December 24, 2004

• Now I Know What War Looks Like

  
  

  I have little personal experience with war in this lifetime.  When my student deferment puked in the sixties, I tried to enlist–not out of any patriotic fervor, but simply because I understood that enlistees had more options than draftees–and found out the the Air Force was not interested in a kid with uncorrected  20/800 vision.  Legally blind is 2/200.  Many of my forebears, however, were warriors.  My five-times great grandfather, Red Eagle, fought andy jackson.  (We deliberately lower-case the name, it is a tribal tradition  meant  to show contempt.)  You can probably guess how that one worked out.  And a more recent grand-daddy, G. W. Grayson, led a regiment of Creek warriors in the War Between the States.  Yeah, we lost that one, too.  More recently still, an uncle of mine fought in ‘Nam, as a Green Beret and the highest-ranking noncom in the US Army.  Amazing guy–he used to jump out of perfectly good airplanes.  But I digress.

  
  

  Although I share to a degree the Amurrikan fascination with violence–I will slow down to gawk at an accident, and as long as they pay some attention to the laws of physics, I enjoy the occasional action-adventure movie–I loathe and abhor war.  I despise beyond telling the all-hat, no cattle moron in the Oval Office who has sent so many young men and women to their deaths for no good reason, as well as all of his comfortable and  well-tailored accomplices.  But I never had anything resembling a mental image of war, some physical way to symbolize  what is to me the ultimate obscenity.  Until  the other  night.
  

  
  

  I was watching one of the afore-mentioned videos, and there was a shot of an F-16 taking off, one of those Stealth fighter things.  Suddenly I got a sick sinking feeling in my guts seeing that featureless, anonymous thing taking off.  Out of who knows where, the thought came to me–my God, that is what war looks like.  No blood or guts or gore, just a shape streaking through the sky, as black as fear, as black as evil, as black as death itself.

  
  

  • 6:01 pm
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