There are nights the world is held together
only by cigarette ash.
Two men lean against opposite sides
of a wire fence
under a moon thin as a field dressing,
passing insults back and forth
like brothers testing river ice.
Acronyms, NATO and ANA,
do nothing to separate two men
sharing one cigarette, as it's done
in that part of the world not out of
rationing cigarettes, it's a social thing.
One of them has six daughters.
The other carries a photograph
of one folded soft at the corners
from being opened too often.
Beyond them:
sandbags, diesel, old & cold tea,
the muttering generators,
helmets on hooks under callsigns,
boots sleeping upright beside cots.
Above them:
a sky with no allegiance.
And somewhere in the dark machinery
of the nervous system:
I fought the law and the law won…
not softly, it always sings LOUDLY,
like he's a child humming to himself
in the backseat during thunder.
Neither man believes in glory anymore if ever they did.
One says war is work.
Bread on the table.
Schoolbooks if God is kind.
Winter coats, too, if very kind.
The other speaks of a woman back home
he cannot stop loving
even after ten years
of trying to learn how.
And the man with six daughters laughs,
and says, when you get back, you must ask
her for supper, and the other man laughs, you
don't understand, it's different back home, only
to be chided, NO, is YOU who doesn't understand!
Men? Women? It is always the same, all over the
world... just try, maybe it will melt her heart, you
two should give your daughter many brothers
and sisters!! Then both laughed at this broad
chasm between cultures that couldn't be bridged.
Then when deeper truths and hurts are shared,
he drops to his knees facing east,
prays for a dead woman
he never met, but grieves
as it is his friend's late wife.
Prays for his and her unborn child, too.
This is the part historians never understand:
Sometimes almost-enemies meet
and discover
they were both raised by mothers
who worried too much.
Sometimes hatred collapses entirely
from exhaustion.
Sometimes two men stand in freezing twilight
calling each other the filthiest names possible
(in military terms, "getting to know one another")
because tenderness
would break them open.
The night keeps breathing,
as they keep chain-smoking.
The cigarettes shorten toward their filters
like little burning lifespans.
One man again insists:
Love can always return.
The other laughs and laughs.
Geared up, forming up for a joint patrol,
ANA on the north side, us south... God,
all of us are so tired, working from the
second we wake up until we fall into our
bunks in the worst outpost in Kandahar
I'm absolutely sure, merest basics of life.
Somewhere beyond the camp walls
a bicycle moves through darkness
toward morning.
And because routine is the most dangerous narcotic,
because human beings can grow accustomed
even to the Apocalypse both would wager,
no one notices the child anymore.
He has passed too many times already.
He gives him MREs for his family to eat,
to trade, or sell, he wears one of his Maple
Leaf flashes, "Kanadisch! I like very much!!"
Then dawn arrives all at once.
Not as sunlight.
As immense pressure on eardrums.
As white sound.
As a second blinding sun
opening its terrible mouth.
Then dust.
Then ringing.
Then the strange silence afterward
that feels less like quiet
and more like the universe
holding its breath.
I fought the law and the law won…
The law of gravity.
The law of blood.
The law that says flesh separates faster than memory.
A bicycle's tubing packed with car-parts and Russian ПВВ-5А,
the boy's family being held, and, nooo, first KIA seen, Mehmet.
They didn't mix much with ANA fellas, not out of any racial
issues. They were all of us just so over-worked, but they'd grown...
He'd loved Mehmet. Nah, scratch that, dead or not, he loves him,
present tense, decades later still... a tiniest small screw right through.
There are jobs no one assigns officially.
Jobs that are no one's job to do at all.
No one is tasked
with gathering what remains of a human being
once it has soaked into the dirt.
So the stray dogs come.
A brown one trots from the alleys
tail wagging gently,
still believing the world contains kindness.
The man tries to chase it away.
The dog does not understand.
Why would it?
Animals know hunger.
They do not know sacrilege.
The dog lapping at his friend's brains.
He tried to shoo it, then a kick in the ribs,
while shouting, *"Isn't it anyone's fucking
job to clean these brains off the ground, FFS?!?"*
The dog snaps from fear.
It takes a chunk out of the man's hand.
Dammit, fucking rabies shot, just GO!!!!
Trauma and anger combine, and his ancient
Browning 9mm answers not from any fear
whatsoever, but a man searching for
whatever dignity he could for his friend..
And afterward
everyone startles
as though lightning itself
has landed on earth.
The last thing one should
do after an IED attack is
discharge a firearm.
There are moments new trauma ceilings
enters the body like weather.
Not pain exactly.
A climate shift.
Yes, new ceilings breaking high overhead.
And suddenly every trauma you ever carried
comes crashing down together
like dishes stacked to the ceiling of a house
finally losing balance.... SMASHING down!!!
Your first funeral.
Your first truly broken heart.
Every slammed door, ever.
Every heard scream through drywall
of your parents when a child.
Every unanswered prayer that take one
further away from believing in a God.
All of it avalanches down all at once.
People speak of fight or flight
because they have never met freeze.
Freeze is different.
Freeze is becoming furniture inside your own terror-filled
sitcom set-piece living room, maybe "Married With Trauma"?
Freeze is hearing your heartbeat
from another room.
Freeze is watching yourself continue living
from very far away.
That's what dissociating is, not split-personality
movie-of-the-week stupidity, it is not "Cybil".
There are other deaths after that.
There are always other deaths quick after that.
That 12 year old girl buried to her neck
for teaching mathematics.
Smallest stones chosen deliberately because
mercy kills too quickly for those insane bastards.
That Taliban fuck who came to her village,
gathering all the cowardly men together who
slowly, painfully stoned this girl for adding & subtracting,
and as I pissed holed for 3 days seeing through crosshairs.
I just thought, fuck YES, praising God I got that mission!!
A trigger tightening.
A head opening like rotten fruit
under distance and velocity.
And then the sickness hits.
For even then —
even then,
even killing evil
costs something sacred.
Because somewhere beneath the uniforms,
beneath flags and languages and revenge,
there remains a buried law:
we were not made for this.
We were made for gardens.
For soup simmering slowly.
For children asleep in the next room.
For touching another human face
without fear.
But war is what happens
when humanity declares rebellion
against its own design.
I fought the law…
No.
Not the law.
The law inside me.
The law that whispered:
love them anyway.
Years pass strangely afterward.
People think trauma is remembering too much.
Sometimes it is the opposite.
Sometimes trauma is losing the names of feelings entirely.
You stand in a grocery store
holding a jar of peanut butter
while some enormous unnamed emotion
fills your chest like floodwater,
and you cannot tell
whether it is grief
or joy
or terror
or all three wearing each other’s clothes.
You can't even tell if it
is a good emotion or
a bad emotion, you
can't tell anything
anymore, no...
You laugh at funerals.
You don't catch yourself until
everyone there is staring at you...
You feel nothing at all while making love.
You wake at 2 a.m. already chain-smoking beside
ghosts, wondering, "How TF did I get out here?"
You keep hearing rusty bicycle chains every
night while you try to get to sleep, yeah??
And the worst part is not the fear.
Not even the memories.
It is the helplessness.
The sense that your body received the order
to survive
years ago
with hyper-vigilance,
and never received
the second order
to stand down.
So the neurotransmitters keep flooding.
The pulse never lowers.
The soul remains crouched
behind invisible sandbags.
Always waiting.
Always waiting.
As though somewhere in the distance
the morning is still exploding, and you
just know the morning will never, ever
stop exploding, not for the rest of your life...
And on certain sleepless nights
when the world narrows
to smoke
and heartbeat
and cold air entering the lungs,
two unnamed men
still lean against their fence together
beneath a Arghandab River moon,
laughing at each other’s impossible ideas of love,
while a song loops endlessly
through the frightened chambers
of a human mind:
I fought the law and the law won…
And perhaps that is true.
But sometimes, briefly,
not between one war
and the next,
but between one heartbeat
and the next,
love wins, too.
Yes, I know, just sometimes
love wins, too.