The average man doesn't like trouble and danger, much less a scared kid-- and if you were to get down to the real reasons why men fight or get involved with macho, death-defying activities you would find that it rarely had to do "with patriotism alone", but some kind of self-motivated incentive. The lust for adventure, or to travel in foreign lands, or meet women even-- or to return with a badge of honor with a brave chest of medals to demonstrate that one has proven themselves with a sense of achievement.

When "the draft" came along-- whether sent off to war or to one's local middle school, one was given the old "hard sell" of either/or thinking by their parents and community. . . . . it was either complete shame and one being ostracized as "a defective character" or some kind of "magical conclusion" of glory and happiness. A big part of this was not particularly "the draftees" wanting to fight, but finding themselves way too scared of what society would think of them "if they didn't go along with the program". In America there is the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, and the freedom to use neither as people find themselves placed into emotional and financial enslavement when they had "to fit a role" that society had chosen for them.

There were moments of extreme excitement, yes. For any kid who ever went to his first heavy metal concert, feeling out "the limits of being young and almost free" and itching for the desire to exceed oneself at "the speed of light". The fact it was pushing against the bounds "of respectable society", that you were a little bit scared, yes-- with the hint of romance on the air. Yet one would find themselves led out by the pied piper of the youth culture media age into the black night of snows "like some kind of answer", when this posturing disappeared with the abrupt chill wind of reality and one realized that they had been played like a fool by the bill-licking opportunists and their pretenders pitching goods through a bullhorn.

But back to "the war".

In this age of anarchy and decline you had the pillars of the community. . . . . "the doctor, the lawyer, and the Indian chief" who cheered on their young soldiers in this vale of respectability that they clenched onto like a fixed quantity as they played "squash" at the gym and the mayor tore up their traffic tickets in a buddy-buddy relationship where everyone understood "what was what". Yet it was the false bravado against that big ole' lion out there that haunts their consciousness, the one of uncertainty that maybe America was not #1 and the world was incredibly grotesque and twisted. To them this should be "a snipe hunt", a boy scout adventure-- a day at school.

They sent their young men off to fight even as the roar came off the savannah.

The one thing the boy feels is shame because this campaign can't be brought to a conclusion, and is a quagmire of bad terrain, worse equipment, oblivious leadership, and the fear of failure and annihilation is all-consuming. It is like an underweight kid forced to go out for football and becoming the target of abuse because he's the weaker and "can't keep up his end" as his teammates feel as if they have to conform to their role as soldiers whom are hard-as-nails which only makes up for their own essential lostness and lack of guidance.

Spooky things happen, like big cat tracks around the camp and telling ghost stories around a crackling fire, inevitably turning back to man-cat's with outstretched arms who can't be killed with the blood n' thunder of M-16's. Vanished bodies, beating a hasty retreat to the helicopter evacuation site where you go back stateside away from that madness. Some of us would be the target of hideously-dark pranks, like a "gift basket" that turned out to be full of feathers, broken glass, syringes, used condoms, and snack wrappers with a note that read, "Fuck you, bitch-tits". It was the snarling rictus of death, like severed heads mounted up on punji stakes.

I call it "the hamburger grinder".

Wave after wave of effort was sent in, the freshest and the best mangled and lost forever for want of a hill that proved to be ever more bankrupt and rigged against the ascent of someone like you. An unwinnable war, that left some of us in an emotional wheelchair for all we sacrificed and paid with our youth until they were an embittered husk, a drop-out, a failure who lived in utter loathing and discouragement. Yet the parents and community leaders would emotionally "slap him around" and make him feel worse about himself for what he could not do, for secretly he made them uneasy about the nature of the universe and what that said about their set of convictions-- which they tried to impose, uninvited, upon a boy who had been led to ruin. They would leave him in there "to die forever", just for their peace of mind, for the role they picked for him.

In the midst of the campaign, they may have once seemed as if they "ever had an answer". Now they are hunched over, doddering, ruined with the economic collapse like gray, shrunken men living out the twilight of their years in head-shaking fear. To the extent that I have my enterprise here, I have been sold on far more dubious things with fritter-brained logic by emotional splotches of human beings. May they rot in hell. . . . . and the grave be their long-yearned silence.