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Personal

Aftermath

November 7, 2016 by Pen Leave a Comment

“People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

Ten years, nearly, since I came back from my first experience of war. I’ve learned a lot since then. About the lies society breeds into us.

About flags and nation-states. I hope I’ve learned a bit about honor and what it means to live meaningfully.

I won’t discuss my worst memories of war, although they still trouble me at times. Mostly I want to discuss the utter banality of modern evil. On the eve of a decade back in relative peace, a state I don’t really know what I’ve done to deserve, I mostly wonder about the people I left behind. The ones trapped in Baghdad. I wonder how many of them are alive. How many of them are sane. How many of them have been broken beyond repair.

It is, I think, our nature as human beings to live in the moment. We try to survive as best we can. When opportunities allow for it we thrive. Sometimes the thriving leads to dancing and parties. I’m all for that.

One of my most poignant memories of war is that of a moment when we were gathered to go out into the place we called the red zone, which was almost all of the country. The irony of living in a space designated the green zone has never escaped me. The irony of my existence there was amplified by the fact that everyone who hated what we represented, our flags, and our imperfect ideals, and the way we saw god. Those people had our coordinates dialed in. The so-called green zone was a shooting gallery where death consisted of a moment of awareness and then shattering. The missiles and rockets came in like random horsemen of the apocalypse riding on the wings of death. They lobbed the hate when they could. Every time they could.

I’m sure someone was tracking the inbound hatred on a screen. It wasn’t me. In such an environment, one must, of necessity, become numb. In some human environments, one can use blending as a survival technique. In the green zone surrounded by the red zone that was not the case. We went about our business and blindly hoped that the airborne anger wouldn’t choose us on any given day. It never directly chose me. I watched them land a few times, these explosive daggers made of death. I felt them in my core, ran from them, thought about their nature, and from some numb place inside, I feared them. But I had my distractions. Enough so that unlike one fellow soldier, I didn’t wake up on any given morning and simply refuse to get out of bed.

I put on my uniform, strapped on my battle rattle, met the day.

Surrounded by concrete t-walls and well meaning bureaucrats with guns, most of us, I think, believed we were making the world a better place. A freer place. Looking back, that seems naive.

My first war was predicated on manufactured facts that weren’t. Iraq’s involvement in fostering terrorism against the United States was marginal at best when we invaded the country. That is not to say that I regret my service. I did nothing I am ashamed of in my first war. I hope that it has made me more thoughtful. I hope that it has made me more compassionate. I hope that war has grown my empathy for all the human beings I will encounter today and tomorrow for all long as I shall live.

One memory, one that I want to revisit with you in this moment, is that of a noisy, dusty morning at the edge of the green zone. Preparing to dance with death and chance, we did all the things required of Americans saving the world from terror in 2006. We checked our combat loads. We coordinated our communications. We made sure that our maps were up to date and that our vehicles were fully fueled and in proper running order.

It was a scene of professional chaos full of barked orders, frenetic activity and people living on the edge of war’s numb reality. The memory of the kid sitting with his back against a t-wall calmly reading Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five stays with me and it always will. I had experienced a close call with a mortar two days prior. We briefly made eye contact. He went back to reading his novel.

I remember. Now I share the memory with you.

There is always an aftermath. I’ll always wonder what the kid I saw that day thought of Vonnegut. That kid saved me from something. I’m not quite sure what.

“It was a movie about American bombers in World War II and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers , and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans though and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.”  
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

Filed Under: Essays, Freewrite, Personal Tagged With: abandonment, aftermath, Baghdad, GWOT, memory, reflection, slaughterhouse-five, vonnegut, war

Duality

November 4, 2016 by Pen 1 Comment

Colonel: Marine, what is that button on your body armor?
Joker: A peace symbol, sir.
Colonel: Where’d you get it?
Joker: I don’t remember, sir.
Colonel: What is that you’ve got written on your helmet?
Joker: “Born to kill”, sir.
Colonel: You write “born to kill” on your helmet, and you wear a peace button. What’s that supposed to be, some kind of sick joke?
Joker: No, sir.
Colonel: What is it supposed to mean?
Joker: I don’t know, sir.
Colonel: You don’t know very much, do you?
Joker: No, sir.
Colonel: You better get your head and your ass wired together, or I will take a giant shit on you!
Joker: Yes, sir.
Colonel: Now answer my question or you’ll be standing tall before the man!
Joker: I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man, sir.
Colonel: The what?
Joker: The duality of man. The Jungian thing, sir.
Colonel: Whose side are you on, son?
Joker: Our side, sir.
Colonel: Don’t you love your country?
Joker: Yes, sir.
Colonel: Then how ’bout getting with the program? Why don’t you jump on the team and come on in for the big win?
Joker: Yes, sir.
Colonel: Son, all I’ve ever asked of my Marines is for them to obey my orders as they would the word of God. We are here to help the Vietnamese, because inside every gook there is an American trying to get out. It’s a hard-ball world, son. We’ve gotta try to keep our heads until this peace craze blows over!
Joker: [salutes] Aye-aye, sir.

— Full Metal Jacket, Stanley Kubrick


We are all dualities, and madness is always closer than we think it is. Brains are chemical soup, and the recipe has to be just right for us to blend into the tribe and play our part correctly. Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist who came up with the concept of the ‘duality of man’ was himself beset by mental illness. The duality concept is simple, unless you don’t want it to be, and lots of you who read this won’t. But simple needs complex so I understand if you want duality to be the other side of the coin. I’m going to argue for the simple side.

Good needs evil. In this reality if I do something good, someone else somewhere else has to do something equally evil to keep the universe in balance. We are individuals, but we are also all part of this duality. I am not all good, or all bad. I am not all man, and you, if you happen to identify as female, are not all woman. Each of us, whether we like it or not, has some characteristics of both sexes. There is no purely asexual or androgynous human being.

This is a yin.yang thing. Making people think about the idea that they aren’t all one way makes them uncomfortable. In the movie, Joker is a pacifist with a gun. He’s not all killer, but some of him is. Another part of him wants to be peaceful. He is at war in Vietnam, but he is also at war within himself. When I was in the Marine Corps, many years ago, I watched Full Metal Jacket over and over and thought about duality. I was raised by pacifists, so I need to join the Corps. I did the same job as Joker. I was a combat correspondent. The movie was release in 1987 and I joined the Corps in 1991. We are creatures of our time and place, and we are more than one thing.

It’s how a loving mother can also be a wanton slut, how a priest can also be a pedophile. Murderers can be kind. Dictators can be benevolent. The world is full of people who are more than one thing and also people who are in different moments, opposite things. I understand how that can be confusing when we are constantly being asked to make quick judgment calls, when people demand that we label others and wear the labels they have given us.

My advice to you is to quietly let them know you refuse to wear that which they want you to wear. Tell them you are a duality. Tell them you are just trying to wrap your mind around that fact and are therefore much too busy to be bothered at the moment. Tell them it is hard enough balancing out what you are without all their white noise. If that’s not enough, thank them for teaching you what sort of person you don’t want to become. It’s OK to make mistakes, and you get to choose the balance you want for yourself. Unless you’re so off kilter the rest of us decide you need to be kept in a cage for our safety and yours. We’re all evolving at the same time. At different rates. You are fortunate enough to have been born into a time and place where the sum of all that is known is growing exponentially. This leads to opportunities for massive empathy. And also endless cynicism. It’s your choice to make.

You’ll be remembered as a saint or sinner, but most likely you’ll be somewhere in between the two extremes. Remember duality as you walk the paths life shows you.

Filed Under: Essays, Freewrite, Personal Tagged With: all things need opposites, being human, duality, duality of man, essay, nature of being

It just feels like a waste of time

September 27, 2016 by Pen 2 Comments

The political system in the United States is broken

I watched the first presidential debate of 2016 last night. Gross.

Why do I have to choose between a shady, back-room power deals career politician and a shady, back-room power deals career businessman? Both of them are liars. Both of them are flip-floppers. Both of them are power hungry. These are not qualities I can support in a leader.

Every logical fallacy I am aware of was at play in the debate last night. These two individuals are not the best choices to lead the United States for the next four years. We shouldn’t have to choose between two paragons of fail. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are not root causes. They are not the disease. They are the symptoms of a bigger problem.

The virus of the two-party system, where all opinions are slowly silenced until there are only two voices left. A system of decision making that offers only two choices is not healthy. The debate last night didn’t offer any real dialog about the problems average Americans face. It didn’t offer any real perspectives. That’s because, in the United States, minorities who aren’t bought are still silenced. That’s the real problem.

If you’re a socially progressive and fiscally conservative, like I am, there isn’t a real choice. If you believe politicians should be honest and responsible, you don’t have a real choice this election cycle. If you think government should operate transparently, always choosing to balance personal liberties with social infrastructure that demands personal responsibility, neither of these two is palatable.

They will both hoard power. They will both continue the vast, non-transparent, morally bankrupt security state we’ve been building since Sept. 11, 2001. We’ll keep using drones to extra-judicially murder those who, real or imagined, represent some sort of threat to this nation-state. All of our options will continue being boiled down into soundbites that lack any true substance. I can’t vote for that. I won’t vote for it. I don’t want to build a wall, and I don’t want to create more failed states like Libya and Syria in the name of the American people.

We owe it to ourselves to destroy the two-party system that offered up these two as our best hope for turning the ship before it collides with an iceberg named mediocrity.

I asked my girlfriend to register to vote. “It just feels like a waste of time,” she said. She’s right.

Until we manage to destroy the two-party system, this country is going to continue its downhill trajectory. It doesn’t matter which party wins in the upcoming election. The problem isn’t the candidates, it’s the system that offered them up as saviors.

Filed Under: Personal Tagged With: 2016, clinton, fail versus fail, failure of leadership, perspectives, time, trump, two-party system, United States

Writers on writing – Augusten Burroughs

June 23, 2016 by Pen Leave a Comment

This guy. Augusten Burroughs. I haven’t read his novels yet, but based on the advice given in this short video, I’m going to. [embedyt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTOjkwkeEF0[/embedyt]

Update: March 24, 2017 – [easyazon_link identifier=”B008O9BKGC” locale=”US” nw=”y” tag=”penfist-20″]Running with Scissors[/easyazon_link] is a crazy book.

Filed Under: Personal Tagged With: #amwriting, augusten burroughs, on writing, running with scissors, video

Highlands, North Carolina

May 2, 2016 by Pen Leave a Comment

Forty-four hundred feet above sea level. We’re sitting in comfortable plastic and aluminum chairs next to a rushing stream in a magnolia forest. Winter is coming on, the temperature mild and the fresh air mixed with our camp smoke are incredibly aromatic. They are smells I thrive on. This sun is starting to dip, and a gentle breeze is coming across the ridges all around us. Kimber, Low, Simmons, and me. We’re old men now, the only ones left from the time over there.

Baghdad. We spent a year together, in the way back. A year in which the sound of things exploding seemed more common to me then gunfire, which I don’t tend to think of as an explosion, but more of a controlled detonation. Although I have to admit, a lot of the trigger fingers in Baghdad weren’t starting controlled explosions during that year. More like panicked ones.

I think all of us knew, somehow, that this would be the last trip to Highlands. We’re old now, and we want our comfort. Plus. What happened.

Kimber was the first sergeant. Low, Simmons and me were one section in his public affairs team. Our job, reporting on the war from inside the war. I suppose it was important. But it was also a heaping helping of bullshit. We weren’t reporting from an unbiased perspective. We were mouthpieces for men who loved metrics and spin. You know the type, I’m sure. They act as talking heads on the boob tube daily, even though all that shit happens in holovision now. War isn’t the same when you’re projected right into the middle of it. It’s harder for those power mongering fucks to start wars these days. An invasion in holovision, well, you can’t control the footage that gets out of a war like that, and it shakes people up a lot more than what they got to hear and see back in 2005. I had a fucking panic attack for the first time in 20 years the first time I watched Dark Descends on Baghdad in holo. Fuck, that brought it back.

Mortar attack, Christmas, twenty o’ five. I ran for my life. Ran like I never had before in all that rattletrap bullshit gear they gave me to wear. Wished I wasn’t wearing anything but some track shoes. The ones who weren’t wearing body armor made it into the bunker precious seconds ahead of me. That fucking war movie sent me right back into the moment. Whooooop. The sound of  a mortar coming in is something you never forget after the first one lands near you. Your brain trains itself to get running the instant that whooooop starts. Cause you know more of them are coming behind and you better be inside a concrete structure quick.

I was proud when the IVAW got that Pentagon rule about showing wounded and dead troops rescinded. People need to see what the ones in charge are responsible for. On all sides of any given argument or dispute. I believed it then, and I still believe it now. It gets a lot hard to make bad decisions when the results are right there in your living room, in full holo. Those nicer units give you the smells too, and believe you me, the smells of war will make a protestor out of you. I think the Chinese incursion of 2030 had a lot to do with that policy being rescinded too, while I’m rambling. Alaska being renamed New Hainan kind of shook things up and made us take a step back when it came to being the world’s loudest blowhards.

Kimber is a human piece of shit. We’ve been doing this trip once or twice a year since we got back alive in 2005. This is the first time Kimber made it. Why?

We all hate him. Plus, he’s been incarcerated until recently, so even if we’d gone crazy and asked him to come along, he wouldn’t have been able. Couple years after the unit got back from the sandbox he got arrested for touching his stepdaughter.

No one was surprised except Kimber. Fifty shades of self-delusion and an untouchables complex that stood a foot taller than he did. This guy. Kimber. What a bull necked, hard-headed, misogynistic, crude loudmouth. Or just bully for short. Big guy. Of the kind that goes sorta soft around 30. Fat rolls around all the vitals. Running up into the neck. Enough size and muscle to push the medium size guys around still, but would go down hard if a real brawler showed up. Kimber was a real pro when it came to using verbal threats and cajoling to get things done.

He used to trade favors over there. “Hey,” he’d say, “I’ll get my guys to write a story about you, a real good one, that you can send to the fam back home. You get me some better meals.” Shit like that. He wrote himself up for a bronze star at the end of our year. It got approved. You know, connections. Fucker stayed under cover in a fortified parking garage the whole time we were there, but the commendation didn’t mention that. Bronze stars are supposed to be for folks who actually take risks and achieve something that means something. The first sergeant didn’t take any risks, and he sure as shit didn’t achieve a damn thing unless it somehow made him more comfortable or forwarded his career somehow. He spent all his time handing danger out to us, and he enjoyed the hell out of it. One week it was a story in Mosul, the next in Mamudiya. We’d come back in one piece somehow, and have to listen to his endless critiques about our shortcomings as war reporters. He liked to use massive, ripping farts as punctuation marks for the creative verbal beatdowns that flowed unceasingly out of his mouth along with foul smelling breath.

He liked to touch us inappropriately, pretending he was some sort of crossbred father/teacher/wiseman, and that he was only telling us how much we sucked because he wanted to make us better at what we did. Bop in, put an arm around your shoulder all friendly like, and start talking in a low conspiratorial voice about whatever his latest great idea to fuck us all over happened to be. By the end of our year in hell with him as the main decision maker, I lost count of how many times I’d fantasized about shooting him in the back of the head just to shut him up.

There was one guy, Escridida, who was from Guam or somewhere, I can’t remember for sure, and had a hard to understand accent. Short little guy who talked really fast and got nervous often, which made him screw up the simplest tasks. Escridida made it through the year in Baghdad. He ate a bullet about three months later. I’ve always believed it had something to do with the fact that Kimber spent a year riding his ass and mocking his accent. Truth be told, the guy was hard to understand, but none of us are perfect, and most of us don’t need someone riding our ass about it 24/7. Kimber and Escridida were only one rank apart, but Kimber treated that poor guy like he was a private. Fucking asshole.

He was more than a standard issue fucking asshole though. He drew energy from the simple pleasure of making everyone under his control as miserable as possible. How we all got through those missions he sent us on for a year unscathed is something I still wrestle with. Touch of survivor’s guilt. I’m pretty sure of that. We weren’t really unscathed. More like the scars just weren’t visible. They were there, and lots of things would make them scream. The scars he put on us were up in our grey matter. Most people don’t jump under a table in a restaurant when the server drops a plate and it shatters. I’ve been doing that for a couple of decades.

Kimber found Jesus when he got pinched for touching little girls. He served 27 on a 30-year sentence. It happened about three years after we got home. While he sat in jail talking to Jesus, Low and I went to the VA for counseling and to get some of the road wear looked at. I ended up on the middle of that scale they use to calculate just how fucked up you are from going to war. Only fifty percent fucked up. Yeah, that’s me. I get a little extra paycheck at the end of every month, and have been for a good long while.

You might be wondering why the three of us were sitting around that little campfire with a guy each of us hated with a passion. I was too, back on that night. Kimber always was a good cajoler and convincer. Even though we hated him, I gotta admit he’s a good talker. He told us that he wanted to talk about Baghdad and make some amends. You know, like those AA guys are supposed to do. Apologies won’t do much for Escridida, was what I was thinking, but Low and Simmons wanted to hear him out, so I grudgingly said yes, he could come along and have a heart to heart if that’s what they wanted.

Anyhow, he made his apology, while we were all sipping on some Jim Beam. It didn’t sit right with me, mostly because of the way he kicked it off. Nothing he did really ever sat right with me. I gotta admit that. Don’t start an apology by telling someone that you’re not guilty. Don’t tell three people you put through hell that you didn’t touch little girls, that it was just she made the story up because she got in trouble. I’ve heard enough of his horse shit to know when he’s lying, and when’s he twisting up reality. Plus, while I didn’t attend the trial, I read the court transcripts. He was guilty as shit, and he’d been doing it a good long while. He messed both of their heads up, bad.

I let him finish telling the three of us what Jesus did to make him a better man, and how sorry he was about the way he treated us back in Baghdad. I only asked him one thing.

“Did you send us on missions out of the wire just to get in good with people?”

He lied and said no, that all those missions, especially the hot ones, came from the major. It disgusted me. I’m not sure quite how to put how gross the man made me feel inside into words. I’d heard him plotting through the thin trailer walls on phone calls more than once. He sent Pincher to Fallujah for a week just so he could get on some pogue run to the biggest PX in the city, and buy who the hell knows what. Probably some goddamn Xbox game. Pincher came back different. Fallujah was real hot back then. Lots of stuff flying around. Pincher saw things people really aren’t supposed to see. He told me one of them. About the wounded enemy laying in the street. What it sounded like when the Abrams ran over his head and it went pop. Pincher told me about what the brains felt like running down the inside of his uniform collar. And how the pulp went real far and got on everything.

There was no plan. I’d swear to that. Not that night. I got up and said, “who needs a refill?” I was thinking about Jim Beam. Everybody held their cups out. I went around the circle and filled. Kimber was the last one. When he leaned back to take a nip, he smacked his lips and something broke. Suddenly, I wasn’t thinking.

When I looked down, I realized that I’d put my Benchmade into his gut. That Benchmade has got me out of some shit over the last 30 years. Kimber looked down and dropped his plastic cup. A waste of good alcohol, if you ask me.

First, I didn’t feel anything at all. Then, I felt the need to get my knife back. It’s expensive, and well made, and I am never without it. I pulled it out real hard so it wouldn’t hang up on anything. The back is serrated. Kimber, even though he’d shrunk an inch or two from getting old, was still way bigger than I ever hoped to be. He tried to grab me. I just put one arm on his face and pushed.

That’s what another thing I wasn’t expecting happened. Low and Simmons put their knives in him too. They went for the neck. He bled out in maybe a little less than a minute. Couldn’t talk. He was trying, but nothing came out except some air, and a lot of blood. You cut on either side like that, and it’s over quick. It was done, and we just looked at each other when he fell backwards into the camp chair with his mouth open in a way that felt obscene to me.

We dragged him a good half-mile, dug a hole, dumped him in. I told Jesus how sorry Kimber was for all the wrong he’d done. We burned the camp chair because it was easier than trying to clean all his blood off.

It’s been about a year since that night, and I just had to write down what happened. It’s what I do. No one ever came looking for him. I don’t think anyone cared enough to do that. The three of us have never discussed what happened, and we never will.

I don’t know if this story has any lesson in it, but every word of it’s the truth and I needed to write it down. I still have a conscience. Somewhere deep, it’s telling me that maybe what we did needs the light of day. I slept good in my tent that night though. Better than I had since 2005. My night terrors and the teeth grinding rarely pay a visit now.

Sometimes the wrong things die, and sometimes they don’t. I’m just a guy who tells stories. I’ll let you sort out which kind are what.

Filed Under: Personal, Short Stories Tagged With: a lot happened over there, aftermath, fiction, fiction based on reality, Iraq, penfist, revenge, short fiction, short story, things that happen

What kind of character are you?

February 8, 2016 by Pen Leave a Comment

“Throw out everything you believe in.” It’s the kind of thing I’m likely to whisper to you in the dark. Assuming we’re ever in the dark together. However we got there, know that I’m an antihero.

antihero

noun  an·ti·he·ro  \ˈan-tē-ˌhē-(ˌ)rō, ˈan-ˌtī-, -ˌhir-(ˌ)ō\

: a main character in a book, play, movie, etc., who does not have the usual good qualities that are expected in a hero

I’d fail miserably as a hero. My heart beats right the hell out of my chest when I’m faced with direct danger. My stoic’s poker face is good at hiding that fact. But I’m not running towards the bullets. I’m shooting back from behind solid cover, hopefully with vastly superior technology. Or, more likely, running away so the heroes can go in and get killed eliminating the threat.

You can only extract wisdom from a traumatic situation if it doesn’t kill you or fuck you up so bad you can’t function normally in society after the situation ends.

Speaking of which.

When I was about six years old, I observed a group of neighborhood kids holding down an unlucky child, for reasons I’ll never know. They forced his mouth open and made him eat donkey shit out of a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket. He was screaming and crying. But it was five on one, so he was going to eat that pie. Chalk it up to cruelty. Imagine he violated one of the group’s mores. Maybe he stole another one of the group’s prize possessions.

I could have intervened. I had my bow and arrows that day. I was part of an untouchable caste. A white kid in Haiti. There would have been only minor repercussions if I had attacked.

I know, because I tried it once, on a different day, with a different group of kids. I got scolded by the yard boy, and he didn’t tell my parents I shot a kid in the leg with an arrow. He even got the arrow back for me. A hero doesn’t shoot a kid in the leg with an arrow and then not remember why he did it as an adult.

It’s weird. What I remember.

I remember making a vow to fight to the death before I let someone hold me down and force me to eat donkey shit. You’d have to bash me unconscious before that would be a possibility.

I like the idea of justice, but it seems to be a shifting target. One person’s idea of justice is another person’s abomination.

When I was working as a contractor in Afghanistan we drove around every day in our armor trucks pretending to be brave, and every now and then proving that maybe some of us were. But most of us were just bored. Which is why some of the idiots I worked with found it fun to see how many locals they could knock off bicycles using the side mirrors of our vehicles.

It was easy to get away with shit like that. Chaos in the streets of Kabul is an understatement. I didn’t like it when it happened, but I remembered that I was the kid who shot someone with an arrow and still couldn’t be sure why. Except people change.

I like the idea of justice, even if I’m not always sure what it is supposed to be shaped like. With all that malleability, and the fact that I’m not a hero, I usually watch quietly. Usually.

When my buddy decided he was going to play the mirror game, and knocked an old man right off the side of the road and into a bus, I told him if he ever did it again I was reporting him up the chain of command.

Then I told him if we ever got stuck in the middle of a riot because of his recklessness, I was going to put the first bullet in his head.

He didn’t do it again. And I wasn’t a hero.

He just pissed me off because a) the old man wasn’t doing anything to him and b) he put my life in danger. Afghanistan is a motherfucking volatile place and I had no plans to die there because someone wanted to bip people in the back with their mirrors just to see if they could get away with it.

Antihereos:

  • Neither 100% good nor 100% evil
  • Fated to cause grief to individuals, the community, or oneself
  • Do not need to die at close of the story, resolution is often uncertain
  • Can act as a vigilante, even against oneself
  • Act according to their own set of rules and values
  • May have tragedy in their life
  • May have a tragic personal flaw
  • Lack true identity or are disillusioned with life
  • This does not define them as a villain
  • Their actions are often merely reactions to events
  • Usually not motivated to act for or against anyone
  • They fight present circumstances, not fate

Sounds like a person I am.

One day, I’ll tell you about the time I played with fire. Or the trigger pulling game.

Filed Under: Essays, Freewrite, Personal Tagged With: #amwriting, Afghanistan, change, freewrite, morality, observation, self-awareness

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