the waste of a perfectly good prayer. And here’s the real justification behind the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell—not the wasted prayers, but the guilt. It’s hard enough, if people are willing to face it, to live with the guilt of knowing that others are out there fighting and dying for their country while the average person, at most, contributes only a small wealth of taxes (and even those they complain about). And to complicate this guilt with the possibility that some soldiers are, by the civilian’s measure, reprehensible beings, is too much for most people, as reprehensible as they are. Because they don’t want to know about the lives of soldiers. They have standards for what type of person is good enough to die for them. Imagine that. But it’s not that complicated in my mind. Not at all. If someone is willing to die for me then I’m just going to shut the fuck up about everything else. And if there’s people who want to raise the standards in regards to who is qualified to die on their behalf, then it’s my belief they should be the ones out there in the desert, sniffing out IED’s so that the dogs and the rest of the decent folk can get on with being decent.
My friend Jude was like that. He was as decent as they came and willing to die for a lot of people who weren’t worth it. But I’m biased in regards to Jude, who appeared on base without knowing a soul and actually wanting to go to war. By then, nobody in the unit had a mindset to make new friends, and Jude was met mostly by the unit as an outsider. But I tried not to be like that. I think it helped that I didn’t know that Beatles song about his name. Some guys in the unit liked to serenade him with that song but I didn’t figure out for a while what the hell was going on. Had these guys lost it or what? I thought they might be an on-base glee club that I didn’t know about, but they weren’t. They thought I was lying about not knowing the song, or that I was crazy. I wasn’t either of those. And I don’t know what the big deal is, because I still haven’t ever heard the song they were singing.
Jude was the all-American type—tall, handsome, smart, and athletic. He was especially athletic. His limbs were long and tight, and even the most mundane task, such as brushing his teeth, was accompanied by the bulging and rippling of his forearm. He bounded through physical training exercises with ease, and even though I marveled at his and ability, from afar, for several weeks, it was he who first spoke to me. It was after hours, I was in my bunk, and he began a conversation about the book I was reading. It was a generic conversation about a generic fantasy paperback, and it didn’t take much to figure out that he just needed to talk to somebody about anything. I didn’t have much to say about myself, and so we talked about the book. I figured that the fantasy wouldn’t interest him greatly, but that didn’t stop me from filling him in on the important details of this particular installment (the fourth in the series), and about the significant bloodlines and mythic items that were the key players for the author. He listened intently and asked good questions, and while at first I thought he was just being polite, I began to sense his genuine interest. As our conversation moved forward, he claimed he hadn’t read fantasy before. In school, he had occupied virtually allof his extracurricular hours with athletics, and when he was forced to read outside of his English syllabus, he gravitated toward paperback Westerns, because, in his words, they were easy and his father approved of them. I laughed at his logic and then agreed to put some Westerns on my to-read list, as long as he put some fantasy on his. He did, and our friendship started there.
What I already knew, and what Jude was soon to discover, is that reading is a great way to distract the mind. The closer we got to deploying, the more we emphasized spending every available minute with our noses in a book. As I drifted into numerous fantasy worlds, it became easier to not preoccupy my brain with all the bad things that could happen when we got to Iraq. The ideal soldier would keep his mind on the mission, and do a mental run through of how he or she was going to react in any given situation. That’s how they stayed calm, and that’s what made them good soldiers. I was not a good soldier, and so that kind of exercise simply scared the shit out of me. To think about all the different things that could go wrong made me freeze up. I’d get a weight on my chest and start gasping for air, and when I tried to calm myself down, the only activity my brain seemed willing to participate in was to catalogue every gruesome image from every war movie I’d ever seen. I could feel bullets distort the air around my head. I could hear their angry hiss. I could see thick streams of blood spouting from empty limbs. I could hear the scared voices of boys crying for their mothers. I could see bodies on the ground and the swaths of dust that took no hesitation in devouring the pools of warm blood.
Better to just read. Fantasy books. What isn’t real can’t hurt you, but it sure can distract you. That was my distraction of choice, and I wasn’t the only one.
When the rest of the unit were playing video games and bragging about all the intercourse they had had with everyone else’s mothers, Jude and I were swapping novels. They kidded us about being nerds, and we pointed out that they were playing video games and then we’d laugh. A nervous laugh, pre-war. I was glad that Jude had gotten into the fantasy—it made it easy to talk to him and acted as yet another distraction from the waiting hell. It also gave us something to bond over. It made us different. He liked the different structures and myths that made up each work—cosmology, economics, politics, religions, geography, technology, and so on—whereas I liked the magic and the dragons. Mostly the dragons. There’d be some sword fighting and some romance and some betrayal and I’d be reading it like, Where are all the fucking dragons at?
Jude laughed and said I had to think about more than just the dragons, but whatever. It felt good to have somebody there.
On the eve that we arrived in Iraq, I came across a character in my fantasy novel that was a soldier—a good one. She’d seen a lot of war and so she’d seen a lot of death. Swords and shields and all of that. She was focused and calm in her duty, like I should have been. This woman was captured by the bad guys (heaven forbid) and they were throwing all these politics at her about what she could do to save her life—what they wanted her to tell them—but this character didn’t care. She was stone cold. She laughs in the face of his captors and says, You think that I think of my life as some kind of precious thing?
She said that right to their face. It wasn’t a bluff either, I tell you. This girl was as genuine as any fake character could be, and all I could think about was the heaviness of the question she posed. I wondered how much death can one person see before they can no longer value the gift of life. And can someone even know when they get to that point? I guess that’s what really gets me—the possibility of something once precious being cast into the wind without a thread of recognition or regret. If something like life can lose its value then nothing is sacred.
Then again, it’s easy for a character that’s not real—that has no life—to cast such a gift out. After all, she is just a bunch of words. And her words are just the words of more words. Can that be precious?
That character made me realize something though. I never aspired to being any kind of war hero or five-star general. I planned on spending the breadth of my military career as close to the bottom rungs as I could. I’d rather have my life in someone else’s hands than anyone’s life in mine. When the warm blood of fellow soldiers started to run into the sandy streets, I wanted it to stay on those streets and not on my hands. It takes someone special to order men to death. A real conviction that I never possessed. And it doesn’t matter if I trusted those people or not. My life was going to be threatened, and when the time came I was going to do all I could to preserve it, simple as that. It didn’t matter to me whose hands my blood ends up on, so long as there is none on mine. I don’t know if that worked out for me though, keeping the blood off, because when Jude died over there in that hell hole, it did a number on me.
Paths for the Blind
It was dark, and under a starred night sky walked Silvio in the manner of a man more insane than he is—hands deep in his pockets and neck flopped back so as to appreciate the sky above while maintaining his wobbly, sickening gait. Where he saw only minor fragments of light were gas giants, and between those, in the cavernous black dark, hid the cosmic dust of
