New Title 1 (40 page)

And that’s when I saw it.

The headline read: “Iran-Iraq War: Blood in the Streets of Kuwait.” It was accompanied by a quarter-page color photograph; a street scene. The road was a narrow stretch of dirt tamped flat by an endless procession of feet and scooter tires. On either side stood squat buildings—or, more accurately, their remains. They resembled sand castles in the midst of being washed away by an advancing tide. Chunks of brick were strewn haphazardly about, crumbling walls pockmarked with bullet holes. To the far left, a tattered and charred Iraqi flag was caught in mid-flutter on a twisted flagpole.

A pair of bodies lay amidst the rubble. Their limbs were bent at angles that would’ve been physically impossible had they been alive. There was an uneven ring around one of the heads, tinted a slightly darker hue than the red dirt it was lain across. In the right foreground a young boy, maybe fourteen, crouched behind an overturned Jeep. He was firing an AK-47 at something or someone off-frame.

If that had been all the photograph depicted I would have turned the page.

But it wasn’t.

A lone figure stood in the doorway of a gutted building. He was not hunched over or cowering; instead he leaned, one hand casually pocketed, against the doorframe. It was a posture suggestive of complete comfort and ease: a director watching an expertly-orchestrated action sequence playing itself out. Sunlight streamed through shell-holes in the building to veil his face in muted yellow tones…

But there was no mistaking the shock of curly red hair.

Or the oh-so-familiar smile touching the corners of that delicate upturned mouth.

Or that cold, red, utterly unfeeling stare.

Answer. Chaos.

Two emotions swept through me, starkly conflicting: hate and love. Hatred for Answer, or whatever he had become, and, on a higher cosmic level, hatred for whatever forces were at work to necessitate such realities as war, and violence, and evil. But, cresting in a surprising wave, was the opposing emotion.

Love.

It slammed together in my head with all the crushing weight of epiphany: I loved those men. Gunner and Slash, Crosshairs and Tripwire and Zippo—
loved
. There was no shame in the admission, only the unshakeable certainty that I
should
love them. It was not the love of a man for a woman, or of a father for his child. That is an elemental love, love expressed at the depth of bone, and blood, and soul. The love I felt for those men was one of circumstance: the element of choice did not exist for us. We did not choose one another but instead were thrown into a situation that forced us to place our trust and our lives in those we fought beside. Soldiers in a warzone enter into a pact, whether knowingly or unknowingly: whatever goes down, whoever goes down, they all go down together, as a unit, live or die.

So, yeah, I loved those men. It was a reckless and extreme kind of love, but love all the same. Perhaps the only kind I’ve ever really known.

I set the newspaper back on the rack and walked out the library’s front doors.

I would never return.

A Greyhound took me from Pittsburgh to Macon, Georgia, where I spent the day with an old friend. Another Greyhound brought me to Key Largo. I took a motel room a few blocks from the seaport. The next morning I walked the pier and made casual enquiries. A longshoreman pointed me towards the
Monkey Sea
. I met the captain and we struck a handshake deal: seven-thousand dollars for passage to Syria and safe entry into Iraq.

Now, nearly three weeks later, the frigate is a
 
thousand knots from the Syrian coast. The captain drains the flask’s final drops into our cups.

He says, “And what of you, friend—a toast?”

I consider. “Well, Ernest Hemingway once wrote,
It’s a fine world and worth fighting for
. There was a time when I only agreed with the second part.” I tip the cup back, swallow, and stare out into the darkly cycling sea. “But now I’m pretty much in total agreement.”

The captain claps me on the back. “You are a good man. I will see you in the morning.” He stands, legs wobbling slightly, and disappears belowdecks.

When I was young, fifteen or sixteen, I used to think war was the Great High: I’d thumb the pages of
Soldier of Fortune
, those grainy black and white photos of Special Ops soldiers with their faces smeared in greasepaint, legs shoulder-width apart, rifles crossed over their chests; or that famous snapshot of an unidentified unit cresting a hillside at twilight, their bodies silhouetted against the setting sun, their posture bowed but resolute as they passed into enemy territory. And all I was thinking then was
yeah, gimme some of
that
shit
. It was about kicking ass and taking names, killing ’em all and letting God sort them out, living hard and going out in a blaze of glory.

But, after a few Tours in ’Nam, I came to see war as the Great Lie: your country wanted something and their country wanted something and everyone was feeding lies and misinformation to get what they wanted. And all the memorials and the monuments and the medals and the American flags waving outside shopfronts on Veteran’s Day—that was all part of the lie. Those things only shrouded the one stone-cold fact, which was this: some soldier, some fucking
kid
, dying alone in the middle of a rice paddy or a shallow trench, this kid who was playing high school ball and chasing tail six months earlier now dying with parts from the inside of his body strewn about the outside of it, dying in the mud and the shit and the sick-
fucking
-twist of it was that he had no idea
why
he was dying, no comprehension of the forces that had brought him there, far away from home, to die. All he knew was he was cold, and in pain, and that once, at some far-off time, he was deathly afraid of being thought a coward, a boy who’d refused to do what was best for his country. Look into the face of any man dying in a combat zone and all you’ll see is confusion. This
what the fuck am I doing here
look—because it is then, and only then, that they’re able to peer beyond the ropes and the pulleys and the scaffolding and see war for what it really is: a horrible, stupid lie.

But now I know differently.

War is not a lie.

War is Truth. The purest Truth in this world.

War is the truth of human nature. The basic law of man. The truth of
life
. It’s a fight, man against man, and if you are going to defeat that other man, defeat him completely. Leave him there, dead, on the ground. The laws of beasts and the laws of man are interchangeable at their most basic level—they are the laws of the jungle, survival of the fittest. The refinements of civilization take us away from that basic truth, but war pulls us back. It reaches deep inside and grasps at the roots of who, and what, we really are. It is jungle law, primal law, a law that calls for winners and losers and leaves no room for compromise. It is war’s ability to tap that fundamental state of mankind that gives it so much power; of all fundamental human endeavors it goes deepest and, in going deepest, goes the furthest toward the truth.

And now I know.

War is Truth.

But there is no beauty in this truth.

It is a cold truth, a hard truth, an ugly truth, and I want nothing to do with it.

I walk to the ship’s bow. The wind and the booze and the lack of toes combine to unsteady me and I reach, blindly, for the railing. My fingers catch the metal rail and I pull myself up. Christ, I feel so feeble. Weak and infirm, an old man where a young man once stood. Doesn’t matter. I’ll be strong enough when the time comes.

Bluegills ride the wave of water pushed by the frigate’s shovel-shaped prow. Their bodies are lean and tapered, resembling ballistic torpedoes. They move just below the waves, quicksilver flashes, leaping out of the water occasionally, tails flickering, droplets of water spraying. They don’t care where they’re going or remember where they’ve been. They are content to be moving. Content with the simple pleasure of forward motion.

I am a born leader. Give me a unit or a crew, five or six men, and they will follow me anywhere. And I think war—
Chaos—
needs me, and men like me. We are the enablers of chaos. The spark. When a young man is going into a situation where he could lose his life or take the life of another, he is not thinking about the inspiring speeches of photogenic statesmen or the safety of the free world or the red, the white, and the blue. All he is thinking, then, is how scared he is, and how lonely, and how far he is from home. He looks to me, or someone like me, for strength. And I give it to him in the form of a reassuring hand on the shoulder and the words, “You’re going to pull through, son. You’re going to make it. Just go hard, bear down, don’t look back.”

And they do.

So you see how I give chaos a recognizable face and a familiar name and all the force of conviction. A front line agent of chaos, if you will. I possess the ability to lead men into the unthinkable, again and again. In this way I am every bit the instrument of Chaos as any of those creatures I encountered in the woods of northern Canada. A monster. The realization sickens me. And yet it is who I am, who I have always been.

A monster.

I am reminded of the old parable of the scorpion and the frog. The scorpion needs to cross a pond, so he says to the frog,
Take me across on your back, because I cannot swim.
The frog says,
But you’re a scorpion. You’ll sting me
.
No I won’t
, the scorpion says,
I promise
. Halfway across the pond, the scorpion stings the frog.
Why did you do that
? the frog says as the poison works its way through its system.
Now we’ll both die
.
I’m a scorpion
, it replies,
and you knew that when you picked me up
.

Sometimes you’ve got to ask yourself who you are—the scorpion or the frog.

Sometimes you’ll find you’re both.

And, like the scorpion, maybe I can’t help what it is I am. Except this one time.

I see it, in my mind’s eye. Answer. Chaos. See it squatting in a filthy Iraqi bunker, surrounded by bones and blood and shit. Waiting for me. It is dark in the bunker but candles are burning, hundreds of them, in every corner, on every ledge. Things are moving at the periphery of my vision, beyond the light of the candles. Darkness prevents me from giving them a name or a species. I don’t believe they are human. I hope they aren’t.

Chaos squats naked in the swimming light of the candles. Its body is half human and half beast, and this seems perfectly right to me. One of its legs is humanoid, but withered and lacking muscle tone—an invalid’s leg. The other is that of a quadruped, a stag or elk, heavily furred and tapering to a cloven hoof. Its remaining eye is huge and compound, a miniature disco ball; candlelight arcs off each individual facet. Its hair is red and curly, a feature that feels at once so right and so totally wrong.

“Here I am,” I hear myself saying.

“I knew you’d come,” the creature says. “You are my finest achievement. You and others like you.”

“And I have come. But not for the reason you think.”

Does an expression of unease flicker across its face?

I think it does.

I say, “I know what I am.”

Then I part my jacket and let it see what I’ve hidden inside. Watch its septic red eye expand in recognition.

“But that doesn’t mean I like what I am.”

Beneath the cot in my cabin is a crate. In that crate, beneath a layer of dried hay, are sixteen sticks of dynamite. I picked them up in Macon, where I stopped to visit Deacon, the man whose life I saved by taking the life of another. Deacon, an ex-demo expert, knew people who knew people and in this way I laid my hands on enough explosive to level half a city block. I purchased a nylon vest, the kind fly fishermen wear. At night, sitting here on the deck, I have carefully sewn sixteen long, narrow pockets onto its chest and back. The dynamite fits snugly.

It fits.

Questions, questions, always questions.