DISCLAIMER: As with the other one. Drugs, foul language, yadda yadda.
If there's one thing you need to know about my life, it's that I've never shot at anything that couldn't shoot back. Or didn't shoot first. That's the important thing.
I'm not one for the sickly-sweet or the condescending, so let me tell it to you the way I see it: you don't know shit. This isn't personal, by the way. It's just that you weren't born when American soldiers - people like me - were killing children in Nam. You don't know what a LURP is, or why an M16 isn't any better than a pop-gun. You've never been in a war, never even seen one for all I know.
I've never heard of a war that wasn't religious. I remember feeling godlike once, young and metal-bucking. That's a common misconception. That gods stay young forever, I mean. It kinda begs the question, do gods grow old?
I think the day I got old was the day my brother beat the draft. He was four years younger than me, so it wasn't like he had to work for a living, just coast through college with his patriarchal good looks. He'd sprout philosophy sometimes, poems about platonic love and whispery moons. I don't think I ever understood my brother very well. The only moon I knew - the one Nam taught me - was nothing but a big silver dollar flipped by God. He flipped it and it landed scarred side up. So God made the world. I lost my flip with fate and ended up finishing my degree somewhere out in Charlie's country. Laughter was a great way to keep from going crazy. I'd laugh, and the sharp staccato Hail Mary was enough to make any Vietcong think we were a god split sixty.
Someone would always read Dickens or Ibsen by the moonlight. Ibsen was a favorite, I think. It didn't seem wrong or strange to pretend literature was important because, hell, we were all playing with dolls' houses back then. Especially the live ones. Break one, get another.
I'm not a bad looker, I've been told, but I'll never get married. I'll never have kids. Just thinking about my brother is enough to make me feel like I've made the right choice. He called me last night, must've read some article I'd published in the papers. I hung up before he could say my name.
Nam wasn't the sum total of my life either. Sure, I did my stint in rehab, but I never whacked out the way some other vets did. Thirty years on, I'm a professor in State Colorado. I've written children's books and fantasy novels and biographies about long-dead kings. I teach people like you things that I think you want to hear.
The day I came home, I didn't recognize my brother. He'd grown his hair long and his eyes were glassy, like he'd been smoking too much dope, like maybe he was dead inside. He was waiting for me on the steps of our home. His spit mocked me as easily as the blood I left behind.
People often overlook the fact that tragedy is what makes life worth living. Pain salves over the wounds, makes us remember better things. That's why some lives are lead for the better and some for the worse, and who's to say which life is worth living more - the one without pain or the one with the greatest? Maybe someday, you'll know the shape of your life. But by then, it'll probably be too late. So yeah, technically, I guess you could call my brother and me the same generation, although it's hard sometimes just remembering we're the same flesh and blood.
Recently, I've been thinking about death a lot. What it'll be like, what it'll feel like. I'm not suicidal, at least I don't think I am, but I like to play Russian Roulette in my dreams. It's not a conscious decision, because I've never even met a Ruskie, but nonetheless, the barrel clicks and I'm in. People like to sleep because sleep is the closest they can ever get to death.
I've been thinking about getting a gun recently. A .45 automatic. Just to get the feel again - it's been years since I've held one, let alone squeezed - but the slick sweat palm in the grip would be cathartic and anyway, the first rule of combat is get a firearm you know. There's no point carrying around something that you can't shoot.
It's starting to affect my work, I think. I walked out of a lecture the other day. A hundred eyes upon me and any one of 'em Charlie. The word 'gun' comes out a lot in my lectures these days. No one calls it a gun in Nam, it's always a piece or a weapon. It's never a gun. And it's starting to affect my work.
I can’t say I know the meaning of life, and I don't think anyone else on this earth has the right to say they do either. But the meaning of life is something vastly different from the trick to living it, and that's the one thing I do know, and can share.
The trick to living - is knowing when to stop.
