He grew up in the woods and rivers of the county, fishing and swimming and hunting under sprawling blue skies and driving his rattletrap car insanely and lying on the moss with his girl and watching the branches above groping the sky and marveling as the young do at the strangeness of life, and the war came in a far country. It doesn’t matter which. It was just a country.

His father, an angry man emitting the foul stench of patriotism, said his duty was to become a soldier and kill whoever it was in the far country, wherever it was. His father didn’t know or much care. It didn’t matter. Somebody would know. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. It would be a grand adventure, an uncle said.

He enlisted. In the aching humid heat of a hot state he drew toothpaste and seven-eighty-two gear and green clothes from supply and learned to march in squares while a sergeant said Lef-rye-lef-rye-lef. He felt the sense of power and invincibility that comes of rhythmic camaraderie with thudding boots. He learned to use grenades and flamethrowers and the proper placement of a bayonet in a kidney. He learned obedience and various forms of likely suicide, but it was for his country, dulce et decorum est, and he sang fierce cadences on the march. If I die on the Russian front, bury me with a Russian cunt, lef-rye-lef-rye-lef-rye-lef. It was a grand adventure, calling to a young male’s desperation to defy existence, to cross the mountains, to see the dragon, to overcome. The colonels at Training Command had calculated this nicely.

continue reading

Related Reading