3. "A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe." - Tim O'Brien [RF]

"A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe." - Tim O'Brien [RF]

(Marine Corps running cadence)

Leader: Every other left foot you say “KILL”

Beat beat

All: KILL

beat beat

All: KILL

Leader: On a Monday…

All: KILL

Leader: On a Tuesday

All: KILL …

Leader: On a Sunday

All: KILL

Leader: God let me

All: KILL

Leader: God help me

KILL

God help me

KILL

God help me

(Texas)

So, Hollywood, you kill anyone over there in Afghanistan?

Well, I…

My cousin was a Marine, I think he was a sniper or something?

Oh, well…

He got an award.

That’s really…

Do you know him? His name is…something something

No, man, Sorry.

Oh. Well he was a sniper. So you kill anyone?

-I inhale-

(Afghanistan)

“If he pops up again, take him.” This is the moment. For four years, I’ve been searching for this: the moment when the man in white appears again. I wait. Four hundred meters from the barrel of my rifle to the man in white’s chest. Any second. Dope is set, 1.4 mils, up. I scan through the highly magnified but eerily narrow world of my scope. My position is good, heels down, plenty of support. Four hundred meters to my destiny. Whatever I had run away from, whatever person I could have become, should have become, would die when I squeezed, ever so gently, the two and a half pounds of slack out of the trigger. I would put to a final rest the self-doubter, the observer, the academic. This is my new way, my new path, my new self. Confident and righteous. This is what I want. This is the culmination of everything it means to be an infantryman. To kill. Four hundred meters away the man in white stood up again.

-I exhale-

Did I kill anyone? It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if I pulled that trigger or not. Afghanistan has no memory, like the Pacific. God can’t see past the mountains. He doesn’t see his children, skinny, young, brown, and forgettable pour out of the madrasas in Pakistan every spring for the fighting season. They flow into the fertile valley of the Helmand River to shoot Russian rifles and rockets. They come to plant bombs and to plant dreams. They fall, like leaves in the autumn, and die, and then come again in the spring, still faceless, still dirty, still angry, still mad with dreams that mad men planted in their heads, of paradise, so that they would plant bombs and the old men would plant poppy, for heroin, instead of wheat, for food, in that fertile valley of the Helmand river.

Americans once planted our dreams in the vast, fertile acres of the west. We planted new lives and tilled the land to form a more perfect union. But the frontier closed and America stopped dreaming. Our nights were too haunted with visions of dark men, beaten, bloodied, chained, and sometimes twisting, dangling from the branch of a tree. We awoke in the night screaming of Buddhists, alight like torches, in the middle of the street and the smell of burnt flesh, and ash. Conscience made us cowards, and we traded away our dreams, and ended the shocks to which the flesh is heir. Now we see nothing, and our nights are unmolested.

Hungry to dream again, I went on a journey, to see and be transformed. I saw, and lived and died and wept. My blindness fell away. But no great truths came to me. I came back. They asked me, “Did I kill?”. All I have are questions. In a world I don’t understand, where I can never tell what is going on, and whatever I do or don’t hurts someone, what do I do? Who do I want to be? Who does the world need me to be? Can I be the killer and still be the dreamer? A time to plant, and a time to kill. Should I pull the trigger?

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