For Two Soldiers

1) The Dream (4/28/07):

I was on a boat. I went up to the bridge. “Is this boat going to Hawaii?” I asked someone in a uniform there.
“No,” he replied, “this boat is going to War!”
“But I am supposed to be going to Hawaii,” I answered back.
I walked around the ship and people were busying putting things into other things around the sides, things made of metal into bigger things made of metal in tube shapes.
Here and there, I would stop and say to people, “I am supposed to be in Hawaii right now.”
I remember seeing Corporal Klinger (Jamie Farr's character on M*A*S*H) and said to him, “I am not supposed to be here you know.” But he did not say anything. He just stood there in a dress and gave me a look that said, “Tell me about it! Look at me and I still can get out of here.”

         I know why I had the dream. While reading the local newspaper (something I almost never do) simply to find out what the rules were when the Dalai Lama was to speak (what you could bring, how early to get there, etc.) I had been confronted with an unwelcome bit of news. It turned out someone from my little town on my little island had been killed in Iraq during the April 'surge.' His funeral was that morning and I was conflicted about whether or not to go.

         I did not know him, so really I had no business being there. It is pretty obvious to many I disagree with the war, so some pro-war people would suggest, such people ought not to go. But if that were the case, there would be fewer and fewer people attending them at all. Since it was mentioned in the newspaper when the services would be, it would be open to the public, but it did not say specifically that anyone could attend. It is really a very small town, like I said, on a small island, so to me things were making me feel like I should go for some reason.

         Its not that I wanted to. I did not even go to my father's funeral and did not feel guilty about not going to that. It was not economically possible, many thousands of miles away without enough money for such a long trip, and he never liked funerals either and almost never went to any himself. Plus, you don't have to have been a fan of HBO's “Six Feet Under” to be a little creeped out by them, me no less than most.

         But it wasn't possible for me to go to this one here anyway, I thought. I was supposed to work that day. And if I had not even read that paper earlier in the week, I would not even had felt like there was anything different about that day than any other. Certainly nothing that depressing to think about doing or going to where I would have been probably intruding anyway. But when something like that even gets into your dreams, you have to think, maybe I should go.

         Though I did not go to it, more things happened that made me aware of it. It turned out I did not have to work and ended up nearby it. A lot of near misses and circumstances drawing me closer and closer to being at something which probably I might not have been welcomed to going to either. Like most others, I would pay my respects some other way without possibly intruding on anyone.

         But the dream weighed on me all day. How many others lives were being lost, and still are, everyday thinking they did not or do not belong there, that they belonged home with their families, back in their towns? We are told they are heroes, putting themselves on the line for our freedom. Not to disparage their bravery or manhood, but almost everyone knows or ought to by now that this war is not and never was about a threat to us so much as what our country hopes to gain from it, namely oil leases, permanent bases, and a launching pad for more wars, more oil leases, and more permanent bases in countries which will hate us more the more me bomb them to “free them” and give them “democracy” which if they don't want or like what we are doing to them or their countries, we can criticize them as we do Iraqis for being too “primitive” to understand the good we are doing to and for them. As we bomb them, keep them under a state of martial law, leave them without security, without electricity, safety, without a proper economy while our companies profit from their misery almost without end.

         But the soldiers really have no part in this. Yes, all this would not be possible without them, but few of them would say anymore that what they are doing there is what they signed up for. So many of them there now, supposedly overwhelmingly most or all, think we are not welcome there and not helping anyone by being there. If today's reports are correct, with constant operations going on for over 4 years, still shelling cities we have “liberated” long ago, yet we only control 1/3 of the capital city and almost none of the country.

         But even if we only controlled one building, the parliament, with lawmakers dependent upon our protection about to give us control of their countries resources for the next decades, coincidentally or not, how long Bush and Gates have said we intend to be there for, despite their Parliament asking us to leave, and their public overwhelmingly now seeing us as a hostile occupation force. We respect “democracies” so long as the “democracy” has nothing to do with what the public wants when inconvenient to what we want. If we only had bases in countries that wanted us there, how many countries would we have them in? My guess is it would be significantly less that the 110 or 120 countries we now have bases in, some quite pointedly asking us to leave, as if that mattered in the least.

         While I had that dream, fretted about going or not going to one funeral, many more ships were on their way to the Persian Gulf. The buildup for the War with Iran was underway then, as it is now, but of course, almost no one in our government, Democrat nor Republican, will say that was what the 'surge' was really about. Nor will they say Iran may or may not be interested in having nuclear weapons because we have attacked and invaded and now occupy with large armies countries on both sides of them, against international law, against the publics in those countries wishes (all the self-serving propaganda 'they will/did welcome us as liberators' bullshit notwithstanding), and have been threatening to do the same to them, and to nuke them no less if we feel like it.

         Many Americans are completely without reason on this point. It is so beyond the pale of what they can consider possible that they wander around in a dream-like state much as people in mental hospitals who shut out anything that is upsetting and live in their own dream world. “How dare Russia use energy to gain influence over countries!” This in regards to withholding subsidies and lower prices to countries they do not like and making them pay market prices. Now compare that to threating to invade, take over, conduct terrorist operations in, and if that doesn't work, to nuke them if necessary to prevent others from gaining weapons you not only have, but have thousands of, illegally because the very treaty you accuse them of breaking says you were supposed to be disarming and instead, you are openly talking about building thousands more! But hey, no irony there. Just put your fingers in your ears, and join up for Bush's delusional reality about how we are “saving” people by the same things others are advocating that will inevitably not only destroy our army but commit a genocide of the people we tell ourselves we are trying to help, but that will be another “accidental” genocide, unavoidable, and basically all their fault because they cannot understand “democracy” or how we are trying to “help” them.

         Since no doubt we have lost the ability to reason completely, our politicians quake with the fear that if they actually tried to stop what they are doing to our young people who do not belong there and know more than anyone else, how unwelcome they are there, that if they ended the insanity and brought them home, they would suffer criticism the cannot or would not successfully deflect of “not being supportive of the troops.” The truth is that any letup in the insanity would enable people to take note of where they are and where they are going, thus all the more reason we are likely to repeat our mistakes again and again as quickly and often as possible while Bush remains in office. Iran, Syria, Venezuela, take your pick.

        We, a country violating international laws left and right with more weapons of mass destruction than all of the rest of the world put together, invading and occupying countries against the will of their peoples because they theoretically might pose a threat to us someday gives us license to kill large numbers of their citizens today and are only seeking to 'defend' ourselves from a country that has not initiated a war or invaded anyone in centuries. And this because our people have been told how horrible it would be if they acquired a level of technology, because they are a Muslim country, that our “ally” Pakistan, another Muslim country already has, which already can be and has been exported by them to other countries without us threatening to bomb them, possibly because they could do something about it. Yet this is what we will 'save' the world from by taking out Iran, from a Muslim country getting the bomb. As if Iran could ever be a threat to us militarily. The point is that they would be able to defend themselves against us in a short while, and that is really what the new war and new rush to war is to silence.

         None will speak to this in our government. Our military, though they know better, hold to rules which say that it is not their province and must bow to 'civilian' governance even though that 'civilian' government is now more openly than ever talking about the conditions it would take, far from unusual or unexpected, to shut down the federal government completely and put it under executive control. As if that has not happened yet already. That war is already over except for the shouting.


2) The Gas Station (Summer 2006):

         I was having a bad day. My gas was very low and I had to go miles out of my way off the highway to get to a gas station to avoid running out completely. I was going to Boston for something, I don't remember what, but was in a hurry to get there.

         The credit card reader on the pump at the gas station was not working, so that meant I would have to go inside and pay for it there. Now I was really starting to get irked. I saw a line of people inside and I did not wish to have to wait but already had shut my car off.

         When I got inside, it took me a second or two to read the room. That is when you know you are getting old, or maybe it was just because I was agitated and distracted. At first I thought it might have been being robbed, a weird feeling, everyone was so uncomfortable, not afraid, but uneasy. There were a few people behind the register but no customers standing around were actively being waited on, though many were in line. The clerk closest to me, a teen male looked around nervously and would not make eye contact.

         A girl a few years older looked apologetic glancing around at different random spots in space but smiled politely though uncomfortably. Others in there were even more uneasy and were beginning to reach the level of frustration I had before I even walked in. The cause of it all was the last thing I hit upon, someone no doubt having a worse day than me.

         He looked like the crusty drill sergeant at the training camp in just about every war movie I ever saw. He was obviously new at this job, maybe his first day, and it was not going well. He was counting the drawer which is why no one was being waited on and could not until he was done. He kept making mistakes, getting more frustrated with himself, and kept having to start over. It was clear he was not used to doing that, and it seemed pretty clear he did not seem to be used to having only one arm to count the money with.

         There are lots of reasons one could be missing a limb. Cancer, a staff infection which causes a viral infection under the skin, a car accident, lots of things that have absolutely nothing to do with Iraq. I can't say why, but none of these seemed to apply to him. He looked so natural like a soldier, even over 40, that it was hard to see him in a different line of work, and it seemed like he would not have imagined it either, much less having to learn how to count a drawer with only one arm at his age.

         The proximity to the army base was one factor, maybe a cap or other insignia might have given me that impression as well. However correct or mistaken the impression was, like most people there (though some peoples patiences were wearing thin), I knew my being pissed off would have to wait awhile, because it was less important at the moment.

         But the natural questions when seeing someone who most probably, at least as I saw it at the time, had been to Iraq, kept popping into my head: “Did you support the war before,” “what do you think of what is going on there,” “Do you think what we are trying to do is worth it?” These are the natural questions any child would think to ask, but as adults, we never think to ask them. We keep our place, show our respect by not communicating and not asking what people, we think, would not wish to talk about.

         No doubt with the mood he was in, even if my presumptions were correct, he would not have wanted to talk about such things. Nor was I in a patient reflective mood myself at that moment. But on another day, under different circumstances, hopefully such questions could be asked delicately. People instinctively need to communicate what they have been through, what they have seen in their life, and what perspective from it they have gained.

         We honor such people who have made sacrifices, usually unintentionally, though often intentionally willing to put themselves in harms way for others, by keeping silent, not wanting to intrude. But that is not always what is best. We all, at one time or another, don't mind when someone asks us about our lives, even when it is something painful which at other times we would not wish to talk about. Those around us often can have more opportunities to catch us at those moments, but they also can and usually do fall most into patterns of behavior around us, acting in the same ways, almost habitual patterns of conversations. Those who can set people at ease, ask them to share something unique to them in a way they want to talk about it, they are good to have around, though not always welcomed.

         And not always is such questioning being nosy either. Life puts certain people around you at different points in your life to learn from them. You don't need to be a reporter to be curious about the people you see all around you, to wonder how they got to where they are, what they think about the things that have happened to them along the way there. Those people whose jobs it is to be curious, they have it easy, they have an opening while the rest of us must suppress most often that desire to know more about the uniqueness of appearance or experience of the people we pass by, usually without thinking of them at all.

         As I said, that was a bad time when little could have come of such conversations even had they been able to occur. The problem is, far too often they do not anyway. Television, society at large, so many factors make people think they know what people would or would not say or think about many things, often asking them seems superfluous or unnecessary. Worse yet is when we are so caught in believing in a culture's predispositions that we do not even question to ourselves what we really think about things because we think that there is no need. Its what we should think, we reflexively say when pressed by others, or instead of saying that, saying what that would or should be in such instances.

         So much we take for granted that we 'know' that we do not ever bother to ever again ask, not of others, not even sometimes of ourselves, and never reflect on why or how we came to settle into such perspectives unquestioningly in the first place, or never realize consciously we have done so. There is not enough time, rethinking would not be proper, not being a good this or a respectful that. Its what we should do or say without having to think what we should do or say. When we get caught up in that, we become blind to those standing right in front of us, and unfortunately only even notice those people whom cannot be pigeon-holed because we can tell their experiences or perspectives touch upon things we cannot readily say we know or understand, those are the only ones that stick out at all as being noteworthy or memorable.

         When this happens, when the unusual or unexpected cross our paths, when the time is right, they are the best means of growth we will ever get, not only to learn about something new, but reawaken that connection in yourself to asking the most basic of questions, “what happened to you,” “what did you think about it,” “how did you get here,” “what did you learn from it?” If not to tell you, believe it or not, they live to tell and communicate that to someone, and we honor them not by remaining silent, but by occasionally risking getting our heads bit off by letting them know whenever they are ready to tell us, that we are eager to hear that.