In 1992 I decided I wanted to hunt again, after many years of not being around weapons. But the thought of firing a high powered rifle at a deer or elk still made me queasy. The local archery range was a wonderful system of trails through a forest of redwoods and manzanita brush a short distance from Santa Cruz. My friend Walter Smith and I spent long hours there, and my boyhood love of archery was rekindled.
That fall Larry Yien and I went for an archery elk hunt on a ranch in the Colorado Rockies. One morning we were out of our tents and in the woods before daylight, and split up to hunt separately. As the Eastern sky took its time going from starry dark to faint light, I crested a gradual rise and stopped to be quiet and listen and look.
As the light became lighter, the fir branches surrounding me visibly drooped with dewdrops. As the first orange sliver of sun pushed its tiny arc above the mountain to the East, a dewdrop in front of my nose caught that sunlight and became a rainbow that for a long moment occupied my entire vision. Awake now, and having just been taught by the world around me to notice such a thing, that world exploded quietly, with a patience that moved slowly yet wasted no instant, into a galaxy of rainbows refracted in dewdrops.
This stuff happens to me all the time; the world just flat knocks my socks off. And anything that birds do – especially flight – amazes me. Pelicans circling with one eye on the water, then diving for dinner in a collapse of wings, a comically ungainly splash and a struggling takeoff, or flying in V formation along the California coast, never fail to remind me of Robinson Jeffers’ line in his poem “Boats in a Fog” about watching a file of fishing boats bucking waves and wind offshore: “...a flight of pelicans/ is nothing lovelier to look at...” Or Canada geese, in Oregon where I live now. A few years ago Kit and Kim Phelps hired me to build a small addition to the old farmhouse on their place. One wintry evening I was working alone on the roof, trying to get the plywood sheathing in place before dark. It had been raining off and on all day. With the quick temperature changes we’re used to in that place, sometimes the surface of the plywood would turn icy as I was nailing it in place. Timm Turrentine, my friend and helper, was sick that day, but I was almost done. Just a couple more sheets...
In the last light of day, the western sky did what it often does there in the open spaces around Lostine: it burned. With the urgency of getting the roof covered before dark, and getting out of my freezing coveralls, I wasn’t in the mood to pay attention to the sky.
Neither was the sky in a mood to ignore me. Clouds in bulbous, tubular streams stretched from the southern to the northern horizon, then flamed pink, orange, red, purple, charcoal, against the azure-going-to-indigo sky. The scene gave me a shiver that was not from cold.
Then I heard them, coming out of the sunset: a V of Canada geese, forced close to the ground by low clouds, were headed straight for me, kneeling there on the roof. Okay, some things you can ignore, some you can’t. They barely cleared the ridge of the roof I was working on. As they passed a few feet above me I watched individual feathers on their wings move. I heard the sibilance of those feathers’ sliding across one another as they did the work of flight, against the very nearby symphony of their honking.
The violent wonderment in the way I saw and heard the sky and the geese was a direct result, 40 years on, of another moment in Tho An, a couple of hours after the moment of the screaming baby boy and the old man’s hateful stare that ended my religion and all the other Big Ideas that made up the fabric of my life before that April day in 1966. That was the infinite moment when the burst of automatic fire went between those of us standing around the well, and I saw in a blinding lapse of my habitual stupidity how easy it is to die, how lucky I was to still be alive, and how precious life is, every moment of every day.
Religion, in my life, was replaced by a greater gift: an appreciation of life as we have it, from rainbows in dewdrops to geese in flight to simply breathing, walking, kissing.... if you ask me, I traded up.
Since that change in the way I see things, Life is what matters: the blood and breath coursing through me, through other humans, through my dog and my friends’ horses and other creatures who live with us and by us. And just the living of it: working at something that serves life, such as providing food or shelter; playing music or playing with children, and of course loving. Not fighting. Loving.
I don’t believe in anything else: no ism, no ology, just... life. Any idea which I see as tending towards life, I support. Any idea which I see as trying to pull humans towards conflict – especially in the name of any ism or “national interest” (which usually means defending some sort of economic interest), I oppose. Any idea that wants to put a weapon in the hands of young men, or boys, or young women, or girls, and assigns a human target to that young armed person, I oppose. The way I see it, all those ideas lean towards, or march towards, or sprint towards, death.
I take this stance as a warrior. I am not a pacifist. I would still fight – fiercely and well - to defend my wife, my friends, my neighbors. But our nation is now using wars in such a way as to increase the numbers of people who call us “the enemy,” along with the strength of their resolve to destroy us.
For anyone who has read Sun Tzu’s 2,500-year-old (give or take)The Art of War, or who has studied martial arts for twenty years as I have, our current politico-military posture in the world is just plain lousy military strategy. It robs us of our money, our blood, our youth, even of the vast reservoir of international good will which we (North) Americans owned after World War II.
As a warrior, I oppose it.
Recently I was re-reading
“The Good Old Days: The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders.”() The book's title is a phrase handwritten into the photo album of one Kurt Franz, from his days as deputy commandant, then commandant, of the Nazi extermination camp at Treblinka.
The book contains reproductions of a number of black and white photographs, from Treblinka and other camps and execution sites. Many are so grainy and badly focused as to show very little. Yet they show everything: Jewish women being forced to undress before the eyes of their captors, trying to cover their nakedness with their hands, being shot, lying dead in crumpled piles as the few only wounded by the first volley are finished off by a soldier standing among them with a submachine gun.
As I turned the pages, one of the pictures(
) stopped me. I shuddered. The shudder settled in my stomach and became a vague nausea, a physical feeling of dread. This photo shows a single soldier, his rifle slung underarm, guarding a cluster of Latvian Jews who have been gathered for execution. The photograph is too grainy to be sure, but the prisoners look to be all women and children.
That photo isn't nearly so horrible as some of the others in the book.
What caused the physical nausea in me was not so much the ill-focused image of the women who were seated on the ground, with their children, who would all be shot minutes after the picture was taken.
It was the angle at which the rifle of the soldier guarding them hung under his arm. It was the same as the angle of my M14 rifle as I guarded the women and children and one old man near the village well at Tho An. The angle was the same for a simple reason: both of us soldiers had our rifles slung underarm with the muzzles down, which soldiers often do to keep the rifle’s action and trigger ready to hand.
It's especially convenient when we’re guarding people who are sitting on the ground.
The awful click in my mind when I noticed the angle of that soldier's rifle (I don't know whether he was a Latvian policeman collaborating with the Nazis, or a German soldier), while it proves nothing, can point to a whole hidden universe, or at least did for me.
That hidden universe is the continuum of male violence. I've seen that continuum in things I've done and witnessed, from shooting the robin as a boy with my bow and arrow, to my need to become adept with guns, to be a hunter as the men I knew were hunters, to the fun-seeking scrappiness of the "townies" I nearly tangled with in Colorado Springs, to my readiness to "kill at least one” of them, to the spark of agreement that arced around our circle of Marines' faces at Chu Lai when one said, "I'd sure like to kill just one gook before I leave this fucking place," to the beatings by angry husbands and fathers of the women and children I met at the battered women's shelter where one little girl asked her sister if I was going to hit them, to the gleam in the eye of an American mercenary in Central America as he told his story of “reloading face to face,” to superpower-induced guerrilla warfare in Central America.
A major portion of the human male spirit has been woefully, cruelly, out-of-balance for millenia. We all know men who would never think of reaching for a weapon to solve a problem, who simply work hard to support families, raise their kids as best they can, and go fishing on weekends if they’re lucky. But the world also knows many more who do, or have, reflexively resorted to force, or offered their persons to an armed group who used force. And force is the boss in human affairs. Force owns a terrible leverage: it magnifies itself until patently baseless arguments and ideas carry the day.
Another way of saying this is that it’s easier to destroy than to build. It takes months of sweaty work to build a house; to destroy it, all you have to do is light a fuse. Throughout history, men have been both builders and destroyers. Too often, the latter.
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.
END
