by Stefan Schindler
Tim O’Brien on the Tao of Truth: “Find the square root
of an Absolute, then multiply by maybe.” You think you know,
but you don’t. A combat soldier knows. Vietnam at night.
Spooky, man, spooky. The enemy? Gremlins and ghosts.
Shadows can kill you, and they will. “The land was haunted.
We were fighting forces that did not obey the laws
of twentieth-century science.” Uncertainty the only certainty.
“You’re never more alive than when you’re almost dead.”
What is sound? What is sight? Insects and heat.
No moon. No breeze. An ethical wasteland. “This isn’t civilization.
This is Nam.” Kiowa said: “The earth is slow, but the buffalo is patient.”
Yeah, man, but where’s the rain? Wounded, yeah, I can take the pain.
But not this night shit. Dead bodies. Dead buddies. The smell.
Sweat burning the eyes. And yet, there it is: the immutable inscrutable.
It waits. For one small slip. “The thing about remembering
is that you don’t forget.” I don’t know. You don’t know.
The combat soldier knows. Always the same: hurry up and wait.
“I’d pulled enough night guard to know how the fear factor
gets multiplied as you sit there hour after hour, nobody
to talk to, nothing to do but stare into the big black hole
at the center of your own sorry soul.”
Note from Kathie MM: Perpetual thanks to Tim O’Brien for making the deadliness of war come alive, and thanks to Stefan Schindler for sharing some of O’Brien’s words so poetically. Only you can end the cycle of endless war because you are the only ones who do not profit from it. Beware the military industrial complex. Check out political candidates to find out whose pockets they are in. Register to vote if you have not done so already and help others register. Now is the hour.
