Questions August 6, 2007 DENTON, TX - He was tall and gangly, an overgrown puppy with an angular face that cried out for glasses; raw boned with a thick twangy accent and the manner of one not used to the bright lights and big cities but rapidly becoming so. He sat down at my table with his friend, who proceeded to engage my companion in the exuberant shorthand that old friends upon meeting again tend to fall into. While they chatted I decided to occupy myself with a lighthearted interrogation, intent on discovering who this kid was (I persist in thinking of him as a kid though he's just three years younger than me). A few basic questions revealed him to be twenty one years old, a small town boy from a truly tiny Texas town. He summed up his childhood with recollections of cow tipping, sipping cans of Budweiser in the back of a Chevy pickup truck, the terra cotta feel of the town's surface neutralizing both the highs and lows, the good and bad of such a life, revealing only a smooth sun baked façade to outsider eyes. "I grew up on a ranch. Miles away out there in the middle of nothing. Nothin' to do. With a lifetime of that under my belt, joinin' the army was easy. It was great. I got to go somewhere. At least I got out of there. See, the place where I grew up, once you were grown there was nothing for you there. If you didn't make good grades or play ball to get a scholarship the army was the ticket out." He had joined the service right out of high school. He swelled with pride as he explained the rigorous training he had undergone as part of a Special Forces unit( or so he said, never mentioned what the unit was just that it was just saying that it was classified) and been shipped out to Iraq three years ago. He had just gotten out a few months back. "Iraq was something all right. I was down in South America for awhile and then in Germany, but Iraq, woo, that was something else" It's a popular misconception that all the soldiers over there are miserable, hate the fighting life, hate the army. However this guy had the look of a kid who has just experienced that first loss of love, the look of having thought you've found your place in the world only to find that you just don't fit. That was the expression on his face when he talked about the army. "We ran fifteen miles a day. They taught us to shoot. How to kill a man- I know about forty different ways. It was great. I wish I could go back. I'd go back in a minute right over to Iraq even if they'd let me back in." "Well why don't you?" "I've got some shrapnel in me. I can't do the work anymore. You see, I was going into this café in with my buddies to have a drink. I was the last one to walk in the door. The guy in front of me turned around stopped in the doorway to say something. I don't know what he was going to say. He saved my life. A bomb went off in the café and all the guys I was with were taken out. The guy in front of me who had kept me outside the door was in pieces. They didn't find much of anybody. I got blown clear by the blast. I was lucky." His version of lucky still involved shrapnel lodged throughout his body in such a way that the numerous angry red scars on his chest were just a sample, he said of the damage done. He required six months of rehab and the army though notoriously undermanned at the moment, refused to take him back, presenting with an honorable discharge and outpatient physical therapy. Their reasons for doing this may have been more complex than the mere physical damages sustained. I asked him if he had killed anyone. He smiled, memory simultaneously lighting up that angular face, and summoning a predatory look from the depth of his eyes. "Well, I can't tell you that. It's classified." He said it with pride, and all the implications of one who had been covered in blood and gore. I persisted with my line of questioning with a terrier like tenacity. As much as he wanted to be a man who had taken lives I wanted to know if he had really done it. I'm still not sure how much of what he told me was the truth and how much of it was simply what he was willing the truth to be. He couldn't answer my questions, as what he had done was "classified" but we eventually worked out a system by which I could get some answers and he would be allowed to tel. If he rapped his knuckles on the wooden tabletop twice it meant yes, once meant no. "Did you kill anybody?" Knock Knock. "Do you wish you hadn't?" Knock. "How many people have you killed?" Knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock… He looked me straight in the eye as his hand hit the table. His eyes gleamed. His face filled with pride, flooded with satisfaction as he raped his knuckles on the wooden table. Each knock symbolizing a life ended, an everyday human existence snuffed out by a small town boy whose country taught him how to shoot. "Do you remember them?" "I remember every face." He glowed with pride in those taps. And maybe it is understandable. It must be a powerful feeling to be given a mandate to break one of society's cardinal rules. Life and death, at least from this side of things seem very final. You are one or the other, and it's difficult to change that status either way. Taking a life, making the decision that someone else does not deserve to live must be a potent drug a powerful feeling. Maybe the people that set off the bomb, killing some soldiers, but killing innocent bystanders as well, feel proud in the same way and are tapping out their numbers, counting their scalps. Eisenhower famously observed in his farewell address," Old soldiers never die, they just fade away." But what about the young soldiers, boys who haven't quite learned to be men, but have already discovered that the old sayings are true- life is not fair and can be crueler than we ever imagined and death doesn't even bother to lurk in darkened corners and abandoned alleyways but comes to sit down quite companionably beside you. I don't know if what he said was true; I want to believe it wasn't. After our conversation, the table lurched onto the subject of sports, and the young veteran with the wild eyes suddenly became a man like any other man, laughing and talking, engrossed in how his team (Cincinnati Reds) was playing. I stopped staring at the terrifying creature that the army had unleashed and talked to a friend of a friend in a bar. I've met other soldiers since then and have tried my best to remember both my moment of pure animal fear and the realization that the gleaming eyes I was afraid easily became the eyes of a guy who's just a kid. alarana.net | 2009 | Houston, TX