Okay, again, another of about five sample chapters of my new book, “I Believe in You.” This is a major departure from what most folks are used to seeing from me. I can best describe it as a “giant hallmark card.” I wanted to put these samples out so if anyone was interested in buying it (at the moment it is only available on kindle) they would know what they were getting.
This chapter is a little darker. If you are close to someone who is a combat veteran, well . . .
An Ode to a Dogface Soldier
At the time when your youth was at its brightest, your country called upon you, asking you to do nothing less than look death square in the face. You had to put your own life aside and learn the arts of war, even though such things were contrary to your gentle nature. And on some distant foreign shore, you experienced the sights, the sounds, and the smell of combat.
By some miracle– or pure luck– you survived the insanity. You made it back home. At the time, home was all that mattered. But the home you came back to was somehow different. What you thought was home was now a land filled with strangers, people who, unlike your comrades in arms, no longer knew you. At last, you realized that home was not different. It was you who had changed.
And so, yet another exceptional degree of courage was demanded of you. You had to try to put the recent past out of your mind. You had to adjust to this new reality of who you were, and build a future for yourself and your family. There are no medals for such quietly heroic efforts.
Much time has past. The hardest part of this second campaign is over. You have done your best to put the past aside and return to civil society. For the most part, on the outside at least, all is back to normal. You have done an excellent job of putting on a game face for the crowds. But all these many years later, the echoes of those distant guns have never left you. I cannot help being curious. I ask you about these faraway memories. You can discuss it up to a point, then there is always that moment when certain lines are approached too closely. There is a hesitation, then a nervous laugh, and then a quick change of the subject.
Those of us who have never been shot at have the luxury of romanticizing about great military campaigns. To us, they are great shining moments in human history. But to you, these events, so safely and objectively described in the history books, bandied about as grand patriotic crusades against tyranny, can never be separated from your vivid personal memories of mud, noise, bugs, hunger, loneliness, grief, and moments of sheer terror that are too much to contemplate.
I understand, now, that when I reach out to you, and you turn away in distant silence, it is not because you want to. It is borne out of a need to harden and protect yourself from your own memories. You were taught– perhaps too well– to be stoic. You have to keep certain things locked up within. Only your comrades have any idea of what you are feeling, and even then, you rarely discuss it openly with them. A simple nod of the head is all that is necessary to acknowledge the past. And so the horror and the grief remain, carefully tucked away, out of sight of the conscious mind. There is no way for you to honestly discuss it, for no words, no book, no storyteller, nor any Hollywood production can ever hope to impart the true nature of your experience to anyone who has not been there. We simply cannot comprehend it. Any attempt on your part to explain it just makes you feel ever more separate and sequestered, and contributes even more to the distance between us, when all you wanted was to come back home and try to feel the sense of belonging you once had.
When we try to add up the cost of war, the casualty lists do not tell the entire story. Who has experienced war without being forever changed– and forever wounded– by it? How many young spirits came home, perhaps without a purple heart pinned to their chest, but injured and maimed just the same? And how far has this pain rippled through generation after generation? These ghosts of innocence lost on a distant battlefield come back to haunt us all. Throughout the land we are left with this great divide between friends, between family, between mothers, sons, fathers, daughters, husbands, and wives. For all the shared experiences of family and friends, there is a great invisible wall between those who went to war and those who did not. This difference in experience makes us, in some subtle yet relentless way, forever strangers. No one who has not been there can truly know who you are any longer. We are as close as human beings can be, and yet there is a barrier of no man’s land between us that can never be crossed.
This emotional barricade between us has often made me feel isolated. This sense of loneliness has occasionally led to frustration and anger. But in rare moments of calm reflection, I am occasionally able to look past my own pain, and my thoughts turn to those families who have been through so much worse– families whose loved ones were killed, or worse, those whose children went to war and disappeared without a trace, leaving a legacy of perpetual grief that is forever replenished by the imagination.
In the face of this infinite emotional laceration, the mind is overwhelmed by the images of hurt and anguish that once ruled the earth, and endlessly threaten to visit us again. At such moments I think I can, in some small abstract way, get at least a sense of what you once lived through. But I can only conjecture. I have only seen the aftermath. You once faced, hand to hand, the steel teeth of this monstrous beast that has torn so many lives.
I try to be grateful that life has only required me to deal with the lesser of so many evils. Still, we are faced with a very real death here that must be mourned. Part of the child we sent off to the front is now forever lost. Their playground laughter is gone, buried with their fallen comrades. And part of each of us is buried there as well.
We are now left to do our best, to deal with the rusted remnants of this great crusade of so long ago and the rift that now exists between us. I know that you had to endure, and perhaps do, some terrible things. There is much I will never understand. I know you want to put it out of your mind, so I can accept your desire to not talk about the past. I will let it rest. But with what little understanding I do have of what you did, and what you lived through, I say to you, and others like you:
Thank you, and welcome home.
———————-
Excerpt from “I Believe in You”
(c) 2012 Justin Locke
This book is currently only available through the Amazon Kindle Store. You do not need to own a kindle, they have free software so you can read kindle books on a PC or tablet. A paperback version is coming eventually.
Sample Chapters from “I Believe in You” :
