Either the pain or the heat cracked open my eyelid first. Miriam was not there, and I realized I had never met her, nor even knew what she looked like. Thirst removed these thoughts, and replaced them with faint pleas to my soul, begging it to leave and let the body rest. Besides my eyelid, the only other part of me that accepted my offer to move was my right index finger. It waved at me weakly and accepted its fate as a mute messenger to rest of my body. I prepared to die.
This is an opportune time to reflect. I’m struggling to breathe under a muddy pool of my own blood. Since I find myself alone here, dying, face down in my own mortality, I figure now might be a good time to focus my thoughts and take a temporary stand on the morality I never sought.
My current and soon-to-be discarded assessment of the issue is as follows: morality is a tool, much like the hammer or the penny-cutting Ginsu knife I’ve seen sold with such fervor on the home shopping network. It is a funny-little gizmo that serves to lighten loads, make work easier, and quiet screaming voices, specifically those piercing yelps of mercy breaching the borders of our subconscious, flailing like abused children in rebellious hopes of leading us astray from the normal conduct of our immoral duties. It makes us feel better about the horrible things we are forced to do.
My occupation is an excellent example of horrible morality, one, which I feel, proves invaluable when reflected upon. Consider the gravity. I am the American soldier who has just fought your battle. After feeling the hot singe of metal enter my body, I collapsed, dropping limply to the ground. My forward momentum pushed me over the edge of the mountain, and I fell, forty, maybe fifty feet, banging on the mountain’s jagged incline during my descent. I cannot move, not enough to pull my mouth from the dirt-blood mix blocking the air from my lungs, not enough to lie and pass facing a nonobjective sky. I can only lay here and wait to pass.
As a soldier, I am expected to engage and destroy the enemies of the United States in close combat. How noble the cause sounds when said with such stately resonance. Rest assured, I smile through the pain. As witnessed by my present state, the cause is accompanied by certain occupational hazards, which are most often mitigated by a bullet and less often handled with the diplomatic heroics you might be prone to witness on your favorite news network. At no time is it handled with the false moral standards with which we of the western enlightenment govern ourselves. I don’t care what you say about patriotism or camaraderie or duty. When faced with the prospect of destroying another human life, things just don’t feel right. I’m not saying killing is wrong, or even unnecessary. It’s just horrible, and it cannot conceivably be justified with anything less than a horrible moral outlook on life.
Let me tell you what I’ve seen as a firsthand observer. In nearly all of the places I’ve visited, or better still, all of the places to which I’ve invaded as part of this man’s army, morality has maintained an uncomforting omnipresence, causing good people to fret and bad people to smirk, and thus further proving itself to be a remarkably useful tool in aiding and abetting the entire human situation. Look first at religious morality. Religion gives confused but paradise-bound teenagers a reason to blow themselves up outside of mosques and police stations. Then take a look at moral patriotism with a firm concentration on American morals. Doors are kicked down, funny little brown people see and are seen through the front sights of rifles, soldiers scream “This is for 9-11, motherfucker!” and the funny, little brown people scream, “This is for Allah, motherfucker!” and then people die. Ironically enough, both parties killed and were killed for very moral reasons. And I find that to be quite amusing, no matter how much pain I’m in.
Please pardon the sarcasm. I’m trying to make light of a bad situation. Also, I think the rapid blood loss is grievously affecting my thought processes. The humor is relative to the perspective. I joke because I am now fully aware that morality breeds violence. It is funnier to see the moral violence with your own two eyes than the eyes of a camera; that’s why I can be sarcastic in a disgustingly brutal situation and you can’t. This is my perspective. I’ve been witness to the violence, and, though I tried so hard not to participate, and I no longer feel particularly bad about it, I was still there. As I’ve admitted before, I grieve my indecision, but I surely do not die feeling guilty about the violence that has occurred, nor do I think the horror was unnecessary. Maybe you think certain things are horrible and then, after feeling bad about it for a second, you go back to your dinner, flushing the bad things from your mind, not being bothered by them again until you sit down with your most beloved anchorman again at breakfast. I, on the other hand, never had the luxury of turning off the television and retreating to the family room. I couldn’t play Monopoly with my life and my 2.5 children, purebred dog and trophy wife, setting up hotels on Boardwalk and getting a healthy-good feeling every time I passed go. I could never buy my morality.
And what a grand sales pitch you bought and sold me with. Soldiers are courageous, incorruptible, spiritually disciplined in the highest possible regard. No amount of evil in the world can harm them; they wield morality like a sword, fending of thoughts of cowardice and submission and any other immoral atrocities that dare confront them. Blow by blow, they destroy these atrocities, and they do so with violent, sometimes tranquil faces, all while smiling or praying, or maybe raising a family and holding a flag. Dependent upon the state of horror in which they may find themselves, the soldier will employ his values so as to lessen the strain posed by his conscience and hide his acts under a finely woven blanket of righteousness. He kills, he thrills, he seeks that warm, fatherly smile from Uncle Sam.
Dissenters will say these thoughts are farcical, treasonous even. Just die, already. I can hear them whispering slanderously against me. Suicide bombers aren’t moral; they’re evil and brainwashed and need to see how hurtful their actions are.
Though nearly gone, I feel strong enough to defend myself from the whispers.
You who say the suicide bomber is immoral, you, my friend, are an idiot. The suicide bomber will never see how hurtful his actions are, mostly because he’s exploded himself into a thousand meaty pieces of vengeful deliciousness, and he did so thinking he was the most moral and pure Muslim in the world. You say soldiers who defend our freedoms by deploying to distant and dangerous lands aren’t immoral but honorable and in deserve of veneration. Really? You, fine patriot, this soon-to-be dead soldier speaks to you. You go out and shoot someone. Perhaps you could shoot a terrorist, or if you really wanted to be a patriot, shoot anyone and everyone that disagrees with your country’s foreign policies. Kill with pride. Release that bullet knowing you do so in the name of national defense and a safer world. Then you deal with the uncertainty that plagues you, nightly, over how much safer you actually made this terrestrial heaven by seeding it with violence.
But he was trying to do me harm, you say. If I hadn’t shot him, he most definitely would have killed my family. He might have aimed a rocket-propelled grenade at my brand new Lincoln Navigator as my family and I drove to Tahoe. He’s evil. He’s not moral and I am, so now you have to kill him, Mr. Soldier, because I love my Navigator.
You’re probably right. Kill now or be killed later, that’s the moral stance. If we can justify our actions as moral, than nothing we do is wrong and we are perfect in every sense of our humanity. We have found the balance by shooting that terrorist. We stay happy as long as we can give and take within the limits of moral scales, and as long as we can see the scales are even, than all actions we commit are moral, no matter how horrible they seem, even when they extend outside of our bullshit, capricious, patriotic, religious paradigms. Unfortunately, I’m not quite comfortable with that, and since I stand ready to fight my moral battle for the last time, I’d just as well avoid your firm acceptance of your own moral ambiguity.
Don’t thank me either. Don’t derive some weird eccentricity from my service, my death. Indeed, I did fight for you, but I did not pave a shiny, happy path of freedom that will lead your children away from future war zones. My kind brought violence, and perpetuated violence, and we did so without morals. You and your children will see that someday.
Do not thank me, I am not a moral man. I am not a hero and I do not want a free coke with every meal as long as I wear my uniform in your restaurant. I’d really rather not have your false adulation served up to me with a cold beverage. Do not infect me with your eschewed view of morality. You are ignorantly blissful, and it is very, very likely you will die not realizing how truly mortal your beliefs are until you exhale that last bit of ignorant bliss with your final breath.
I’m not convinced by any of what I just said. In fact, I’m still unsure of my thoughts on the matter, though considering my state, I feel strongly enough about the whole issue to finally let it go. I also feet motivated by an impending sense of doom, since I have little time left, to consider why I masked my emotions for so long and in doing so, failed to make a moral choice. There must have been a reason.
*
I’m not dead yet. How long does this take? I haven’t reached any conclusions. I guess my death will be conclusive enough. But I’m still not convinced. I should go over the story, examine the dark places, find something that was tucked away. Start with the dream. It will be best explained by starting with the dream. How did it start? I fought, I lost and I woke up unchanged.
Marshall Smith welcomes comments about this novel-in-progress, and hopes you will tell him what you think by clicking "discuss this article." You can contact him personally at marshallsmithwriting@yahoo.com.