Bringing the War Home

But patriotism was no longer so simple. Like the Shi'ite officer who walked away from germ-filled missiles and the French Legionnnaires who threw their Gulf war medals into the dirt in disgust, didn't a true patriot have a duty to try to stop immoral and inept leaders? I had to face the realization that I could soon be ordered to napalm families not unlike my own. I had to acknowledge the fact that I could no longer march in lockstep obedience to a Commander-in-Chief as craven and disingenuous as a Nixon or an LBJ.

I sent my letter of resignation to the Chief of Naval Ops with a lighter heart than I'd known for years. If being exiled from the land of my birth turned out to be the price for not killing people I had no quarrel with, so be it. It remained my most fervent desire to depart this planet without taking a human life.

Certainly not tonight.

But you never know. In a place where corpses have become such common currency, my own life could jingle like small change in the pockets of someone for whom sentiment has become an unaffordable indulgence.

Besides, my body carries a three million year-old imperative. And more recent memories. If cornered, I had not the slightest doubt it will know what to do. For have been there before, in a paradisiacal yet perverse place called Pago Pago, where a pocketed rigging knife appeared open in my hand before the first synapse of conscious volition could begin to overcome the shock of an attack intended to kill.

That move left me wandering dazed for hours under bowing palms, high on adrenaline and its unexpected atavistic grace. It also saved my life, continuing as it did in a single fluid upwards curve that slashed savagely at the leader of a loping pack of feral dogs just as lunged snarling for my throat.

Dogs are not men (though the reverse is not always true.) But when I turned with a curse to bloody my assailant, I learned in that primal moment that it makes absolutely no difference if mortal threat is borne on two legs or four.

The only true pacifists are martyred saints, or those who have never been threatened with immediate extinction by aggressors unmoved by protestations of peace or reason. When the karma collectors are pounding on your door, who but the most coddled armchair pundit can argue against self-preservation? And yet, despite my experience in Samoa and a seemingly unassailable rationale, how to explain the way my fingers linger over the Kalashnikov, enjoying its curves and its heft, the rigorous frame of its sight-picture?

The next gunshot hardly bothers me at all. For I've found the perfect anodyne to the fear of armed attack. With almost sensual pleasure, I rip open a cardboard box labeled in Arabic and begin pushing 7.62 mm cartridges into empty, spring-loaded clips. Each click of a round seating home carries a reassurance as seductive as it is false. No tracers tonight; I load only solid shells capable of shattering an arm in passing, or spreading some stranger's entrails hot and steaming over pants he'd donned, like me, this morning.

It's important to remind myself of these things, for it seems incredible - even impossible - that such a calming, almost domestic chore could have such brutal consequences. Or attract similar violence to itself.

Isn't this the seduction of all wars? Turn on testosterone-addled teenage boys with made-for-the-movies uniforms, place the god-like power of life-taking weapons in their unwise hands, and point them toward an "enemy" they'd probably be happy sharing a beer with if met in other circumstances---

The catch is - and each generation seems to have to relearn this lesson for itself - by the time the impetuous and the indoctrinated discover they've fallen for a lie, it's way too late to change their minds.