Reflections of Undertakers of Rain
I
assure you that I am much less rough than I once was. I suppose age
tends to mellow people out, age or possibly life experience. Who
knows? I am not the angry man that I once was. I wander through my
days, sleepwalking if possible, and I mix with the world around me.
I do not easily stir to anger anymore. Yet, occasionally, when I'm
in a certain mood and I see the “support our troops” bumper
sticker, it takes everything I have not to boil over. The first
thing I want to do is throw a rock through their window. No, not a
rock, too passive. I want to throw a fist through their window.
Support our troops? What
the fuck does that even mean? I'll tell you what I think it means.
It means that the older than dirt, blindly patriotic,
I-wish-it-were-still-1952-return-to-family-values asshole who put the
sticker on does not support our troops but rather supports the
government that sent our troops abroad. I know this because if
someone really wanted to support our troops
it's a support that comes years later, long after the war is over.
I have my own
thoughts about war. We all do. These thoughts along with same sex
marriage, gun control, capital punishment and abortion help keep us
polarized. We are welcome to think all the thoughts we want to think
and we can speak our thoughts (in theory, please see the First
Amendment). My thoughts on war? War is oftentimes completely
unnecessary. It is always costly both financially and physically.
There are no winners. And those who do come home do not come home
the same.
I left the military
in 1992. I left the middle east a year before that. I came home,
rejoined my friends who had spent the interceding years smoking pot
and partying. I started college and I did what all the rest of
everyone was doing in the 1990s. There was never a second thought to
things for me. I graduated college, and I got a job.
Only
in retrospect do I understand how long it took for me to really
recover from the war. Keep in mind that my war was not nearly as
nasty as many other wars. But, it took just about ten years for it
to catch up with me.
In my late 20s, I
was a suit and tie. It was a stressful job. My relationships with
others both personally and professionally were superficial at best,
and disastrous generally. I was unhappy and just could not figure
out why. It wasn't until 9/11 and the war that began in Afghanistan
the next month that I began to put things in order. I protested the
second war with Iraq. My heart broke everyday the war in Iraq
continued, and it breaks continually when I think of Afghanistan.
What kind of world do we live in? This is a simple view on it, I
know.
But
this is not about war. It's about combat soldiers. It's about
Undertakers of Rain.
This is a novel about two combat soldiers ten years after the war.
There are two main characters: John and Sam. They work high stress
jobs, they drink heavily, they have disastrous relationships. This
begs the question: is this novel autobiographical?
No. I repeat, no. It's fiction. I write fiction. However, like
all fiction, there is a certain level of autobiography in it. In the
preamble, it was Chris who I missed so much. Chris and I worked a
stressful suit and tie job together many years ago. Chris, like me,
is also a veteran. This is about the end of the autobiographical
aspects. As I explained last week, I modeled John and Sam characters
on aspects of Chris and me. What I really wanted to capture was the
returned to society combat soldier.
Returned from war.
Add ten years. I think I captured the feeling, the confusion, the
anger.
Next time: Images
and the construction of story
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