A former student and friend, now pursuing graduate studies, served in the accursed Somalia, and experiences the haunting of war:  He  permits me to share with you his most recent account of his sleep deprivation:

The war for me is over, but, every now and then, it
starts up again. You can never get away from it. You
wanted war and finally got it and now you have to live
with it whether you like it or not, you poor
motherfucker. You asked for it and now you have to
live with it. War is your child. War is dangling from
your shoulders, pulling you down and bringing the
sharp pains in weak places…pain in places you won’t
admit exist but are there, just the same. Sometimes
you dream about it but it makes less sense there than
it does on the outside….

You are lying in a bright room surrounded by warriors
you did not fight with…but you know them…knew them
after their war ended….knew them when they let it all
go and ran away….ran home to forget about it all….you
and that guy, and another guy…you’re all the same but
you know you’re different….but it doesn’t really
matter…

…you’re lying in the room, relaxing…and you are back
in the Marines…it is time to get up and put on a dress
shirt and slacks…to walk proudly and admire the wars
on each other’s chests. The Marine you’re looking at
has a khaki shirt…piled high on his chest, in the
place above the pocket where the fighting is stacked
neatly…is instead a stack of hardback book…these hardbacks
are from your youth…the books that you had as a kid…you
stacked them on your dresser and sometimes flipped through
them….sometimes you colored in them or found where someone
else had already colored in them for you…red and blue…
streaks violating the seriousness of your precious books…
your books sitting stacked on the shelf and piled more
for show than to teach you anything…….the books are piled
on his chest, where the war is supposed to go…

…you are confused by this, but this is a dream and
your life is confusing, anyway, and for these reasons
it all makes sense and seems normal…you tell yourself
as you narrate your own fantasy….

The Marines walk outside….some of your loved ones are
walking behind you…a woman…you have a daughter…there
is a warm feeling from this but you know it is only a
dream, that you have no daughter…but the daughter
walks behind you and you feel like a man…more than the
war or the books or the Marines built you in to…

You are walking across a street and just like that the
bright day is gone and now it is African dark….you are
wearing the gear of a man again…you are walking and
your hands are filled with anxiety and a loaded
rifle…you are lost and you cannot see and now you are
in charge again of a lost patrol and are coming up
quickly on a house….you are following the sidewalk and
there is a house with the porch light lit and now you
are closer and you can see students….you know they are
students because they covet books on their laps and
learn but do not share knowledge….like students do…and
now you realize that you are separated from the
Marines you are responsible for and that they are
missing in the dark…the students are looking at you as
you walk past in your war gear and you look and see
the skyline of your hometown….and now you
realize..through the dark of the place and the dream
and your broken soul that you are in your hometown and
you are still very much in Somalia.

The Marines are missing and you call for them on the
radio and they tell you they are under fire and you
tell them to hang on, you are coming…and you hear the
fighting over the radio but you cannot hear it with
your own ears and you know they are far away from
you..and suddenly you realize that you have just
walked to the edge of the long sidewalk.

You look to the left and you see three armed Somalis.
They are firing their rifles at you. This is all very
real and you look to your front and one of your
Marines is hiding behind a clump of bushes in the
front yard of one of the houses in your hometown…you
can remember crashing your bicycle into that same
bush….on purpose for laughs…before the gear of man and
rifles and war…that obsession still young and
unfocused…waiting for you to find your nerve and wit.

You are pinned down between the end of the row of
houses in your hometown and the clump of bushes where
your Marines are firing fiercely into the Somalis…the
fighting goes on for a minute and you are firing into
it again.

You are firing into it but this time you can see their
eyes and very much want to greet them, to ask them if
they remember you and can validate it all but you also
very much want them to see your bullets striking them
in their chests and killing them…

The fighting rages and the lost patrol is winning,
too…everyone is winning but it never really ends…and
you think to yourself as you fire into the war again
how strange it is for someone to have books from your
childhood pilled high on their dress uniform in the
place where their war is supposed to go…

The little girl is gone and the woman you love and
even the Marines but the war is still there… and you
wake up and start all over again.

Cole’s work in progress, as yet untitled, will be published in the near future.

As the would be peacekeepers in Iraq are picked off slowly, perhaps a pair at a time, one muses about the mental instability of those who will return someday, perhaps to a society unable to sustain interest in saturation TV of real time coverage of the daily carnage, much as the Israeli/Palestinian seesaw of violence takes its daily place in the Living Room Wars.

IN MEMORIAM THE DEAD AND WOUNDED – “WE HERE HIGHLY RESOLVE, NEVER AGAIN” (PACE LINCOLN)