Tumbling through life with shades on

“So, This Is Life” Blog #29: Sometimes, we love our pain.

The above is a scene from the novel Souldiers ($12: Paperback / E-Reader).

This line reminds me of how painful editing can be.

I had to cut this brutal flashback scene where Ethan, as a boy, is caught in a street fight, beating the hell out of someone in an alley. Eventually, his friend pulls him off. But Ethan pushes his friend aside and goes back to crushing his enemy who could now fill a bowl with all of the blood he’s lost. Ethan’s friend pulls him off again but he fights his way back once more, lusting to knock out another tooth or smash the nose even further to the left.

The next time, the friend just hugs Ethan and whispers, “This isn’t what you want to be.”

Ethan stops.

An interesting quality about Ethan is that he doesn’t avoid practicing violence because he can’t put his heart in it. He avoids practicing violence because he can’t avoid losing his heart in it.

I can relate to that.

Back in the Army, during combat training, we were having one-on-one matches with these sticks that looked like giant q-tips, soft on each end while you hold onto it by the pole in the middle. A few hundred soldiers were watching the bouts. And my opponent and I were standing in a circle when the Drill Sergeant blew the whistle.

Then everything went dark.

And the lights didn’t come back on until the Drill Sergeant was pulling me off my opponent, barking, “When I say stop, you fucking stop!”

Confused, I looked at him and asked, “You said ‘stop,’ Drill Sergeant?”

I walked back to my starting position, for the second round, a little concerned and fascinated, especially when the Drill Sergeant reminded me that I was supposed to use the soft ends of the sticks, not the hard pole in the middle.

Another Drill Sergeant pulled me aside, smirked, and said, “Do that again.”

I wanted to ask, “Do what again?”

All I knew was that my anger with the Army was taking hold of me in a new way.

I once had a friend explain how violence can be a type of intimacy. And hearing that thought set my mind spinning on all of the sanctioned violence in the world, in sports, in bedrooms, and in our entertainment. I also considered the phenomenon of how victims of a violent offense sometimes repeat the nature of that violence against themselves, long after the initial act.

That’s why so much action happens in Souldiers, there’s an ongoing relationship with pain because, in life, pain can be very consistent. And even when something is horrible, if it’s consistent then it can, in its own sick way, also be comforting.

And we all need comfort.

QLuke

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“So, This Is Life” Blog #28: Sometimes you meet people.

The above is a scene from the novel Souldiers ($12: Paperback / E-Reader).

I don’t use the word friend for a lot of people.

And when it comes to the Army, I’m not going to sound off like an HBO special and say we were all brothers.

There were a lot of assholes in the service.

Although, ironically, a few of those assholes were my friends.

Possibly, my favorite part about the Army was the diversity. Having so many characters travel from myriad corners of the country to be stirred into this pot of What the Fuck? called the US Military is one hell of a social experiment.

Consider Sloan.

He was a former MMA fighter, angry as the bathroom line in hell, and the kind of guy who clearly had a good heart but was, at times, an insufferable dick. I liked him a lot, and almost immediately. During Basic, he could get angry enough to make a drill sergeant nervous. But, conversely, if we were in formation with our war paint on, he’d run to the front, raise his rifle and scream, “I am William Wallace!”

Then there was Alvarez.

I would listen to his stories about being a hit man for the Mexican Mafia sometimes and just wonder, “How did my life take such a turn? Why are we in the same room together?”

But again, I liked him a lot. And I’ll never forget his one night stand story where he drunkenly eats out a girl and the next morning learns that she’s from out of town, visiting for a family reunion … the same family reunion that he was going to.

And while that sinks in …

… I’ll start talking about Sergeant Clemson who had a standing order that anybody can take a break from work to go fuck someone. He even kept condoms in the office. One day I walked up to him and said, “Sarge, she’s not pregnant!” I was deadly serious but he had no idea whom I was talking about. Nonetheless, the sergeant wiped his brow, exhaled, sang out a hearty “Thank God!” and went back to business as usual. I felt like his mojo was surgically attached to every aspect of his life. He was the Black Bill Clinton.

Then there was the guy who believed his wife’s story about her strange and sudden case of gonorrhea being a rare form of cancer.

She probably shouldn’t have married him.  

And he probably shouldn’t have been in the Army.

I don’t imagine he tested very well.

There has always been, and will always be, some guilt about not going to Iraq. I did what I had to do but when people leave such a mark on your life, it’s hard not to want to protect them, to serve.

I mean, what is a life if it’s not spent caring for other people?

QLuke

All blogs can be found at www.facebook.com/SoThisIsLifeBlog. 

“So, This Is Life” Blog #27: Sometimes, you have an attitude problem. 

The above is a scene from the novel Souldiers ($12: Paperback / E-Reader).

“… baffled and outraged his commanders.”

Yup. Ethan did do that. And I did too.

I have to be honest though, stirring up a shit storm is kind of fun. However, it’s not so much because of the sadistic rush of satisfaction one receives from tormenting authority figures, although, of course there’s that also. But, mostly, I found pleasure in the mystery of it all.

The disarray within my squadron surrounding my refusal to kill people, and all other related acts of rebellion, sprung from the reality that nobody knew what the hell was wrong with me. And I didn’t either.

One early morning, even early for the Army, a couple of sergeants came knocking on my door. Sleepy and frustrated, I opened up and grunted with a shrug, “What did I do now?” They just laughed because that inappropriate question - to my superiors - aptly summed up who I was at the time.

My colonel told me he would put in me prison for five years if I refused to go to Iraq. I said, “So?” At the time, that just seemed like the most suitable response, not even a “So … sir.” For a while I thought I was losing my mind. But I was really just tired of the bullshit. And I still laugh when I recall that meeting because when I said “So?” the colonel’s face twisted in a way that suggested that I may have just squeezed his dick.

Honestly, I blame reading.

The madness was boiling under the surface for a while as I tried to make myself want to kill people.

Can you believe that shit? I was trying to make myself want to kill people.

But I couldn’t. Maybe I was just too angry about being misled by my recruiter. And I wasn’t a very dedicated soldier, partly because being a good soldier is about self-respect. And I couldn’t respect myself while accepting that situation.

But then I read the autobiography of Frederick Douglas and the scene where he beats up a slave master and, as a slave, declares that no man will ever touch him again without getting touched back. That scene blew me away. I wanted to be that strong. And if Douglas was able to make a decision like that, one that could’ve killed him, I was supposed to flinch at five years?

I actually consider the moment of reading that scene one of the reasons why I can’t say there’s no God. It changed me. It even made me a dedicated soldier, though I still wouldn’t kill. And it was a change that came when I really needed it.

But, true story, I did baffle the shit out of my commanders for a while.

And out of me too.

QLuke

All blogs can be found at www.facebook.com/SoThisIsLifeBlog. 

“So, This Is Life” Blog #26: Sometimes, war can go fuck itself.   

The above is a scene from the novel Souldiers.

I look at this line now and think, “Well, no shit. What war is just?”

But I suppose there are some necessary wars.

I once listened to a historian claim that WW2 and the Revolutionary War are the only American conflicts that needed to happen. And wars should never happen unless they need to happen because wars unfailingly kill innocent people as I unfailingly love the word fuck. They just do. And that’s why no war is just.  

Fuck wars.

Both the external and internal.

In the Army, I knew this guy, Russillo, who was the kind of soldier that made other soldiers proud of being in the military. He was just solid, and smart, and dependable. But after spending a year in a 130 degree litter box where he had to burn away overflowing gobs of human excrement (this is an actual job), suffer the pitfalls of inept leadership, and just try to stay alive, Russillo came back to America ripping lines of cocaine like he was angry at them. Sometimes his nostrils would look like a pair of white wall tires.

As a matter of fact, the first time I ever saw cocaine was because of Russillo. There were four of us in the car when he pulls out a baggy the size of a golf ball and starts taking the powder in like it was the scent of his favorite meal. The fear, like caffeine-riddled moths fornicating in my colon, kept me shifting in my seat. We weren’t even supposed to leave the base. And I was already chin-deep in the shit for refusing to go to Iraq. But then later, Russillo told me if we had gotten pulled over by the police he would have just eaten the bag.

Just eaten the bag?

I say again … fuck wars.

I never knew Russillo when he was healthier. But his healthier self left behind an enviable legacy with the friends we shared. And they loved to tell funny stories about better days. I met Russillo when he was a fucked up war vet and I only feel comfortable saying he was fucked up because he would say that. You ever see a person miss who they used to be?

You ever see the empty in a person?

It’s heartbreaking.

The deception of war lies in its infectiousness. It’s easy to think of war as a loud and dramatic production of violence and glory as told by the kings of Middle Earth, but war is just as deadly when quiet and stirring in the mind of someone barely old enough to vote, folding them into a fetal position and carving tears out of their eyes.

Once more with feeling.

Fuck war.

But, please, remember the warriors.

Happy Memorial Day.

QLuke

All blogs can be found at www.facebook.com/SoThisIsLifeBlog.

“So, This Is Life” Blog #25: Sometimes, you’re in charge. 

The above is a scene from the novel Souldiers ($12: Paperback / E-Reader).

So, this is the reason why I was sentenced to thirteen months in an Oklahoma prison:

My soul is my own.

I was never able to express my stubbornness in that way to my military superiors, but the sanctity of my soul, of my sanity, of my self is why I refused an order to kill people.

But, as there is often some confusion over my choice and why it led to prison, I’ll preface my forthcoming rant with a few facts: A) My recruiter informed me that my job would not require me to kill people, which is what I specifically requested because it is actually possible to serve your country without killing. But he lied. B) While I was in the Army, I tried several times to change to a job that would not require me to kill, but I was refused. And C), I’m not a pacifist. But it’s my soul. And it’s my trigger finger. So, it’s also my decision and I’m not going to be conned into killing. 

I’ve always been stubborn.

My mom tells a funny story where, apparently, as a boy my dad spanked me and I cried. But then I wiped away my tears and dared him to do it again because I was so confident in my position.

There are a lot of places I could go with this but I think all I want to say is that you should protect what is yours even though some days I’m afraid that my stubbornness is going to kill me, literally. I think about my lack of financial success as a writer and how a smarter man would have moved on to something new. But I haven’t yet. And I think about how choosing prison, even if it was choosing prison over Iraq, was fucking dangerous.

But I did.

And I would do it again.

There are so many qualities about myself that I don’t understand, which sometimes makes me want to impulsively change or remove those qualities. And when the world doesn’t understand you either, sometimes the world will also try to change you. But your soul, or identity if that’s more appropriate, is your kingdom. It is your world. You rule it.

And it is always under the attack of other people’s opinions.

Protect it, violently, no matter what it may cost you.

It’s all you have.

Maybe for myself, that was another point I was trying to make in writing this book, that there are soldiers … and then, sometimes, there are souldiers.

QLuke

All blogs can be found at www.facebook.com/SoThisIsLifeBlog.