Killing Me Softly: Reflections of a Vietnam Combat Veteran

Male to Alpha Male, I had arrived. On the rack. Between the tight-lipped morality of my
upbringing and the savagery – now making itself known – that I had inherited with my
scrotum. Boy to Man, Male to Alpha Male.
Warrior. Not the Homeric ideal warrior-hero. We laughed at that shit! Our work was wet
work. Nasty work. Smoke a DX after. Each and all of the pieces of something I was
becoming, we laughed at a lot of things.
I was nineteen. I was afraid. So I laughed.
Memory is a funny thing. Like when my dad died, and that was only ten years ago, and
the grief cascaded out of me seeing him there in the box with his funny hat on (a family
sense of humor) and not moving. We closed the lid, loaded him into a car, and buried him
in a rocky little oak stand outside of Hot Springs.
[Now, he's surrounded by dead relatives in a cemetery that still has only white people's
cadavers in it. I "remember" that, but I can't get that feeling back, even when I think
sometimes my life may depend on it. Getting feelings back.- omit]
I remember vaguely that when I was very young every sentient being I encountered was
someone I loved. Step by step, being by being, parents and relatives and strangers and
associates and the black and white television in our living room all taught me to stop
loving. I didn't stop, but they crippled my capacity for love. They made me strong. My
sister was encouraged in her loving. But once she started to grow tits, she was
encouraged to stop thinking.
I wonder, if I had a choice now to go back and start over, would I choose to live with
thinking distorted by crippled loving, or loving distorted by crippled thinking?
My father taught me to fish when I was very young, and he brought home the corpses of
animals from hunting. He taught me to clean them, the fish and the quail and the rabbits
and an occasional deer. I learned to cut into their bodies and remove their skins and
eviscerate them. My father picked me up and hugged me for my performance. I learned
that I could win approval by stepping over my reticence and fear and loathing. The truth
is, too, that this cutting was a thrilling, sensual thing.
I was a loving boy who delighted in the flight of quail, a loving boy who delighted in the
approval of his father, and a sensual boy who could cut into reality. They stood against
each other, but not equally. And I ate the fish and the rabbit and the quail and the deer.
I don't really remember the original boy. I just have the memory, so that's all I can grieve
for now and I don't remember really deep grief, so the grieving is removed from itself. I
didn't know it at the time, but I was being shaped for a career in the Army.
I was very small for my age as I grew up, and I remain a fairly diminutive person today –
perhaps a bit less diminutive around my midsection, but still never a very imposing