“I am going to join the army. I am going to be a Ranger.”
I was nonplussed. Then I laughed. I had figured it out. Jacob was doing another play. Maybe a new version of HAIR. He was doing the role John Savage did in the movie. A far stretch from reality.
Jacob could not be a soldier. Maybe an infrequent pining for the glory of uniform until his brain caught up with his heart. But aside from playing a role, this kid was raised in the virtual arms of the Buddha. This sometime victim of his own high velocity mind. The thought of him, our wondering wunderkind hurting someone, even after having donned the shiniest uniform ever with glittering high polished brass, was terrible but really laughable joke.
This kid, a favorite of the local folks who had seen the “Got Your Back” by the Smiley Crew as the hero appeared to help some student figure out a math homework problem, fix some elderly person’s flat tire, unstop a sink, save a marriage, and then veer into the sunset saying, “got your back.”
Or coming in with a load of pipe and wire and gizmos and answering our questioning eyes with “Yep, I have it. I can make a perpetual motion machine.”
“I am going to join the army. I am going to be a Ranger.”
My blood ran cold. My sang-froid froze. My laugh died in my throat.
“Well, Jacob. How does that work exactly?
“Well, when I finish basic, the army, the US Army will give me five thousand buck. I will use that to pay off my debts. Then after Basic Training, the army will send me to Ranger training. I will have the esteem of being one of the elite. They will send me to translator school. When I finish with the army, I will go to university, all expenses paid, and get my degree.”
My mind flashed to TV ads, paid for by the taxpayer, of the brightly dressed military used car salesman goons roaming parking lots looking for kids to inveigle into the military. And my frozen blood began to boil. Our son had been duped by the military sideshow carnies.
“Didn’t anything I have said to you about the reality of the US foreign relations nightmare ad infinitum get through to you? Hasn’t your mother’s example of peaceful equanimity impressed you? Aren’t you the guy who was reciting the words of Mahatma Ghandi last month? Has someone slipped you a mickey? Do you have a fever? Do you remember anything about the stillness of Paramahansa Yogananda?
“Do you think you can kill a Muslim mother and her children, Siddhartha? Do you? Do you really?
Jacob was quick. His memory was good. “Oh, I won’t have to kill anyone. I just have to learn the language. I won’t be in harm’s way. And I have a lot of debt. And I want to know I can get through university and make something of myself.”
“Mom, may I borrow five thousand dollars until the end of Basic?”
And suddenly, he was gone. If he reappeared, how would he be? Who would he be? When would that be? How many times would those questions recur?
Would he come back with depleted uranium poisoning? Would his someday wife give birth to a deformed child? Would he die slowly of some popular cancer like leukemia? Would he return totally wacko? Was he destined to make his misfortune in a war that should not be? Killing people who should not be killed?
He went off to the military with the apparent insouciance about his mortality, his existence, as only a wide eyed, inexperienced teenager could go.
We grieved! We were not happy like the political candidates who are now shoving their kids into a dead end war just to show that they, the politicans, are patriotic. Whatever happened to the brave non-soldiers of the Vietnam era who said “hell, no, we won’t go?” Where are the souls of the brave wild eyed kids who DID go? And returned in boxes decorated with flags to hide the cheapness of the fifty-dollar-hammer like caskets? Would our boy come back resembling my friend, Don, who would never harm a flag, but who, when he was fully conditioned just wanted to over kill something, anything.
Several weeks passed. We got a phone call. It was Jacob.
He said he could not take it anymore. It was contrary to all he had been taught growing up. Something horrible happened there on which everyone was focused. It was unrelated to him but perhaps he was using that distraction to get out of there. He couldn’t take it anymore. He had to go underground until his time expired and he was no longer under that command. Then he had to request a discharge. And eventually he was back home with us.
Later he explained the moment of training he could not get past.
“They demonstrated how to kill a mother and child and plant a gun on them so they would appear to have attacked us. I realized that if the situation required a demonstration and an exercise at that level of severity, I would never be able to do that. I was horrified.”
I am grateful he never had to face the decision to do that. He never had to breathe the DU dust that is everywhere in Iraq. He never had to fight a war with sufficient armament. He never had to depend on the lying politicians who refused to ensure the medical care of returning soldiers. The stupid, “maverick”, blood gorged (poli)ticks who almost without exception showed themselves to be gregarious herd members and refused to be real mavericks and stand up against an illegal war, illegally launched without authority by a greedy scion of a family whose list of evil doings goes back to injustices done against holocaust victims.
Jacob is our war hero! He is a real hero, not a strutting banty rooster who calls himself hero to be consistent. The strutting banty rooster’s only consistency is lies.
Jacob does not have the GI Bill for school. He is not a Ranger. But he is doing as Joseph Campbell recommended. He is “following his bliss.” And in his own way, he has still “got your back.”
by jack luna MOTH
