt to understand basic criticisms that exist across the Western and non-Western political spectrum—to take them at face value, and examine them in good faith. The author of this essay believes in the necessity of NATO–its goodness, in fact–so it is an attempt to see things from another perspective.

 

Speaking with people on the right and left who argue against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, one encounters two different critical methodologies that arrive at the same conclusion. This is how Americans who support former candidate for US President Bernie Sanders or current presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein could find common ground with Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, Republican candidate Donald Trump (and former Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates). It’s also how Americans can find common ground with Russian nationalists, Chinese nationalists, and far-right groups across Europe.

 

Jumping into a comparision between the two groups' methodologies requires some minor simplification. I don't think this veers into oversimplification, but then, as I view both arguments against NATO as insufficient, that shouldn't be surprising. The motives of the left and the right are very different. As such, their criticisms have different moral weight, and require different types of justification to make sense. The left and right are not "the same" for reaching similar conclusions about why one should not support a European Cold War alliance, but their conclusions do happen to agree. That's important.

 

Conservative NATO skeptics tend to bring two types of criticism against the organization. The first draws on skepticism over globalization and alliance, and is not unlike the “States Rights” argument one often encounters among this type of thinker. These people view NATO membership as a concession of US sovereignty and agency. Taking part in a mutual defense pact means the US having to defend other countries in ways that run contrary to its own interests. The US loses more than it gains from a military alliance with Europe. The second describes the problem in financial terms: the US cannot afford to spend the money it does on NATO, that money would be better spent almost anywhere else. This second source of concern is similar to the first in that it assumes that the US is somehow being cheated by participating in the alliance—out of sovereignty, agency, or money.

NATO skeptics on the American left are less concerned about advancing “US” interests, and more interested in expanding a world where people can live free from war. To this type of thinking, the US is itself a source of much or the dominant piece of aggression in the world, and as NATO is subservient to US influence, it should be diminished. The hypothesis here is that a smaller or non-existent NATO would inevitably lead to a more peaceful world. People tend to live harmoniously with one another, much moreso than nations, and reducing any nation-state agency is to the good. This type of thinking also leads people to advocate for the reduction or outright destruction of all nuclear weapons. From this point of view—the humanist or humanitarian—the stronger and larger NATO is, the more likely war becomes.

 

Leftist criticism of NATO spending resembles conservative criticisms, with both claiming that the money spent on defense could go elsewhere. Whereas conservatives tend to prefer that money spent on alliance flow instead to grow US military capability, liberals or progressives would prefer that money to be invested in education, infrastructure, and science, both domestically and overseas. This leftist tends to believe that lack of education or transportation leads to misunderstanding and violence, and that were everyone to have the same basis of understanding and knowledge, wars could be prevented.

 

Another possible anti-NATO stance comes from countries hostile to Europe. Countries that would prosper from NATO's wane (China, Russia, etc.), which correctly assess that a militarily unified Europe checks their own territorial or economic ambitions, are natural enemies of NATO. These countries view any alliance of which they are not a part as something to be diminished or destroyed. In a few cases, like that of Serbia, whose territorial ambition NATO buried in the 1990s, hostility could also represent lingering resentment toward having suffered military defeat. It is worth pointing out that people who refer to Serbia as "Yugoslavia" are, as a rule, almost always anti-NATO along these lines.

 

The final perspective hostile to NATO comes from within the US military establishment. This criticism tends toward the conservative: defense industry spending is a zero-sum game. A country only accumulates so much capital, and conservatives believe that investing in alliance or partnership wastes that capital. While the motivation in this case is financial, the criticism manifests itself as political: these skeptics focus on the possibility of fighting war at the tactical level, independent of strategic considerations, or the diplomatic minutia of whether Russia was somehow tricked or deceived by NATO’s expansion. In all cases, the argument by people like Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-48) ends up being reduced support for NATO. This amounts to tacit or explicit acceptance of non-Western agendas.

 

Across the spectrum, people who have criticisms of NATO should not be viewed as necessarily hostile to American, European, or Western interests. While that is certainly the case in a few circumstances, for the most part, criticisms of NATO end up being reflections of the West’s failure to translate its prosperity into a model that is sustainable in the rest of the world. As few places outside the US and Europe have experienced lasting prosperity under Western models, it’s difficult for the West to dismiss criticisms out of hand.

 

In the US and in Europe, hostility toward NATO should be viewed as a failure on the part of NATO to communicate its purpose effectively. If NATO and the US were able to describe how and why, specifically, Europeans and North American participants benefit from the security arrangement, it seems unlikely that any morally and logically humanistic citizens of Western countries would see meaningful opposition to NATO, save on the absolute fringe. On the fringe left, people wish to weaken the US and Europe following the hypothesis that strengthening all non-European countries would lead to an increase in global justice. On the fringe right, people wish for there to be absolute US or European power, and see alliances between the two as contrary to the interests of each.

 

If you believe that peace and prosperity for all humans require a weaker Europe and USA, you see NATO as a problem. If, on the other hand, you believe the USA or Europe should be absolutely powerful, NATO appears wasteful at best, and a threat to your sovereignty at worst. I think you're wrong–but I understand your position.

The title, which I selected myself, is a trick. Most citizens of the United States of America know their war history. There's even a popular television brand dedicated to educating US citizens about war, and their country's role in it. So while it may surprise some to learn that the greatest loss of life during a single battle occurred in World War I rather than the Civil War or World War II, it is not as though people are unaware of those three wars, or the basic context: North versus South, Allies versus Germany, Allies versus Nazi Germany.

 

But “American” refers to the Americas, as a whole. And there’s one war of which few outside South America have heard. A war that occurred during the modern era, and was unlike anything seen during recorded, post-enlightenment history, before or since. While the scope and scale differs from that of the first and second World Wars, the loss of life and culture is comparable in relative terms–even, perhaps, exceeds that inflicted on Germany at the end of that conflict.

 

This war shares something else in common with World War II–a type of dictator that one sees only occasionally in the world. A visionary tyrant, a leader inspired by some overarching idea that compels everyone around him (or her) to attempt a drastic overhaul of society along moral, ethical, or scientific lines.

 

The Paraguayan War (or “The War of the Triple Alliance”) pitted Paraguay (substantially larger then than it is today) against Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. It was a battle of ideologies—on one side, a group of countries (the Triple Alliance) made up of what we would now call repressive authoriatrian regimes. On the other, Paraguay, which was run by an absolutist dictator. Something that all the participants had in common was that all had recently declared their independence from Spain or Portugal as a consequence of the Napoleonic Wars, and were coming into their own as nation-states.

 

Paraguay had a population of 525,000 at the war's outset. The combined population of the Triple Alliance was around 11,000,000. Paraguay was the aggressor, attacking Uruguay, Brazil, and then Argentina in succession until all three nations were united. The war lasted from 1864-1870, and by its end, Paraguay was completely defeated. 70% of the male population of Paraguay died, including its dictator. Paraguay lost large swaths of its territory to Brazil and Argentina, and its population decreased by over half. It took decades for the small country to recover.

 

This type of destruction is rare in modern warfare—a harrowing of one’s enemies so deep that it creates generational disruption. It seems that quite apart from Paraguay’s role of aggressor in the war, a source of hatred for Paraguay and unwillingness on the part of the Triple Alliance to negotiate with them was the nature of Paraguay’s dictatorship, and its history. The Triple Alliance all had similar forms of government—authoritarian aristocracy-based systems, recently liberated from a similarly aristocratic Europe, run primarily by European elites drawn from the country that had originally colonized them (Spain in Argentina's case, Portugal in the case of Brazil). They all condoned slavery to varying degrees.

Paraguay was different–almost unique in world history. In the wake of its independence from Spain during the Napoleonic wars, Paraguay was ruled by a heavily centralized government that obeyed the despotic but charismatic progressive leader Jose Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia. De Francia closed Paraguay's borders and instituted a radical set of social and political reforms, ruling until his death in 1840. Following that, his successor and acolyte (a nephew) Carlos Antonio Lopez ruled from 1842 until he died in 1862. While slavery was not abolished until after the fall of the dictatorship in 1870, it operated somewhat differently than in neighboring countries, in that after 1842, children of slaves were automatically emancipated upon reaching the age of 25.

 

De Francia and his successor, Carlos Antonion Lopez, took long views of Paraguay's development. Under their harsh direction, Paraguay industrialized, fielded a series of schools that catapulted it to the highest level of education in South America at the time, achieved independence in terms of food production, organized their military along European (Prussian) lines, and created the country's first constitution. They also attempted to create in Paraguay a—wait for it—real racial utopia based on enlightenment (Rousseau, specifically) principles, wherein whites could not marry one another, but were compelled to marry darker-skinned people. Paraguay was run by nepotistic despots, but was less nation-state than an aspiration toward just and equal society. Its leadership seemed legitimately to desire a distinct, enlightened culture wherein elitism occurred only through a honest competition. When de Francia died, for example, he'd doubled Paraguay's wealth–furthermore, it was discovered that he had neglected to collect his full salary, several years' worth of which he returned to swell Paraguay's coffers. The nepotistic aspect of the Paraguayan state seemed more a product of access to education and ideological committment than any egotistical desire on the part of de Francia to perpetuate his blood in leadership roles.

 

When the dictator’s nephew’s son (Francisco Solano Lopez) took over in 1862, he opened the borders and began a serious attempt to organize the smaller South American nations into an alliance that would be capable of resisting larger neighbors like Argentina and Brazil. Lopez also fell in love with the bad-ass Irish wife of a French officer–this heroine subsequently moved to Paraguay and bore multiple children. The first country Lopez sought to influence was Paraguay’s neighbor Uruguay—this country had (at the time) a government friendly to Paraguay's, and enthusiastic about creating a bulwark against South America’s traditional powerhouses. Uruguay also controlled access to the Atlantic Ocean, key to expanding trade.

 

Brazil had other ideas. They succeeded in replacing Uruguay’s pro-Paraguay government with a pro-Brazil government, backed by a Brazilian invasion, and Lopez decided the time was right to push back. Despite its small population and relative lack of equipment, Paraguay's militarized society was able to mobilize large portions of its population quickly, and Lopez took the upper hand against its much larger but less-well organized northern neighbor and its Uruguayan puppet. Following a setback against Brazil's superior navy in 1865, and a rebuke from Argentina, Paraguay expanded the war to include its southern neighbor. After this year, the war became a series of catastrophes for Paraguay, punctuated by the occasional defensive victory.

 

For more details on Paraguay’s earliest days of development as an independent nation (which itself offers several fascinating historical lessons and much intellectual food for thought), I recommend the Wikipedia articles that form the backbone of my own research, here, here, and here. Suffice it to say, Paraguay’s racial and social utopian dream (or nightmare) was destroyed by Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay working in concert whose superior equipment and population told in the long run. Lopez led a guerilla war but was killed in 1870 in the jungle, his family's dream in ruins. Still, as with many such widespread and creatively ambitious social experiments, the legacy of Paraguay’s innovations live on. Paraguay has one of the most homogenous populations in South America—in part a product of that early intermingling of Europeans with black, native, and mixed-race populations—and an unusually long life expectancy (especially given their poverty), along with relatively broad education and literacy rates.

 

I'm not sure what lesson to draw from the Triple War. On the one hand, I'd like to think that real dialogue between different ideologies and nations should be possible. On the other hand, that "dialogue" always seems to find its purest expression through warfare. And one cannot discount that it's always the purest, most radical believers in progress (the Hitlers, the Stalins, the Lopezs) that seem to initiate these struggles.

 

We live in a day and age when people casually employ terms like "fascist," "communist," and "dictator," (as I have to a certain extent in this essay), and extrapolate a great deal from those words' associations. Jose Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia lived a frugal life that he seemed unattached to, so much so that his substantial inheritence went to enriching Paraguay. Nevertheless, his nephew's son was a belligerent war-hawk who brought ruin to his neighbors, and, ultimately, to Paraguay itself. I wonder–countries, societies like that of  newly-independent, 19th century Paraguay don't attempt to mask their intentions–they telegraph them to the outside world. The tyrant, the dictator, boldly and proudly tells all who will listen: "this is how society should be–this is how *all* society should be." Are there any nations today that can honestly claim to resemble tiny Paraguay, dreaming of dominion?

Military hyperbole is at the heart of Serial’s second season. Sarah Koenig has gambled that she can take a simple premise—man walks off a base in Afghanistan, is captured by the Taliban—and make it representative. Of the war, of the world, of human nature. The season has discussed how Army private Bowe Bergdahl came to leave his post in Afghanistan, was captured by the Haqqani network (a savage affiliate of the Taliban), and the military’s efforts to rescue him. Its focus was procedural as well as institutional, describing the military’s bizarre, byzantine, and unrecognizably convoluted legal and social skeleton. The season’s sixth episode, “5 O’Clock Shadow,” extended that focus to the military’s extreme linguistic habits.

 

It’s difficult to imagine a world without metaphor or hyperbole. Try it—try visualizing a day wherein everything everyone said to you and everything you said to someone else, was understood as a verifiable truth claim. Conducted properly, the exercise results in confusion, absurdity, and a bewildering breakdown of communication. While metaphor and hyperbole aren’t necessary for communication, we rely on these linguistic devices to describe thoughts or emotions that involve some discomfort, and as most people’s lives involve discomfort—in work, in love, or in one’s fragile ambitions—metaphor, analogy, and hyperbole become a kind of language within a language.

 

This is doubly true in the military. When one considers the context, it’s not surprising—the military, and especially the Army (or Marine) infantry consists of a more or less constant indoctrination into the ideas that (1) a soldier is part of a collective, with limited value as an individual and (2) one should expect to get hurt very badly or die, and that so long as this occurs within a military-sanctioned action against one’s enemies, that injury or death is desirable. Citizens of countries that have Western humanism and individualism at their cultural heart will find these thoughts incomprehensible at best—and those citizens who become soldiers of their humanist nation’s militaries therefore take this linguistic tendency to speak in metaphor and hyperbole to dramatic extremes.

 

In “Five O’Clock Shadow,” Koenig made much of Bergdahl’s disillusionment when a prominent and high-ranking sergeant in his unit claimed that soldiers had joined the military to “rape, kill, pillage, and burn,” a claim that was not immediately disputed by others present. Apparently, Bergdahl took the sergeant’s statement at face value, and statements like it. This became evidence to Bergdahl that his unit’s leadership was unscrupulous.

 

Most people with military experience—and especially experience in the combat arms, where euphemism and hyperbole are most necessary for psychical well being—understand that the military is filled with hyperbole. The easiest example of this (described by Army veteran Nate Bethea for Task & Purpose’s Serial Podcast) is a popular way of saying that one is angry with a peer or subordinate: “I’m going to cut off his head and shit down his neck.” The correlation between American soldiers or officers promising this horrible and primitive manner of execution and actual executions carried out? A perfect 0.

 

Establishing that people don’t mean everything they say, in or outside the military, is one important component to see how Koenig understands Bergdahl. Another point is that the military itself is filled with double standards that could be (and in the case of Bergdahl, were) interpreted as hypocrisy. Hence Bergdahl’s conclusion that the official fixation on unit uniform standards (or standards in general) was arbitrary and unreasonable—a fixation with which every soldier in post-9/11 combat has had to struggle. The same sergeant was quoted in “Five O’Clock Shadow” as viewing unshaven soldiers in the same light as the Vietnam-era unit that committed the My Lai massacre. To Bergdahl, this was another confusing example of hyperbolic rhetoric, but to the sergeant, the statement was intended to be taken at face value.

 

Bergdahl concluded that the military’s priorities were honorable and decent, and that it was his unit’s leadership that was intentionally or foolishly misinterpreting rules, regulations, and intentions in Afghanistan. Bergdahl concluded this because he apparently had difficulty interpreting metaphor and hyperbole, and was unable to reconcile the difference between ideal and real. This quintessentially human struggle, in Bergdahl’s case, appears to have been insurmountable.

 

The seventh and eighth episodes of Serial elaborate on Bergdahl’s literal-mindedness, and assign it a definition that fits it into the spectrum of mental illness: schizotypal personality disorder, a form of schizophrenia. In other words, Bergdahl’s behaved like a crazy person because… he was a crazy person.

 

I have argued elsewhere that Bergdahl should never have been in the military to begin with, and that due to his uniquely unsuitable temperament, those officers responsible for adjudicating Bergdahl’s case should view his crime with mercy and compassion. These episodes make it very clear that Bergdahl was never fit to serve in the Army infantry—from a social standpoint, as well as from a literary and linguistic one.

How World War II gets remembered isn’t accurate, and for Curzio Malaparte, it's not even true. Not the American version, not the Russian, not anywhere, really. At best, our memory of WWII has become a lie founded on emotional connections to people barely known in life. A series of well-intentioned miscommunications and words spoken (or not) in German, Italian, Russian, Japanese or English across untranslatable generational gaps. The product of the optimistic if misplaced belief that one human could ever be said to understand another without dreaming some part of one’s own self and aspirations into them. Less good, our memory of WWII is a thoughtless generalization, and ultimately, a stand-in for racism, nationalism, and all the worst stereotypes that made anyone feel good about going to the War in the first place. Worst case scenario, it’s a deliberate deception – the product of malicious individuals or concerns eager to portray the narrative in ways that advantage themselves and their interests.

In the version of WWII I grew up with – the one popular here in America – here’s how it happened. This comes from my grandfathers, one of whom was an enlisted man in Europe with the U.S. Army, and the other of whom was in the U.S. Army Air Corps, an officer (Lieutenant) in a B-24 Liberator. Nazi Germany declared war on Europe and beat them, save for Italy, which was Germany’s comically inept ally that was good mostly for humorous tension-relief. Then they turned on their sort-of-ally (more like Frenemy), the Soviet Union. Germany and the Soviet Union were slugging it out, and England was on the ropes, when in jumped America. D-Day, Battle of the Bulge, game over – America: 1, Nazi Germany: 0. The Soviet Union wanted Europe for themselves, but America said, “nope, not gonna happen fellas, hang on while we beat Japan with our other hand,” then we got the atomic bomb. Communists and peaceniks stole our secrets and sold them to the Soviets because they hated America, and the rest is history. Bottom line: Britain? Weak. France? Super weak. Italy? Worse than France! Japan? Sneaky, mostly. Russia? Strong, but sneaky. Germany? Strong, but not as strong as America!

And America? Strongest of all. Just, and right, and boy did we take it to the Germans.

One of the other editors of this intellectual initiative, Mr. Carson, gave me a book for Christmas: Kaputt, by Curzio Malaparte, nee Kurt Erich Suckert, a northern Italian. While as a "memoir" it falls under biography / autobiography, it's the sort of memoir that can only be produced during a time of catastrophe. Kaputt describes Malaparte's time as an Italian Army officer / journalist on the Eastern Front – an absurd account of the violence that is so far as I can tell, both largely inaccurate and unique. Malaparte visits Romania, Ukraine, Poland and Finland and through almost-unbelievable access,  bears witness to the horrors of war and governance of the Nazis. That in and of itself is remarkable, because access breeds familiarity, but in this case, it grants the author (and the reader) a perspective on the occupiers that is simultaneously individual and universal. Witness the scene (one of many) with Hans Frank, the Nazi Governor-General of Poland, when Frank attempts to convince Malaparte that the Axis mission is just by invoking his wife and her friends knitting in their parlor:

Frank's hand on my shoulder, though it was not heavy, oppressed me. Little by little, disentangling and considering each feeling that Frank aroused in me and attempting to understand and define the meaning, the pretexts and the reason for his every word and gesture, and trying to piece together a moral portrait of him out of the scraps that I had picked up about his character in the past few days, I became convinced that he was not to be judged summarily.

The uneasiness that I felt within me in his presence was born precisely because of the complexity of his character – a peculiar mixture of cruel intelligence, refinement, vulgarity, brutal cynicism and polished sensitiveness. There had to be a deep zone of darkness within him that I was still unable to explore – a dark region, an inaccessible hell from which dull, fleeting glows flashed unexpectedly, lighting his forbidding face – that disturbing and fascinating mysterious face.

The opinion I had formed of Frank long ago was, unquestionably, negative. I knew enough of him to detest him, but I felt honor-bound not to stop there. Of all the elements that I was conscious of in Frank, some a result of the experience of others and some of my own, something, I could not say what, was lacking – something the very nature of which was not known to me but which I expected would suddenly be revealed to me at any moment.

I hoped to catch a gesture, a word, an involuntary action that might reveal to me Frank's real face, his inner face, that would suddenly break away from the dark, deep region of his mind where, I instinctively felt, the roots of his cruel intelligence and musical sensitiveness were anchored in a morbid and, in a certain sense, criminal subsoil of character.

"This is Poland – an honest German home," repeated Frank, embracing in a single glance that middle-class scene of domestic simplicity.

Readers receive the usual evaluation of a prominent Nazi leader – that of the thug, the brute – but that is only the jumping-off point for a more careful and scathing indictment, which is to say, the suggestion that the thing that makes Nazi Germany spectacular and special is its specifically middle-class sensibility. In other words – to the British, German, or American reader – the Nazis are like us.

It’s an astonishing book by an extraordinary man, who has been largely ignored by American history, likely for the reason stated above. Malaparte seems to have gotten a bad reputation for his involvement in the Italian fascist party, and, as a human, seems also to have been both a fanatical social climber, as well as a flamboyant intellectual. For all his political and moral failings, though, it’s important to recognize that he spent 5 years in exile for publishing defamatory remarks public statements about Mussolini and Hitler, then was imprisoned for similar anti-fascist/Nazi activity in 1938, 39, 41, and 43. He was a valorously decorated combat veteran of World War I, which means something, especially considering his service with Italy’s premiere infantry unit of the time, the Alpini.

Kaputt details the final destruction of a dying world order. We remember World War I as having swept away much of Europe’s prevailing social climate, and shows like Downton Abbey catalogue how that played out in Great Britain. There’s some truth to that recollection of history – the aftermath of WWI saw the beginning of Soviet (not Communist) Russia, and there were greater "rights" enunciated to women, as well as expanded economic opportunities for the lower and middle-class in non-communist societies (mostly through human space created by war casualties and the Spanish Influenza rather than human altruism)  – but the events that were set in motion during World War I accelerated after the fall of Tsarist Russia and the ascension of the Soviet Union. By the time the Nazis swept into power and through Poland and France, the old social order had been almost entirely eviscerated. Malaparte bears witness to this destruction on landscapes that are unfamiliar to most Western readers, and many Eastern European readers as well. Kaputt is full of surreal images of the horrors of war – it is a read unlike anything else one will encounter on the subject of World War II. Two quick examples:

Mad with terror, the horses of the Soviet artillery – there were almost a thousand of them – hurled themselves into the furnace and broke through the besieging flames and machine guns. Many perished within the flames, but most of them succeeded in reaching the shores of the lake and threw themselves into the water…while still madly struggling, the ice gripped them. The north wind swooped down during the night… Suddenly, with the peculiar vibrating noise of breaking glass, the water froze. The heat balance was broken, and the sea, the lakes, the rivers froze. In such instances, even sea waves are gripped in mid-air and become rounded ice waves suspended in the void. On the following day, when the first [Finnish] Ranger patrols, their hair singed, their faces blackened by smoke, cautiously stepped over the warm ashes in the charred forest and reached the lakeshore, a horrible and amazing sight met their eyes. The lake looked like a vast sheet of white marble on which rested hundreds upon hundreds of horses' heads. They appeared to have been chopped off cleanly with an ax. Only the heads stuck out of the crust of ice. And they were all facing the shore. The white flame of terror still burnt in their wide-open eyes. Close to the shore a tangle of wildly rearing horses rose from the prison of ice.

and this account of what a German Lieutenant Colonel did upon taking a Ukrainian boy-partisan prisoner, as told to a German princess and one of her aristocratic friends:

Finally the officer stopped before the boy, stared at him for a long time in silence, then said in a slow tired voice full of boredom: "Listen, I don't want to hurt you. You are a child, and I am not waging war against children. You have fired at my men, but I am not waging war on children. Lieber Gott, I am not the one who invented war." The officer broke off, then went on in a strangely gentle voice: "Listen, I have one glass eye. It is difficult to tell which is the real one. If you can tell me at once, without thinking about it, which of the two is the glass eye, I will let you go free." "The left eye," replied the boy promptly. "How did you know?" "Because it is the one that has something human in it." …

"I met that officer again later at Soroca on the Dniester – a very serious man, a good father, but a true Prussian, a true Piffke as the Viennese say. He talked to me about his family, about his work. He was an electrical engineer. He also spoke about his son Rudolf, a boy ten years old. It was really difficult to tell the glass eye. He told me that the best glass eyes are made in Germany."   "Stop it!" said Louise.  "Every German has a glass eye," I said.

and a third, as though two weren't enough – in this, a very different view of German soldiers (circa 1941) from that of the typical "they were all fanatical criminals" so popular in literature, cinema, and plays (a canard that Malaparte disputes):

The German soldiers returning from the front line, when they reached the village squares, dropped their rifles on the ground in silence. They were coated from head to foot in black mud, their beards were long, their hollow eyes looked like the eyes of the sunflowers, blank and dull. The officers gazed at the soldiers and at the rifles lying on the ground, and kept silent. By then the lightning war, the "Blitzkrieg," was over, the "Dreizigjahrigerblitzkrieg," the thirty-year lighting war, had begun. The winning war was over, the losing war had begun. I saw the white stain of fear growing in the dull eyes of German officers and soldiers. I saw it spreading little by little, gnawing at the pupils, singeing the roots of the eyelashes and making the eyelashes drop one by one, like the long yellow eyelashes of the sunflowers. When Germans become afraid, when that mysterious German fear begins to creep into their bones, they always arouse a special horror and pity. Their appearance is miserable, their cruelty sad, their courage silent and hopeless. That is when the Germans become wicked. I repented being a Christian. I felt ashamed of being a Christian.

Malaparte had unfettered access as an Italian journalist to the Eastern Front (when he wasn’t in prison for mouthing off), and describes the events from the persective of someone who knows the war effort is doomed – far more interestingly though, are the ways in which he frames these stories, telling them, as it were, in a series of country clubs and aristocratic estates to the intellectual and social inheritors of the West’s cultural legacy. Swedish, Spanish, German, Italian, and French aristocrats and diplomats. Polish princesses. The wealthy and powerful of another age, now, no longer so – some of whom, bound for the death camps. Malaparte catalogues an amazing history of loss, a way of life swept away forever. The British are largely absent, and come across when they are described as fairly pragmatic if not necessarily "good," and the Americans seem, if anything, to be parvenues – in this sense, Kaputt could almost be a companion piece for Henry James's earlier work – the reflection of American ambition for social weight in Europe, viewed through the prism of a massive class war.

Malaparte’s writing is powerful and moving, and despite his politics, it’s difficult to see how this book would not have had a stronger and more sympathetic reception in the West, save for its fundamental conceit: wealth and strength cannot keep you safe during times of war and true social tempest. There is no shelter from that storm, nothing counts in the end save the raw instinct for survival. This sort of morality tale is unwelcome in the capitalist West – this is not the sort of book anyone with property in the Hamptons would like to read, though I would argue that it is the clearest depiction of the horror of war that I have read, cleaner even than Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, and certainly far better than any of the “realist” portrayals of wartime (O'Brien, Marlantes, etc) who end up sentimentalizing and therefore implicitly endorsing war, which means they couldn't have thought very well about the experience even if they wrote effectively about it.

Malaparte becomes increasingly more sympathetic to the Soviets over the course of the book, an emotional and sentimental desire to see them as better or more than the Germans in part because they have beaten the Germans, and in part because of the horror the Germans have themselves inflicted, a fact that Malaparte observes firsthand on several occasions. This is interesting as well because the natural evolution of thinking for most in the West is a growing concern that the Soviets will simply replace Nazi Germany – in fact, in terms of history, the Soviets ultimately eclipsed the Nazis as a totem of fear when they acquired the atomic bomb, and became the first non-Western country with the ability to destroy the world. Despite the recent example of the war or perhaps because of it, many German and Italian intellectuals made up their minds to stick with moderates and capitalism after the collapse of Nazi Germany – more of them sided with the Totalitarian Soviets based on a sense that there was something in Communism, and to this day, European communism retains a small but important political presence, often derided in England and America. Malaparte’s viewpoint is, therefore, especially interesting considering his various positions before and during World War II.

 There aren’t many “literary” fiction books out about Afghanistan, and almost none authored by veterans. Brian Castner, a veteran of Iraq, published an essay in Los Angeles Review of Books that examines the phenomenon in more depth. Roy Scranton, another veteran of Iraq and a philosopher, claims in a different LARB essay that there are plenty of war stories by American veterans already available, and that Western audiences should be looking for stories by or about the host nation. This claim has been made by writers like Joydeep-Roy Battacharya and Helen Benedict, as well.
Enter Green on Blue, a savagely honest, realistic novel about Afghanistan by Elliot Ackerman. Imminently readable and deeply subversive, Green on Blue draws on its author’s extensive experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan to paint a stunning and accurate description of why the West is losing and will lose in Afghanistan. The problem and solution both exist within the book’s title.

“Green on Blue” is a military term that derives from the color of units on NATO battle maps – blue colored units are friendlies (America, Great Britain, West Germany), green are allies (France), and red are enemy (Soviet-aligned countries). Green on blue describes what happens when allies deliberately or accidentally attack friendly soldiers / units. The incidents, therefore, are incredibly troubling – they represent the failure of alliance, the prospect of new enemies arising from botched friendships. They hint at betrayal, in the context of existential struggle.

In Green on Blue, Americans are “blue” and Afghans are “Green,” the allies. Crucially to the plot, there are no “red” – there are enemies, but this term, in the context of Afghanistan, is fungible. The plot revolves around an Afghan militiaman named Aziz, who navigates generations of human relationships between Afghans, while attempting not to be crushed by the war. At its heart, the war is described as a competition between groups for social standing – respect from young men, and money from the Americans.

According to the capitalist west, money is supposed to buy respect and loyalty. This forms the basis of an important miscommunication between Americans and Afghans in the novel – a strategic cultural miscalculation of extraordinary significance. Money, in the context of the story, represents a sort of catastrophic idealism, which merely compels individuals to compete in a zero-sum game for resources. Ultimately, American dependence on the coercive power of tangible resources predicts the type of incident hinted at in the book’s title.

On a local level, in Afghanistan, the most important thing is respect – the honor of a group (“nang”), which is under constant threat of insult. Once “nang” has been challenged, the group is required to respond to the insulter with revenge – “badal,” which consists of appropriately violent action. The protagonist learns this essential lesson as a child: “Once, in Sperkai, an older child had split my lip in a fight. When my father saw this, he took me to the boy’s home. Standing at their front gate, he demanded that the father take a lash to his son. The man refused and my father didn’t ask twice. He struck the man in the face, splitting his lip just as his son had split mine…” On this plane, Green on Blue operates as a sort of slowly-unfolding national tragedy, wherein the Afghans become their own heroes and villains, and the Americans – representative of “The West” – are simply agents of catastrophe and destruction, casually and unthinkingly paying money to keep the feuds going, hoping to find “High Value Targets” in the war on terror.

Aziz is both nuanced and archetypal – a quintessentially Afghan product of the West’s involvement in Afghanistan. At the story’s beginning, his father (a fighter for hire), dies at some point between the Civil War period after Soviet rule and NATO’s intervention in 2001: First there was the dust of people running. Behind the dust was a large flatbed truck and many smaller ones. They pushed the villagers as a broom cleans the streets… Amid the dust and the heat, I saw men with guns. The men looked like my father but they began to shoot the villagers who ran. The gunmen are never identified – they destroy Aziz’s village and move on, leaving Aziz and his older brother orphaned. After a difficult childhood where he and his brother struggle against the odds to improve their tenuous life at society’s margins, another, similar tragedy involving a Taliban suicide bomber leads Aziz to join the “Special Lashkar,” a CIA-funded militia on the border of Pakistan.

In the “Special Lashkar,” Aziz learns to fight and kill. The group’s leader is an Afghan named Commander Sabir, paid by the CIA to fight against the Taliban. Readers quickly learn that Sabir is enmeshed in his own struggle over “badal” and “nang” – Sabir is hunted by the brother of a Taliban fighter that Sabir killed, a Taliban named Gazan, in revenge for that now-dead brother having killed Sabir’s brother, the former leader of the Special Lashkar. If that seems complicated, it should – alliances and enmities proliferate in the book, ensnaring all and forcing everyone to take sides in the conflict. Nothing is sacred, not love, not honor, not brotherhood – nothing. And behind it all stands the enigmatic, fascinating character of “Mr. Jack,” the CIA officer who runs the Special Lashkar, and who seeks targets for America’s war on terror.

Mr. Jack is my favorite character in post-9/11 fiction. There isn’t much of him in the book, but his influence is seen everywhere – he resonates through the book’s pages, exceptionally powerful, moving in and out of autocthonic settings like he belongs, while making obscene and absurd mistakes that lead only to more preventable strife. Mr. Jack is so unaware of the consequences of his actions, that he becomes an incidental antagonist. His hunt for professional success turns Mr. Jack into a caricature of a man, a careerist who seeks professional success without any understanding of its human cost.

There are no heroes in this book, which could make it a World War II story similar to Catch-22 or Slaughterhouse Five – save that there are no antiheroes, either. There are believable human characters that find themselves at war in spite of themselves, forced to fight for meanings that shift and collapse until the only thing left is friendship, then friendship collapses as well. This resembles the standard Vietnam narrative, like Matterhorn or The Things They Carried, but the characters in Ackerman’s book are not motivated by ambition or by ideology – rather they seek simply to survive, not to be killed. The characters in Green on Blue do not have space for the type of indulgent self-reflection imagined by the typical Vietnam-era author, such as Tim O'Brien or Tobias Wolff – this is a book where there is little room or space for interiors. Perhaps we are on the verge of a new type of fiction – a story that balances deliberately earnest almost modernist narrative plotlines, while acknowledging the infinitely expansive potentials of post-modern perspective and awareness of self- and other-ness, only to reject that literary and intellectual dead-end as (paradoxically) reductive. Or, as Aziz says in the opening sentence: “Many would call me a dishonest man, but I’ve always kept faith with myself. There’s an honesty in that, I think.” Rather than opening a meditation on postmodernity, Aziz goes on to show us precisely, meticulously, how that opening statement could possibly be true, in the context of Afghanistan.

Green on Blue makes a series of bold philosophical, political, and literary claims, which are plausibly balanced and supported throughout. It is a powerfully realistic and exciting adventure; it is also a eulogy for the failed post-colonial ambitions of a capitalist society that believes it can demand service for money, as though the developing world is a whore or a dependent. It is among the best, most accessible and accurate descriptions of Afghanistan available – and the single greatest critique of the West’s policy yet written.

Incidentally, the most successful militia commander in Paktika Province for the last ten years – a wealthy man who has successfully played the role of insurgent, bandit, contractor, and militiaman on both sides of the fence? That would be Commander Aziz.

Brad Pitt loves playing in WWII movies. He loves fighting Nazis, who, incredibly, really existed, and were (if anything) even more evil than comes across on a movie screen. For 12 years, one of the most civilized, technologically and institutionally advanced countries on earth was ruled by a brutal, vicious band of thugs who employed racial mythology, sentimentalism, romanticism, emotion, intimidation, and murder in their attempt to extort as much wealth as possible from the populations they ruled. While not the worst catastrophe the world has ever witnessed, to put the Nazis in list terms (the only terms most people understand these days), we're probably talking one of the three all-time worst. Almost certainly bottom five, and indisputably bottom ten.

It's important to frame the list in terms of utility, or effectiveness, so as not to unintentionally make the case that this type of behavior is worthy of praise, or anything other than the most resounding condemnation and rejection. Oftentimes people confuse the intensity or degree of an action with its having some sort of value as an accomplishment, which is completely false. An evil accomplishment is not an accomplishment at all – only a fiend would claim different. Therefore, the Nazis and other misfortunes that humanity have inflicted upon itself such as other brands of totalitarianism or authoritarianism should never occupy the "top" of any list – only the bottom, where they belong.

Having established the terms of what we're talking about – which are critical to the debate – I wanted to weigh in on the topic of Fury again, in part because some people read my review and did not understand that I did watch the movie after writing the review based on previews. I watched it for two reasons: first, because when a woman says she wants to watch a war movie for a date, only a churl says: "no." Second, because I'd made the emotional if somewhat foolhardy claim that if Fury revealed anything new or fundamentally true about life or war by using different weapons than Saving Private Ryan, I'd boil and eat my leather shoe. I stood by that claim, but not without some trepidation as curtain time approached.

I should have trusted my gut. As composed, Fury was a confused series of cliches (many of which have been described elsewhere at great length) cobbled together around three competing assertions (contained within the protagonist): one, that the Nazis and specifically the SS were an antagonist of such manifest evil that to battle and kill them when and wherever possible was the highest possible good, two, that America and Americans were essentially different from the Nazis as expressed by the SS, a fact that explained or excused the actions of American soldiers within that context, and three that in war, people tend to develop tribes based on their unit – and in a tank, especially a Sherman tank, the weapon itself, the tank, becomes a part of the tribe – a living part of the unit.

Fury billed itself as a "realistic" movie, and a lot of the marketing surrounding the film concerned its attention to detail as well as the importance to the actors and studio that they "get it right," so it's worth discussing how the movie measured up based on those standards. Based on every reliable review I've seen from subject matter experts, the Germans and Americans were outfitted with equipment and weapons appropriate for the time, and those weapons functioned more or less as one would expect. The Americans aren't facing the Wehrmacht of 1941, they're facing militia reserves composed of children and old men, and the ineffectiveness of many German units in the face of American combat power (the missed shots, the shoddy equipment, etc.) can be explained as bad craftsmen misusing their tools. The deaths were realistic – people died characteristically realistically considering the medium, rather than unrealistically.

SPOILER

There is a scene with a Tiger tank that arrives with about 30 minutes left to go in the movie. One understands immediately that in a movie named for a tank, the Tiger will likely not destroy Fury and then rumble away as the protagonist (played by Brad Pitt), a troubled staff sergeant named Wardaddy, leads his crew to safety. The question becomes whether the American close air support (featured shortly before the tanks roll out) will show up and knock out the Tiger, or whether somehow Fury and the other tanks will outmaneuver the Tiger and knock it out, or some other plausible scenario, for example maybe Brad Pitt knows how to make sticky bombs like Tom Hanks. In a brilliant reference to the old GI Joe cartoons, where Cobras would unload battalions worth of firepower on the outgunned and outnumbered Joes, missing every time, the Tiger manages to destroy the other non-Fury tanks, then miss or score glancing hits (from point blank range with AP ammo) on Fury, until Wardaddy has maneuvered the tank behind the Tiger, and scores a direct hit seconds before the Tiger manages to miss again, or score another dramatic near-miss. 

BACK TO NON-SPOILER

The presentation of time-appropriate weapons and equipment, and the opening combat sequences, are all very well done, if on the melodramatic side. As time went on, though, the tactics, the strategy, how collections of people tended to move and work on an aggregate and specific level became less and less "realistic," while still purporting to strive for that standard. And this is a shame – if the movie had embraced the surreal, if it had let the "realism" go in favor of something more impressionistic, it could have avoided the absurd, cliched pitfall into which it ended up falling. Instead, it doubled down on its commitment to the narrative, the plot, and those three aforementioned competing assertions, which brings the Sherman tank, Fury, led by Wardaddy, to a crossroads that must be defended at all costs.

META SPOILER

Lest I be seen as a hater (someone who just criticizes success to make myself sound clever or fill some internal insecurity or bitterness), allow me to propose an alternative movie, which I found to be much closer to the truth about the horrors of war, (if less "realistic") – and which I proposed in my preview review of Fury – Cross of Iron.  In the end of Cross of Iron, a corrupt and ambitious Prussian Captain wants a Cross of Iron, and follows a heroic enlisted German soldier into a suicidal counterattack. This action occurs during a Russian assault in which the German unit is being overrun, and the action is remarkably even-handed – Russians and Germans are slaughtered indiscriminately, and heroic actions are presented as tiny tragedies. The protagonist and the Captain are fired upon – by a child – and the Captain can't figure out how to reload his submachine gun. The enlisted German soldier – Steiner, played brilliantly by James Coburn – sees this happen and begins laughing hysterically. The Russian child soldier is so disgusted by the Prussian's incompetence and desperation that he rolls his eyes rather than shooting again. The Prussian officer pathetically puts his helmet on backwards, still without having reloaded his submachine gun while Steiner laughs at the tragic absurdity of it all. From there, the movie cuts to the ending credits a series of stills of an execution carried out by Nazis, Steiner's laughter ringing in our ears. The credits are, collectively, one of the most powerfully damning pieces of evidence against the Nazis I've seen in any movie, ever.

I cannot stress enough how untrue and devastatingly inaccurate – unrealistic – any statement other than the one attempted by Peckinpah is. In order to make something real, there has to be something at stake. Fury wagers nothing, and presents the audience with a conclusion that's about as far from Cross of Iron as one could get.

META SPOLER COMPLETE – INITIATE SPOILER

At the end of Fury, the tank is disabled by a German anti-tank mine, cleverly placed in a piece of key strategic terrain. As it happens, Wardaddy's crew has been tasked with defending this terrain against a possible German counterattack – they are the only protection remaining between the Germans and an American resupply column. It is an afternoon in April, 1945. One of the tank's crew mans an OP, and discovers, with horror, that a full Battalion of adult male (i.e. veteran) SS panzer grenadier infantry is approaching down the road, singing, marching, panzerfausts at the ready – full of esprit de corps and savage intention, the kind we know is bad because they're SS.

Let's suspend disbelief – I'm sure it's possible such an event like this happened, even near the end of the war. I read a memoir by an SS infantry officer called Black Edelweiss which should be required reading for every young American male, as a cautionary tale of how propaganda and blind nationalism can lead even the best-intentioned young men astray. The author (writing for understandable reasons under the guise of a pseudonym) describes how his unit was shifted from the far north of Finland to Germany in January-February of 1945. Moving at night via ship, train, and foot to avoid being strafed or bombed, the unit was detected during an attack and strafed, bombed, and shelled nearly out of existence before seeing any enemy (American or British) soldiers. The survivors were then sent on a series of increasingly absurd missions, culminating, for the author, in a pointless and near-suicidal defense of a position with a single machine-gun against two Sherman tanks, which coincided with his injury and incarceration.

So this unit of SS infantrymen is moving in formation, singing, near the frontline, down a road, in a place where the Americans have aerial domination (uncontested access to the skies). It seems incredible – but maybe this is just a testament to confidence in their fighting prowess. The soldier at the OP runs back to tell Wardaddy about the situation – 300 enemy veteran soldiers, trucks, vehicles, kitted out to fight. Wardaddy's reaction is to announce that the others should return to the unit, but that he's carrying out the mission – he's manning Fury, staying with the tank, to repulse the Germans. The other American soldiers in the tank concur that this is a sound and reasonable plan, and they set about prepping for an ambush, in a scene that echoes the ending of Saving Private Ryan.

Now – the ambush and ensuing battle are relatively unimportant, and filled with the type of improbable and ludicrous cinematic excesses one would rightly expect it to contain. The crew guns down Germans as though they were pigeons; for their part, the Germans have inexplicably packed away the Panzerfausts they were carrying in cumbersome boxes. The SS has forgotten to fight, or perhaps never learned – something that would be slightly more believable if the unit were not filled with veteran adults, rather than cannon-fodder children. It's important, vital, even, to note here that every serious military analyst has credited Germany's early battlefield successes and long survival against impossible odds to a marked tactical superiority over their Russian, British, and American foes – the myth that German military success derived from technological superiority is a convenient invention of video game producers, Hollywood, and daytime television hucksters. The truth of the matter is that, outgunned, outproduced, and outmatched in almost every important category, the Germans held on because they outfought their enemies tactically almost everywhere, finding themselves bested occasionally by elite American units in areas like Bastogne, or by Russians at Kursk. Much of WWII was, for the Allies, a function of merely holding on, shelling the Germans with artillery and bombing them while our inferior soldiers made incremental gains against exhausted and increasingly ill-trained conscripts. This is not embarrassing or shameful – we won a modern war against a country attempting to fight along pre-modern lines (using human ingenuity against weapons). On top of which, the Nazis were, as described before, a pack of evil and unscrupulous bullies who needed to be stopped. So – to come back to the original point – Fury inflicts massive losses on the Germans, who continue to rush the tank rather than flanking it, or doing anything even the most basic military unit knows to do. As a combat-proven, valorously decorated former airborne infantry officer who has seen combat firsthand, I can say this without a shadow of doubt: in reality, the ambush and combat go down very differently from how they are portrayed in the movie.

When Brad Pitt's Wardaddy dies – shot twice, heroically, by a German sniper, then finished off by two grenades dropped into the tank by a final rush by the Germans (their fourth or fifth?) – he is presented like a figure in a painting by Titian or one of the old masters.

I've thought about why this must've been for some time, why none of it hung together. I mean, sure, anyone who has been to combat and knows how the thing works must find a movie like Fury condescending and trite. But why did the director and actors decide to play the movie this way? Why undercut the basic premise that the Germans were a serious, formidable foe? My hypothesis is that Hollywood has been producing these movies for so long that it has actually lost it's understanding of why or how the Nazis and SS were evil. Hollywood and popular culture – which have always placed more value on aesthetics and beauty than ideas, have become fascinated with the SS and Nazis as symbols of evil, but not as actually evil. So they pay lip service to the idea that the Nazis are horrible, and the SS are just the worst, and fail utterly to understand that the worst thing of all is human fanaticism, is bullying – the urge to destroy, divested of humanity, and invested with a purpose that confuses ends with means. The ends, for every combat veteran who's spent more than a few weeks in real combat, is (1) staying alive, and (2) helping keep one's buddies stay alive. The moment at which Wardaddy decides to stay with his tank, and is then absolutely fine with having his crew with him is the moment, for me, that the movie became both unrealistic and inaccurate, as well as untrue – in part due to Wardaddy's decision to damn his crew, and in part due to the way in which their efforts to stop the Germans were portrayed in valedictory terms, rather than under a mound of opprobrium.

Fury works when it's a movie about a German tank, filled with SS soldiers who are even at the end of the war and if somewhat skeptically in all practical terms, still committed to fighting and dying for their Fuhrer. Defending a crossroads against impossible odds? Check – the SS was famous for doing precisely that, even though it was stupid and pointless. Ambushing an American military unit many times its size, with the full weight of the U.S. military behind it, and the inevitability of artillery and air power once identified? Check – happened on more occasions than are worth recounting here. Fury is a movie about an SS tank, led by the German-speaking Brad Pitt, which is fanatically devoted to the proposition that the enemies of Germany must be stopped at all costs.

Otherwise it doesn't make any sense at all. Worse, by allowing one of the Americans (the "good" one) to live, and by killing the others off heroically against impossible odds, Fury sends an awful and inherently misguided message about war, which contributes to the same tired old myth that helps lead America into foolish conflicts today. Good people understand when it is appropriate to head off to war, and do not need convincing – this myth of the necessity to throw one's life away for nothing is far beyond absurd – it is, in fact, obscene. I hope not to see more movies about World War II like Fury – perhaps it will be the last. It would be unrealistic of me to actually expect that, though.

Some useful acronyms by which to understand 21st century conflict:

COIN: Counter Insurgency. Employed by ISAF in Afghanistan from 2003-2010. Broadly speaking, the strategy wherein a friendly force competes with an enemy force for the allegiance and support of a largely-neutral population. Unattractive to militaries because of the numerous paradoxes involved in successfully pursuing the strategy. Very attractive to democracies and advocates of human rights as, ideally, COIN involves pitting humanism and liberal, western ideas against some competing philosophy, and we’d rather believe that, properly marketed, our system will defeat any competing system.

CT: Counter Terror. Employed by ISAF in Afghanistan from 2010-present. Employed around the world by America. Championed most vocally by Vice President Joe Biden. The strategy wherein intelligence (gathered directly by humans or by technological means) identifies actual or potential terrorist threats to the U.S.A. or any of its allies (or strategic interests, including Russia and China), and that terrorist threat is neutralized. With a bomb or a gun. “Taken off the board.” AKA “whack-a-mole” for its apparent ineffectiveness.

DEVGRU: Seal Team Six.

GWOT: Global War on Terror. The Bush Administration’s term for the overarching foreign policy strategy that included OEF (the war in Afghanistan) and OIF (the war in Iraq). Intentionally imprecise.

GCO: Global Contingency Operations. The Obama Administration’s term for the overarching foreign policy strategy that includes OEF (the war in Afghanistan), and the unnamed operations in Africa, Pakistan, throughout South America and Europe and Southeast Asia. Terrifyingly, even broader and somehow more vague than GWOT.

ISAF: International Security Assistance Force. The group of mostly-NATO countries helping Afghanistan transition from tribal society into modern democracy. Also jokingly known as “I Saw Americans Fighting” among Scandinavian ISAF members.

OEF: Operation Enduring Freedom. The war in Afghanistan.

OIF: Operation Iraqi Freedom. The war in Iraq.

SOCOM: Special Operations Command (the command, now basically obsolete, responsible for organizing Delta, Rangers, Seals, and Special Forces).

TF -: Task Force [blank] – depending on the context, either a Battalion or Brigade-size effort, or a much smaller higher-echelon group of former SOCOM-affiliate soldiers performing deniable missions for which there are no names.

In 1946, George Orwell wrote an essay about the way politics was impacting the ways in which people used language. The basic idea was that unscrupulous people who had things to hide were manipulating how we communicated in order to deceive us into supporting people or policies that we would not otherwise want to support. That politicians lie was not a new idea in 1946, and is not surprising today. In a world with enough thermonuclear energy to destroy most life above cockroaches, though, the stakes are a great deal higher.

Orwell refined the ideas he expressed in 1946, and published them in a more broad fashion in 1984, when he described the language of “Newspeak.” The language (a revision of English undertaken by a totalitarian state apparatus) would shift the way people thought by channeling their ability to express certain thoughts in public, the way they exchanged information. Reading “Politics and the English Language” and 1984, it’s not difficult to see how Orwell’s ideas about thinking and language had evolved. Orwell believed strongly in the potential of democracy and humanism to create morally responsible, ethical, civic-minded individuals, and put his life on the line to that end in the Spanish Civil War, receiving a throat wound that kept him off the front lines of the Second World War.

One of the most important and relevant intellectual legacies that George Orwell bequeathed us was this idea that, either with or without malice, institutions routinely and deliberately attempt to shape public thought through language. Nowhere is that more apparent today than in the successive American Presidential Administrations responsible for beginning what we call the “Global War on Terror” (the Bush Administration) and expanding the definition and bureaucratic entrenchment of that war (the Obama Administration). Both Administrations make heavy, almost exclusive use of acronyms to describe every aspect of the conflict, from the weapons used, to the agencies involved, to the nature and scope of the military actions. Orwell would recognize the current “Global Contingency Operations” (GCO) as the apogee of post-modern “Newspeak” in action – a war that is made up of “contingency operations,” less police action than police-intention, less of an effort and more of an idea. Something slippery, hopelessly slick, around which no counter-argument can be mustered.

The acronyms are constantly changing. When I got to Afghanistan, the Taliban were called “ACM,” or “Anti-Coalition Militia.” Eight months later, they became “AAF,” or “Anti-Afghan Forces.” A single fighter was a “MAM” or “Military-Aged Male,” though many of the soldiers called them “FAGs,” or “Fighting Aged Guys.” As earlier pointed out, GWOT morphed into GCO sometime mid-2010. The CIA, with too much baggage, has lost much of its actual importance to various TFs, the NSA, DEA, DIA, and DHS, which in their turn will likely change acronyms over the coming years.

The enemy carried AKs and PKMs and RPGs, while we carried M4s, AT4s, M240Bs, SAWs and M4-mounted 203s, which were later swapped out for 320s. HIMARS is good, but getting a GOMAR is bad, although one of the finest, most scrupulous officers I ever served with went on record saying that if you got out of combat without a CIB and a GOMAR, you hadn’t done your job properly, a commentary on the higher-level leadership in the Army’s unreliability and essential disconnect from events on the ground. One cannot understand the military without speaking its acronyms fluently–and each military branch has a separate set of acronyms, some so different as to be mutually unintelligible.

In short – to wage war on the side of justice and good (America, the west, humanism), one must first master a shifting language of words and acronyms which themselves change every few years or so. I can testify from personal experience that the effort involved in mastering that language is great, especially when one is actually in combat (and therefore not incentivized to do anything with one’s energy save decipher the enemy’s intentions). Mastering military-speak is the first step in confronting the realities of the war – one cannot effectively protest or criticize without understanding what it is one is protesting or criticizing. If one lacks the proper words by which to challenge a given political institution – especially when it is in the institution’s interests to keep the nature of its goals and efforts obscure – one will simply rail away in a vacuum, doomed to appear to be protesting the last war, or some archaic problem that is irrelevant.

This is why the long-haired Vietnam-era protester seems so sad, so overmatched – he’s saying “no war,” to which statement the Obama Administration can correctly say “we never declared war, but Iraq, which was begun on false premises by the Bush Administration, has been closed down,” and ignore the ongoing engagement in Afghanistan, and the ubiquitous worldwide “Counter-Terror” operations targeting, among others, American citizens. College students and idealists who feel – correctly! – that we should be more careful about how much information we allow our government to collect have to sift through layers of obfuscation before they uncover an acronym – NSA? Not CIA, or DHS? – that gives them an entity, literally an agency against which to argue, with which to dispute.

And why, why does any of this matter? Because every political administration understands that if they were to place a new agency inside the Pentagon and advertise it by its true name – in the case of the NSA, for example, the “Office of Monitoring Everything Anyone Does Online to Profile and Preempt Terrorist Attacks,” there would presumably be a great deal of blowback. While some polls seem to indicate that a majority of Americans support sacrificing a certain amount of privacy to security, it’s not clear to me whether Americans would support such a program or agency – supposing that the majority of the population agrees that one should trump the other, we could have (given knowledge of the NSA’s programs) collectively agreed to discuss our way ahead as a nation. Even the CIA – the “Central Intelligence Agency,” which I will use as an umbrella acronym for those acronyms I should not divulge to the public in the interests of national security, could at this point more accurately be called the “CIA / DDSAT,” or Central Intelligence Agency / Department of Drone Strikes Against Terrorists.” Again, if the public had understood – understood, that we had kill teams in many third world countries, and were targeting individual human beings for assassination, oftentimes based on patterns of behavior, there probably would have been a spirited debate on the subject. These actions were not kept secret, but were buried beneath an avalanche of acronyms and double-speak. Newspeak, in fact.

One should not have to offer one’s credentials or explain one’s love of country when making such a statement, but it still feels obligatory. In an intellectual atmosphere where substance is more important than words, I have to point out that I believe, like Orwell, so strongly in the potential for good in the west and our cultural tradition that I went to war, twice, for it – OEF VIII and OEF X (it may have been XI, I never got a clear answer on that). I believe that my country, a part of the cultural legacy of Kant and Plato, is an especially permissive and forgiving country in which to be a journalist and thinker, and despite the vitriol with which intellectuals are attacked from both the left and the right (the Williamsburg Hipsters on the one hand who see no wrong in President Obama, and the Fox News / Rush Limbaugh apologists on the right who see no wrong with anything the Neocons say or do), you can still live freer here than in any other large country of which I’m aware in the world. We can do better, though, as citizens – we should expect better from our government. Obfuscation and deceit are rife within our political community, and should be done away with. We must begin calling things by their true names again, and if we don’t like how they look on paper – we need to be more responsible about how we exercise our global citizenship. On this, Orwell would agree.

Adrian B