SPECIAL POST: END OF RATTLESNAKE DREAMS(C) by Dean Metcalf

RATTLESNAKE DREAMS© (end) by Dean Metcalf

When something dark and terrible and bloody happens - when a Lee Harvey Oswald or a Charles Manson or a Jeffrey Dahmer gets loose among us - we tend to call the deed and the doer "evil," shake our heads and say we don't understand, or analyze it under that heading, asking ourselves earnestly, Where does this evil come from, this way of being that is so foreign to us?

     Sure, there are evil people in the world, people who need to kill in order to satisfy something in themselves. But the body count accomplished by such people is paltry compared to that stacked up by organized armies of nations whose leaders, citizens, and soldiers thought they were doing good. And these people - that is, you and I and our parents and children and brothers and sisters and relatives and neighbors - think we are doing good, not in the three-quarter-hearted way a person holds an opinion about a politician or a style of dress or music, but with that deep spiritual conviction that is required in order for young men to stand up, fix bayonets, and walk into the firing.       

     Going to war is sometimes a necessity, for defenders. More often it is a choice, which we contort to make look like a necessity, as in Tonkin/Vietnam.

     We men - we warriors - can and must make some other choice. If we are to do that, two things are required of us.

     The first is that we must see our own natures and motives for what they are. This book is my attempt to do that, for myself. Others may or may not recognize parts of themselves, of their personal experiences, in my stories.

     The second is that we must tell true stories, without embellishment or self-censorship, so that boys and young men, and their parents, may know how terrible war is before they sign up for one, how little it has to do with reasons governments give for going to war, or with the reasons we warriors give ourselves.    

     Evil isn't what we have to fear. Our definition of what is good is what we should fear, and should study until it breaks open to the light.

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